The distresses which I have set forth in my former letters are now increased to such an alarming pitch by the imprudent measures of your Governor, and by the arbitrary and impolitic conduct pursued with the merchants and importers of grain, that the very existence of the Fort of Madras seems at stake, and that of the inhabitants of the settlement appears to have been totally overlooked:  many thousands have died, and continue hourly to perish of famine, though the capacity of one of your youngest servants, with diligence and attention, by doing justice, and giving reasonable encouragement to the merchants, and by drawing the supplies of grain which the northern countries would have afforded, might have secured us against all those dreadful calamities.  I had with much difficulty procured and purchased a small quantity of rice, for the use of myself, my family, and attendants, and with a view of sending off the greatest part of the latter to the northern countries, with a little subsistence in their hands.  But what must your surprise be, when you learn that even this rice was seized by Lord Macartney, with a military force! and thus am I unable to provide for the few people I have about me, who are driven to such extremity and misery that it gives me pain to behold them.  I have desired permission to get a little rice from the northern countries for the subsistence of my people, without its being liable to seizure by your sepoys:  this even has been refused me by Lord Macartney.  What must your feelings be, on such wanton cruelty exercised towards me, when you consider, that, of thousands of villages belonging to me, a single one would have sufficed for my subsistence!

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22d March, 1783. Translation of a Letter from the Nabob of Arcot to the Chairman and Directors of the East India Company.  Received from Mr. James Macpherson, 1st January, 1784.

I am willing to attribute this continued usurpation to the fear of detection in Lord Macartney:  he dreads the awful day when the scene of his enormities will be laid open, at my restoration to my country, and when the tongues of my oppressed subjects will be unloosed, and proclaim aloud the cruel tyrannies they have sustained.  These sentiments of his Lordship’s designs are corroborated by his sending, on the 10th instant, two gentlemen to me and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah; and these gentlemen from Lord Macartney especially set forth to me, and to my son, that all dependence on the power of the superior government of Bengal to enforce the intentions of the Company to restore my country was vain and groundless,—­that the Company confided in his Lordship’s judgment and discretion, and upon his representations, and that if I, and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, would enter into friendship with Lord Macartney, and sign a paper declaring all my charges and complaints against him to be false, that his Lordship might be induced to write to England that all his allegations against me and my son were not well founded, and, notwithstanding his declarations to withhold my country, yet, on these considerations, it might be still restored to me.