While Lord Clive was every day more and more desirous of disengaging himself from the vexatious and unsatisfactory annoyances of Leadenhall Street politics, yet unwilling to forsake altogether the means which they afforded him of promoting the interest of his friends, and of influencing beneficially the government of our Indian empire, as to the fate of which it was impossible that he could be indifferent, the progress of events drew him once more conspicuously forward on the stage of public life, and desperate attempts were made to ruin at once his fortune and his reputation. It was his fate to suffer, not for his vices or errors, but for his virtues. His upright and honourable discharge of his painful duties, during his second government of Bengal, was at the root of all the persecutions which he afterwards endured. The men whom he made his enemies, by a firm yet temperate exercise of authority, resolved, if they could not justify their own conduct, to embitter, to the utmost of their power, the feelings of the statesman who had disturbed them in the career of unlawful gain. They had attempted to injure him in the courts at the India House. The changes in public affairs now enabled them to point an attack against him on a larger theatre, in the British Parliament. We have seen that the rumours of the boundless wealth of India, the extent of the provinces conquered, and the amount of the revenue acquired, had raised the question to whom those conquests belonged,--to the trading company that had made them, or to the country and sovereign under whose auspices they were made? and that, to prevent the decision of this question, for which neither party was perfectly prepared, a compromise had been entered into between Government and the Directors, in 1767, and afterwards renewed. But disasters and mismanagement in India and at home had, in the course of a few years, reduced the Company's affairs to such distress that, far from being able to pay the sum stipulated, it became very problematical if they would be able to discharge their ordinary debts. The Directors were willing to throw the blame on their servants abroad, whom they charged for acting contrary to their orders; while they, on their part, defended themselves as they best could from the imputations cast upon them. Reports of oppression in India were widely circulated; and the private fortunes rapidly accumulated, that were every day brought home from that country (fortunes large in themselves and exaggerated by report), were held by many sufficiently to prove the truth of the charges.