As I have dwelt so long on these who are indirectly under the Company’s administration, I will endeavor to be a little shorter upon the countries immediately under this charter-government.  These are the Bengal provinces.  The condition of these provinces is pretty fully detailed in the Sixth and Ninth Reports, and in their Appendixes.  I will select only such principles and instances as are broad and general.  To your own thoughts I shall leave it to furnish the detail of oppressions involved in them.  I shall state to you, as shortly as I am able, the conduct of the Company:—­1st, towards the landed interests;—­next, the commercial interests;—­3rdly, the native government;—­and lastly, to their own government.

Bengal, and the provinces that are united to it, are larger than the kingdom of France, and once contained, as France does contain, a great and independent landed interest, composed of princes, of great lords, of a numerous nobility and gentry, of freeholders, of lower tenants, of religious communities, and public foundations.  So early as 1769, the Company’s servants perceived the decay into which these provinces had fallen under English administration, and they made a strong representation upon this decay, and what they apprehended to be the causes of it.  Soon after this representation, Mr. Hastings became President of Bengal.  Instead of administering a remedy to this melancholy disorder, upon the heels of a dreadful famine, in the year 1772, the succor which the new President and the Council lent to this afflicted nation was—­shall I be believed in relating it?—­the landed interest of a whole kingdom, of a kingdom to be compared to France, was set up to public auction!  They set up (Mr. Hastings set up) the whole nobility, gentry, and freeholders to the highest bidder.  No preference was given to the ancient proprietors.  They must bid against every usurer, every temporary adventurer, every jobber and schemer, every servant of every European,—­or they were obliged to content themselves, in lieu of their extensive domains, with their house, and such a pension as the state auctioneers thought fit to assign.  In this general calamity, several of the first nobility thought (and in all appearance justly) that they had better submit to the necessity of this pension, than continue, under the name of zemindars, the objects and instruments of a system by which they ruined their tenants and were ruined themselves.  Another reform has since come upon the back of the first; and a pension having been assigned to these unhappy persons, in lieu of their hereditary lands, a new scheme of economy has taken place, and deprived them of that pension.

The menial servants of Englishmen, persons (to use the emphatical phrase of a ruined and patient Eastern chief) “whose fathers they would not have set with the dogs of their flock” entered into their patrimonial lands.  Mr. Hastings’s banian was, after this auction, found possessed of territories yielding a rent of one hundred and forty thousand pounds a year.