428 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 Carnatick. They are obscure; they shun inquiry; they are enormous. That is all you know of them. That you may judge what chance any honourable and useful end of government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country; though in truth my mind revolts from it; though you will hear it with horrour; and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with a few words as to the cause. The great fortunes made in India in the beginnings 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 dependant 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 Indostan. 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 Marattas; and the third to himself. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Decan. On this scheme of their servants, the company was to appear in the Carnatick in no other light than as a contractor for the provision of armies, and the hire of mercenaries for his use, and under his direction. This disposition was to be secured by the nabob's putting himself under the guarantee of France; and by the means of that rival nation, preventing the English for ever from assuming an equality, much less a superiority in the Carnatick. In pursuance of this treasonable project (treasonable on the part of the English) they extinguished the company as a sovereign power in that • Report of the select committee, Madras Consultations, January 7, 1771. See also papers published by the order of the court of directors in 1776; and lord Macartney's correspondence with Mr. Hastings and the nabob of Arcot. See also Mr. Dundas's Appendix, No. 376 B. Nabob's propositions through Mr. Sullivan and Assam Khân, Art. 6, and indeed the whole. VOL. II. GG g part of India; they withdrew the company's garrisons out of all the forts and strong holds of the Carnatick; they declined to receive the ambassadors 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 heroick avarice of the projectors, you have all heard (and he has made himself to be well remembered) of an Indian chief called Hyder Ali Khan. This man possessed the western, as the company under the name of the nabob of Arcot does the eastern, division of the Carnatick. It was among the leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to their own emphatick language) to extirpate this Hyder Ali. They declared the nabob of Arcot to be his sovereign, and himself to be a rebel, and publickly 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. Both 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 «The principal object of the expedition is to get money from Tanjore to pay the nabob's debt: if a surplus, to be applied in discharge of the nabob's debts to his private creditors." Consultations, March 20, 1771; and for further lights, Consultations, 12th June, 1771. "We are alarmed, lest this debt to individuals should have been the real motive for the aggrandizement of Mahomed Ali [the nabob of Arcot] and that we are plunged into 2 war to put him in possession of the Mysore revenues for the discharge of the debt." Letter from the directors, March 17, 1769. + Letter from the nabob, May 1st, 1768; and ditto, 24th April 1770, ist October; ditto, 16th September, 1772, 16th March 1773. 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, they were always prevented by some overruling influence (which they do not describe, but which cannot be misunderstood) from performing what justice and interest combined so evidently to enforce.+ 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 Carnatick 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 resolution. 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, havock, and desolation, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst 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 Carnatick-Then ensued a scence of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrours of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havock. A storm of Letter from the presidency at Madras to the court of directors, 27th June 1769. + Mr. Dundas's committee, Report 1. Appendix No. 29. 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 amidst 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. The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by charity that pri vate charity could do: but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food. For months together, these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days, had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horrour so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more adviseable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions. * 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 their art, Hyder Ali, and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious yow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, * Appendix No. 4, Report of the Committee of assigned Revenue. |