him personally L70,000, and had been succeeded by his son,
though not before the government had been further demoralized by taking
L100,000 as a gift from the new nawab; while Kasim Ali had induced not
only the viceroy of Oudh, but the emperor of Delhi himself, to invade
Behar. After the first mutiny in the Bengal army, which was suppressed
by blowing the sepoy ringleader from a gun, Major Munro, "the Napier of
those times," scattered the united armies on the hard-fought field of
Buxar. The emperor, Shah Alam, detached himself from the league, while
the Oudh viceroy threw himself on the mercy of the British. Clive had
now an opportunity of repeating in Hindustan, or Upper India, what he
had accomplished for the good of Bengal. He might have secured what are
now called the United Provinces, and have rendered unnecessary the
campaigns of Wellesley and Lake. But he had other work in the
consolidation of rich Bengal itself, making it a base from which the
mighty fabric of British India could afterwards steadily and
proportionally grow. Hence he returned to the Oudh viceroy all his
territory save the provinces of Allahabad and Kora, which he made over
to the weak emperor. But from that emperor he secured the most important
document in the whole of British history in India up to that time, which
appears in the records as "firmaund from the King Shah Aalum, granting
the dewany of Bengal, Behar and Orissa to the Company, 1765." The date
was the 12th of August, the place Benares, the throne an English
dining-table covered with embroidered cloth and surmounted by a chair in
Clive's tent. It is all pictured by a Mahommedan contemporary, who
indignantly exclaims that so great a "transaction was done and finished
in less time than would have been taken up in the sale of a jackass." By
this deed the Company became the real sovereign rulers of thirty
millions of people, yielding a revenue of four millions sterling. All
this had been accomplished by Clive in the few brief years since he had
avenged "the Black Hole" of Calcutta. This would be a small matter, or
might even be a cause of reproach, were it not that the Company's
undisputed sovereignty proved, after a sore period of transition, the
salvation of these millions. The lieutenant-governorship of Bengal since
Clive's time has grown so large and prosperous that in 1905 it was found
advisable to divide it into two separate provinces. But Clive, though
thus moderate and even generous