on such terms as were not only strictly honorable, but equally advantageous to my friends the Company:  for they justly thought that my honor and dignity and sovereign rights were the first objects of my wishes and ambition.  But how can I paint my astonishment at Lord Macartney’s presumption in continuing his usurpation after their positive and reiterated mandates, and, as if nettled by their interference, which he disdained, in redoubling the fury of his violence, and sacrificing the public and myself to his malice and ungovernable passions?

I am, Gentlemen, at a loss to conceive where his usurpation will stop and have an end.  Has he not solemnly declared that the assignment was only made for the support of war? and if neither your instructions nor the orders of his superiors at Bengal were to be considered as effectual, has not the treaty of peace virtually determined the period of his tyrannical administration?  But so far from surrendering the Carnatic into my hands, he has, since that event, affixed advertisements to the walls and gates of the Black Town for letting to the best bidder the various districts for the term of three years,—­and has continued the Committee of Revenue, which you positively ordered to be abolished, to whom he has allowed enormous salaries, from 6000 to 4000 pagodas per annum, which each member has received from the time of his appointment, though his Lordship well knows that most of them are by your orders disqualified by being my principal creditors.

If those acts of violence and outrage had been productive of public advantage, I conceive his Lordship might have held them forward in extenuation of his conduct; but whilst he cloaks his justification under the veil of your records, it is impossible to refute his assertions or to expose to you their fallacy; and when he is no longer able to support his conduct by argument, he refers to those records, where, I understand, he has exercised all his sophistry and malicious insinuations to render me and my family obnoxious in the eyes of the Company and the British nation.  And when the glorious victories of Sir Eyre Coote have been rendered abortive by a constant deficiency of supplies,—­and when, since the departure of that excellent general to Bengal, whose loss I must ever regret, a dreadful famine, at the close of last year, occasioned by his Lordship’s neglect to lay up a sufficient stock of grain at a proper season, and from his prohibitory orders to private merchants,—­and when no exertion has been made, nor advantage gained over the enemy,—­when Hyder’s death and Tippoo’s return to his own dominions operated in no degree for the benefit of our affairs,—­in short, when all has been a continued series of disappointment and disgrace under Lord Macartney’s management, (and in him alone has the management been vested,)—­I want words to convey those ideas of his insufficiency, ignorance, and obstinacy which I am convinced you would entertain, had you been spectators of his ruinous and destructive conduct.