It is only to complete the view I proposed of the conduct of the Company with regard to the dependent provinces, that I shall say any thing at all of the Carnatic, which is the scene, if possible, of greater disorder than the northern provinces.  Perhaps it were better to say of this centre and metropolis of abuse, whence all the rest in India and in England diverge, from whence they are fed and methodized, what was said of Carthage,—­“De Carthagine satius est silere quam parum dicere.”  This country, in all its de nominations, is about 46,000 square miles.  It may be affirmed universally, that not one person of substance or property, landed, commercial, or moneyed, excepting two or three bankers, who are necessary deposits and distributors of the general spoil, is left in all that region.  In that country, the moisture, the bounty of Heaven, is given but at a certain season.  Before the era of our influence, the industry of man carefully husbanded that gift of God.  The Gentoos preserved, with a provident and religious care, the precious deposit of the periodical rain in reservoirs, many of them works of royal grandeur; and from these, as occasion demanded, they fructified the whole country.  To maintain these reservoirs, and to keep up an annual advance to the cultivators for seed and cattle, formed a principal object of the piety and policy of the priests and rulers of the Gentoo religion.

This object required a command of money; and there was no pollam, or castle, which in the happy days of the Carnatic was without some hoard of treasure, by which the governors were enabled to combat with the irregularity of the seasons, and to resist or to buy off the invasion of an enemy.  In all the cities were multitudes of merchants and bankers, for all occasions of moneyed assistance; and on the other hand, the native princes were in condition to obtain credit from them.  The manufacturer was paid by the return of commodities, or by imported money, and not, as at present, in the taxes that had been originally exacted from his industry.  In aid of casual distress, the country was full of choultries, which were inns and hospitals, where the traveller and the poor were relieved.  All ranks of people had their place in the public concern, and their share in the common stock and common prosperity.  But the chartered rights of men, and the right which it was thought proper to set up in the Nabob of Arcot, introduced a new system.  It was their policy to consider hoards of money as crimes,—­to regard moderate rents as frauds on the sovereign,—­and to view, in the lesser princes, any claim of exemption from more than settled tribute as an act of rebellion.  Accordingly, all the castles were, one after the other, plundered and destroyed; the native princes were expelled; the hospitals fell to ruin; the reservoirs of water went to decay; the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers disappeared; and sterility, indigence, and depopulation overspread the face of these once flourishing provinces.