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 ligitation.

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 burthen 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 bona fide advanced; entitle yourself to my protection, by the fairness and fullness 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 becor >

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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 bona fide; in all probability they were even forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the nabob's obligations. They had no trust 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.

These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the universally conceived cause 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 pounds 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.

It is

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. 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. 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. However, it was never without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness. There was a sort of floating debt of about 4 or 500,000l. 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. Sullivan, agent to the nabob and the creditors, stated at 2,800,000/., which (if the cavalry loan, and the remains of the debt of 1767, be subtracted) leaves it at the amount originally declared at the Durbar, in 1777. But then there is a private instruction to Mr. Sullivan, 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 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 the interest of two millions, at twelve per cent.; and the assignment supposed, that if these instal

ments might exceed, they might also fall short of the real provision for that interest.

Another instalment bond was afterwards granted. In that bond the interest exactly tallies with a capital of 1,400,000l. 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. 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 instalment 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 extraordinary 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. 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 Indostan. 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 Marattas; and the third to himself. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Decan.

On this scheme of their servants, the company was to appear in the Carnatic in no other light than as 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 guarantee of France; and by the means of that rival nation, preventing the English for ever 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 strong-holds 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