To check this evil, the Court of Directors, as we have seen, ordered covenants against receiving presents to be entered into by all their servants.
The orders issued regarding the inland trade nearly shut up another great source of gain. During the five years in which the public servants had carried it on with such amazing profit, the export trade, as an inferior branch, had been left chiefly to free merchants and free mariners. The orders excluding the Company's servants from the inland trade now drove them back, once more, to foreign and general trade, but in more unfavourable circumstances.
They complained to the Directors that, by the course of events, which had done so much for the Company, they were placed in a worse situation than ever, and engaged in an unfavourable competition even with the free traders: that, instead of benefiting, they suffered by being in the Company's service, as they were confined to one spot by the Company's concerns, while the others could run over the country, and had nothing to engage them but their own interests. In this representation there was much truth; though the conclusion might have reached farther than either the Company or their servants would have been willing to allow.
Men who had been accustomed to look to great and immediate returns for their capital, or for the mere use of their name, looked upon the restrictions under which they were now placed as the height of tyranny. The habits of indulgence and expense which they had acquired from the rapid influx of wealth, and the golden prospects which their situation had seemed to hold out to them, were bad preparations for returning to, or for acquiring, the patient, sober, and steady habits of business which general commerce requires. Lord Clive found the settlement in a ferment; and all ranks of the Company's servants resolved to throw every obstacle in the way of executing the Company's orders.
How he triumphed over the civil, as well as military, combinations which threatened ruin to the British ascendency in India, we have already seen: but if he triumphed, it was not by firmness alone; it was equally by the justice, the consideration, the policy, which guided all his measures.