not been satisfied with authorizing 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_l._ 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_l._ of the public revenues, for what is
called the Cavalry Loan. After dispatching this, the right honorable
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 favor 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 anywhere? But
what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman
of the Committee of Secrecy[21], who had published to the House, and to
the world, the facts that condemn these 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,[22]--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 honorable 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 arrangement of _their own_, an arrangement made by those who best
knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor
it merited,[23] and how little hopes they had to find any persons in
authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.
But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations 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 terror. 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 honorable gentleman[24] 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
plainest reasons in the world) the right honorable 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 litigations, 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 honorable 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 honorable 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 burden 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 _bonâ fide_ advanced; entitle
yourself to my protection by the fairness and fulness of the
communications you make"? Did an honest creditor ever refuse that
reasonable 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 England 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 fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched
indeed: by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is
left for them. They lent _bonâ fide_; in all probability they were even
forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob's
obligations. They had no trusts to carry to his market. They had no
faith of alliances to sell. They had no nations to betray to robbery and
ruin. They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had
they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver
over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.[25]
These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the
universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives
are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make
provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason. You see in
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 pound 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, whilst
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.
I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of
those demands, in order to see how much, supposing 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_l._, of the loan of 1767
remains unpaid. How much interest is in arrear I could never discover:
seven or eight years' at least, which would make the whole of that debt
about 396,000_l._ 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_l._; and this 294,000_l._, 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 amongst 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_l._ capital. When this
consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was
represented authentically at 2,400,000_l._ In that, or rather in a
higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.[26] It
afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its
weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000_l._[27] 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.
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.
Sulivan, agent to the Nabob and his creditors, stated at 2,800,000_l._,
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. Sulivan,
which, it seems, will reduce it again to the lower standard of
1,400,000_l._
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,[28] I found, in a
sort of postscript, by way of an additional remark, (not in the body of
the obligation,) the debt represented at 1,400,000_l._: but when I
computed the sums to be paid for interest by instalments in another
paper, I found they produced an interest of two millions, at twelve per
cent; and the assignment supposed, that, if these instalments might
exceed, they might also fall short of, the real provision for that
interest.[29] Another instalment-bond was afterwards granted: in that
bond the interest exactly tallies with a capital of 1,400,000_l._:[30]
but pursuing this capital through the correspondence, I lost sight of it
again, and it was asserted that this instalment-bond was considerably
short of the interest that ought to be computed to the time
mentioned.[31]
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 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
horror, 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.[32] 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 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 guaranty 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 strongholds of the Carnatic; 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.[33] 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 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 Carnatic. It was
among the leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to
their own emphatic language) to _extirpate_ this Hyder Ali.[34] 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. 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 his equal the ordinary titles of respect and courtesy.[35] 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.[36]