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
favourable 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 one 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 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 labour, 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 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 embraced as their own. These were
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.