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 the 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 think it more advisable to throw a pall over this
hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.