Excerpt from The Founders of the Indian Empire: Clive, Warren Hastings, and Wellesley, Lord Clive In performing my self-allotted task I have striven to be impartial. I am sure I have not written as a partisan. With the admiration I naturally feel for a man who did as much as any man who ever trod this earth to make of this small island in the Atlantic the Queen of nations, her roots spreading all over the world, it is with pain, greater than I can describe, that I have been forced to the conclusions I have recorded in the last chapter. I have done justice, I am certain, to the brilliant genius which changed the future of India; to the daring, the coolness, the energy, the clear-sightedness, the superiority to circumstances, displayed on every trying occasion. The greater, then, is my mortification that I cannot deny the existence of the alloy which, at times of peculiar temptation, disfigured a character which 2 would have been otherwise without reproach. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.