A guilty mind seeks concealment. Such, evidently, was not the object of Clive on this or any other occasion of his life; and those, even, who condemn his actions, must acknowledge that they were grounded upon a complete conviction in his own mind that they were not only defensible, but consistent with his principles of honour as a gentleman, and with those of his duty as a public servant.
I have, in this chapter, stated, with much freedom, my difference of opinion from Mr. Mill, on some points connected with the revolution at Moorshedabad; I have great pleasure, however, in referring to his subsequent general remarks on this subject.
The chairman of the Select Committee of the House of Commons of 1773, when he brought up its report, made a motion, that the House should inquire into the circumstances of the death and deposition of Suraj-u-Dowlah, the fictitious treaty, and other matters which took place on the elevation of Meer Jaffier. This was rejected, on the plea of the reports of the Committee not being evidence. Mr. Mill deems this ground of rejection a "subterfuge of the nature of a legal shuffle:"--"but there were other considerations," he states, "to which the House never adverted, which fairly recommended the rejection, or at least a very great modification, of the penal proceeding; that the punishment threatened was more grievous than the offence; that it was punishment by an _ex-post-facto_ law, because, however contrary to the principles of right government the presents received from Meer Jaffier, and however odious to the moral sense the deception practised upon Omichund, there was no law at the time which forbid them; that the presents, how contrary soever to European morals and ideas, were perfectly correspondent to those of the country in which they were received, and to the expectations of the parties by whom they were bestowed; that the treachery to Omichund was countenanced and palliated by some of the principles and many of the admired incidents of European diplomacy; that Clive, though never inattentive to his own interests, was actuated by a sincere desire to promote the prosperity of the Company, and appears not, in any instance, to have sacrificed what he regarded as their interests to his own; and that it would have required an extraordinary man, which no one ought to be punished for not being, to have acted, in that most trying situation in which he was placed, with greater disinterestedness than he displayed."[190]