My honorable friend who made you the motion has sufficiently exposed the nature of this debt.  He has stated to you, that its own agents, in the year 1781, in the arrangement they proposed to make at Calcutta, were satisfied to have twenty-five per cent at once struck off from the capital of a great part of this debt, and prayed to have a provision made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all.  This was an arrangement of their own, an arrangement made by those who best knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor it merited,[23] and how little hopes they had to find any persons in authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.

But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations of a sanguine avarice, had not the confidence to propose, they have found a Chancellor of the Exchequer in England hardy enough to undertake for them.  He has cheered their drooping spirits.  He has thanked the peculators for not despairing of their commonwealth.  He has told them they were too modest.  He has replaced the twenty-five per cent which, in order to lighten themselves, they had abandoned in their conscious terror.  Instead of cutting off the interest, as they had themselves consented to do, with the fourth of the capital, he has added the whole growth of four years’ usury of twelve per cent to the first overgrown principal; and has again grafted on this meliorated stock a perpetual annuity of six per cent, to take place from the year 1781.  Let no man hereafter talk of the decaying energies of Nature.  All the acts and monuments in the records of peculation, the consolidated corruption of ages, the patterns of exemplary plunder in the heroic times of Roman iniquity, never equalled the gigantic corruption of this single act.  Never did Nero, in all the insolent prodigality of despotism, deal out to his praetorian guards a donation fit to be named with the largess showered down by the bounty of our Chancellor of the Exchequer on the faithful band of his Indian sepoys.

The right honorable gentleman[24] lets you freely and voluntarily into the whole transaction.  So perfectly has his conduct confounded his understanding, that he fairly tells you that through the course of the whole business he has never conferred with any but the agents of the pretended creditors.  After this, do you want more to establish a secret understanding with the parties,—­to fix, beyond a doubt, their collusion and participation in a common fraud?

If this were not enough, he has furnished you with other presumptions that are not to be shaken.  It is one of the known indications of guilt to stagger and prevaricate in a story, and to vary in the motives that are assigned to conduct.  Try these ministers by this rule.  In their official dispatch, they tell the Presidency of Madras that they have established the debt for two reasons:  first, because the Nabob (the party indebted) does not dispute it; secondly,