It may be said that this letter was written by the Nabob of Arcot in a moody humor, under the influence of some chagrin.  Certainly it was; but it is in such humors that truth comes out.  And when he tells you, from his own knowledge, what every one must presume, from the extreme probability of the thing, whether he told it or not, one such testimony is worth a thousand that contradict that probability, when the parties have a better understanding with each other, and when they have a point to carry that may unite them in a common deceit.

If this body of private claims of debt, real or devised, were a question, as it is falsely pretended, between the Nabob of Arcot, as debtor, and Paul Benfield and his associates, as creditors, I am sure I should give myself but little trouble about it.  If the hoards of oppression were the fund for satisfying the claims of bribery and peculation, who would wish to interfere between such litigants?  If the demands were confined to what might be drawn from the treasures which the Company’s records uniformly assert that the Nabob is in possession of, or if he had mines of gold or silver or diamonds, (as we know that he has none,) these gentlemen might break open his hoards or dig in his mines without any disturbance from me.  But the gentlemen on the other side of the House know as well as I do, and they dare not contradict me, that the Nabob of Arcot and his creditors are not adversaries, but collusive parties, and that the whole transaction is under a false color and false names.  The litigation is not, nor ever has been, between their rapacity and his hoarded riches.  No:  it is between him and them combining and confederating, on one side, and the public revenues, and the miserable inhabitants of a ruined country, on the other.  These are the real plaintiffs and the real defendants in the suit.  Refusing a shilling from his hoards for the satisfaction of any demand, the Nabob of Arcot is always ready, nay, he earnestly, and with eagerness and passion, contends for delivering up to these pretended creditors his territory and his subjects.  It is, therefore, not from treasuries and mines, but from the food of your unpaid armies, from the blood withheld from the veins and whipped out of the backs of the most miserable of men, that we are to pamper extortion, usury, and peculation, under the false names of debtors and creditors of state.

The great patron of these creditors, (to whose honor they ought to erect statues,) the right honorable gentleman,[9] in stating the merits which recommended them to his favor, has ranked them under three grand divisions.  The first, the creditors of 1767; then the creditors of the cavalry loan; and lastly, the creditors of the loan in 1777.  Let us examine them, one by one, as they pass in review before us.

The first of these loans, that of 1767, he insists, has an indisputable claim upon the public justice.  The creditors, he affirms, lent their money publicly; they advanced it with the express knowledge and approbation of the Company; and it was contracted at the moderate interest of ten per cent.  In this loan, the demand is, according to him, not only just, but meritorious in a very high degree:  and one would be inclined to believe he thought so, because he has put it last in the provision he has made for these claims.