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
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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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
over-ruling 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 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 of 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 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 those 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 emboweled (may God avert the omen
of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your imagination
a little farther, 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. 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, 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 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 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 uses 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
embrace as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition;
but 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. 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 re-establish 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 re-animate 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 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 first have 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; 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 revenues, 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
L480,000 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 hostilities of oppression and mismanagement, that the revenues,
sinking with the prosperity of the country, had fallen to about L800,000
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 L800,000.
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; 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.