He had fought and conquered the evil spirits of greed, corruption, and private extortion, but he had not killed them. The hatred of the evil-doer pursued him across the seas and roused up all the old jealousies at home. On his first and second returns he had been hailed, first as a man of the most brilliant promise and then as a man who had splendidly fulfilled that promise. But now, in the country which he had enriched by the addition of a whole empire no charge was so base that it was not believed against him. He had put down the oppressor, the extortioner, and the money-grubber, and he came back to his native land to be arraigned before a committee of the House of Commons as all these and something of a criminal to boot! But with this third home-coming of his, his story as an Empire-Maker ends. It is well to know that he came triumphantly out of all the toils that his jealous and unworthy enemies had laid for him, and in this he was happier than his great rival Dupleix, who sank through all the gradations of poverty and misery into a nameless grave. But still the work of his foes and that of the terrible Indian climate had not been without effect. Crippled both in mind and body, he at last sought refuge in opium from the tortures of the diseases which he had contracted in the service of his country. Time after time his genius blazed out again through the glooms that were settling over his later days, and so great was the faith of the Government in him that he was actually asked to go and do for North America what he had done for India. If the broken invalid of those days had been the same man as the defender of Arcot and the victor of Plassey, the history of the Anglo-Saxon race might well have been changed, for Robert Clive would not only have been strong to crush the rebels, but also just and generous to procure them afterwards those equal rights of citizenship the denial of which split Anglo-Saxondom in two. Of this, at least, we may be fairly certain: there would have been no Bunker’s Hill and no Brandywine River save as geographical expressions, and there would have been neither a Saratoga nor a Yorktown save as towns and nothing more. But this was not to be. Clive’s genius had given forth its last flash and the eclipse had come. On November 22, 1774, some ten weeks after the assembly of the Revolutionary Congress at Philadelphia, Robert, Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey, and Conqueror of the domains of the great Tamerlane, for the third time put a pistol to his head--and this time it went off. It was, as Macaulay says, an awful close to such a career, and yet, after all, granted even everything that his worst enemies said against him, Robert Clive had well and worthily earned a place in the front rank of Britain’s Empire-Makers.