to pay some attention to their immediate and urgent necessities. An inferior man would have hesitated and faltered: Clive saw that decision was necessary for the crisis. He could not undo his own work of pacification and reform. The affairs of the Society were too far advanced to be discontinued all at once. He therefore confirmed the grant to the Society, but declared that it was to terminate at the conclusion of the current year, the 1st of September, 1767.[84] At the same time, the Select Committee of Calcutta, by their letter of the 26th of January, 1767, while they mentioned that the orders for discontinuing the Society had been complied with, remonstrated strongly with the Court of Directors on the occasion; calling on them to review their opinion. Such is an outline of the history of the Society of Trade during Clive's government. He formed a society in unison, as he supposed, with the spirit of the orders of the Court of Directors, which desired him, in the new plan of trade intended to be formed, to consult the benefit of three parties--the Nabob, the Company, and its servants. The Nabob's interest had merged in the Company's. The interest of the natives, however, the most important of all, was consulted by their restoration to the benefits of the trade, from which recently they had nearly been excluded; and by the exclusion of Europeans from any participation in the details of it. How the interests of the Company's servants were to be consulted by any plan that admitted them to the profits, yet excluded them in every shape from the trade, it is not easy to imagine. Lord Clive and the Committee did, therefore, what then, and in all succeeding times, it has been found necessary to do, in India, and in every distant possession, to form and execute a plan on their own responsibility, and to leave the future approbation or disapprobation to their distant masters. Inconvenient as this may be, it is an inconvenience inseparable from distant legislation. A few words may here be said on the future history of the salt trade. The Court of Directors, after receiving the letters of the Select Committee, still persisted in their desire of abolishing the Society, and of removing Europeans from this and all other concern with the inland trade of the country. They therefore, by their letter of the 20th of November, 1767, written eighteen months after their former letter, ordered the Society of Trade to be abolished, and the salt-pans to be sold by public auction, excluding all Europeans from being bidders or owners, directly or indirectly. Instead of the benefits resulting to the senior servants from this trade, an allotment of 2-1/2 per cent. on the net revenue of the dewannee was assigned to them in certain shares; and a small increase of pay to captains and subalterns.[85]