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
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, havoc, 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 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 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 private 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 horror 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 advisable to throw a pall over this
hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.
For eighteen months,[37] 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 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 this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane 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 wholly
untouched) escaped the general ravage.
The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure
to yourself, 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, and from the Irish to the
German Sea, east and west, emptied and embowelled (may God avert the
omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your
imagination a little further, and then suppose your ministers taking a
survey of this scene of waste and desolation. What would be your
thoughts, if you should be informed that they were computing how much
had been the amount of the excises, how much the customs, how much the
land and malt tax, in order that they should charge (take it in the most
favorable light) for public service, upon the relics of the satiated
vengeance of relentless enemies, the whole of what England had yielded
in the most exuberant seasons of peace and abundance? What would you
call it? To call it tyranny sublimed into madness would be too faint an
image; yet this very madness is the principle upon which the ministers
at your right hand have proceeded in their estimate of the revenues of
the Carnatic, when they were providing, not supply for the
establishments of its protection, but rewards for the authors of its
ruin.
Every day you are fatigued and disgusted with this cant, "The Carnatic
is a country that will soon recover, and become instantly as prosperous
as ever." They think they are talking to innocents, who will believe,
that, by sowing of dragons' teeth, men may come up ready grown and ready
armed. They who will give themselves the trouble of considering (for it
requires no great reach of thought, no very profound knowledge) the
manner in which mankind are increased, and countries cultivated, will
regard all this raving as it ought to be regarded. In order that the
people, after a long period of vexation and plunder, may be in a
condition to maintain government, government must begin by maintaining
them. Here the road to economy lies not through receipt, but through
expense; and in that country Nature has given no short cut to your
object. Men must propagate, like other animals, by the mouth. Never did
oppression light the nuptial torch; never did extortion and usury spread
out the genial bed. Does any of you think that England, so wasted,
would, under such a nursing attendance, so rapidly and cheaply recover?
But he is meanly acquainted with either England or India who 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.
The Carnatic is not by the bounty of Nature a fertile soil. The general
size of its cattle is proof enough that it is much otherwise. It is some
days since I moved that a curious and interesting map, kept in the
India House, should be laid before you.[38] 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 uses of the influences of Heaven itself are in that country a
work of art. The Carnatic is refreshed by few or no living brooks or
running streams, and it has rain only at a season; but its product of
rice exacts the use of water subject to perpetual command. This is the
national bank of the Carnatic, on which it must have a perpetual credit,
or it perishes irretrievably. For that reason, in the happier times of
India, a number, almost incredible, of reservoirs have been made in
chosen places throughout the whole country: they are formed, for the
greater part, of mounds of earth and stones, with sluices of solid
masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and labor, and
maintained at a mighty charge. In the territory contained in that map
alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs, and they
amount to upwards 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 watercourses again call
for a considerable expense to keep them properly scoured and duly
levelled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there cannot 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 purification. 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 sepulchres 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.
Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant
of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious
funds of culture and population, that everywhere the reservoirs were
fallen into a miserable decay.[39] But after those domestic enemies had
provoked the entry of a cruel 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 reëstablish them, as the means of
present subsistence to the people and of future revenue to the state.
What, Sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do, on the view of
the ruins of such works before them?--on the view of such a chasm of
desolation as that which yawned in the midst of those countries, to the
north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They
would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would
have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every
shilling derived from the producing to reanimate the powers of the
unproductive parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty,
whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity,
they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors, whose crimes
were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance,--that they
must silence their inauspicious tongues,--that they must hold off their
profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have
proclaimed, with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every
country the first creditor is the plough,--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;[40] 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
objects 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 and a civil establishment, would have been impossible; therefore
the ministers are silent on that head, and rest themselves on the
authority of Lord Macartney, who, in a letter to the Court of Directors,
written in the year 1781, speculating on what might be the result of a
wise management of the countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates
the revenue, as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a
year, as he does those of the king of Tanjore (which had not been
assigned) at four hundred and fifty. On this Lord Macartney grounds his
calculations, and on this they choose to ground theirs. It was on this
calculation that the ministry, in direct opposition to the remonstrances
of the Court of Directors, have compelled that miserable enslaved body
to put their hands to an order for appropriating the enormous sum of
480,000_l._ annually, as a fund for paying to their rebellious servants
a debt contracted in defiance of their clearest and most positive
injunctions.
The authority and information of Lord Macartney is held high on this
occasion, though it is totally rejected in every other particular of
this business. I believe I have the honor of being almost as old an
acquaintance as any Lord Macartney has. A constant and unbroken
friendship has subsisted between us from a very early period; and I
trust he thinks, that, as I respect his character, and in general admire
his conduct, I am one of those who feel no common interest in his
reputation. Yet I do not hesitate wholly to disallow the calculation of
1781, without any apprehension that I shall appear to distrust his
veracity or his judgment. This peace estimate of revenue was not
grounded on the state of the Carnatic, as it then, or as it had
recently, stood. It was a statement of former and better times. There is
no doubt that a period did exist, when the large portion of the Carnatic
held by the Nabob of Arcot might be fairly reputed to produce a revenue
to that, or to a greater amount. But the whole had so melted away by the
slow and silent hostility of oppression and mismanagement, that the
revenues, sinking with the prosperity of the country, had fallen to
about 800,000_l._ a year, even before an enemy's horse had imprinted his
hoof on the soil of the Carnatic. From that view, and independently of
the decisive effects of the war which ensued, Sir Eyre Coote conceived
that years must pass before the country could be restored to its former
prosperity, and production. It was that state of revenue (namely, the
actual state before the war) which the Directors have opposed to Lord
Macartney's speculation. They refused to take the revenues for more than
800,000_l._ In this they are justified by Lord Macartney himself, who,
in a subsequent letter, informs the court that his sketch is a matter of
speculation; it supposes the country restored to its ancient prosperity,
and the revenue to be in a course of effective and honest collection.
If, therefore, the ministers have gone wrong, they were not deceived by
Lord Macartney: they were deceived by no man. The estimate of the
Directors is nearly the very estimate furnished by the right honorable
gentleman himself, and published to the world in one of the printed
reports of his own committee;[41] but as soon as he obtained his power,
he chose to abandon his account. No part of his official conduct can be
defended on the ground of his Parliamentary information.
In this clashing of accounts and estimates, ought not the ministry, if
they wished to preserve even appearances, to have waited for information
of the actual result of these speculations, before they laid a charge,
and such a charge, not conditionally and eventually, but positively and
authoritatively, upon a country which they all knew, and which one of
them had registered on the records of this House, to be wasted, beyond
all example, by every oppression of an abusive government, and every
ravage of a desolating war? But that you may discern in what manner they
use the correspondence of office, and that thereby you may enter into
the true spirit of the ministerial Board of Control, I desire you, Mr.
Speaker, to remark, that, through their whole controversy with the Court
of Directors, they do not so much as hint at their ever having seen any
other paper from Lord Macartney, or any other estimate of revenue than
this of 1781. To this they hold. Here they take post; here they intrench
themselves.
When I first read this curious controversy between the ministerial
board and the Court of Directors, common candor obliged me to attribute
their tenacious adherence to the estimate of 1781 to a total ignorance
of what had appeared upon the records. But the right honorable gentleman
has chosen to come forward with an uncalled-for declaration; he
boastingly tells you, that he has seen, read, digested, compared
everything,--and that, if he has sinned, he has sinned with his eyes
broad open. Since, then, the ministers will obstinately shut the gates
of mercy on themselves, let them add to their crimes what aggravations
they please. They have, then, (since it must be so,) wilfully and
corruptly suppressed the information which they ought to have produced,
and, for the support of peculation, have made themselves guilty of
spoliation and suppression of evidence.[42] The paper I hold in my hand,
which totally overturns (for the present, at least) the estimate of
1781, they have no more taken notice of, in their controversy with the
Court of Directors, than if it had no existence. It is the report made
by a committee appointed at Madras to manage the whole of the six
countries assigned to the Company by the Nabob of Arcot. This committee
was wisely instituted by Lord Macartney, to remove from himself the
suspicion of all improper management in so invidious a trust; and it
seems to have been well chosen. This committee has made a comparative
estimate of the only six districts which were in a condition to be let
to farm. In one set of columns they state the gross and net produce of
the districts as let by the Nabob. To that statement they oppose the
terms on which the same districts were rented for five years under
their authority. Under the Nabob, the gross farm was so high as
570,000_l._ sterling. What was the clear produce? Why, no more than
about 250,000_l._; and this was the whole profit of the Nabob's
treasury, under his own management of all the districts which were in a
condition to be let to farm on the 27th of May, 1782. Lord Macartney's
leases stipulated a gross produce of no more than about 530,000_l._; but
then the estimated net amount was nearly double the Nabob's. It,
however, did not then exceed 480,000_l._; and Lord Macartney's
commissioners take credit for an annual revenue amounting to this clear
sum. Here is no speculation; here is no inaccurate account clandestinely
obtained from those who might wish, and were enabled, to deceive. It is
the authorized, recorded state of a real, recent transaction. Here is
not twelve hundred thousand pound,--not eight hundred. The whole revenue
of the Carnatic yielded no more, in May, 1782, than four hundred and
eighty thousand pounds: nearly the very precise sum which your minister,
who is so careful of the public security, has carried from all
descriptions of establishment to form a fund for the private emolument
of his creatures.
In this estimate, we see, as I have just observed, the Nabob's farms
rated so high as 570,000_l._ Hitherto all is well: but follow on to the
effective net revenue; there the illusion vanishes; and you will not
find nearly so much as half the produce. It is with reason, therefore,
Lord Macartney invariably, throughout the whole correspondence,
qualifies all his views and expectations of revenue, and all his plans
for its application, with this indispensable condition, that the
management is not in the hands of the Nabob of Arcot. Should that fatal
measure take place, he has over and over again told you that he has no
prospect of realizing anything whatsoever for any public purpose. With
these weighty declarations, confirmed by such a state of indisputable
fact before them, what has been done by the Chancellor of the Exchequer
and his accomplices? Shall I be believed? They have delivered over those
very territories, on the keeping of which in the hands of the committee
the defence of our dominions, and, what was more dear to them, possibly,
their own job, depended,--they have delivered back again, without
condition, without arrangement, without stipulation of any sort for the
natives of any rank, the whole of those vast countries, to many of which
he had no just claim, into the ruinous mismanagement of the Nabob of
Arcot. To crown all, according to their miserable practice, whenever
they do anything transcendently absurd, they preface this their
abdication of their trust by a solemn declaration that they were not
obliged to it by any principle of policy or any demand of justice
whatsoever.
I have stated to you the estimated produce of the territories of the
Carnatic in a condition to be farmed in 1782, according to the different
managements into which they might fall; and this estimate the ministers
have thought proper to suppress. Since that, two other accounts have
been received. The first informs us, that there has been a recovery of
what is called arrear, as well as of an improvement of the revenue of
one of the six provinces which were let in 1782.[43] It was brought
about by making a new war. After some sharp actions, by the resolution
and skill of Colonel Fullarton several of the petty princes of the most
southerly of the unwasted provinces were compelled to pay very heavy
rents and tributes, who for a long time before had not paid any
acknowledgment. After this reduction, by the care of Mr. Irwin, one of
the committee, that province was divided into twelve farms. This
operation raised the income of that particular province; the others
remain as they were first farmed. So that, instead of producing only
their original rent of 480,000_l._, they netted, in about two years and
a quarter, 1,320,000_l._ sterling, which would be about 660,000_l._ a
year, if the recovered arrear was not included. What deduction is to be
made on account of that arrear I cannot determine, but certainly what
would reduce the annual income considerably below the rate I have
allowed.
The second account received is the letting of the wasted provinces of
the Carnatic. This I understand is at a growing rent, which may or may
not realize what it promises; but if it should answer, it will raise the
whole, at some future time, to 1,200,000_l._
You must here remark, Mr. Speaker, that this revenue is the produce of
_all_ the Nabob's dominions. During the assignment, the Nabob paid
nothing, because the Company had all. Supposing the whole of the lately
assigned territory to yield up to the most sanguine expectations of the
right honorable gentleman, and suppose 1,200,000_l._ to be annually
realized, (of which we actually know of no more than the realizing of
six hundred thousand,) out of this you must deduct the subsidy and rent
which the Nabob paid before the assignment,--namely, 340,000_l._ a year.
This reduces back the revenue applicable to the new distribution made by
his Majesty's ministers to about 800,000_l._ Of that sum five eighths
are by them surrendered to the debts. The remaining three are the only
fund left for all the purposes so magnificently displayed in the letter
of the Board of Control: that is, for a new-cast peace establishment, a
now fund for ordnance and fortifications, and a large allowance for what
they call "the splendor of the Durbar."