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, while 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! amount of 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 When the rude hand of inquiry was withdrawn, it expanded in all the luxuriant vigor of its original vegetation.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 nearly 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 £1,400,000. 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 a sort of postscript, by way of an additional remark (not in the body of the obligation), the debt represented at £1,400,000; but when I computed the sums to be paid for interest by installments in another paper, I found they produced the interest of two millions, at twelve per cent., and the assignment supposed that if these installments might exceed, they might also fall short of the real provision for that interest. Another installment bond was afterward grant I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the Impossible to amount of the whole of those demands, determine the in order to see how much, supposing these debts. 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 £220,000 of the loan of 1767, remains unpaid. How much interest is in arreared. In that bond the interest exactly tallies with I could never discover; seven or eight years, at least, which would make the whole of that debt about £396,000. 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 £294,000, and this £294,000, 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 among 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 £880,000 capital. When this consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar [Court], it was represented authentically at £2,400,000. In that, or rather in a higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it. It afterward fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its weight at once; and it sunk to £1,400,000. 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. a capital of £1,400,000. But, pursuing this capital through the correspondence, I lost sight of it again, and it was asserted that this installment 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 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 pro remarks on the mode of plundering the country. The great fortunes made in India in the beIntroductory ginnings 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 dependent 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 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 contractor for the provision of armies, and the hire of mercenaries for his use and under his direction. This disposition was to be se cured by the Nabob's putting himself under the guarantee 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 strong-holds of the Carnatic; they declined to receive the embassadors 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. 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 Hyder avarice of the projectors, you have all heard A (and he has made himself to be well remembered) of an Indian chief called Hyder Ali Khan. This man possessed the western [Mysore], 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. 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. 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. 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," Both 25 24 This took place in 1769, when Hyder Ali artfully drew off the British army to a great distance from Madras, and then suddenly, by a forced march of one hundred and twenty miles in three days, surprised the city in a defenseless state. No resist ance could be offered, and the Council of Madras for a restitution of its conquests, and a co-operation was compelled to conclude a treaty, which provided with Hyder Ali for their mutual benefit. 25 This triple government seems to have been the Nabob of Arcot, the nominal sovereign, and the two factions into which the Council was divided. they were always prevented by some overruling influence (which they do not describe, but which can not be misunderstood) from performing what justice and interest combined so evidently to enforce. His invasion of the Carnatic in 1780. 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 reso lution. 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. While 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, amid 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.26 26 The reader will find it interesting to compare this passage with the most eloquent one in Mr. Fox's speeches, beginning "And all this without an intelligible motive," page 549; and also with Demosthenes' description (about the middle of his Oration for the Crown) of the terror and confusion at Athens, when the news arrived that Elateia had been seized by Philip. Mr. Fox does not attempt to describe; he simply shows us a man on a field of battle, asking why it is fought; and, as the inquiry goes on, we catch glimpses of the scene around, while Mr. Fox (after The alms of the settlement [Madras], in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal, and all his usual manner) turns the whole into argument, mingled with the severest irony and sarcasm. Demosthenes gives us a picture of the scene by a few distinct characteristic touches-the Presidents starting from their seats in the midst of supperrushing into the market-place-tearing down the booths around it-burning up the hurdles even, though the space would not be wanted till the next day-sending for the generals-crying out for the trumpeter: The Council meeting on the morrow at break of day-the people (usually so reluctant to attend) pouring along to the assembly before the Council had found a moment's opportunity to inquire into the assembly-their announcing the newsor agree on measures-the entering of the Council their bringing forward the messenger to tell bis story: And then the proclamation of the herald, "Who will speak?"-the silence of all-the voice of their common country crying out again through the herald, "Who will speak for our deliverance?" -all remaining silent-when Demosthenes arose, and suggested measures which caused all these dangers to pass away oneр vépoç, like a cloud! Mr. Burke had no individual scene of this kind to depict; his description was of necessity a general one, embracing those elements of terror and destruction which attend the progress of an invading army. There are three central points around which the description gathers as it advances. First, the forces of Hyder Ali (like those of Fabius at the approach of Hannibal), hanging in "one black cloud on the declivities of the mountains." Secondly, "the storm of universal fire," which did in fact lay waste the the "whirlwind of cavalry"-how apt an image of Carnatic from one extremity to the other. Thirdly, Hyder Ali's terrible band of Abyssinian horsemen, which swept the whole country around, and hurried tens of thousands "into captivity in an unknown and hostile land!" Lord Brougham, in a criticism on this passage, pointedly remarks, that some of the secondary touches which fill up the picture, such as "blackening of all the horizon," "the menacing meteor," the "goading spears of drivers." and 'the trampling of pursuing horses," rather diminish than increase the effect. He mentions, also, "the storm of unusual fire"-an expression flat enough certainly, if Mr. Burke had used it, to merit all his censures. But if his Lordship had recalled the cir cumstances of Hyder Ali's march, he would have seen that fire was one of his chief instruments of destruction; and therefore that the "storm of universal fire," no less than the black cloud and the whirlwind of cavalry, should occupy a prominent place in the picture. Without wishing, however, to criticise so admirable a passage too closely, or agreeing with Lord Brougham in all his remarks, the Editor would sug gest that the first two sentences of this paragraph are too much clogged with qualifying thoughts. In a passage leading to so animated a description, the ideas should be few and simple; there should be nothing to occupy or detain the mind; every thing should bear it forward to one point. But instead of this, Mr. Burke, when he had spoken of men who would sign no convention, goes on to describe them as those "whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of hu man intercourse itself;" he then represents them as "incorrigible and predestinated criminals," and in the next sentence speaks of them as those "against 1785.] NABOB OF ARCOT'S DEBTS. was done by charity that private charity could | and from the Irish to the German Sea, east and Every day you are fatigued and disgusted For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in theif art, Hyder Ali, and his more ferocious son [Tippoo Saib], 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 That hurricane this assertion in its full extent. 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 whol-acquainted with either England or India, who ly untouched) escaped the general ravage. The Carnatic is a country not much inferior Extent of the in extent to England. Figure to yourCarnatic. self, 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, whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no protection." All this, or nearly all, were better omitted in such a place, and perhaps, also, his description of Hyder Ali's confederates as those "who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation of the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot." Every one must feel, especially in reading these sentences aloud, that there is a heaviness about them which is any thing but fitted to introduce a description like that which follows. 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. at great ex The Carnatic is not by the bounty of nature a fertile soil. The general size of its Requires concattle is proof enough that it is much stant irrigation otherwise. It is some days since I pense. moved that a curious and interesting map, kept in the India House, should be laid before you.28 27 Cadmus, having slain a dragon which guarded the fountain of Mars, sowed its teeth by command of Minerva, and instantly full-grown men sprang up, armed, from the ground. 28 Mr. Barnard's map of the Jaghire. By Jag hire is here meant a tract of country whose reve and population, that every where the reservoirs were fallen into a miserable decay. But after those domestic enemies had provoked the entry of a cruel and 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 re-establish them as the means of present subsistence to the people, and of future revenue to the state. No aid afforded for this purpose. 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 use of the influences of Heaven itself are in that country a work of art. The Carnatic is refresh- What, sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ed by few or no living brooks or running streams, ministry do on the view of the ruins and it has rain only at a season; but its product of such works before them? on the by the ministry of rice exacts the use of water subject to per- view of such a chasm of desolation petual command. This is the national bank of as that which yawned in the midst of those counthe Carnatic, on which it must have a perpetual tries, to the north and south, which still bore some credit, or it perishes irretrievably. For that rea- vestiges of cultivation? They would have reson, in the happier times of India, a number al- duced all their most necessary establishments; most incredible of reservoirs have been made in they would have suspended the justest payments; chosen places throughout the whole country. they would have employed every shilling derived They are formed for the greater part of mounds from the producing to reanimate the powers of the of earth and stones, with sluices of solid mason- unproductive parts. While they were performry; the whole constructed with admirable skilling this fundamental duty-while they were cele and labor, and maintained at a mighty charge. brating these mysteries of justice and humanity, In the territory contained in that map alone, I they would have told the corps of fictitious credhave been at the trouble of reckoning the reser-itors, whose crimes were their claims, that they voirs, and they amount to upward 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 water-courses again call for a considerable expense to keep them properly scoured and duly leveled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there can not 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 purifications. 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 sepulchers 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! must keep an awful distance; that they must silence their inauspicious tongues; that they must hold off their profane and unhallowed paws from this holy work. They would have proclaimed, with a voice that should make itself heard, that in every country the first creditor is the plow; 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;30 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 ob jects 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 29"Yet let me tell you, Cassius, you yourself Are much condemned to have an itching palm." Julius Cesar. 30 Interest is rated by the month in India. |