sterling. Lord Macartney's account of 1781, states it to be at that period, 1,200,000. 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 publick 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 publick 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 colours, all false appellations, as well as false facts, do positively deny that the Carnatick 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 10,000. It is, however, on this principle the company makes up its demands on the Carnatick. 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. I therefore applaud my right honourable 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 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 publick 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 connexion 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

That

all the other debts lurk and cover themselves. 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. 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 publick 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 nobob'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 advisa

ble (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 a usury of twenty, twentyfour, thirty-six, and even eight-and-forty per cent. with compound interest, 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 publick; and by binding him and their servsnts together in a common cause, they enable him to form a 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 every thing false, and every thing 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 Carnatick has escaped them; a territory as large as England. During these operations, what a scene has that country presented! 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 clamour

of the European assignee. 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 condi tion, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradic tory 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 govern. ment, 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 re-enact provisions, of which they have given bounties for the breach. This inconsistency has been well exposed.* But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid ?