Company's servants traded, bargained, and took bribes as freely as they had done in the days of Vansittart. The golden age which Clive had promised after his return home was realised only by the gentlemen who were making their fortunes at the Company's expense, and by a number of native agents, officers, and landholders, who throve upon the jobbery and peculation that played havoc both with the trade and the revenues of Bengal.
In 1770, the year when Cartier succeeded Verelst, broke out the terrible famine which slew more than a third of the people in Bengal, and turned large tracts of fertile country into tiger-haunted jungle. Meanwhile, the Company itself was borrowing money for immediate needs, and was paying in other ways the full penalty of its transformation into a political power. Amidst seeming riches, so great was its actual poverty that the Directors asked for a loan from the British exchequer. The loan, which saved them from impending bankruptcy, was granted in 1772, only on condition that the Company should pay the nation £400,000 a year for the privilege of holding a few years longer the dominions won by treaty from the Emperor of Delhi. The spectacle of a merchant company wielding all the powers and patronage of sovereign rulers in the face of their own sovereign, George III, was an anomaly which no English statesman could readily brook; and the tide of popular feeling ran very strong against the whole class of 'Nabobs,' who, laden with the spoils of Indian service,
