soucars were at hand; that is, private English moneyjobbers 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 honourable 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 lacks 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 this sum to the officers of my regiments at the time they mentioned; and desired the officers, at the

pay

same time, to pa ify 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 burthen 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 Carnatick to governour Rumbold, dated the 22d, and received the 24th of March 1779.

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 12 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 any thing. 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 proved 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 12 per cent. in compensation for a lingering payment to the nabob of 160,000/. 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 tenour:- "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.

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 governour 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 governour, being cash-keeper, is generally on good terms with the banker, who manages matters thus: The governour 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 freemason 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 honourable gentleman's favourite 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 born 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 honourable 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 honourable 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. Are we ripe to say that no creditor under similar circumstances