Читать книгу The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12) - Edmund Burke - Страница 3

The times we live in, Mr. Speaker, have been distinguished by extraordinary events. Habituated, however, as we are, to uncommon combinations of men and of affairs, I believe nobody recollects anything more surprising than the spectacle of this day. The right honorable gentleman1 whose conduct is now in question formerly stood forth in this House, the prosecutor of the worthy baronet2 who spoke after him. He charged him with several grievous acts of malversation in office, with abuses of a public trust of a great and heinous nature. In less than two years we see the situation of the parties reversed; and a singular revolution puts the worthy baronet in a fair way of returning the prosecution in a recriminatory bill of pains and penalties, grounded on a breach of public trust relative to the government of the very same part of India. If he should undertake a bill of that kind, he will find no difficulty in conducting it with a degree of skill and vigor fully equal to all that have been exerted against him.

But the change of relation between these two gentlemen is not so striking as the total difference of their deportment under the same unhappy circumstances. Whatever the merits of the worthy baronet's defence might have been, he did not shrink from the charge. He met it with manliness of spirit and decency of behavior. What would have been thought of him, if he had held the present language of his old accuser? When articles were exhibited against him by that right honorable gentleman, he did not think proper to tell the House that we ought to institute no inquiry, to inspect no paper, to examine no witness. He did not tell us (what at that time he might have told us with some show of reason) that our concerns in India were matters of delicacy, that to divulge anything relative to them would be mischievous to the state. He did not tell us that those who would inquire into his proceedings were disposed to dismember the empire. He had not the presumption to say, that, for his part, having obtained, in his Indian presidency, the ultimate object of his ambition, his honor was concerned in executing with integrity the trust which had been legally committed to his charge: that others, not having been so fortunate, could not be so disinterested; and therefore their accusations could spring from no other source than faction, and envy to his fortune.

Had he been frontless enough to hold such vain, vaporing language in the face of a grave, a detailed, a specified matter of accusation, whilst he violently resisted everything which could bring the merits of his cause to the test,—had he been wild enough to anticipate the absurdities of this day,—that is, had he inferred, as his late accuser has thought proper to do, that he could not have been guilty of malversation in office, for this sole and curious reason, that he had been in office,—had he argued the impossibility of his abusing his power on this sole principle, that he had power to abuse,—he would have left but one impression on the mind of every man who heard him, and who believed him in his senses: that in the utmost extent he was guilty of the charge.

But, Sir, leaving these two gentlemen to alternate as criminal and accuser upon what principles they think expedient, it is for us to consider whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Treasurer of the Navy, acting as a Board of Control, are justified by law or policy in suspending the legal arrangements made by the Court of Directors, in order to transfer the public revenues to the private emolument of certain servants of the East India Company, without the inquiry into the origin and justice of their claims prescribed by an act of Parliament.

It is not contended that the act of Parliament did not expressly ordain an inquiry. It is not asserted that this inquiry was not, with equal precision of terms, specially committed, under particular regulations, to the Court of Directors. I conceive, therefore, the Board of Control had no right whatsoever to intermeddle in that business. There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence, if this be not undeniably true, that when, a special authority is given to any persons by name to do some particular act, that no others, by virtue of general powers, can obtain a legal title to intrude themselves into that trust, and to exercise those special functions in their place. I therefore consider the intermeddling of ministers in this affair as a downright usurpation. But if the strained construction by which they have forced themselves into a suspicious office (which every man delicate with regard to character would rather have sought constructions to avoid) were perfectly sound and perfectly legal, of this I am certain, that they cannot be justified in declining the inquiry which had been prescribed to the Court of Directors. If the Board of Control did lawfully possess the right of executing the special trust given to that court, they must take it as they found it, subject to the very same regulations which bound the Court of Directors. It will be allowed that the Court of Directors had no authority to dispense with either the substance or the mode of inquiry prescribed by the act of Parliament. If they had not, where in the act did the Board of Control acquire that capacity? Indeed, it was impossible they should acquire it. What must we think of the fabric and texture of an act of Parliament which should find it necessary to prescribe a strict inquisition, that should descend into minute regulations for the conduct of that inquisition, that should commit this trust to a particular description of men, and in the very same breath should enable another body, at their own pleasure, to supersede all the provisions the legislature had made, and to defeat the whole purpose, end, and object of the law? This cannot be supposed even of an act of Parliament conceived by the ministers themselves, and brought forth during the delirium of the last session.

My honorable friend has told you in the speech which introduced his motion, that fortunately this question is not a great deal involved in the labyrinths of Indian detail. Certainly not. But if it were, I beg leave to assure you that there is nothing in the Indian detail which is more difficult than in the detail of any other business. I admit, because I have some experience of the fact, that for the interior regulation of India a minute knowledge of India is requisite. But on any specific matter of delinquency in its government you are as capable of judging as if the same thing were done at your door. Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation, engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and cast with those that are born and bred in England. To go no farther than the case before us: you are just as competent to judge whether the sum of four millions sterling ought or ought not to be passed from the public treasury into a private pocket without any title except the claim of the parties, when the issue of fact is laid in Madras, as when it is laid in Westminster. Terms of art, indeed, are different in different places; but they are generally understood in none. The technical style of an Indian treasury is not one jot more remote than the jargon of our own Exchequer from the train of our ordinary ideas or the idiom of our common language. The difference, therefore, in the two cases is not in the comparative difficulty or facility of the two subjects, but in our attention to the one and our total neglect of the other. Had this attention and neglect been regulated by the value of the several objects, there would be nothing to complain of. But the reverse of that supposition is true. The scene of the Indian abuse is distant, indeed; but we must not infer that the value of our interest in it is decreased in proportion as it recedes from our view. In our politics, as in our common conduct, we shall be worse than infants, if we do not put our senses under the tuition of our judgment, and effectually cure ourselves of that optical illusion which makes a brier at our nose of greater magnitude than an oak at five hundred yards' distance.

I think I can trace all the calamities of this country to the single source of our not having had steadily before our eyes a general, comprehensive, well-connected, and well-proportioned view of the whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their true bearings and relations. After all its reductions, the British empire is still vast and various. After all the reductions of the House of Commons, (stripped as we are of our brightest ornaments and of our most important privileges,) enough are yet left to furnish us, if we please, with means of showing to the world that we deserve the superintendence of as large an empire as this kingdom ever held, and the continuance of as ample privileges as the House of Commons, in the plenitude of its power, had been habituated to assert. But if we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty, if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object, be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall by mean reparations upon mighty ruins.

I confess I feel a degree of disgust, almost leading to despair, at the manner in which we are acting in the great exigencies of our country. There is now a bill in this House appointing a rigid inquisition into the minutest detail of our offices at home. The collection of sixteen millions annually, a collection on which the public greatness, safety, and credit have their reliance, the whole order of criminal jurisprudence, which holds together society itself, have at no time obliged us to call forth such powers,—no, nor anything like them. There is not a principle of the law and Constitution of this country that is not subverted to favor the execution of that project.3 And for what is all this apparatus of bustle and terror? Is it because anything substantial is expected from it? No. The stir and bustle itself is the end proposed. The eye-servants of a short-sighted master will employ themselves, not on what is most essential to his affairs, but on what is nearest to his ken. Great difficulties have given a just value to economy; and our minister of the day must be an economist, whatever it may cost us. But where is he to exert his talents? At home, to be sure; for where else can he obtain a profitable credit for their exertion? It is nothing to him, whether the object on which he works under our eye be promising or not. If he does not obtain any public benefit, he may make regulations without end. Those are sure to pay in present expectation, whilst the effect is at a distance, and may be the concern of other times and other men. On these principles, he chooses to suppose (for he does not pretend more than to suppose) a naked possibility that he shall draw some resource out of crumbs dropped from the trenchers of penury; that something shall be laid in store from the short allowance of revenue-officers overloaded with duty and famished for want of bread,—by a reduction from officers who are at this very hour ready to batter the Treasury with what breaks through stone walls for an increase of their appointments. From the marrowless bones of these skeleton establishments, by the use of every sort of cutting and of every sort of fretting tool, he flatters himself that he may chip and rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to diet into some similitude of health and substance the languishing chimeras of fraudulent reformation.

Whilst he is thus employed according to his policy and to his taste, he has not leisure to inquire into those abuses in India that are drawing off money by millions from the treasures of this country, which are exhausting the vital juices from members of the state, where the public inanition is far more sorely felt than in the local exchequer of England. Not content with winking at these abuses, whilst he attempts to squeeze the laborious, ill-paid drudges of English revenue, he lavishes, in one act of corrupt prodigality, upon those who never served the public in any honest occupation at all, an annual income equal to two thirds of the whole collection of the revenues of this kingdom.

Actuated by the same principle of choice, he has now on the anvil another scheme, full of difficulty and desperate hazard, which totally alters the commercial relation of two kingdoms, and, what end soever it shall have, may bequeath a legacy of heartburning and discontent to one of the countries, perhaps to both, to be perpetuated to the latest posterity. This project is also undertaken on the hope of profit. It is provided, that, out of some (I know not what) remains of the Irish hereditary revenue, a fund, at some time, and of some sort, should be applied to the protection of the Irish trade. Here we are commanded again to task our faith, and to persuade ourselves, that, out of the surplus of deficiency, out of the savings of habitual and systematic prodigality, the minister of wonders will provide support for this nation, sinking under the mountainous load of two hundred and thirty millions of debt. But whilst we look with pain at his desperate and laborious trifling, whilst we are apprehensive that he will break his back in stooping to pick up chaff and straws, he recovers himself at an elastic bound, and with a broadcast swing of his arm he squanders over his Indian field a sum far greater than the clear produce of the whole hereditary revenue of the kingdom of Ireland.4

Strange as this scheme of conduct in ministry is, and inconsistent with all just policy, it is still true to itself, and faithful to its own perverted order. Those who are bountiful to crimes will be rigid to merit and penurious to service. Their penury is even held out as a blind and cover to their prodigality. The economy of injustice is to furnish resources for the fund of corruption. Then they pay off their protection to great crimes and great criminals by being inexorable to the paltry frailties of little men; and these modern flagellants are sure, with a rigid fidelity, to whip their own enormities on the vicarious back of every small offender.

It is to draw your attention to economy of quite another order, it is to animadvert on offences of a far different description, that my honorable friend has brought before you the motion of this day. It is to perpetuate the abuses which are subverting the fabric of your empire, that the motion is opposed. It is, therefore, with reason (and if he has power to carry himself through, I commend his prudence) that the right honorable gentleman makes his stand at the very outset, and boldly refuses all Parliamentary information. Let him admit but one step towards inquiry, and he is undone. You must be ignorant, or he cannot be safe. But before his curtain is let down, and the shades of eternal night shall veil our Eastern dominions from our view, permit me, Sir, to avail myself of the means which were furnished in anxious and inquisitive times to demonstrate out of this single act of the present minister what advantages you are to derive from permitting the greatest concern of this nation to be separated from the cognizance, and exempted even out of the competence, of Parliament. The greatest body of your revenue, your most numerous armies, your most important commerce, the richest sources of your public credit, (contrary to every idea of the known, settled policy of England,) are on the point of being converted into a mystery of state. You are going to have one half of the globe hid even from the common liberal curiosity of an English gentleman. Here a grand revolution commences. Mark the period, and mark the circumstances. In most of the capital changes that are recorded in the principles and system of any government, a public benefit of some kind or other has been pretended. The revolution commenced in something plausible, in something which carried the appearance at least of punishment of delinquency or correction of abuse. But here, in the very moment of the conversion of a department of British government into an Indian mystery, and in the very act in which the change commences, a corrupt private interest is set up in direct opposition to the necessities of the nation. A diversion is made of millions of the public money from the public treasury to a private purse. It is not into secret negotiations for war, peace, or alliance that the House of Commons is forbidden to inquire. It is a matter of account; it is a pecuniary transaction; it is the demand of a suspected steward upon ruined tenants and an embarrassed master that the Commons of Great Britain are commanded not to inspect. The whole tenor of the right honorable gentleman's argument is consonant to the nature of his policy. The system of concealment is fostered by a system of falsehood. False facts, false colors, false names of persons and things, are its whole support.

Sir, I mean to follow the right honorable gentleman over that field of deception, clearing what he has purposely obscured, and fairly stating what it was necessary for him to misrepresent. For this purpose, it is necessary you should know, with some degree of distinctness, a little of the locality, the nature, the circumstances, the magnitude of the pretended debts on which this marvellous donation is founded, as well as of the persons from whom and by whom it is claimed.

Madras, with its dependencies, is the second (but with a long interval, the second) member of the British empire in the East. The trade of that city, and of the adjacent territory, was not very long ago among the most flourishing in Asia. But since the establishment of the British power it has wasted away under an uniform gradual decline, insomuch that in the year 1779 not one merchant of eminence was to be found in the whole country.5 During this period of decay, about six hundred thousand sterling pounds a year have been drawn off by English gentlemen on their private account, by the way of China alone.6 If we add four hundred thousand, as probably remitted through other channels, and in other mediums, that is, in jewels, gold, and silver, directly brought to Europe, and in bills upon the British and foreign companies, you will scarcely think the matter overrated. If we fix the commencement of this extraction of money from the Carnatic at a period no earlier than the year 1760, and close it in the year 1780, it probably will not amount to a great deal less than twenty millions of money.

During the deep, silent flow of this steady stream of wealth which set from India into Europe, it generally passed on with no adequate observation; but happening at some periods to meet rifts of rocks that checked its course, it grew more noisy and attracted more notice. The pecuniary discussions caused by an accumulation of part of the fortunes of their servants in a debt from the Nabob of Arcot was the first thing which very particularly called for, and long engaged, the attention of the Court of Directors. This debt amounted to eight hundred and eighty thousand pounds sterling, and was claimed, for the greater part, by English gentlemen residing at Madras. This grand capital, settled at length by order at ten per cent, afforded an annuity of eighty-eight thousand pounds.7

Whilst the Directors were digesting their astonishment at this information, a memorial was presented to them from three gentlemen, informing them that their friends had lent, likewise, to merchants of Canton in China, a sum of not more than one million sterling. In this memorial they called upon the Company for their assistance and interposition with the Chinese government for the recovery of the debt. This sum lent to Chinese merchants was at twenty-four per cent, which would yield, if paid, an annuity of two hundred and forty thousand pounds.8

Perplexed as the Directors were with these demands, you may conceive, Sir, that they did not find themselves very much disembarrassed by being made acquainted that they must again exert their influence for a new reserve of the happy parsimony of their servants, collected into a second debt from the Nabob of Arcot, amounting to two millions four hundred thousand pounds, settled at an interest of twelve per cent. This is known by the name of the Consolidation of 1777, as the former of the Nabob's debts was by the title of the Consolidation of 1767. To this was added, in a separate parcel, a little reserve, called the Cavalry Debt, of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds, at the same interest. The whole of these four capitals, amounting to four millions four hundred and forty thousand pounds, produced at their several rates, annuities amounting to six hundred and twenty-three thousand pounds a year: a good deal more than one third of the clear land-tax of England, at four shillings in the pound; a good deal more than double the whole annual dividend of the East India Company, the nominal masters to the proprietors in these funds. Of this interest, three hundred and eighty-three thousand two hundred pounds a year stood chargeable on the public revenues of the Carnatic.

Sir, at this moment, it will not be necessary to consider the various operations which the capital and interest of this debt have successively undergone. I shall speak to these operations when I come particularly to answer the right honorable gentleman on each of the heads, as he has thought proper to divide them. But this was the exact view in which these debts first appeared to the Court of Directors, and to the world. It varied afterwards. But it never appeared in any other than a most questionable shape. When this gigantic phantom of debt first appeared before a young minister, it naturally would have justified some degree of doubt and apprehension. Such a prodigy would have filled any common man with superstitious fears. He would exorcise that shapeless, nameless form, and by everything sacred would have adjured it to tell by what means a small number of slight individuals, of no consequence or situation, possessed of no lucrative offices, without the command of armies or the known administration of revenues, without profession of any kind, without any sort of trade sufficient to employ a peddler, could have, in a few years, (as to some, even in a few months,) amassed treasures equal to the revenues of a respectable kingdom? Was it not enough to put these gentlemen, in the novitiate of their administration, on their guard, and to call upon them for a strict inquiry, (if not to justify them in a reprobation of those demands without any inquiry at all,) that, when all England, Scotland, and Ireland had for years been witness to the immense sums laid out by the servants of the Company in stocks of all denominations, in the purchase of lands, in the buying and building of houses, in the securing quiet seats in Parliament or in the tumultuous riot of contested elections, in wandering throughout the whole range of those variegated modes of inventive prodigality which sometimes have excited our wonder, sometimes roused our indignation, that, after all, India was four millions still in debt to them? India in debt to them! For what? Every debt, for which an equivalent of some kind or other is not given, is, on the face of it, a fraud. What is the equivalent they have given? What equivalent had they to give? What are the articles of commerce, or the branches of manufacture, which those gentlemen have carried hence to enrich India? What are the sciences they beamed out to enlighten it? What are the arts they introduced to cheer and to adorn it? What are the religious, what the moral institutions they have taught among that people, as a guide to life, or as a consolation when life is to be no more, that there is an eternal debt, a debt "still paying, still to owe," which must be bound on the present generation in India, and entailed on their mortgaged posterity forever? A debt of millions, in favor of a set of men whose names, with few exceptions, are either buried in the obscurity of their origin and talents or dragged into light by the enormity of their crimes!

In my opinion the courage of the minister was the most wonderful part of the transaction, especially as he must have read, or rather the right honorable gentleman says he has read for him, whole volumes upon the subject. The volumes, by the way, are not by one tenth part so numerous as the right honorable gentleman has thought proper to pretend, in order to frighten you from inquiry; but in these volumes, such as they are, the minister must have found a full authority for a suspicion (at the very least) of everything relative to the great fortunes made at Madras. What is that authority? Why, no other than the standing authority for all the claims which the ministry has thought fit to provide for,—the grand debtor,—the Nabob of Arcot himself. Hear that prince, in the letter written to the Court of Directors, at the precise period whilst the main body of these debts were contracting. In his letter he states himself to be, what undoubtedly he is, a most competent witness to this point. After speaking of the war with Hyder Ali in 1768 and 1769, and of other measures which he censures, (whether right or wrong it signifies nothing,) and into which he says he had been led by the Company's servants, he proceeds in this manner:—"If all these things were against the real interests of the Company, they are ten thousand times more against mine, and against the prosperity of my country and the happiness of my people; for your interests and mine are the same. What were they owing to, then? To the private views of a few individuals, who have enriched themselves at the expense of your influence and of my country: for your servants HAVE NO TRADE IN THIS COUNTRY, neither do you pay them high wages; yet in a few years they return to England with many lacs of pagodas. How can you or I account for such immense fortunes acquired in so short a time, without any visible means of getting them?"

When he asked this question, which involves its answer, it is extraordinary that curiosity did not prompt the Chancellor of the Exchequer to that inquiry which might come in vain recommended to him by his own act of Parliament. Does not the Nabob of Arcot tell us, in so many words, that there was no fair way of making the enormous sums sent by the Company's servants to England? And do you imagine that there was or could be more honesty and good faith in the demands for what remained behind in India? Of what nature were the transactions with himself? If you follow the train of his information, you must see, that, if these great sums were at all lent, it was not property, but spoil, that was lent; if not lent, the transaction was not a contract, but a fraud. Either way, if light enough could not be furnished to authorize a full condemnation of these demands, they ought to have been left to the parties, who best knew and understood each other's proceedings. It was not necessary that the authority of government should interpose in favor of claims whose very foundation was a defiance of that authority, and whose object and end was its entire subversion.

It may be said that this letter was written by the Nabob of Arcot in a moody humor, under the influence of some chagrin. Certainly it was; but it is in such humors that truth comes out. And when he tells you, from his own knowledge, what every one must presume, from the extreme probability of the thing, whether he told it or not, one such testimony is worth a thousand that contradict that probability, when the parties have a better understanding with each other, and when they have a point to carry that may unite them in a common deceit.

If this body of private claims of debt, real or devised, were a question, as it is falsely pretended, between the Nabob of Arcot, as debtor, and Paul Benfield and his associates, as creditors, I am sure I should give myself but little trouble about it. If the hoards of oppression were the fund for satisfying the claims of bribery and peculation, who would wish to interfere between such litigants? If the demands were confined to what might be drawn from the treasures which the Company's records uniformly assert that the Nabob is in possession of, or if he had mines of gold or silver or diamonds, (as we know that he has none,) these gentlemen might break open his hoards or dig in his mines without any disturbance from me. But the gentlemen on the other side of the House know as well as I do, and they dare not contradict me, that the Nabob of Arcot and his creditors are not adversaries, but collusive parties, and that the whole transaction is under a false color and false names. The litigation is not, nor ever has been, between their rapacity and his hoarded riches. No: it is between him and them combining and confederating, on one side, and the public revenues, and the miserable inhabitants of a ruined country, on the other. These are the real plaintiffs and the real defendants in the suit. Refusing a shilling from his hoards for the satisfaction of any demand, the Nabob of Arcot is always ready, nay, he earnestly, and with eagerness and passion, contends for delivering up to these pretended creditors his territory and his subjects. It is, therefore, not from treasuries and mines, but from the food of your unpaid armies, from the blood withheld from the veins and whipped out of the backs of the most miserable of men, that we are to pamper extortion, usury, and peculation, under the false names of debtors and creditors of state.

The great patron of these creditors, (to whose honor they ought to erect statues,) the right honorable gentleman,9 in stating the merits which recommended them to his favor, has ranked them under three grand divisions. The first, the creditors of 1767; then the creditors of the cavalry loan; and lastly, the creditors of the loan in 1777. Let us examine them, one by one, as they pass in review before us.

The first of these loans, that of 1767, he insists, has an indisputable claim upon the public justice. The creditors, he affirms, lent their money publicly; they advanced it with the express knowledge and approbation of the Company; and it was contracted at the moderate interest of ten per cent. In this loan, the demand is, according to him, not only just, but meritorious in a very high degree: and one would be inclined to believe he thought so, because he has put it last in the provision he has made for these claims.

I readily admit this debt to stand the fairest of the whole; for, whatever may be my suspicions concerning a part of it, I can convict it of nothing worse than the most enormous usury. But I can convict, upon the spot, the right honorable gentleman of the most daring misrepresentation in every one fact, without any exception, that he has alleged in defence of this loan, and of his own conduct with regard to it. I will show you that this debt was never contracted with the knowledge of the Company; that it had not their approbation; that they received the first intelligence of it with the utmost possible surprise, indignation, and alarm.

So for from being previously apprised of the transaction from its origin, it was two years before the Court of Directors obtained any official intelligence of it. "The dealings of the servants with the Nabob were concealed from the first, until they were found out" (says Mr. Sayer, the Company's counsel) "by the report of the country." The Presidency, however, at last thought proper to send an official account. On this the Directors tell them, "To your great reproach, it has been concealed from us. We cannot but suspect this debt to have had its weight in your proposed aggrandizement of Mahomed Ali [the Nabob of Arcot]; but whether it has or has not, certain it is you are guilty of an high breach of duty in concealing it from us."

These expressions, concerning the ground of the transaction, its effect, and its clandestine nature, are in the letters bearing date March 17, 1769. After receiving a more full account, on the 23d March, 1770, they state, that "Messrs. John Pybus, John Call, and James Bourchier, as trustees for themselves and others of the Nabob's private creditors, had proved a deed of assignment upon the Nabob and his son of FIFTEEN districts of the Nabob's country, the revenues of which yielded, in time of peace, eight lacs of pagodas [320,000l. sterling] annually; and likewise an assignment of the yearly tribute paid the Nabob from the Rajah of Tanjore, amounting to four lacs of rupees [40,000l.]." The territorial revenue at that time possessed by these gentlemen, without the knowledge or consent of their masters, amounted to three hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling annually. They were making rapid strides to the entire possession of the country, when the Directors, whom the right honorable gentleman states as having authorized these proceedings, were kept in such profound ignorance of this royal acquisition of territorial revenue by their servants, that in the same letter they say, "This assignment was obtained by three of the members of your board in January, 1767; yet we do not find the least trace of it upon your Consultations until August, 1768, nor do any of your letters to us afford any information relative to such transactions till the 1st of November, 1768. By your last letters of the 8th of May, 1769, you bring the whole proceedings to light in one view."

As to the previous knowledge of the Company, and its sanction to the debts, you see that this assertion of that knowledge is utterly unfounded. But did the Directors approve of it, and ratify the transaction, when it was known? The very reverse. On the same 3d of March, the Directors declare, "upon an impartial examination of the whole conduct of our late Governor and Council of Fort George [Madras], and on the fullest consideration, that the said Governor and Council have, in notorious violation of the trust reposed in them, manifestly preferred the interest of private individuals to that of the Company, in permitting the assignment of the revenues of certain valuable districts, to a very large amount, from the Nabob to individuals"; and then, highly aggravating their crimes, they add,—"We order and direct that you do examine, in the most impartial manner, all the above-mentioned transactions, and that you punish, by suspension, degradation, dismission, or otherwise, as to you shall seem meet, all and every such servant or servants of the Company who may by you be found guilty of any of the above offences." "We had" (say the Directors) "the mortification to find that the servants of the Company, who had been raised, supported, and owed their present opulence to the advantages gained in such service, have in this instance most unfaithfully betrayed their trust, abandoned the Company's interest, and prostituted its influence to accomplish the purposes of individuals, whilst the interest of the Company is almost wholly neglected, and payment to us rendered extremely precarious." Here, then, is the rock of approbation of the Court of Directors, on which the right honorable gentleman says this debt was founded. Any member, Mr. Speaker, who should come into the House, on my reading this sentence of condemnation of the Court of Directors against their unfaithful servants, might well imagine that he had heard an harsh, severe, unqualified invective against the present ministerial Board of Control. So exactly do the proceedings of the patrons of this abuse tally with those of the actors in it, that the expressions used in the condemnation of the one may serve for the reprobation of the other, without the change of a word.

To read you all the expressions of wrath and indignation fulminated in this dispatch against the meritorious creditors of the right honorable gentleman, who according to him have been so fully approved by the Company, would be to read the whole.

The right honorable gentleman, with an address peculiar to himself, every now and then slides in the Presidency of Madras, as synonymous to the Company. That the Presidency did approve the debt is certain. But the right honorable gentleman, as prudent in suppressing as skilful in bringing forward his matter, has not chosen to tell you that the Presidency were the very persons guilty of contracting this loan,—creditors themselves, and agents and trustees for all the other creditors. For this the Court of Directors accuse them of breach of trust; and for this the right honorable gentleman considers them as perfectly good authority for those claims. It is pleasant to hear a gentleman of the law quote the approbation of creditors as an authority for their own debt.

How they came to contract the debt to themselves, how they came to act as agents for those whom they ought to have controlled, is for your inquiry. The policy of this debt was announced to the Court of Directors by the very persons concerned in creating it. "Till very lately," say the Presidency, "the Nabob placed his dependence on the Company. Now he has been taught by ill advisers that an interest out of doors may stand him in good stead. He has been made to believe that his private creditors have power and interest to overrule the Court of Directors."10 The Nabob was not misinformed. The private creditors instantly qualified a vast number of votes; and having made themselves masters of the Court of Proprietors, as well as extending a powerful cabal in other places as important, they so completely overturned the authority of the Court of Directors at home and abroad, that this poor, baffled government was soon obliged to lower its tone. It was glad to be admitted into partnership with its own servants. The Court of Directors, establishing the debt which they had reprobated as a breach of trust, and which was planned for the subversion of their authority, settled its payments on a par with those of the public; and even so were not able to obtain peace, or even equality in their demands. All the consequences lay in a regular and irresistible train. By employing their influence for the recovery of this debt, their orders, issued in the same breath, against creating new debts, only animated the strong desires of their servants to this prohibited prolific sport, and it soon produced a swarm of sons and daughters, not in the least degenerated from the virtue of their parents.

From that moment the authority of the Court of Directors expired in the Carnatic, and everywhere else. "Every man," says the Presidency, "who opposes the government and its measures, finds an immediate countenance from the Nabob; even our discarded officers, however unworthy, are received into the Nabob's service."11 It was, indeed, a matter of no wonderful sagacity to determine whether the Court of Directors, with their miserable salaries to their servants, of four or five hundred pounds a year, or the distributor of millions, was most likely to be obeyed. It was an invention beyond the imagination of all the speculatists of our speculating age, to see a government quietly settled in one and the same town, composed of two distinct members: one to pay scantily for obedience, and the other to bribe high for rebellion and revolt.

The next thing which recommends this particular debt to the right honorable gentleman is, it seems, the moderate interest of ten per cent. It would be lost labor to observe on this assertion. The Nabob, in a long apologetic letter12 for the transaction between him and the body of the creditors, states the fact as I shall state it to you. In the accumulation of this debt, the first interest paid was from thirty to thirty-six per cent; it was then brought down to twenty-five per cent; at length it was reduced to twenty; and there it found its rest. During the whole process, as often as any of these monstrous interests fell into an arrear, (into which they were continually falling,) the arrear, formed into a new capital,13 was added to the old, and the same interest of twenty per cent accrued upon both. The Company, having got some scent of the enormous usury which prevailed at Madras, thought it necessary to interfere, and to order all interests to be lowered to ten per cent. This order, which contained no exception, though it by no means pointed particularly to this class of debts, came like a thunderclap on the Nabob. He considered his political credit as ruined; but to find a remedy to this unexpected evil, he again added to the old principal twenty per cent interest accruing for the last year. Thus a new fund was formed; and it was on that accumulation of various principals, and interests heaped upon interests, not on the sum originally lent, as the right honorable gentleman would make you believe, that ten per cent was settled on the whole.

When you consider the enormity of the interest at which these debts were contracted, and the several interests added to the principal, I believe you will not think me so skeptical, if I should doubt whether for this debt of 880,000l. the Nabob ever saw 100,000l. in real money. The right honorable gentleman suspecting, with all his absolute dominion over fact, that he never will be able to defend even this venerable patriarchal job, though sanctified by its numerous issue, and hoary with prescriptive years, has recourse to recrimination, the last resource of guilt. He says that this loan of 1767 was provided for in Mr. Fox's India bill; and judging of others by his own nature and principles, he more than insinuates that this provision was made, not from any sense of merit in the claim, but from partiality to General Smith, a proprietor, and an agent for that debt. If partiality could have had any weight against justice and policy with the then ministers and their friends, General Smith had titles to it. But the right honorable gentleman knows as well as I do, that General Smith was very far from looking on himself as partially treated in the arrangements of that time; indeed, what man dared to hope for private partiality in that sacred plan for relief to nations?

It is not necessary that the right honorable gentleman should sarcastically call that time to our recollection. Well do I remember every circumstance of that memorable period. God forbid I should forget it! O illustrious disgrace! O victorious defeat! May your memorial be fresh and new to the latest generations! May the day of that generous conflict be stamped in characters never to be cancelled or worn out from the records of time! Let no man hear of us, who shall not hear, that, in a struggle against the intrigues of courts and the perfidious levity of the multitude, we fell in the cause of honor, in the cause of our country, in the cause of human nature itself! But if fortune should be as powerful over fame as she has been prevalent over virtue, at least our conscience is beyond her jurisdiction. My poor share in the support of that great measure no man shall ravish from me. It shall be safely lodged in the sanctuary of my heart,—never, never to be torn from thence, but with those holds that grapple it to life.

I say, I well remember that bill, and every one of its honest and its wise provisions. It is not true that this debt was ever protected or enforced, or any revenue whatsoever set apart for it. It was left in that bill just where it stood: to be paid or not to be paid out of the Nabob's private treasures, according to his own discretion. The Company had actually given it their sanction, though always relying for its validity on the sole security of the faith of him14 who without their knowledge or consent entered into the original obligation. It had no other sanction; it ought to have had no other. So far was Mr. Fox's bill from providing funds for it, as this ministry have wickedly done for this, and for ten times worse transactions, out of the public estate, that an express clause immediately preceded, positively forbidding any British subject from receiving assignments upon any part of the territorial revenue, on any pretence whatsoever.15

You recollect, Mr. Speaker, that the Chancellor of the Exchequer strongly professed to retain every part of Mr. Fox's bill which was intended to prevent abuse; but in his India bill, which (let me do justice) is as able and skilful a performance, for its own purposes, as ever issued from the wit of man, premeditating this iniquity,—

Hoc ipsum ut strueret, Trojamque aperiret Achivis,—

expunged this essential clause, broke down the fence which was raised to cover the public property against the rapacity of his partisans, and thus levelling every obstruction, he made a firm, broad highway for sin and death, for usury and oppression, to renew their ravages throughout the devoted revenues of the Carnatic.

The tenor, the policy, and the consequences of this debt of 1767 are in the eyes of ministry so excellent, that its merits are irresistible; and it takes the lead to give credit and countenance to all the rest. Along with this chosen body of heavy-armed infantry, and to support it in the line, the right honorable gentleman has stationed his corps of black cavalry. If there be any advantage between this debt and that of 1769, according to him the cavalry debt has it. It is not a subject of defence: it is a theme of panegyric. Listen to the right honorable gentleman, and you will find it was contracted to save the country,—to prevent mutiny in armies,—to introduce economy in revenues; and for all these honorable purposes, it originated at the express desire and by the representative authority of the Company itself.

First let me say a word to the authority. This debt was contracted, not by the authority of the Company, not by its representatives, (as the right honorable gentleman has the unparalleled confidence to assert,) but in the ever-memorable period of 1777, by the usurped power of those who rebelliously, in conjunction with the Nabob of Arcot, had overturned the lawful government of Madras. For that rebellion this House unanimously directed a public prosecution. The delinquents, after they had subverted government, in order to make to themselves a party to support them in their power, are universally known to have dealt jobs about to the right and to the left, and to any who were willing to receive them. This usurpation, which the right honorable gentleman well knows was brought about by and for the great mass of these pretended debts, is the authority which is set up by him to represent the Company,—to represent that Company which, from the first moment of their hearing of this corrupt and fraudulent transaction to this hour, have uniformly disowned and disavowed it.

So much for the authority. As to the facts, partly true, and partly colorable, as they stand recorded, they are in substance these. The Nabob of Arcot, as soon as he had thrown off the superiority of this country by means of these creditors, kept up a great army which he never paid. Of course his soldiers were generally in a state of mutiny.16 The usurping Council say that they labored hard with their master, the Nabob, to persuade him to reduce these mutinous and useless troops. He consented; but, as usual, pleaded inability to pay them their arrears. Here was a difficulty. The Nabob had no money; the Company had no money; every public supply was empty. But there was one resource which no season has ever yet dried up in that climate. The soucars were at hand: that is, private English money-jobbers offered their assistance. Messieurs Taylor, Majendie, and Call proposed to advance the small sum of 160,000l. to pay off the Nabob's black cavalry, provided the Company's authority was given for their loan. This was the great point of policy always aimed at, and pursued through a hundred devices by the servants at Madras. The Presidency, who themselves had no authority for the functions they presumed to exercise, very readily gave the sanction of the Company to those servants who knew that the Company, whose sanction was demanded, had positively prohibited all such transactions.

However, so far as the reality of the dealing goes, all is hitherto fair and plausible; and here the right honorable gentleman concludes, with commendable prudence, his account of the business. But here it is I shall beg leave to commence my supplement: for the gentleman's discreet modesty has led him to cut the thread of the story somewhat abruptly. One of the most essential parties is quite forgotten. Why should the episode of the poor Nabob be omitted? When that prince chooses it, nobody can tell his story better. Excuse me, if I apply again to my book, and give it you from the first hand: from the Nabob himself.

"Mr. Stratton became acquainted with this, and got Mr. Taylor and others to lend me four lacs of pagodas towards discharging the arrears of pay of my troops. Upon this, I wrote a letter of thanks to Mr. Stratton; and upon the faith of this money being paid immediately, I ordered many of my troops to be discharged by a certain day, and lessened the number of my servants. Mr. Taylor, &c., some time after acquainted me, that they had no ready money, but they would grant teeps payable in four months. This astonished me; for I did not know what might happen, when the sepoys were dismissed from my service. I begged of Mr. Taylor and the others to pay this sum to the officers of my regiments at the time they mentioned; and desired the officers, at the same time, to pacify and persuade the men belonging to them that their pay would be given to them at the end of four months, and that, till those arrears were discharged, their pay should be continued to them. Two years are nearly expired since that time, but Mr. Taylor has not yet entirely discharged the arrears of those troops, and I am obliged to continue their pay from that time till this. I hoped to have been able, by this expedient, to have lessened the number of my troops, and discharged the arrears due to them, considering the trifle of interest to Mr. Taylor and the others as no great matter; but instead of this, I am oppressed with the burden of pay due to those troops, and the interest, which is going on to Mr. Taylor from the day the teeps were granted to him." What I have read to you is an extract of a letter from the Nabob of the Carnatic to Governor Rumbold, dated the 22d, and received the 24th of March, 1779.17

Suppose his Highness not to be well broken in to things of this kind, it must, indeed, surprise so known and established a bond-vender as the Nabob of Arcot, one who keeps himself the largest bond-warehouse in the world, to find that he was now to receive in kind: not to take money for his obligations, but to give his bond in exchange for the bond of Messieurs Taylor, Majendie, and Call, and to pay, besides, a good, smart interest, legally twelve per cent, (in reality, perhaps, twenty or twenty-four per cent,) for this exchange of paper. But his troops were not to be so paid, or so disbanded. They wanted bread, and could not live by cutting and shuffling of bonds. The Nabob still kept the troops in service, and was obliged to continue, as you have seen, the whole expense to exonerate himself from which he became indebted to the soucars.

Had it stood here, the transaction would have been of the most audacious strain of fraud and usury perhaps ever before discovered, whatever might have been practised and concealed. But the same authority (I mean the Nabob's) brings before you something, if possible, more striking. He states, that, for this their paper, he immediately handed over to these gentlemen something very different from paper,—that is, the receipt of a territorial revenue, of which, it seems, they continued as long in possession as the Nabob himself continued in possession of anything. Their payments, therefore, not being to commence before the end of four months, and not being completed in two years, it must be presumed (unless they prove the contrary) that their payments to the Nabob were made out of the revenues they had received from his assignment. Thus they condescended to accumulate a debt of 160,000l. with an interest of twelve per cent, in compensation for a lingering payment to the Nabob of 160,000l. of his own money.

Still we have not the whole. About two years after the assignment of those territorial revenues to these gentlemen, the Nabob receives a remonstrance from his chief manager in a principal province, of which this is the tenor. "The entire revenue of those districts is by your Highness's order set apart to discharge the tunkaws [assignments] granted to the Europeans. The gomastahs [agents] of Mr. Taylor to Mr. De Fries are there in order to collect those tunkaws; and as they receive all the revenue that is collected, your Highness's troops have seven or eight months' pay due, which they cannot receive, and are thereby reduced to the greatest distress. In such times it is highly necessary to provide for the sustenance of the troops, that they may be ready to exert themselves in the service of your Highness."

Here, Sir, you see how these causes and effects act upon one another. One body of troops mutinies for want of pay; a debt is contracted to pay them; and they still remain unpaid. A territory destined to pay other troops is assigned for this debt; and these other troops fall into the same state of indigence and mutiny with the first. Bond is paid by bond; arrear is turned into new arrear; usury engenders new usury; mutiny, suspended in one quarter, starts up in another; until all the revenues and all the establishments are entangled into one inextricable knot of confusion, from which they are only disengaged by being entirely destroyed. In that state of confusion, in a very few months after the date of the memorial I have just read to you, things were found, when the Nabob's troops, famished to feed English soucars, instead of defending the country, joined the invaders, and deserted in entire bodies to Hyder Ali.18

The manner in which this transaction was carried on shows that good examples are not easily forgot, especially by those who are bred in a great school. One of those splendid examples give me leave to mention, at a somewhat more early period; because one fraud furnishes light to the discovery of another, and so on, until the whole secret of mysterious iniquity bursts upon you in a blaze of detection. The paper I shall read you is not on record. If you please, you may take it on my word. It is a letter written from one of undoubted information in Madras to Sir John Clavering, describing the practice that prevailed there, whilst the Company's allies were under sale, during the time of Governor Winch's administration.

"One mode," says Clavering's correspondent, "of amassing money at the Nabob's cost is curious. He is generally in arrears to the Company. Here the Governor, being cash-keeper, is generally on good terms with the banker, who manages matters thus. The Governor presses the Nabob for the balance due from him; the Nabob flies to his banker for relief; the banker engages to pay the money, and grants his notes accordingly, which he puts in the cash-book as ready money; the Nabob pays him an interest for it at two and three per cent per mensem, till the tunkaws he grants on the particular districts for it are paid. Matters in the mean time are so managed that there is no call for this money for the Company's service till the tunkaws become due. By this means not a cash is advanced by the banker, though he receives a heavy interest from the Nabob, which is divided as lawful spoil."

Here, Mr. Speaker, you have the whole art and mystery, the true free-mason secret, of the profession of soucaring; by which a few innocent, inexperienced young Englishmen, such as Mr. Paul Benfield, for instance, without property upon which any one would lend to themselves a single shilling, are enabled at once to take provinces in mortgage, to make princes their debtors, and to become creditors for millions.

But it seems the right honorable gentleman's favorite soucar cavalry have proved the payment before the Mayor's Court at Madras! Have they so? Why, then, defraud our anxiety and their characters of that proof? Is it not enough that the charges which I have laid before you have stood on record against these poor injured gentlemen for eight years? Is it not enough that they are in print by the orders of the East India Company for five years? After these gentlemen have borne all the odium of this publication and all the indignation of the Directors with such unexampled equanimity, now that they are at length stimulated into feeling are you to deny them their just relief? But will the right honorable gentleman be pleased to tell us how they came not to give this satisfaction to the Court of Directors, their lawful masters, during all the eight years of this litigated claim? Were they not bound, by every tie that can bind man, to give them this satisfaction? This day, for the first time, we hear of the proofs. But when were these proofs offered? In what cause? Who were the parties? Who inspected, who contested this belated account? Let us see something to oppose to the body of record which appears against them. The Mayor's Court! the Mayor's Court! Pleasant! Does not the honorable gentleman know that the first corps of creditors (the creditors of 1767) stated it as a sort of hardship to them, that they could not have justice at Madras, from the impossibility of their supporting their claims in the Mayor's Court? Why? Because, say they, the members of that court were themselves creditors, and therefore could not sit as judges.19 Are we ripe to say that no creditor under similar circumstances was member of the court, when the payment which is the ground of this cavalry debt was put in proof?20 Nay, are we not in a manner compelled to conclude that the court was so constituted, when we know there is scarcely a man in Madras who has not some participation in these transactions? It is a shame to hear such proofs mentioned, instead of the honest, vigorous scrutiny which the circumstances of such an affair so indispensably call for.

But his Majesty's ministers, indulgent enough to other scrutinies, have not been satisfied with authorizing the payment of this demand without such inquiry as the act has prescribed; but they have added the arrear of twelve per cent interest, from the year 1777 to the year 1784, to make a new capital, raising thereby 160 to 294,000l. Then they charge a new twelve per cent on the whole from that period, for a transaction in which it will be a miracle if a single penny will be ever found really advanced from the private stock of the pretended creditors.

In this manner, and at such an interest, the ministers have thought proper to dispose of 294,000l. of the public revenues, for what is called the Cavalry Loan. After dispatching this, the right honorable gentleman leads to battle his last grand division, the consolidated debt of 1777. But having exhausted all his panegyric on the two first, he has nothing at all to say in favor of the last. On the contrary, he admits that it was contracted in defiance of the Company's orders, without even the pretended sanction of any pretended representatives. Nobody, indeed, has yet been found hardy enough to stand forth avowedly in its defence. But it is little to the credit of the age, that what has not plausibility enough to find an advocate has influence enough to obtain a protector. Could any man expect to find that protector anywhere? But what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman of the Committee of Secrecy21, who had published to the House, and to the world, the facts that condemn these debts, the orders that forbid the incurring of them, the dreadful consequences which attended them? Even in his official letter, when he tramples on his Parliamentary report, yet his general language is the same. Read the preface to this part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could fall from a vigilant guardian of the public treasury upon those who attempted to rob it. What must be felt by every man who has feeling, when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its authenticity,—without a single step taken to settle even the amount of the demand,—without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand pound, principal money,22—without an attempt made to ascertain the proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of Directors,—of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle, by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about for their own particular purposes?

My honorable friend who made you the motion has sufficiently exposed the nature of this debt. He has stated to you, that its own agents, in the year 1781, in the arrangement they proposed to make at Calcutta, were satisfied to have twenty-five per cent at once struck off from the capital of a great part of this debt, and prayed to have a provision made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all. This was an arrangement of their own, an arrangement made by those who best knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor it merited,23 and how little hopes they had to find any persons in authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.

But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations of a sanguine avarice, had not the confidence to propose, they have found a Chancellor of the Exchequer in England hardy enough to undertake for them. He has cheered their drooping spirits. He has thanked the peculators for not despairing of their commonwealth. He has told them they were too modest. He has replaced the twenty-five per cent which, in order to lighten themselves, they had abandoned in their conscious terror. Instead of cutting off the interest, as they had themselves consented to do, with the fourth of the capital, he has added the whole growth of four years' usury of twelve per cent to the first overgrown principal; and has again grafted on this meliorated stock a perpetual annuity of six per cent, to take place from the year 1781. Let no man hereafter talk of the decaying energies of Nature. All the acts and monuments in the records of peculation, the consolidated corruption of ages, the patterns of exemplary plunder in the heroic times of Roman iniquity, never equalled the gigantic corruption of this single act. Never did Nero, in all the insolent prodigality of despotism, deal out to his prætorian guards a donation fit to be named with the largess showered down by the bounty of our Chancellor of the Exchequer on the faithful band of his Indian sepoys.

The right honorable gentleman24 lets you freely and voluntarily into the whole transaction. So perfectly has his conduct confounded his understanding, that he fairly tells you that through the course of the whole business he has never conferred with any but the agents of the pretended creditors. After this, do you want more to establish a secret understanding with the parties,—to fix, beyond a doubt, their collusion and participation in a common fraud?

If this were not enough, he has furnished you with other presumptions that are not to be shaken. It is one of the known indications of guilt to stagger and prevaricate in a story, and to vary in the motives that are assigned to conduct. Try these ministers by this rule. In their official dispatch, they tell the Presidency of Madras that they have established the debt for two reasons: first, because the Nabob (the party indebted) does not dispute it; secondly, because it is mischievous to keep it longer afloat, and that the payment of the European creditors will promote circulation in the country. These two motives (for the plainest reasons in the world) the right honorable gentleman has this day thought fit totally to abandon. In the first place, he rejects the authority of the Nabob of Arcot. It would, indeed, be pleasant to see him adhere to this exploded testimony. He next, upon grounds equally solid, abandons the benefits of that circulation which was to be produced by drawing out all the juices of the body. Laying aside, or forgetting, these pretences of his dispatch, he has just now assumed a principle totally different, but to the full as extraordinary. He proceeds upon a supposition that many of the claims may be fictitious. He then finds, that, in a case where many valid and many fraudulent claims are blended together, the best course for their discrimination is indiscriminately to establish them all. He trusts, (I suppose,) as there may not be a fund sufficient for every description of creditors, that the best warranted claimants will exert themselves in bringing to light those debts which will not bear an inquiry. What he will not do himself he is persuaded will be done by others; and for this purpose he leaves to any person a general power of excepting to the debt. This total change of language and prevarication in principle is enough, if it stood alone, to fix the presumption of unfair dealing. His dispatch assigns motives of policy, concord, trade, and circulation: his speech proclaims discord and litigations, and proposes, as the ultimate end, detection.

But he may shift his reasons, and wind and turn as he will, confusion waits him at all his doubles. Who will undertake this detection? Will the Nabob? But the right honorable gentleman has himself this moment told us that no prince of the country can by any motive be prevailed upon to discover any fraud that is practised upon him by the Company's servants. He says what (with the exception of the complaint against the Cavalry Loan) all the world knows to be true: and without that prince's concurrence, what evidence can be had of the fraud of any the smallest of these demands? The ministers never authorized any person to enter into his exchequer and to search his records. Why, then, this shameful and insulting mockery of a pretended contest? Already contests for a preference have arisen among these rival bond-creditors. Has not the Company itself struggled for a preference for years, without any attempt at detection of the nature of those debts with which they contended? Well is the Nabob of Arcot attended to in the only specific complaint he has ever made. He complained of unfair dealing in the Cavalry Loan. It is fixed upon him with interest on interest; and this loan is excepted from all power of litigation.

This day, and not before, the right honorable gentleman thinks that the general establishment of all claims is the surest way of laying open the fraud of some of them. In India this is a reach of deep policy. But what would be thought of this mode of acting on a demand upon the Treasury in England? Instead of all this cunning, is there not one plain way open,—that is, to put the burden of the proof on those who make the demand? Ought not ministry to have said to the creditors, "The person who admits your debt stands excepted to as evidence; he stands charged as a collusive party, to hand over the public revenues to you for sinister purposes. You say, you have a demand of some millions on the Indian Treasury; prove that you have acted by lawful authority; prove, at least, that your money has been bonâ fide advanced; entitle yourself to my protection by the fairness and fulness of the communications you make"? Did an honest creditor ever refuse that reasonable and honest test?

There is little doubt that several individuals have been seduced by the purveyors to the Nabob of Arcot to put their money (perhaps the whole of honest and laborious earnings) into their hands, and that at such high interest as, being condemned at law, leaves them at the mercy of the great managers whom they trusted. These seduced creditors are probably persons of no power or interest either in England or India, and may be just objects of compassion. By taking, in this arrangement, no measures for discrimination and discovery, the fraudulent and the fair are in the first instance confounded in one mass. The subsequent selection and distribution is left to the Nabob. With him the agents and instruments of his corruption, whom he sees to be omnipotent in England, and who may serve him in future, as they have done in times past, will have precedence, if not an exclusive preference. These leading interests domineer, and have always domineered, over the whole. By this arrangement, the persons seduced are made dependent on their seducers; honesty (comparative honesty at least) must become of the party of fraud, and must quit its proper character and its just claims, to entitle itself to the alms of bribery and peculation.

But be these English creditors what they may, the creditors most certainly not fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched indeed: by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is left for them. They lent bonâ fide; in all probability they were even forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob's obligations. They had no trusts to carry to his market. They had no faith of alliances to sell. They had no nations to betray to robbery and ruin. They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.25

These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason. You see in this instance that the presumption of guilt is not only no exception to the demands on the public treasury, but with these ministers it is a necessary condition to their support. But that you may not think this preference solely owing to their known contempt of the natives, who ought with every generous mind to claim their first charities, you will find the same rule religiously observed with Europeans too. Attend, Sir, to this decisive case. Since the beginning of the war, besides arrears of every kind, a bond-debt has been contracted at Madras, uncertain in its amount, but represented from four hundred thousand pound to a million sterling. It stands only at the low interest of eight per cent. Of the legal authority on which this debt was contracted, of its purposes for the very being of the state, of its publicity and fairness, no doubt has been entertained for a moment. For this debt no sort of provision whatever has been made. It is rejected as an outcast, whilst the whole undissipated attention of the minister has been employed for the discharge of claims entitled to his favor by the merits we have seen.

I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of those demands, in order to see how much, supposing the country in a condition to furnish the fund, may remain to satisfy the public debt and the necessary establishments. But I have been foiled in my attempt.

About one fourth, that is, about 220,000l., of the loan of 1767 remains unpaid. How much interest is in arrear I could never discover: seven or eight years' at least, which would make the whole of that debt about 396,000l. This stock, which the ministers in their instructions to the Governor of Madras state as the least exceptionable, they have thought proper to distinguish by a marked severity, leaving it the only one on which the interest is not added to the principal to beget a new interest.

The Cavalry Loan, by the operation of the same authority, is made up to 294,000l.; and this 294,000l., made up of principal and interest, is crowned with a new interest of twelve per cent.

What the grand loan, the bribery loan of 1777, may be is amongst the deepest mysteries of state. It is probably the first debt ever assuming the title of Consolidation that did not express what the amount of the sum consolidated was. It is little less than a contradiction in terms. In the debt of the year 1767 the sum was stated in the act of consolidation, and made to amount to 880,000l. capital. When this consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was represented authentically at 2,400,000l. In that, or rather in a higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.26 It afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000l.27 However, it never was without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness. There was a sort of floating debt of about four or five hundred thousand pounds more ready to be added, as occasion should require.

In short, when you pressed this sensitive-plant, it always contracted its dimensions. When the rude hand of inquiry was withdrawn, it expanded in all the luxuriant vigor of its original vegetation. In the treaty of 1781, the whole of the Nabob's debt to private Europeans is by Mr. Sulivan, agent to the Nabob and his creditors, stated at 2,800,000l., which, if the Cavalry Loan and the remains of the debt of 1767 be subtracted, leaves it nearly at the amount originally declared at the Durbar in 1777: but then there is a private instruction to Mr. Sulivan, which, it seems, will reduce it again to the lower standard of 1,400,000l.

Failing in all my attempts, by a direct account, to ascertain the extent of the capital claimed, (where in all probability no capital was ever advanced,) I endeavored, if possible, to discover it by the interest which was to be paid. For that purpose, I looked to the several agreements for assigning the territories of the Carnatic to secure the principal and interest of this debt. In one of them,28 I found, in a sort of postscript, by way of an additional remark, (not in the body of the obligation,) the debt represented at 1,400,000l.: but when I computed the sums to be paid for interest by instalments in another paper, I found they produced an interest of two millions, at twelve per cent; and the assignment supposed, that, if these instalments might exceed, they might also fall short of, the real provision for that interest.29 Another instalment-bond was afterwards granted: in that bond the interest exactly tallies with a capital of 1,400,000l.:30 but pursuing this capital through the correspondence, I lost sight of it again, and it was asserted that this instalment-bond was considerably short of the interest that ought to be computed to the time mentioned.31

Here are, therefore, two statements of equal authority, differing at least a million from each other; and as neither persons claiming, nor any special sum as belonging to each particular claimant, is ascertained in the instruments of consolidation, or in the installment-bonds, a large scope was left to throw in any sums for any persons, as their merits in advancing the interest of that loan might require; a power was also left for reduction, in case a harder hand, or more scanty funds, might be found to require it. Stronger grounds for a presumption of fraud never appeared in any transaction. But the ministers, faithful to the plan of the interested persons, whom alone they thought fit to confer with on this occasion, have ordered the payment of the whole mass of these unknown, unliquidated sums, without an attempt to ascertain them. On this conduct, Sir, I leave you to make your own reflections.

It is impossible (at least I have found it impossible) to fix on the real amount of the pretended debts with which your ministers have thought proper to load the Carnatic. They are obscure; they shun inquiry; they are enormous. That is all you know of them.

That you may judge what chance any honorable and useful end of government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country; though in truth my mind revolts from it, though you will hear it with horror, and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with a few words as to the cause.

The great fortunes made in India, in the beginnings of conquest, naturally excited an emulation in all the parts and through the whole succession of the Company's service. But in the Company it gave rise to other sentiments. They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them. On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions and menaces: and that the servants might not be bribed into them by the native princes, they were strictly forbidden to take any money whatsoever from their hands. But vehement passion is ingenious in resources. The Company's servants were not only stimulated, but better instructed by the prohibition. They soon fell upon a contrivance which answered their purposes far better than the methods which were forbidden: though in this also they violated an ancient, but they thought, an abrogated order. They reversed their proceedings. Instead of receiving presents, they made loans. Instead of carrying on wars in their own name, they contrived an authority, at once irresistible and irresponsible, in whose name they might ravage at pleasure; and being thus freed from all restraint, they indulged themselves in the most extravagant speculations of plunder. The cabal of creditors who have been the object of the late bountiful grant from his Majesty's ministers, in order to possess themselves, under the name of creditors and assignees, of every country in India, as fast as it should be conquered, inspired into the mind of the Nabob of Arcot (then a dependant on the Company of the humblest order) a scheme of the most wild and desperate ambition that I believe ever was admitted into the thoughts of a man so situated.32 First, they persuaded him to consider himself as a principal member in the political system of Europe. In the next place, they held out to him, and he readily imbibed, the idea of the general empire of Hindostan. As a preliminary to this undertaking, they prevailed on him to propose a tripartite division of that vast country: one part to the Company; another to the Mahrattas; and the third to himself. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Deccan.

On this scheme of their servants, the Company was to appear in the Carnatic in no other light than as a contractor for the provision of armies, and the hire of mercenaries for his use and under his direction. This disposition was to be secured by the Nabob's putting himself under the guaranty of France, and, by the means of that rival nation, preventing the English forever from assuming an equality, much less a superiority, in the Carnatic. In pursuance of this treasonable project, (treasonable on the part of the English,) they extinguished the Company as a sovereign power in that part of India; they withdrew the Company's garrisons out of all the forts and strongholds of the Carnatic; they declined to receive the ambassadors from foreign courts, and remitted them to the Nabob of Arcot; they fell upon, and totally destroyed, the oldest ally of the Company, the king of Tanjore, and plundered the country to the amount of near five millions sterling; one after another, in the Nabob's name, but with English force, they brought into a miserable servitude all the princes and great independent nobility of a vast country.33 In proportion to these treasons and violences, which ruined the people, the fund of the Nabob's debt grew and flourished.

Among the victims to this magnificent plan of universal plunder, worthy of the heroic avarice of the projectors, you have all heard (and he has made himself to be well remembered) of an Indian chief called Hyder Ali Khan. This man possessed the western, as the Company, under the name of the Nabob of Arcot, does the eastern division of the Carnatic. It was among the leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to their own emphatic language) to extirpate this Hyder Ali.34 They declared the Nabob of Arcot to be his sovereign, and himself to be a rebel, and publicly invested their instrument with the sovereignty of the kingdom of Mysore. But their victim was not of the passive kind. They were soon obliged to conclude a treaty of peace and close alliance with this rebel, at the gates of Madras. Both before and since that treaty, every principle of policy pointed out this power as a natural alliance; and on his part it was courted by every sort of amicable office. But the cabinet council of English creditors would not suffer their Nabob of Arcot to sign the treaty, nor even to give to a prince at least his equal the ordinary titles of respect and courtesy.35 From that time forward, a continued plot was carried on within the divan, black and white, of the Nabob of Arcot, for the destruction of Hyder Ali. As to the outward members of the double, or rather treble government of Madras, which had signed the treaty, they were always prevented by some overruling influence (which they do not describe, but which cannot be misunderstood) from performing what justice and interest combined so evidently to enforce.36

When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.

The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by charity that private charity could do: but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food. For months together, these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger: of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting, they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers, they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

For eighteen months,37 without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that, when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region. With the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of some few forts, I wish to be understood as speaking literally. I mean to produce to you more than three witnesses, above all exception, who will support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed through every part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or seven districts to the north and to the south (and these not wholly untouched) escaped the general ravage.

The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the German Sea, east and west, emptied and embowelled (may God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your imagination a little further, and then suppose your ministers taking a survey of this scene of waste and desolation. What would be your thoughts, if you should be informed that they were computing how much had been the amount of the excises, how much the customs, how much the land and malt tax, in order that they should charge (take it in the most favorable light) for public service, upon the relics of the satiated vengeance of relentless enemies, the whole of what England had yielded in the most exuberant seasons of peace and abundance? What would you call it? To call it tyranny sublimed into madness would be too faint an image; yet this very madness is the principle upon which the ministers at your right hand have proceeded in their estimate of the revenues of the Carnatic, when they were providing, not supply for the establishments of its protection, but rewards for the authors of its ruin.

Every day you are fatigued and disgusted with this cant, "The Carnatic is a country that will soon recover, and become instantly as prosperous as ever." They think they are talking to innocents, who will believe, that, by sowing of dragons' teeth, men may come up ready grown and ready armed. They who will give themselves the trouble of considering (for it requires no great reach of thought, no very profound knowledge) the manner in which mankind are increased, and countries cultivated, will regard all this raving as it ought to be regarded. In order that the people, after a long period of vexation and plunder, may be in a condition to maintain government, government must begin by maintaining them. Here the road to economy lies not through receipt, but through expense; and in that country Nature has given no short cut to your object. Men must propagate, like other animals, by the mouth. Never did oppression light the nuptial torch; never did extortion and usury spread out the genial bed. Does any of you think that England, so wasted, would, under such a nursing attendance, so rapidly and cheaply recover? But he is meanly acquainted with either England or India who does not know that England would a thousand times sooner resume population, fertility, and what ought to be the ultimate secretion from both, revenue, than such a country as the Carnatic.

The Carnatic is not by the bounty of Nature a fertile soil. The general size of its cattle is proof enough that it is much otherwise. It is some days since I moved that a curious and interesting map, kept in the India House, should be laid before you.38 The India House is not yet in readiness to send it; I have therefore brought down my own copy, and there it lies for the use of any gentleman who may think such a matter worthy of his attention. It is, indeed, a noble map, and of noble things; but it is decisive against the golden dreams and sanguine speculations of avarice run mad. In addition to what you know must be the case in every part of the world, (the necessity of a previous provision of habitation, seed, stock, capital,) that map will show you that the uses of the influences of Heaven itself are in that country a work of art. The Carnatic is refreshed by few or no living brooks or running streams, and it has rain only at a season; but its product of rice exacts the use of water subject to perpetual command. This is the national bank of the Carnatic, on which it must have a perpetual credit, or it perishes irretrievably. For that reason, in the happier times of India, a number, almost incredible, of reservoirs have been made in chosen places throughout the whole country: they are formed, for the greater part, of mounds of earth and stones, with sluices of solid masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and labor, and maintained at a mighty charge. In the territory contained in that map alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs, and they amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from the extent of two or three acres to five miles in circuit. From these reservoirs currents are occasionally drawn over the fields, and these watercourses again call for a considerable expense to keep them properly scoured and duly levelled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there cannot be in the Carnatic and Tanjore fewer than ten thousand of these reservoirs of the larger and middling dimensions, to say nothing of those for domestic services, and the use of religious purification. These are not the enterprises of your power, nor in a style of magnificence suited to the taste of your minister. These are the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people,—testators to a posterity which they embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition,—but by the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits of Nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.

Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious funds of culture and population, that everywhere the reservoirs were fallen into a miserable decay.39 But after those domestic enemies had provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not leave it, until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not either totally destroyed, or cut through with such gaps as to require a serious attention and much cost to reëstablish them, as the means of present subsistence to the people and of future revenue to the state.

What, Sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do, on the view of the ruins of such works before them?—on the view of such a chasm of desolation as that which yawned in the midst of those countries, to the north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every shilling derived from the producing to reanimate the powers of the unproductive parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty, whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity, they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors, whose crimes were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance,—that they must silence their inauspicious tongues,—that they must hold off their profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have proclaimed, with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every country the first creditor is the plough,—that this original, indefeasible claim supersedes every other demand.

This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said. This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or doing. A ministry of another kind would have first improved the country, and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country there is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers, from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by fire, sword, and famine: their sympathies took another direction; they were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long missed the harvest of its returning months;40 they felt for peculation, which had been for so many years raking in the dust of an empty treasury; they were melted into compassion for rapine and oppression, licking their dry, parched, unbloody jaws. These were the objects of their solicitude. These were the necessities for which they were studious to provide.

To state the country and its revenues in their real condition, and to provide for those fictitious claims, consistently with the support of an army and a civil establishment, would have been impossible; therefore the ministers are silent on that head, and rest themselves on the authority of Lord Macartney, who, in a letter to the Court of Directors, written in the year 1781, speculating on what might be the result of a wise management of the countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates the revenue, as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a year, as he does those of the king of Tanjore (which had not been assigned) at four hundred and fifty. On this Lord Macartney grounds his calculations, and on this they choose to ground theirs. It was on this calculation that the ministry, in direct opposition to the remonstrances of the Court of Directors, have compelled that miserable enslaved body to put their hands to an order for appropriating the enormous sum of 480,000l. annually, as a fund for paying to their rebellious servants a debt contracted in defiance of their clearest and most positive injunctions.

The authority and information of Lord Macartney is held high on this occasion, though it is totally rejected in every other particular of this business. I believe I have the honor of being almost as old an acquaintance as any Lord Macartney has. A constant and unbroken friendship has subsisted between us from a very early period; and I trust he thinks, that, as I respect his character, and in general admire his conduct, I am one of those who feel no common interest in his reputation. Yet I do not hesitate wholly to disallow the calculation of 1781, without any apprehension that I shall appear to distrust his veracity or his judgment. This peace estimate of revenue was not grounded on the state of the Carnatic, as it then, or as it had recently, stood. It was a statement of former and better times. There is no doubt that a period did exist, when the large portion of the Carnatic held by the Nabob of Arcot might be fairly reputed to produce a revenue to that, or to a greater amount. But the whole had so melted away by the slow and silent hostility of oppression and mismanagement, that the revenues, sinking with the prosperity of the country, had fallen to about 800,000l. a year, even before an enemy's horse had imprinted his hoof on the soil of the Carnatic. From that view, and independently of the decisive effects of the war which ensued, Sir Eyre Coote conceived that years must pass before the country could be restored to its former prosperity, and production. It was that state of revenue (namely, the actual state before the war) which the Directors have opposed to Lord Macartney's speculation. They refused to take the revenues for more than 800,000l. In this they are justified by Lord Macartney himself, who, in a subsequent letter, informs the court that his sketch is a matter of speculation; it supposes the country restored to its ancient prosperity, and the revenue to be in a course of effective and honest collection. If, therefore, the ministers have gone wrong, they were not deceived by Lord Macartney: they were deceived by no man. The estimate of the Directors is nearly the very estimate furnished by the right honorable gentleman himself, and published to the world in one of the printed reports of his own committee;41 but as soon as he obtained his power, he chose to abandon his account. No part of his official conduct can be defended on the ground of his Parliamentary information.

In this clashing of accounts and estimates, ought not the ministry, if they wished to preserve even appearances, to have waited for information of the actual result of these speculations, before they laid a charge, and such a charge, not conditionally and eventually, but positively and authoritatively, upon a country which they all knew, and which one of them had registered on the records of this House, to be wasted, beyond all example, by every oppression of an abusive government, and every ravage of a desolating war? But that you may discern in what manner they use the correspondence of office, and that thereby you may enter into the true spirit of the ministerial Board of Control, I desire you, Mr. Speaker, to remark, that, through their whole controversy with the Court of Directors, they do not so much as hint at their ever having seen any other paper from Lord Macartney, or any other estimate of revenue than this of 1781. To this they hold. Here they take post; here they intrench themselves.

When I first read this curious controversy between the ministerial board and the Court of Directors, common candor obliged me to attribute their tenacious adherence to the estimate of 1781 to a total ignorance of what had appeared upon the records. But the right honorable gentleman has chosen to come forward with an uncalled-for declaration; he boastingly tells you, that he has seen, read, digested, compared everything,—and that, if he has sinned, he has sinned with his eyes broad open. Since, then, the ministers will obstinately shut the gates of mercy on themselves, let them add to their crimes what aggravations they please. They have, then, (since it must be so,) wilfully and corruptly suppressed the information which they ought to have produced, and, for the support of peculation, have made themselves guilty of spoliation and suppression of evidence.42 The paper I hold in my hand, which totally overturns (for the present, at least) the estimate of 1781, they have no more taken notice of, in their controversy with the Court of Directors, than if it had no existence. It is the report made by a committee appointed at Madras to manage the whole of the six countries assigned to the Company by the Nabob of Arcot. This committee was wisely instituted by Lord Macartney, to remove from himself the suspicion of all improper management in so invidious a trust; and it seems to have been well chosen. This committee has made a comparative estimate of the only six districts which were in a condition to be let to farm. In one set of columns they state the gross and net produce of the districts as let by the Nabob. To that statement they oppose the terms on which the same districts were rented for five years under their authority. Under the Nabob, the gross farm was so high as 570,000l. sterling. What was the clear produce? Why, no more than about 250,000l.; and this was the whole profit of the Nabob's treasury, under his own management of all the districts which were in a condition to be let to farm on the 27th of May, 1782. Lord Macartney's leases stipulated a gross produce of no more than about 530,000l.; but then the estimated net amount was nearly double the Nabob's. It, however, did not then exceed 480,000l.; and Lord Macartney's commissioners take credit for an annual revenue amounting to this clear sum. Here is no speculation; here is no inaccurate account clandestinely obtained from those who might wish, and were enabled, to deceive. It is the authorized, recorded state of a real, recent transaction. Here is not twelve hundred thousand pound,—not eight hundred. The whole revenue of the Carnatic yielded no more, in May, 1782, than four hundred and eighty thousand pounds: nearly the very precise sum which your minister, who is so careful of the public security, has carried from all descriptions of establishment to form a fund for the private emolument of his creatures.

In this estimate, we see, as I have just observed, the Nabob's farms rated so high as 570,000l. Hitherto all is well: but follow on to the effective net revenue; there the illusion vanishes; and you will not find nearly so much as half the produce. It is with reason, therefore, Lord Macartney invariably, throughout the whole correspondence, qualifies all his views and expectations of revenue, and all his plans for its application, with this indispensable condition, that the management is not in the hands of the Nabob of Arcot. Should that fatal measure take place, he has over and over again told you that he has no prospect of realizing anything whatsoever for any public purpose. With these weighty declarations, confirmed by such a state of indisputable fact before them, what has been done by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his accomplices? Shall I be believed? They have delivered over those very territories, on the keeping of which in the hands of the committee the defence of our dominions, and, what was more dear to them, possibly, their own job, depended,—they have delivered back again, without condition, without arrangement, without stipulation of any sort for the natives of any rank, the whole of those vast countries, to many of which he had no just claim, into the ruinous mismanagement of the Nabob of Arcot. To crown all, according to their miserable practice, whenever they do anything transcendently absurd, they preface this their abdication of their trust by a solemn declaration that they were not obliged to it by any principle of policy or any demand of justice whatsoever.

I have stated to you the estimated produce of the territories of the Carnatic in a condition to be farmed in 1782, according to the different managements into which they might fall; and this estimate the ministers have thought proper to suppress. Since that, two other accounts have been received. The first informs us, that there has been a recovery of what is called arrear, as well as of an improvement of the revenue of one of the six provinces which were let in 1782.43 It was brought about by making a new war. After some sharp actions, by the resolution and skill of Colonel Fullarton several of the petty princes of the most southerly of the unwasted provinces were compelled to pay very heavy rents and tributes, who for a long time before had not paid any acknowledgment. After this reduction, by the care of Mr. Irwin, one of the committee, that province was divided into twelve farms. This operation raised the income of that particular province; the others remain as they were first farmed. So that, instead of producing only their original rent of 480,000l., they netted, in about two years and a quarter, 1,320,000l. sterling, which would be about 660,000l. a year, if the recovered arrear was not included. What deduction is to be made on account of that arrear I cannot determine, but certainly what would reduce the annual income considerably below the rate I have allowed.

The second account received is the letting of the wasted provinces of the Carnatic. This I understand is at a growing rent, which may or may not realize what it promises; but if it should answer, it will raise the whole, at some future time, to 1,200,000l.

You must here remark, Mr. Speaker, that this revenue is the produce of all the Nabob's dominions. During the assignment, the Nabob paid nothing, because the Company had all. Supposing the whole of the lately assigned territory to yield up to the most sanguine expectations of the right honorable gentleman, and suppose 1,200,000l. to be annually realized, (of which we actually know of no more than the realizing of six hundred thousand,) out of this you must deduct the subsidy and rent which the Nabob paid before the assignment,—namely, 340,000l. a year. This reduces back the revenue applicable to the new distribution made by his Majesty's ministers to about 800,000l. Of that sum five eighths are by them surrendered to the debts. The remaining three are the only fund left for all the purposes so magnificently displayed in the letter of the Board of Control: that is, for a new-cast peace establishment, a now fund for ordnance and fortifications, and a large allowance for what they call "the splendor of the Durbar."

You have heard the account of these territories as they stood in 1782. You have seen the actual receipt since the assignment in 1781, of which I reckon about two years and a quarter productive. I have stated to you the expectation from the wasted part. For realizing all this you may value yourselves on the vigor and diligence of a governor and committee that have done so much. If these hopes from the committee are rational, remember that the committee is no more. Your ministers, who have formed their fund for these debts on the presumed effect of the committee's management, have put a complete end to that committee. Their acts are rescinded; their leases are broken; their renters are dispersed. Your ministers knew, when they signed the death-warrant of the Carnatic, that the Nabob would not only turn all these unfortunate farmers of revenue out of employment, but that he has denounced his severest vengeance against them, for acting under British authority. With a knowledge of this disposition, a British Chancellor of the Exchequer and Treasurer of the Navy, incited by no public advantage, impelled by no public necessity, in a strain of the most wanton perfidy which has ever stained the annals of mankind, have delivered over to plunder, imprisonment, exile, and death itself, according to the mercy of such execrable tyrants as Amir-ul-Omrah and Paul Benfield, the unhappy and deluded souls who, untaught by uniform example, were still weak enough to put their trust in English faith.44 They have gone farther: they have thought proper to mock and outrage their misery by ordering them protection and compensation. From what power is this protection to be derived, and from what fund is this compensation to arise? The revenues are delivered over to their oppressor; the territorial jurisdiction, from whence that revenue is to arise, and under which they live, is surrendered to the same iron hands: and that they shall be deprived of all refuge and all hope, the minister has made a solemn, voluntary declaration that he never will interfere with the Nabob's internal government.45

The last thing considered by the Board of Control among the debts of the Carnatic was that arising to the East India Company, which, after the provision for the cavalry, and the consolidation of 1777, was to divide the residue of the fund of 480,000l. a year with the lenders of 1767. This debt the worthy chairman, who sits opposite to me, contends to be three millions sterling. Lord Macartney's account of 1781 states it to be at that period 1,200,000l. The first account of the Court of Directors makes it 900,000l. This, like the private debt, being without any solid existence, is incapable of any distinct limits. Whatever its amount or its validity may be, one thing is clear: it is of the nature and quality of a public debt. In that light nothing is provided for it, but an eventual surplus to be divided with one class of the private demands, after satisfying the two first classes. Never was a more shameful postponing a public demand, which, by the reason of the thing, and the uniform practice of all nations, supersedes every private claim.

Those who gave this preference to private claims consider the Company's as a lawful demand; else why did they pretend to provide for it? On their own principles they are condemned.

But I, Sir, who profess to speak to your understanding and to your conscience, and to brush away from this business all false colors, all false appellations, as well as false facts, do positively deny that the Carnatic owes a shilling to the Company,—whatever the Company may be indebted to that undone country. It owes nothing to the Company, for this plain and simple reason: the territory charged with the debt is their own. To say that their revenues fall short, and owe them money, is to say they are in debt to themselves, which is only talking nonsense. The fact is, that, by the invasion of an enemy, and the ruin of the country, the Company, either in its own name, or in the names of the Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore, has lost for several years what it might have looked to receive from its own estate. If men were allowed to credit themselves upon such principles, any one might soon grow rich by this mode of accounting. A flood comes down upon a man's estate in the Bedford Level of a thousand pounds a year, and drowns his rents for ten years. The Chancellor would put that man into the hands of a trustee, who would gravely make up his books, and for this loss credit himself in his account for a debt due to him of 10,000l. It is, however, on this principle the Company makes up its demands on the Carnatic. In peace they go the full length, and indeed more than the full length, of what the people can bear for current establishments; then they are absurd enough to consolidate all the calamities of war into debts,—to metamorphose the devastations of the country into demands upon its future production. What is this but to avow a resolution utterly to destroy their own country, and to force the people to pay for their sufferings to a government which has proved unable to protect either the share of the husbandman or their own? In every lease of a farm, the invasion of an enemy, instead of forming a demand for arrear, is a release of rent: nor for that release is it at all necessary to show that the invasion has left nothing to the occupier of the soil; though in the present case it would be too easy to prove that melancholy fact.46 I therefore applauded my right honorable friend, who, when he canvassed the Company's accounts, as a preliminary to a bill that ought not to stand on falsehood of any kind, fixed his discerning eye and his deciding hand on these debts of the Company from the Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore, and at one stroke expunged them all, as utterly irrecoverable: he might have added, as utterly unfounded.

On these grounds I do not blame the arrangement this day in question, as a preference given to the debt of individuals over the Company's debt. In my eye it is no more than the preference of a fiction over a chimera; but I blame the preference given to those fictitious private debts over the standing defence and the standing government. It is there the public is robbed. It is robbed in its army; it is robbed in its civil administration; it is robbed in its credit; it is robbed in its investment, which forms the commercial connection between that country and Europe. There is the robbery.

But my principal objection lies a good deal deeper. That debt to the Company is the pretext under which all the other debts lurk and cover themselves. That debt forms the foul, putrid mucus in which are engendered the whole brood of creeping ascarides, all the endless involutions, the eternal knot, added to a knot of those inexpugnable tape-worms which devour the nutriment and eat up the bowels of India.47 It is necessary, Sir, you should recollect two things. First, that the Nabob's debt to the Company carries no interest. In the next place, you will observe, that, whenever the Company has occasion to borrow, she has always commanded whatever she thought fit at eight per cent. Carrying in your mind these two facts, attend to the process with regard to the public and private debt, and with what little appearance of decency they play into each other's hands a game of utter perdition to the unhappy natives of India. The Nabob falls into an arrear to the Company. The Presidency presses for payment. The Nabob's answer is, "I have no money." Good! But there are soucars who will supply you on the mortgage of your territories. Then steps forward some Paul Benfield, and, from his grateful compassion to the Nabob, and his filial regard to the Company, he unlocks the treasures of his virtuous industry, and, for a consideration of twenty-four or thirty-six per cent on a mortgage of the territorial revenue, becomes security to the Company for the Nabob's arrear.

All this intermediate usury thus becomes sanctified by the ultimate view to the Company's payment. In this case, would not a plain man ask this plain question of the Company: If you know that the Nabob must annually mortgage his territories to your servants to pay his annual arrear to you, why is not the assignment or mortgage made directly to the Company itself? By this simple, obvious operation, the Company would be relieved and the debt paid, without the charge of a shilling interest to that prince. But if that course should be thought too indulgent, why do they not take that assignment with such interest to themselves as they pay to others, that is, eight per cent? Or if it were thought more advisable (why it should I know not) that he must borrow, why do not the Company lend their own credit to the Nabob for their own payment? That credit would not be weakened by the collateral security of his territorial mortgage. The money might still be had at eight per cent. Instead of any of these honest and obvious methods, the Company has for years kept up a show of disinterestedness and moderation, by suffering a debt to accumulate to them from the country powers without any interest at all; and at the same time have seen before their eyes, on a pretext of borrowing to pay that debt, the revenues of the country charged with an usury of twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, and even eight-and-forty per cent, with compound interest,48 for the benefit of their servants. All this time they know that by having a debt subsisting without any interest, which is to be paid by contracting a debt on the highest interest, they manifestly render it necessary to the Nabob of Arcot to give the private demand a preference to the public; and, by binding him and their servants together in a common cause, they enable him to form a party to the utter ruin of their own authority and their own affairs. Thus their false moderation, and their affected purity, by the natural operation of everything false and everything affected, becomes pander and bawd to the unbridled debauchery and licentious lewdness of usury and extortion.

In consequence of this double game, all the territorial revenues have at one time or other been covered by those locusts, the English soucars. Not one single foot of the Carnatic has escaped them: a territory as large as England. During these operations what a scene has that country presented!49 The usurious European assignee supersedes the Nabob's native farmer of the revenue; the farmer flies to the Nabob's presence to claim his bargain; whilst his servants murmur for wages, and his soldiers mutiny for pay. The mortgage to the European assignee is then resumed, and the native farmer replaced,—replaced, again to be removed on the new clamor of the European assignee.50 Every man of rank and landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is thus, by a ravenous, because a short-lived succession of claimants, lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I paint. Far, very far, from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and the same source. Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion. They move in a circle, mutually producing and produced; till at length nothing of humanity is left in the government, no trace of integrity, spirit, or manliness in the people, who drag out a precarious and degraded existence under this system of outrage upon human nature. Such is the effect of the establishment of a debt to the Company, as it has hitherto been managed, and as it ever will remain, until ideas are adopted totally different from those which prevail at this time.

Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have thought fit to renew the Company's old order against contracting private debts in future. They begin by rewarding the violation of the ancient law; and then they gravely reenact provisions, of which they have given bounties for the breach. This inconsistency has been well exposed.51 But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid?

I will explain myself. They order the Nabob, out of the revenues of the Carnatic, to allot four hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year, as a fund for the debts before us. For the punctual payment of this annuity, they order him to give soucar security.52 When a soucar, that is, a money-dealer, becomes security for any native prince, the course is for the native prince to counter-secure the money-dealer, by making over to him in mortgage a portion of his territory equal to the sum annually to be paid, with an interest of at least twenty-four per cent. The point fit for the House to know is, who are these soucars to whom this security on the revenues in favor of the Nabob's creditors is to be given? The majority of the House, unaccustomed to these transactions, will hear with astonishment that these soucars are no other than the creditors themselves. The minister, not content with authorizing these transactions in a manner and to an extent unhoped for by the rapacious expectations of usury itself, loads the broken back of the Indian revenues, in favor of his worthy friends, the soucars, with an additional twenty-four per cent for being security to themselves for their own claims, for condescending to take the country in mortgage to pay to themselves the fruits of their own extortions.

The interest to be paid for this security, according to the most moderate strain of soucar demand, comes to 118,000l. a year, which, added to the 480,000l. on which it is to accrue, will make the whole charge amount to 598,000l. a year,—as much as even a long peace will enable those revenues to produce. Can any one reflect for a moment on all those claims of debt, which the minister exhausts himself in contrivances to augment with new usuries, without lifting up his hands and eyes in astonishment at the impudence both of the claim and of the adjudication? Services of some kind or other these servants of the Company must have done, so great and eminent that the Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot think that all they have brought home is half enough. He hallooes after them, "Gentlemen, you have forgot a large packet behind you, in your hurry; you have not sufficiently recovered yourselves; you ought to have, and you shall have, interest upon interest upon a prohibited debt that is made up of interest upon interest. Even this is too little. I have thought of another character for you, by which you may add something to your gains: you shall be security to yourselves; and hence will arise a new usury, which shall efface the memory of all the usuries suggested to you by your own dull inventions."

I have done with the arrangement relative to the Carnatic. After this it is to little purpose to observe on what the ministers have done to Tanjore. Your ministers have not observed even form and ceremony in their outrageous and insulting robbery of that country, whose only crime has been its early and constant adherence to the power of this, and the suffering of an uniform pillage in consequence of it. The debt of the Company from the Rajah of Tanjore is just of the same stuff with that of the Nabob of Arcot.

The subsidy from Tanjore, on the arrear of which this pretended debt (if any there be) has accrued to the Company, is not, like that paid by the Nabob of Arcot, a compensation for vast countries obtained, augmented, and preserved for him; not the price of pillaged treasuries, ransacked houses, and plundered territories: it is a large grant, from a small kingdom not obtained by our arms; robbed, not protected, by our power; a grant for which no equivalent was ever given, or pretended to be given. The right honorable gentleman, however, bears witness in his reports to the punctuality of the payments of this grant of bounty, or, if you please, of fear. It amounts to one hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling net annual subsidy. He bears witness to a further grant of a town and port, with an annexed district of thirty thousand pound a year, surrendered to the Company since the first donation. He has not borne witness, but the fact is, (he will not deny it,) that in the midst of war, and during the ruin and desolation of a considerable part of his territories, this prince made many very large payments. Notwithstanding these merits and services, the first regulation of ministry is to force from him a territory of an extent which they have not yet thought proper to ascertain,53 for a military peace establishment the particulars of which they have not yet been pleased to settle.

The next part of their arrangement is with regard to war. As confessedly this prince had no share in stirring up any of the former wars, so all future wars are completely out of his power; for he has no troops whatever, and is under a stipulation not so much as to correspond with any foreign state, except through the Company. Yet, in case the Company's servants should be again involved in war, or should think proper again to provoke any enemy, as in times past they have wantonly provoked all India, he is to be subjected to a new penalty. To what penalty? Why, to no less than the confiscation of all his revenues. But this is to end with the war, and they are to be faithfully returned? Oh, no! nothing like it. The country is to remain under confiscation until all the debt which the Company shall think fit to incur in such war shall be discharged: that is to say, forever. His sole comfort is, to find his old enemy, the Nabob of Arcot, placed in the very same condition.

The revenues of that miserable country were, before the invasion of Hyder, reduced to a gross annual receipt of three hundred and sixty thousand pound.54 From this receipt the subsidy I have just stated is taken. This again, by payments in advance, by extorting deposits of additional sums to a vast amount for the benefit of their soucars, and by an endless variety of other extortions, public and private, is loaded with a debt, the amount of which I never could ascertain, but which is large undoubtedly, generating an usury the most completely ruinous that probably was ever heard of: that is, forty-eight per cent, payable monthly, with compound interest.55

Such is the state to which the Company's servants have reduced that country. Now come the reformers, restorers, and comforters of India. What have they done? In addition to all these tyrannous exactions, with all these ruinous debts in their train, looking to one side of an agreement whilst they wilfully shut their eyes to the other, they withdraw from Tanjore all the benefits of the treaty of 1762, and they subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this harassed nation to be tributary to a person who is himself, by their own arrangement, deprived of the right of war or peace, deprived of the power of the sword, forbid to keep up a single regiment of soldiers, and is therefore wholly disabled from all protection of the country which is the object of the pretended tribute. Tribute hangs on the sword. It is an incident inseparable from real, sovereign power. In the present case, to suppose its existence is as absurd as it is cruel and oppressive. And here, Mr. Speaker, you have a clear exemplification of the use of those false names and false colors which the gentlemen who have lately taken possession of India choose to lay on for the purpose of disguising their plan of oppression. The Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore have, in truth and substance, no more than a merely civil authority, held in the most entire dependence on the Company. The Nabob, without military, without federal capacity, is extinguished as a potentate; but then he is carefully kept alive as an independent and sovereign power, for the purpose of rapine and extortion,—for the purpose of perpetuating the old intrigues, animosities, usuries, and corruptions.

It was not enough that this mockery of tribute was to be continued without the correspondent protection, or any of the stipulated equivalents, but ten years of arrear, to the amount of 400,000l. sterling, is added to all the debts to the Company and to individuals, in order to create a new debt, to be paid (if at all possible to be paid in whole or in part) only by new usuries,—and all this for the Nabob of Arcot, or rather for Mr. Benfield and the corps of the Nabob's creditors and their soucars. Thus these miserable Indian princes are continued in their seats for no other purpose than to render them, in the first instance, objects of every species of extortion, and, in the second, to force them to become, for the sake of a momentary shadow of reduced authority, a sort of subordinate tyrants, the ruin and calamity, not the fathers and cherishers, of their people.

But take this tribute only as a mere charge (without title, cause, or equivalent) on this people; what one step has been taken to furnish grounds for a just calculation and estimate of the proportion of the burden and the ability? None,—not an attempt at it. They do not adapt the burden to the strength, but they estimate the strength of the bearers by the burden they impose. Then what care is taken to leave a fund sufficient to the future reproduction of the revenues that are to bear all these loads? Every one, but tolerably conversant in Indian affairs, must know that the existence of this little kingdom depends on its control over the river Cavery. The benefits of Heaven to any community ought never to be connected with political arrangements, or made to depend on the personal conduct of princes, in which the mistake, or error, or neglect, or distress, or passion of a moment, on either side, may bring famine on millions, and ruin an innocent nation perhaps for ages. The means of the subsistence of mankind should be as immutable as the laws of Nature, let power and dominion take what course they may.—Observe what has been done with regard to this important concern. The use of this river is, indeed, at length given to the Rajah, and a power provided for its enjoyment at his own charge; but the means of furnishing that charge (and a mighty one it is) are wholly out off. This use of the water, which ought to have no more connection than clouds and rains and sunshine with the politics of the Rajah, the Nabob, or the Company, is expressly contrived as a means of enforcing demands and arrears of tribute. This horrid and unnatural instrument of extortion had been a distinguishing feature in the enormities of the Carnatic politics, that loudly called for reformation. But the food of a whole people is by the reformers of India conditioned on payments from its prince, at a moment that he is overpowered with a swarm of their demands, without regard to the ability of either prince or people. In fine, by opening an avenue to the irruption of the Nabob of Arcot's creditors and soucars, whom every man, who did not fall in love with oppression and corruption on an experience of the calamities they produced, would have raised wall before wall and mound before mound to keep from a possibility of entrance, a more destructive enemy than Hyder Ali is introduced into that kingdom. By this part of their arrangement, in which they establish a debt to the Nabob of Arcot, in effect and substance, they deliver over Tanjore, bound hand and foot, to Paul Benfield, the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of a country which has for years been an object of an unremitted, but, unhappily, an unequal struggle, between the bounties of Providence to renovate and the wickedness of mankind to destroy.

The right honorable gentleman56 talks of his fairness in determining the territorial dispute between the Nabob of Arcot and the prince of that country, when he superseded the determination of the Directors, in whom the law had vested the decision of that controversy. He is in this just as feeble as he is in every other part. But it is not necessary to say a word in refutation of any part of his argument. The mode of the proceeding sufficiently speaks the spirit of it. It is enough to fix his character as a judge, that he never heard the Directors in defence of their adjudication, nor either of the parties in support of their respective claims. It is sufficient for me that he takes from the Rajah of Tanjore by this pretended adjudication, or rather from his unhappy subjects, 40,000l. a year of his and their revenue, and leaves upon his and their shoulders all the charges that can be made on the part of the Nabob, on the part of his creditors, and on the part of the Company, without so much as hearing him as to right or to ability. But what principally induces me to leave the affair of the territorial dispute between the Nabob and the Rajah to another day is this,—that, both the parties being stripped of their all, it little signifies under which of their names the unhappy, undone people are delivered over to the merciless soucars, the allies of that right honorable gentleman and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In them ends the account of this long dispute of the Nabob of Arcot and the Rajah of Tanjore.

The right honorable gentleman is of opinion that his judgment in this case can be censured by none but those who seem to act as if they were paid agents to one of the parties. What does he think of his Court of Directors? If they are paid by either of the parties, by which of them does he think they are paid? He knows that their decision has been directly contrary to his. Shall I believe that it does not enter into his heart to conceive that any person can steadily and actively interest himself in the protection of the injured and oppressed without being well paid for his service? I have taken notice of this sort of discourse some days ago, so far as it may be supposed to relate to me. I then contented myself, as I shall now do, with giving it a cold, though a very direct contradiction. Thus much I do from respect to truth. If I did more, it might be supposed, by my anxiety to clear myself, that I had imbibed the ideas which, for obvious reasons, the right honorable gentleman wishes to have received concerning all attempts to plead the cause of the natives of India, as if it were a disreputable employment. If he had not forgot, in his present occupation, every principle which ought to have guided him, and I hope did guide him, in his late profession, he would have known that he who takes a fee for pleading the cause of distress against power, and manfully performs the duty he has assumed, receives an honorable recompense for a virtuous service. But if the right honorable gentleman will have no regard to fact in his insinuations or to reason in his opinions, I wish him at least to consider, that, if taking an earnest part with regard to the oppressions exercised in India, and with regard to this most oppressive case of Tanjore in particular, can ground a presumption of interested motives, he is himself the most mercenary man I know. His conduct, indeed, is such that he is on all occasions the standing testimony against himself. He it was that first called to that case the attention of the House; the reports of his own committee are ample and affecting upon that subject;57 and as many of us as have escaped his massacre must remember the very pathetic picture he made of the sufferings of the Tanjore country, on the day when he moved the unwieldy code of his Indian resolutions. Has he not stated over and over again, in his reports, the ill treatment of the Rajah of Tanjore (a branch of the royal house of the Mahrattas, every injury to whom the Mahrattas felt as offered to themselves) as a main cause of the alienation of that people from the British power? And does he now think that to betray his principles, to contradict his declarations, and to become himself an active instrument in those oppressions which he had so tragically lamented, is the way to clear himself of having been actuated by a pecuniary interest at the time when he chose to appear full of tenderness to that ruined nation?

The right honorable gentleman is fond of parading on the motives of others, and on his own. As to himself, he despises the imputations of those who suppose that anything corrupt could influence him in this his unexampled liberality of the public treasure. I do not know that I am obliged to speak to the motives of ministry, in the arrangements they have made of the pretended debts of Arcot and Tanjore. If I prove fraud and collusion with regard to public money on those right honorable gentlemen, I am not obliged to assign their motives; because no good motives can be pleaded in favor of their conduct. Upon that case I stand; we are at issue; and I desire to go to trial. This, I am sure, is not loose railing, or mean insinuation, according to their low and degenerate fashion, when they make attacks on the measures of their adversaries. It is a regular and juridical course; and unless I choose it, nothing can compel me to go further.

But since these unhappy gentlemen have dared to hold a lofty tone about their motives, and affect to despise suspicion, instead of being careful not to give cause for it, I shall beg leave to lay before you some general observations on what I conceive was their duty in so delicate a business.

If I were worthy to suggest any line of prudence to that right honorable gentleman, I would tell him that the way to avoid suspicion in the settlement of pecuniary transactions, in which great frauds have been very strongly presumed, is, to attend to these few plain principles:—First, to hear all parties equally, and not the managers for the suspected claimants only; not to proceed in the dark, but to act with as much publicity as possible; not to precipitate decision; to be religious in following the rules prescribed in the commission under which we act; and, lastly, and above all, not to be fond of straining constructions, to force a jurisdiction, and to draw to ourselves the management of a trust in its nature invidious and obnoxious to suspicion, where the plainest letter of the law does not compel it. If these few plain rules are observed, no corruption ought to be suspected; if any of them are violated, suspicion will attach in proportion; if all of them are violated, a corrupt motive of some kind or other will not only be suspected, but must be violently presumed.

The persons in whose favor all these rules have been violated, and the conduct of ministers towards them, will naturally call for your consideration, and will serve to lead you through a series and combination of facts and characters, if I do not mistake, into the very inmost recesses of this mysterious business. You will then be in possession of all the materials on which the principles of sound jurisprudence will found, or will reject, the presumption of corrupt motives, or, if such motives are indicated, will point out to you of what particular nature the corruption is.

Our wonderful minister, as you all know, formed a new plan, a plan insigne, recens, indictum ore alio, a plan for supporting the freedom of our Constitution by court intrigues, and for removing its corruptions by Indian delinquency. To carry that bold, paradoxical design into execution, sufficient funds and apt instruments became necessary. You are perfectly sensible that a Parliamentary reform occupies his thoughts day and night, as an essential member in this extraordinary project. In his anxious researches upon this subject, natural instinct, as well as sound policy, would direct his eyes and settle his choice on Paul Benfield. Paul Benfield is the grand Parliamentary reformer, the reformer to whom the whole choir of reformers bow, and to whom even the right honorable gentleman himself must yield the palm: for what region in the empire, what city, what borough, what county, what tribunal in this kingdom is not full of his labors? Others have been only speculators; he is the grand practical reformer; and whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer pledges in vain the man and the minister, to increase the provincial members, Mr. Benfield has auspiciously and practically begun it. Leaving far behind him even Lord Camelford's generous design of bestowing Old Sarum on the Bank of England, Mr. Benfield has thrown in the borough of Cricklade to reinforce the county representation. Not content with this, in order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten Constitution of his native country. For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House,—to furnish it, not with the faded tapestry figures of antiquated merit, such as decorate, and may reproach, some other houses, but with real, solid, living patterns of true modern virtue. Paul Benfield made (reckoning himself) no fewer than eight members in the last Parliament. What copious streams of pure blood must he not have transfused into the veins of the present!

But what is even more striking than the real services of this new-imported patriot is his modesty. As soon as he had conferred this benefit on the Constitution, he withdrew himself from our applause. He conceived that the duties of a member of Parliament (which with the elect faithful, the true believers, the Islam of Parliamentary reform, are of little or no merit, perhaps not much better than specious sins) might he as well attended to in India as in England, and the means of reformation to Parliament itself be far better provided. Mr. Benfield was therefore no sooner elected than he set off for Madras, and defrauded the longing eyes of Parliament. We have never enjoyed in this House the luxury of beholding that minion of the human race, and contemplating that visage which has so long reflected the happiness of nations.

It was therefore not possible for the minister to consult personally with this great man. What, then, was he to do? Through a sagacity that never failed him in these pursuits, he found out, in Mr. Benfield's representative, his exact resemblance. A specific attraction, by which he gravitates towards all such characters, soon brought our minister into a close connection with Mr. Benfield's agent and attorney, that is, with the grand contractor, (whom I name to honor,) Mr. Richard Atkinson,—a name that will be well remembered as long as the records of this House, as long as the records of the British Treasury, as long as the monumental debt of England, shall endure.

This gentleman, Sir, acts as attorney for Mr. Paul Benfield. Every one who hears me is well acquainted with the sacred friendship and the steady mutual attachment that subsists between him and the present minister. As many members as chose to attend in the first session of this Parliament can best tell their own feelings at the scenes which were then acted. How much that honorable gentleman was consulted in the original frame and fabric of the bill, commonly called Mr. Pitt's India Bill, is matter only of conjecture, though by no means difficult to divine. But the public was an indignant witness of the ostentation with which the measure was made his own, and the authority with which he brought up clause after clause, to stuff and fatten the rankness of that corrupt act. As fast as the clauses were brought up to the table, they were accepted. No hesitation, no discussion. They were received by the new minister, not with approbation, but with implicit submission. The reformation may be estimated by seeing who was the reformer. Paul Benfield's associate and agent was held up to the world as legislator of Hindostan. But it was necessary to authenticate the coalition between the men of intrigue in India and the minister of intrigue in England by a studied display of the power of this their connecting link. Every trust, every honor, every distinction, was to be heaped upon him. He was at once made a Director of the India Company, made an alderman of London, and to be made, if ministry could prevail, (and I am sorry to say how near, how very near, they were prevailing,) representative of the capital of this kingdom. But to secure his services against all risk, he was brought in for a ministerial borough. On his part, he was not wanting in zeal for the common cause. His advertisements show his motives, and the merits upon which he stood. For your minister, this worn-out veteran submitted to enter into the dusty field of the London contest; and you all remember that in the same virtuous cause he submitted to keep a sort of public office or counting-house, where the whole business of the last general election was managed. It was openly managed by the direct agent and attorney of Benfield. It was managed upon Indian principles and for an Indian interest. This was the golden cup of abominations,—this the chalice of the fornications of rapine, usury, and oppression, which was held out by the gorgeous Eastern harlot,—which so many of the people, so many of the nobles of this land had drained to the very dregs. Do you think that no reckoning was to follow this lewd debauch? that no payment was to be demanded for this riot of public drunkenness and national prostitution? Here, you have it here before you! The principal of the grand election-manager must be indemnified; accordingly, the claims of Benfield and his crew must be put above all inquiry.

For several years Benfield appeared as the chief proprietor, as well as the chief agent, director, and controller of this system of debt. The worthy chairman of the Company has stated the claims of this single gentleman on the Nabob of Arcot as amounting to five hundred thousand pound.58 Possibly at the time of the chairman's state they might have been as high. Eight hundred thousand pound had been mentioned some time before;59 and, according to the practice of shifting the names of creditors in these transactions, and reducing or raising the debt itself at pleasure, I think it not impossible that at one period the name of Benfield might have stood before those frightful figures. But my best information goes to fix his share no higher than four hundred thousand pounds. By the scheme of the present ministry for adding to the principal twelve per cent from the year 1777 to the year 1781, four hundred thousand pounds, that smallest of the sums ever mentioned for Mr. Benfield, will form a capital of 592,000l. at six per cent. Thus, besides the arrears of three years, amounting to 106,500l., (which, as fast as received, may be legally lent out at twelve per cent,) Benfield has received, by the ministerial grant before you, an annuity of 35,520l. a year, charged on the public revenues.

Our mirror of ministers of finance did not think this enough for the services of such a friend as Benfield. He found that Lord Macartney, in order to frighten the Court of Directors from the project of obliging the Nabob to give soucar security for his debt, assured them, that, if they should take that step, Benfield60 would infallibly be the soucar, and would thereby become the entire master of the Carnatic. What Lord Macartney thought sufficient to deter the very agents and partakers with Benfield in his iniquities was the inducement to the two right honorable gentlemen to order this very soucar security to be given, and to recall Benfield to the city of Madras from the sort of decent exile into which he had been relegated by Lord Macartney. You must therefore consider Benfield as soucar security for 480,000l. a year, which, at twenty-four per cent, (supposing him contented with that profit,) will, with the interest of his old debt, produce an annual income of 149,520l. a year.

Here is a specimen of the new and pure aristocracy created by the right honorable gentleman,61 as the support of the crown and Constitution against the old, corrupt, refractory, natural interests of this kingdom; and this is the grand counterpoise against all odious coalitions of these interests. A single Benfield outweighs them all: a criminal, who long since ought to have fattened the region kites with his offal, is by his Majesty's ministers enthroned in the government of a great kingdom, and enfeoffed with an estate which in the comparison effaces the splendor of all the nobility of Europe. To bring a little more distinctly into view the true secret of this dark transaction, I beg you particularly to advert to the circumstances which I am going to place before you.

The general corps of creditors, as well as Mr. Benfield himself, not looking well into futurity, nor presaging the minister of this day, thought it not expedient for their common interest that such a name as his should stand at the head of their list. It was therefore agreed amongst them that Mr. Benfield should disappear, by making over his debt to Messrs. Taylor, Majendie, and Call, and should in return be secured by their bond.

The debt thus exonerated of so great a weight of its odium, and otherwise reduced from its alarming bulk, the agents thought they might venture to print a list of the creditors. This was done for the first time in the year 1783, during the Duke of Portland's administration. In this list the name of Benfield was not to be seen. To this strong negative testimony was added the further testimony of the Nabob of Arcot. That prince62 (or rather Mr. Benfield for him) writes to the Court of Directors a letter63 full of complaints and accusations against Lord Macartney, conveyed in such terms as were natural for one of Mr. Benfield's habits and education to employ. Amongst the rest he is made to complain of his Lordship's endeavoring to prevent an intercourse of politeness and sentiment between him and Mr. Benfield; and to aggravate the affront, he expressly declares Mr. Benfield's visits to be only on account of respect and of gratitude, as no pecuniary transaction subsisted between them.

Such, for a considerable space of time, was the outward form of the loan of 1777, in which Mr. Benfield had no sort of concern. At length intelligence arrived at Madras, that this debt, which had always been renounced by the Court of Directors, was rather like to become the subject of something more like a criminal inquiry than of any patronage or sanction from Parliament. Every ship brought accounts, one stronger than the other, of the prevalence of the determined enemies of the Indian system. The public revenues became an object desperate to the hopes of Mr. Benfield; he therefore resolved to fall upon his associates, and, in violation of that faith which subsists among those who have abandoned all other, commences a suit in the Mayor's Court against Taylor, Majendie, and Call, for the bond given to him, when he agreed to disappear for his own benefit as well as that of the common concern. The assignees of his debt, who little expected the springing of this mine, even from such an engineer as Mr. Benfield, after recovering their first alarm, thought it best to take ground on the real state of the transaction. They divulged the whole mystery, and were prepared to plead that they had never received from Mr. Benfield any other consideration for the bond than a transfer, in trust for himself, of his demand on the Nabob of Arcot. An universal indignation arose against the perfidy of Mr. Benfield's proceeding; the event of the suit was looked upon as so certain, that Benfield was compelled to retreat as precipitately as he had advanced boldly; he gave up his bond, and was reinstated in his original demand, to wait the fortune of other claimants. At that time, and at Madras, this hope was dull indeed; but at home another scene was preparing.

It was long before any public account of this discovery at Madras had arrived in England, that the present minister and his Board of Control thought fit to determine on the debt of 1777. The recorded proceedings at this time knew nothing of any debt to Benfield. There was his own testimony, there was the testimony of the list, there was the testimony of the Nabob of Arcot, against it. Yet such was the ministers' feeling of the true secret of this transaction, that they thought proper, in the teeth of all these testimonies, to give him license to return to Madras. Here the ministers were under some embarrassment. Confounded between their resolution of rewarding the good services of Benfield's friends and associates in England, and the shame of sending that notorious incendiary to the court of the Nabob of Arcot, to renew his intrigues against the British government, at the time they authorize his return, they forbid him, under the severest penalties, from any conversation with the Nabob or his ministers: that is, they forbid his communication with the very person on account of his dealings with whom they permit his return to that city. To overtop this contradiction, there is not a word restraining him from the freest intercourse with the Nabob's second son, the real author of all that is done in the Nabob's name; who, in conjunction with this very Benfield, has acquired an absolute dominion over that unhappy man, is able to persuade him to put his signature to whatever paper they please, and often without any communication of the contents. This management was detailed to them at full length by Lord Macartney, and they cannot pretend ignorance of it.64

I believe, after this exposure of facts, no man can entertain a doubt of the collusion of ministers with the corrupt interest of the delinquents in India. Whenever those in authority provide for the interest of any person, on the real, but concealed state of his affairs, without regard to his avowed, public, and ostensible pretences, it must be presumed that they are in confederacy with him, because they act for him on the same fraudulent principles on which he acts for himself. It is plain that the ministers were fully apprised of Benfield's real situation, which he had used means to conceal, whilst concealment answered his purposes. They were, or the person on whom they relied was, of the cabinet council of Benfield, in the very depth of all his mysteries. An honest magistrate compels men to abide by one story. An equitable judge would not hear of the claim of a man who had himself thought proper to renounce it. With such a judge his shuffling and prevarication would have damned his claims; such a judge never would have known, but in order to animadvert upon, proceedings of that character.

I have thus laid before you, Mr. Speaker, I think with sufficient clearness, the connection of the ministers with Mr. Atkinson at the general election; I have laid open to you the connection of Atkinson with Benfield; I have shown Benfield's employment of his wealth in creating a Parliamentary interest to procure a ministerial protection; I have set before your eyes his large concern in the debt, his practices to hide that concern from the public eye, and the liberal protection which he has received from the minister. If this chain of circumstances does not lead you necessarily to conclude that the minister has paid to the avarice of Benfield the services done by Benfield's connections to his ambition, I do not know anything short of the confession of the party that can persuade you of his guilt. Clandestine and collusive practice can only be traced by combination and comparison of circumstances. To reject such combination and comparison is to reject the only means of detecting fraud; it is, indeed, to give it a patent and free license to cheat with impunity.

I confine myself to the connection of ministers, mediately or immediately, with only two persons concerned in this debt. How many others, who support their power and greatness within and without doors, are concerned originally, or by transfers of these debts, must be left to general opinion. I refer to the reports of the Select Committee for the proceedings of some of the agents in these affairs, and their attempts, at least, to furnish ministers with the means of buying General Courts, and even whole Parliaments, in the gross.65

I know that the ministers will think it little less than acquittal, that they are not charged with having taken to themselves some part of the money of which they have made so liberal a donation to their partisans, though the charge may be indisputably fixed upon the corruption of their politics. For my part, I follow their crimes to that point to which legal presumptions and natural indications lead me, without considering what species of evil motive tends most to aggravate or to extenuate the guilt of their conduct. But if I am to speak my private sentiments, I think that in a thousand cases for one it would be far less mischievous to the public, and full as little dishonorable to themselves, to be polluted with direct bribery, than thus to become a standing auxiliary to the oppression, usury, and peculation of multitudes, in order to obtain a corrupt support to their power. It is by bribing, not so often by being bribed, that wicked politicians bring rum on mankind. Avarice is a rival to the pursuits of many. It finds a multitude of checks, and many opposers, in every walk of life. But the objects of ambition are for the few; and every person who aims at indirect profit, and therefore wants other protection than innocence and law, instead of its rival, becomes its instrument. There is a natural allegiance and fealty due to this domineering, paramount evil, from all the vassal vices, which acknowledge its superiority, and readily militate under its banners; and it is under that discipline alone that avarice is able to spread to any considerable extent, or to render itself a general, public mischief. It is therefore no apology for ministers, that they have not been bought by the East India delinquents, but that they have only formed an alliance with them for screening each other from justice, according to the exigence of their several necessities. That they have done so is evident; and the junction of the power of office in England with the abuse of authority in the East has not only prevented even the appearance of redress to the grievances of India, but I wish it may not be found to have dulled, if not extinguished, the honor, the candor, the generosity, the good-nature, which used formerly to characterize the people of England. I confess, I wish that some more feeling than I have yet observed for the sufferings of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects in that oppressed part of the world had manifested itself in any one quarter of the kingdom, or in any one large description of men.

That these oppressions exist is a fact no more denied than it is resented as it ought to be. Much evil has been done in India under the British authority. What has been done to redress it? We are no longer surprised at anything. We are above the unlearned and vulgar passion of admiration. But it will astonish posterity, when they read our opinions in our actions, that, after years of inquiry, we have found out that the sole grievance of India consisted in this, that the servants of the Company there had not profited enough of their opportunities, nor drained it sufficiently of its treasures,—when they shall hear that the very first and only important act of a commission specially named by act of Parliament is, to charge upon an undone country, in favor of a handful of men in the humblest ranks of the public service, the enormous sum of perhaps four millions of sterling money.

It is difficult for the most wise and upright government to correct the abuses of remote, delegated power, productive of unmeasured wealth, and protected by the boldness and strength of the same ill-got riches. These abuses, full of their own wild native vigor, will grow and flourish under mere neglect. But where the supreme authority, not content with winking at the rapacity of its inferior instruments, is so shameless and corrupt as openly to give bounties and premiums for disobedience to its laws,—when it will not trust to the activity of avarice in the pursuit of its own gains,—when it secures public robbery by all the careful jealousy and attention with which it ought to protect property from such violence,—the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its purposes; neither God nor man will long endure it; nor will it long endure itself. In that case, there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint, fermenting in the constitution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off, or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death,—and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench and poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson to the world.

In my opinion, we ought not to wait for the fruitless instruction of calamity to inquire into the abuses which bring upon us ruin in the worst of its forms, in the loss of our fame and virtue. But the right honorable gentleman66 says, in answer to all the powerful arguments of my honorable friend, "that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this transaction." But it is exposed; it is perfectly known in every member, in every particle, and in every way, except that which may lead to a remedy. He knows that the papers of correspondence are printed, and that they are in every hand.

He and delicacy are a rare and a singular coalition. He thinks that to divulge our Indian politics may be highly dangerous. He! the mover, the chairman, the reporter of the Committee of Secrecy! he, that brought forth in the utmost detail, in several vast, printed folios, the most recondite parts of the politics, the military, the revenues of the British empire in India! With six great chopping bastards,67 each as lusty as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the sight of his new bridegroom, assumes a virgin delicacy; or, to use a more fit, as well as a more poetic comparison, the person so squeamish, so timid, so trembling lest the winds of heaven should visit too roughly, is expanded to broad sunshine, exposed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud with all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of her delicate amours,—

Whilst discovery of the misgovernment of others led to his own power, it was wise to inquire, it was safe to publish: there was then no delicacy; there was then no danger. But when his object is obtained, and in his imitation he has outdone the crimes that he had reprobated in volumes of reports and in sheets of bills of pains and penalties, then concealment becomes prudence, and it concerns the safety of the state that we should not know, in a mode of Parliamentary cognizance, what all the world knows but too well, that is, in what manner he chooses to dispose of the public revenues to the creatures of his politics.

The debate has been long, and as much so on my part, at least, as on the part of those who have spoken before me. But long as it is, the more material half of the subject has hardly been touched on: that is, the corrupt and destructive system to which this debt has been rendered subservient, and which seems to be pursued with at least as much vigor and regularity as ever. If I considered your ease or my own, rather than the weight and importance of this question, I ought to make some apology to you, perhaps some apology to myself, for having detained your attention so long. I know on what ground I tread. This subject, at one time taken up with so much fervor and zeal, is no longer a favorite in this House. The House itself has undergone a great and signal revolution. To some the subject is strange and uncouth; to several, harsh and distasteful; to the relics of the last Parliament it is a matter of fear and apprehension. It is natural for those who have seen their friends sink in the tornado which raged during the late shift of the monsoon, and have hardly escaped on the planks of the general wreck, it is but too natural for them, as soon as they make the rocks and quicksands of their former disasters, to put about their new-built barks, and, as much as possible, to keep aloof from this perilous lee shore.

But let us do what we please to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation. Our attempts to banish this importunate duty will only make it return upon us again and again, and every time in a shape more unpleasant than the former. A government has been fabricated for that great province; the right honorable gentleman says that therefore you ought not to examine into its conduct. Heavens! what an argument is this! We are not to examine into the conduct of the Direction, because it is an old government; we are not to examine into this Board of Control, because it is a new one. Then we are only to examine into the conduct of those who have no conduct to account for. Unfortunately, the basis of this new government has been laid on old, condemned delinquents, and its superstructure is raised out of prosecutors turned into protectors. The event has been such as might be expected. But if it had been otherwise constituted, had it been constituted even as I wished, and as the mover of this question had planned, the better part of the proposed establishment was in the publicity of its proceedings, in its perpetual responsibility to Parliament. Without this check, what is our government at home, even awed, as every European government is, by an audience formed of the other states of Europe, by the applause or condemnation of the discerning and critical company before which it acts? But if the scene on the other side of the globe, which tempts, invites, almost compels, to tyranny and rapine, be not inspected with the eye of a severe and unremitting vigilance, shame and destruction must ensue. For one, the worst event of this day, though it may deject, shall not break or subdue me. The call upon us is authoritative. Let who will shrink back, I shall be found at my post. Baffled, discountenanced, subdued, discredited, as the cause of justice and humanity is, it will be only the dearer to me. Whoever, therefore, shall at any time bring before you anything towards the relief of our distressed fellow-citizens in India, and towards a subversion of the present most corrupt and oppressive system for its government, in me shall find a weak, I am afraid, but a steady, earnest, and faithful assistant.