The real causes of the resolutions of public bodies do not always appear in their public acts. To deprive their servants of their principal means of subsistence, without substituting any authorised allowance in its place, was bad policy in itself, and was reducing Lord Clive, in the midst of his exertions, to a very painful dilemma. Mr. Scrafton, in a letter[83] to Lord Clive, explains their secret reasons. The Proprietors had begun to clamour for an increase of dividend, which the Directors thought unsuitable to the situation of the Company's affairs. "This," says he, "has induced the Directors to defer the consideration of the gratification of the servants on abolishing the salt trade. Such consideration could not be but for a vast sum; and if it had got wind that such gratifications were ordered, the Proprietors would be outrageous for an increase of the dividend. Though we cannot open our minds upon it, yet it appears to me an increase of dividend must take place at the Quarterly Court in June; and then the Court will be under no restraint, but will give a per centage on the revenues, in which the Governor will have a great share, in lieu of trade; the rest among the Committee, Council, colonels, and ten below Council, but no lower."--"Your Lordship may be assured it will take place; for, when the last paragraph was added to the letter to you, the Committee declared it was their meaning and intention to do it by the next ship." The letters of the Directors, the first which Clive had received in answer to his communication on the plan which he had formed, as directed by them, for carrying on the internal trade, reached him only in December, 1766, a month before he left India. He had for some weeks been confined to his chamber by a very severe illness, from which his life was in danger. He now felt himself placed in a most painful predicament, between the Court of Directors and the immediate difficulties of his situation with the civil and military servants. He believed that, with long attention and care, he had succeeded in disarming the salt trade of most of its evils, and by its means had secured to the Company's superior servants a lawful for an unlawful income. But the commands of the Directors were positive; and, though he was of opinion that they were founded on mistake, it was his wish to conform to them. The Company, though aware of the address and spirit of command with which he had checked the machinations of their civil servants in 1765, were still ignorant, when their orders were given, of his still more difficult triumph over the mutiny of their military officers. They had, most justly and wisely, deprived their servants of their means of illicit gain; they now rashly deprived them also of what had been substituted as a lawful provision; they referred these discontented and powerful men, who had vast wealth within their reach, to a future and uncertain time, when their masters should be at leisure