Are we ripe to say that no creditor under similar circumstances was member of the court, when the payment which is the ground of this cavalry debt was put in proof?[20] Nay, are we not in a manner compelled to conclude that the court was so constituted, when we know there is scarcely a man in Madras who has not some participation in these transactions?  It is a shame to hear such proofs mentioned, instead of the honest, vigorous scrutiny which the circumstances of such an affair so indispensably call for.

But his Majesty’s ministers, indulgent enough to other scrutinies, have not been satisfied with authorizing the payment of this demand without such inquiry as the act has prescribed; but they have added the arrear of twelve per cent interest, from the year 1777 to the year 1784, to make a new capital, raising thereby 160 to 294,000_l._ Then they charge a new twelve per cent on the whole from that period, for a transaction in which it will be a miracle if a single penny will be ever found really advanced from the private stock of the pretended creditors.

In this manner, and at such an interest, the ministers have thought proper to dispose of 294,000_l._ of the public revenues, for what is called the Cavalry Loan.  After dispatching this, the right honorable gentleman leads to battle his last grand division, the consolidated debt of 1777.  But having exhausted all his panegyric on the two first, he has nothing at all to say in favor of the last.  On the contrary, he admits that it was contracted in defiance of the Company’s orders, without even the pretended sanction of any pretended representatives.  Nobody, indeed, has yet been found hardy enough to stand forth avowedly in its defence.  But it is little to the credit of the age, that what has not plausibility enough to find an advocate has influence enough to obtain a protector.  Could any man expect to find that protector anywhere?  But what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman of the Committee of Secrecy[21], who had published to the House, and to the world, the facts that condemn these debts, the orders that forbid the incurring of them, the dreadful consequences which attended them?  Even in his official letter, when he tramples on his Parliamentary report, yet his general language is the same.  Read the preface to this part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could fall from a vigilant guardian of the public treasury upon those who attempted to rob it.  What must be felt by every man who has feeling, when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its authenticity,—­without a single step taken to settle even the amount of the demand,—­without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand pound, principal money,[22]—­without an attempt made to ascertain the proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of Directors,—­of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle, by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about for their own particular purposes?