probably was ever heard of; that is, forty-eight per cent. payable monthly, with compound interest.

Such is the state to which the company's servants have reduced that country. Now come the reformers, restorers, and comforters of India. What have they done? In addition to all these tyrannous exactions with all these ruinous debts in their train, looking to one side of an agreement whilst they wil fully shut their eyes to the other, they withdraw from Tanjore all the benefits of the treaty of 1762, and they subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to the nabob of Arcot; a tribute never due, or pretended to be due to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this harassed nation to be tributary to a person who is himself, by their own arrangement, deprived of the right of war or peace; deprived of the power of the sword; forbid to keep up a single regiment of soldiers; and is therefore wholly disabled from all protection of the country which is the object of the pretended tribute. Tribute hangs on the sword. It is an incident inseparable from real sovereign power. In the present case to suppose its existence, is as absurd as it is cruel and oppressive. And here, Mr. Speaker, you have a clear exemplification of the use of those false names, and false colours, which the gentlemen who have lately taken possession of India choose to lay on for the purpose of disguising their plan of oppression. The nabob of Arcot, and rajah of Tanjore, have, in truth and substance, no more than a merely civil authority, held in the most entire dependence on the company. The nabob, without military, without federal capacity, is extinguished as a potentate; but then he is carefully kept alive as an independent and

sovereign power, for the purpose of rapine and extortion; for the purpose of perpetuating the old intrigues, animosities, usuries, and corruptions.

It was not enough that this mockery of tribute, was to be continued without the correspondent protection, or any of the stipulated equivalents, but ten years of arrear, to the amount of 400,0001. sterling, is added to all the debts to the company, and to individuals, in order to create a new debt, to be paid (if at all possible to be paid in whole or in part) only by new usuries; and all this for the nabob of Arcot, or rather for Mr. Benfield, and the corps of the nabob's creditors, and their soucars. Thus these miserable Indian princes are continued in their seats, for no other purpose than to render them in the first instance objects of every species of extortion; and in the second, to force them to become, for the sake of a momentary shadow of reduced authority, a sort of subordinate tyrants, the ruin and calamity, not the fathers and cherishers of their people.

But take this tribute only as a mere charge (without title, cause, or equivalent) on this people; what one step has been taken to furnish grounds for a just calculation and estimate of the proportion of the burthen and the ability? None; not an attempt at it. They do not adapt the burthen to the strength; but they estimate the strength of the bearers by the burthen they impose. Then what care is taken to leave a fund sufficient to the future reproduction of the revenues that are to bear all these loads? Every one, but tolerably conversant in Indian affairs, must know that the existence of this little kingdom depends on its control over the river Cavery. The benefits of heaven to any community, ought never to be connected with political arrangements, or made to depend on the personal conduct of princes; in which the mistake, or errour, or neglect, or distress, or passion of a moment on either side, may bring famine on millions, and ruin an innocent nation perhaps for ages. The means of the subsistence of mankind should be as im

mutable as the laws of nature, let power and dominion take what course they may.-Observe what has been done with regard to this important concern. The use of this river is indeed at length given to the rajah, and a power provided for its enjoyment at his own charge; but the means of furnishing that charge (and a mighty one it is) are wholly cut off. This use of the water, which ought to have no more connexion than clouds, and rains, and sunshine, with the politicks of the rajah, the nabob, or the company, is expressly contrived as a means of enforcing demands and arrears of tribute. This horrid and unnatural instrument of extortion had been a distinguishing feature in the enormities of the Carnatick politicks that loudly called for reformation. But the food of a whole people is by the reformers of India conditioned on payments from its prince, at a moment that he is overpowered with a swarm of their demands, without regard to the ability of either prince or people. In fine, by opening an avenue to the irruption of the nabob of Arcot's creditors and soucars, whom every man who did not fall in love with oppression and corruption on an experience of the calamities they produced, would have raised wall before wall, and mound before mound, to keep from a possibility of entrance, a more destructive enemy than Hyder Ali is introduced into that kingdom. By this part of their arrangement in which they establish a debt to the nabob of Arcot, in effect and substance, they deliver over Tanjore, bound hand and foot, to Paul Benfield, the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of a country, which has for years been an object of an unremitted, but unhappily an unequal struggle, between the bounties of Providence to renovate, and the wickedness of mankind to destroy.

The right honourable gentleman* talks of his fairness in determining the territorial dispute between the nabob of Arcot and the prince of that country, when he superseded the determination of the directors, in

* Mr. Dundas.

whom the law had vested the decision of that controversy. He is in this just as feeble as he is in every other part. But it is not necessary to say a word in refutation of any part of his argument. The mode of the proceeding sufficiently speaks the spirit of it. It is enough to fix his character as a judge that he never heard the directors in defence of their adjudication, nor either of the parties in support of their respective claims. It is sufficient for me, that he takes from the rajah of Tanjore by this pretended adjudication, or rather from his unhappy subjects, 40,000l. a year of his and their revenue, and leaves upon his and their shoulders all the charges that can be made on the part of the nabob, on the part of his creditors, and on the part of the company, without so much as hearing him as to right or to ability. But what principally induces me to leave the affair of the territorial dispute between the nabob and the rajah to another day, is this, that both the parties being stripped of their all, it little signifies under which of their names the unhappy undone people are delivered over to the merciless soucars, the allies of that right honourable gentleman, and the chancellor of the exchequer. In them ends the account of this long dispute of the nabob of Arcot, and the rajah of Tanjore.

The right honourable gentleman is of opinion, that his judgment in this case can be censured by none but those who seem to act as if they were paid agents to one of the parties. What does he think of his court of directors? If they are paid by either of the parties, by which of them does he think they are paid? He knows that their decision has been directly contrary to his. Shall I believe that it does not enter into his heart to conceive, that any person can steadily and actively interest himself in the protection of the injured and oppressed, without being well paid for his service? I have taken notice of this sort of discourse some days ago, so far as it may be supposed to relate to me. I then contented myself, as I shall now do, with giving it a cold, though a very direct contradiction. Thus much I do from respect to truth. If I

did more, it might be supposed, by my anxiety to clear myself, that I had imbibed the ideas, which, for obvious reasons, the right honourable gentleman wishes to have received concerning all attempts to plead the cause of the natives of India, as if it were a disreputable employment. If he had not forgot in his present occupation, every principle which ought to have guided him, and I hope did guide him, in his late profession, he would have known, that he who takes a fee for pleading the cause of distress against power, and manfully performs the duty he has assumed, receives an honourable recompense for a virtuous service. But if the right honourable gentleman will have no regard to fact in his insinuations, or to reason in his opinions, I wish him at least to consider, that if taking an earnest part with regard to the oppressions exercised in India, and with regard to this most oppressive case of Tanjore in particular, can ground a presumption of interested motives, he is himself the most mercenary man I know. His conduct, indeed, is such that he is on all occasions the standing testimony against himself. He it was that first called to that case the attention of the house: the reports of his own committee are ample and affecting upon that subject; and as many of us as have escaped his massacre, must remember the very pathetick picture he made of the sufferings of the Tanjore country, on the day when he moved the unwieldy code of his Indian resolutions. Has he not stated over and over again in his reports, the ill treatment of the rajah of Tanjore (a branch of the royal house of the Marattas, every injury to whom the Marattas felt as offered to themselves) as a main cause of the alienation of that people from the British power ? And does he now think, that to betray his principles, to contradict his declarations, and to become himself an active instrument in those oppressions which he had so tragically lamented, is the way to clear himself of having been actuated by a pecuniary interest, at the time when he chose to appear full of tenderness to that ruined nation?