Sir, at this moment, it will not be necessary to consider the various operations which the capital and interest of this debt have successively undergone.  I shall speak to these operations when I come particularly to answer the right honorable gentleman on each of the heads, as he has thought proper to divide them.  But this was the exact view in which these debts first appeared to the Court of Directors, and to the world.  It varied afterwards.  But it never appeared in any other than a most questionable shape.  When this gigantic phantom of debt first appeared before a young minister, it naturally would have justified some degree of doubt and apprehension.  Such a prodigy would have filled any common man with superstitious fears.  He would exorcise that shapeless, nameless form, and by everything sacred would have adjured it to tell by what means a small number of slight individuals, of no consequence or situation, possessed of no lucrative offices, without the command of armies or the known administration of revenues, without profession of any kind, without any sort of trade sufficient to employ a peddler, could have, in a few years, (as to some, even in a few months,) amassed treasures equal to the revenues of a respectable kingdom?  Was it not enough to put these gentlemen, in the novitiate of their administration, on their guard, and to call upon them for a strict inquiry, (if not to justify them in a reprobation of those demands without any inquiry at all,) that, when all England, Scotland, and Ireland had for years been witness to the immense sums laid out by the servants of the Company in stocks of all denominations, in the purchase of lands, in the buying and building of houses, in the securing quiet seats in Parliament or in the tumultuous riot of contested elections, in wandering throughout the whole range of those variegated modes of inventive prodigality which sometimes have excited our wonder, sometimes roused our indignation, that, after all, India was four millions still in debt to them?  India in debt to them!  For what?  Every debt, for which an equivalent of some kind or other is not given, is, on the face of it, a fraud.  What is the equivalent they have given?  What equivalent had they to give?  What are the articles of commerce, or the branches of manufacture, which those gentlemen have carried hence to enrich India?  What are the sciences they beamed out to enlighten it?  What are the arts they introduced to cheer and to adorn it?  What are the religious, what the moral institutions they have taught among that people, as a guide to life, or as a consolation when life is to be no more, that there is an eternal debt, a debt “still paying, still to owe,” which must be bound on the present generation in India, and entailed on their mortgaged posterity forever?  A debt of millions, in favor of a set of men whose names, with few exceptions, are either buried in the obscurity of their origin and talents or dragged into light by the enormity of their crimes!