“Mr. Stratton became acquainted with this, and got Mr. Taylor and others to lend me four lacs of pagodas towards discharging the arrears of pay of my troops.  Upon this, I wrote a letter of thanks to Mr. Stratton; and upon the faith of this money being paid immediately, I ordered many of my troops to be discharged by a certain day, and lessened the number of my servants.  Mr. Taylor, &c., some time after acquainted me, that they had no ready money, but they would grant teeps payable in four months.  This astonished me; for I did not know what might happen, when the sepoys were dismissed from my service.  I begged of Mr. Taylor and the others to pay this sum to the officers of my regiments at the time they mentioned; and desired the officers, at the same time, to pacify and persuade the men belonging to them that their pay would be given to them at the end of four months, and that, till those arrears were discharged, their pay should be continued to them. Two years are nearly expired since that time, but Mr. Taylor has not yet entirely discharged the arrears of those troops, and I am obliged to continue their pay from that time till this.  I hoped to have been able, by this expedient, to have lessened the number of my troops, and discharged the arrears due to them, considering the trifle of interest to Mr. Taylor and the others as no great matter; but instead of this, I am oppressed with the burden of pay due to those troops, and the interest, which is going on to Mr. Taylor from the day the teeps were granted to him.”  What I have read to you is an extract of a letter from the Nabob of the Carnatic to Governor Rumbold, dated the 22d, and received the 24th of March, 1779.[17]

Suppose his Highness not to be well broken in to things of this kind, it must, indeed, surprise so known and established a bond-vender as the Nabob of Arcot, one who keeps himself the largest bond-warehouse in the world, to find that he was now to receive in kind:  not to take money for his obligations, but to give his bond in exchange for the bond of Messieurs Taylor, Majendie, and Call, and to pay, besides, a good, smart interest, legally twelve per cent, (in reality, perhaps, twenty or twenty-four per cent,) for this exchange of paper.  But his troops were not to be so paid, or so disbanded.  They wanted bread, and could not live by cutting and shuffling of bonds.  The Nabob still kept the troops in service, and was obliged to continue, as you have seen, the whole expense to exonerate himself from which he became indebted to the soucars.

Had it stood here, the transaction would have been of the most audacious strain of fraud and usury perhaps ever before discovered, whatever might have been practised and concealed.  But the same authority (I mean the Nabob’s) brings before you something, if possible, more striking.  He states, that, for this their paper, he immediately handed over to these gentlemen something very different from paper,—­that