The Company had put him into possession of several great cities and magnificent castles.  The good order of his affairs, his sense of personal dignity, his ideas of Oriental splendor, and the habits of an Asiatic life, (to which, being a native of India, and a Mahometan, he had from his infancy been inured,) would naturally have led him to fix the seat of his government within his own dominions.  Instead of this, he totally sequestered himself from his country, and, abandoning all appearance of state, he took up his residence in an ordinary house, which he purchased in the suburbs of the Company’s factory at Madras.  In that place he has lived, without removing one day from thence, for several years past.  He has there continued a constant cabal with the Company’s servants, from the highest to the lowest,—­creating, out of the ruins of the country, brilliant fortunes for those who will, and entirely destroying those who will not, be subservient to his purposes.

An opinion prevailed, strongly confirmed by several passages in his own letters, as well as by a combination of circumstances forming a body of evidence which cannot be resisted, that very great sums have been by him distributed, through a long course of years, to some of the Company’s servants.  Besides these presumed payments in ready money, (of which, from the nature of the thing, the direct proof is very difficult,) debts have at several periods been acknowledged to those gentlemen, to an immense amount,—­that is, to some millions of sterling money.  There is strong reason to suspect that the body of these debts is wholly fictitious, and was never created by money bona fide lent.  But even on a supposition that this vast sum was really advanced, it was impossible that the very reality of such an astonishing transaction should not cause some degree of alarm and incite to some sort of inquiry.

It was not at all seemly, at a moment when the Company itself was so distressed as to require a suspension, by act of Parliament, of the payment of bills drawn on them from India,—­and also a direct tax upon every house in England, in order to facilitate the vent of their goods, and to avoid instant insolvency,—­at that very moment, that their servants should appear in so flourishing a condition, as, besides ten millions of other demands on their masters, to be entitled to claim a debt of three or four millions more from the territorial revenue of one of their dependent princes.

The ostensible pecuniary transactions of the Nabob of Arcot with very private persons are so enormous, that they evidently set aside every pretence of policy which might induce a prudent government in some instances to wink at ordinary loose practice in ill-managed departments.  No caution could be too great in handling this matter, no scrutiny too exact.  It was evidently the interest, and as evidently at least in the power, of the creditors, by admitting secret participation in this dark and undefined concern, to spread corruption to the greatest and the most alarming extent.