Civil Servants to engage in private
trade. So poorly paid were they, indeed, that private trade, or a
compensation for it, had become necessary to them to enable them to
live decently. The proposed compensation was afterwards adopted of
fixing their salaries on a scale which would take away all temptation
to indulge in other methods of obtaining money. Vainly did Clive
press upon the Court the adoption of this alternative. Amongst our
countrymen there is one class whose business it is to rule; but there
are often other classes which aspire to that privilege, and which
seize the opportunity afforded them to exercise power, but whose
members possess neither the education, the enlightenment, nor the
turn {164}of mind to do so with success. Of this latter class were
the men who had become the Directors of the East India Company. These
men possessed no prescience; they were quite unable to make a correct
forecast; they could consider only the present, and that dimly. They
could not realize that the world was not standing still, and they
would have denounced that man as a madman who should have told them
that the splendid daring of Clive had made them the inheritors of the
Mughal empire. Seeing only as far as the tips of their noses, these
men declined to increase the salaries of their servants or to
prohibit private trade.

Hercules could bend to his process of cleansing the stables of the
King of Elis, the rivers Alpheus and Peneus. Clive could not bend the
Court of Directors. The consequence was that his labour was great,
his success incomplete. The utmost he could do, and did do, was to
issue an order abrogating the privilege, used by the Civil Servants
to the ruin of the children of the soil, to grant passes for the
transit of merchandize free of duty; restricting such privilege to
certain authorities named and defined. Upon the private trade of the
civilians he imposed restrictions which minimized as far as was
possible, short of its abolition, the evils resulting from permission
to trade, bringing it in fact to a great extent under the control of
the Government. In both these respects his reforms were wider, and
went deeper, than those which Mir Kasim had vainly asked from Mr.
Vansittart and his Council.

With regard to the salt monopoly, Clive had made {165}investigations
which proved that the trade in that commodity had been conducted in a
manner which, whilst securing enormous profits for the few, had
pressed ve