my government, but is, moreover, the cause of much loss both in revenues and customs.  The detached body of troops under European officers bring nothing but confusion to the affairs of my government, and are entirely their own masters.”  Mr. Middleton, Mr. Hastings’s confidential resident, vouches for the truth of this representation in its fullest extent.  “I am concerned to confess that there is too good ground for this plea. The misfortune hat been general throughout the whole of the vizier’s [the Nabob of Oude] dominions, obvious to everybody; and so fatal have been its consequences, that no person of either credit or character would enter into engagements with government for farming the country.”  He then proceeds to give strong instances of the general calamity, and its effects.

It was now to be seen what steps the Governor-General and Council took for the relief of this distressed country, long laboring under the vexations of men, and now stricken by the hand of God.  The case of a general famine is known to relax the severity even of the most rigorous government.—­Mr. Hastings does not deny or show the least doubt of the fact.  The representation is humble, and almost abject.  On this representation from a great prince of the distress of his subjects, Mr. Hastings falls into a violent passion,—­such as (it seems) would be unjustifiable in any one who speaks of any part of his conduct.  He declares “that the demands, the tone in which they were asserted, and the season in which they were made, are all equally alarming, and appear to him to require an adequate degree of firmness in this board in opposition to them.”  He proceeds to deal out very unreserved language on the person and character of the Nabob and his ministers.  He declares, that, in a division between him and the Nabob, “the strongest must decide.”  With regard to the urgent and instant necessity from the failure of the crops, he says, “that perhaps expedients may be found for affording a gradual relief from the burden of which he so heavily complains, and it shall be my endeavor to seek them out”:  and lest he should be suspected of too much haste to alleviate sufferings and to remove violence, he says, “that these must be gradually applied, and their complete effect may be distant; and this, I conceive, is all he can claim of right.”

This complete effect of his lenity is distant indeed.  Rejecting this demand, (as he calls the Nabob’s abject supplication,) he attributes it, as he usually does all things of the kind, to the division in their government, and says, “This is a powerful motive with me (however inclined I might be, upon any other occasion, to yield to some part of his demand) to give them an absolute and unconditional refusal upon the present,—­and even to bring to punishment, if my influence can produce that effect, those incendiaries who have endeavored to make themselves the instruments of division between us.”