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mutiny in armies; to introduce œconomy in revenues; and for all these honourable 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 honourable gentleman has the unparalleled confidence to assert,) but in the evermemorable 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 honourable 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 colourable, 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. The usurping council say that they laboured 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 £.160,000 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 rea

*See Mr. Dundas's 1st, 2d and 3d, reports.

dily gave the sanction of the company to those servants who knew that the company, whose sanction was demanded, had positively prohi bited 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 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 tc 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 Carnatic to Governour Rumbold, dated the 22d, and received the 24th of March, 1779.*

* See further Consultations, 3d February, 1778

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 be sides, 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 £.160,000 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 tuncaws [assignments] granted to the Europeans. The gomastahs [agents] of Mr. Taylor, to Mr. De Fries, are there in order to collect those tuncaws; 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 sus

tenance 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, shews 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 ini quity 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 cashkeeper, 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 tuncaws he grants on the particular districts for it are paid. Matters in

pendix, No. 2, 10, 18, for the mutinous state Mr Dundas's 1st report, p. 26, 29, and Ap and desertion of the nabob's troops for want of

pay. See also report 4, of the same committee.

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 them selves 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 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 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 in spected? 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! Plea sant! 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 was member of the court, when the payment

* Memorial from the creditors to the governour and council, 22d January 1770.

T

which is the ground of this cavalry debt was put in proof?* 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 affar so indispensably calls for.

But his majesty's ministers, indulgent enougn to other scrutinies, have not been satisfied with authorising 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 £.294,000. 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 £.294,000 of the public revenues, for what is called the cavalry loan. After dispatching this, the right honourable 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 favour 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 any where? But what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman of the committee of secrecy,† who had published to the house, and to the world, the facts that condemn these

In the year 1778, Mr. James Call, one of the proprietors of this specific debt, was actually mayor. Appendix to 2d report of Mr. Dundas's committee, No. 65.-The only proof which ap. peared on the inquiry instituted in the general court of 1781, was an affidavit of the lenders themselves, deposing (what nobody ever denied) that they had engaged and agreed to pay-nor that they had paid the sum of £.160,000. This was two years after the transaction; and the affidavit is made before George Proctor, mayor, an attorney for certain of the old creditors. Proceedings of the president and council of Fort Saint George, 22d February, 1779

Right honourable Henry Dundas.

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? 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 honourable 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 arrangemeut of their own, an arrangement made by those who best knew the true constitution of their own debt; who knew how little favour it merited,† and how little

* Appendix to the 4th report of Mr. Dundas's committee, No. 15.

"No sense of the common danger, in case of a war, can prevail on him [the nabob of Arcot] to furnish the company with what is absolutely necessary to assemble an army, though it is beyond a doubt, that money to a large amount is now hoarded up in his coffers at Chepauk; and tuncaws are granted to individuals upon some of his most valuable countries, for payment of part of those debts which he has contracted, and which certainly will not bear inspection, as neither debtor nor creditors have ever had the

confidence to submit the accounts to our erami. nation, though they expressed a wish to consolidate the debts under the auspices of this government, agreeably to a plan they had for. med " Madras Consultations, 20th July, 1779. Mr. Dundas's Appendix to 2d Report, 143. See also last Appendix to ditto Report, No. 376 B.

hopes they had to find any persons in authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.

But what corrupt men, in the fond imagina tions 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 terrour. 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 honourable gentleman✶ 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

Mr. Dundas.

plainest reasons in the world) the right honourable 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 litigation; 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 honourable 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 honourable 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 fulness of the communications you make." Did an honest creditor ever refuse that reason able 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 Enggland 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 fraudu lent, are the natives, who are numerous and wretched indeed: by exhausting the whole

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