This day, and not before, the right honorable gentleman thinks that the general establishment of all claims is the surest way of laying open the fraud of some of them.  In India this is a reach of deep policy.  But what would be thought of this mode of acting on a demand upon the Treasury in England?  Instead of all this cunning, is there not one plain way open,—­that is, to put the burden of the proof on those who make the demand?  Ought not ministry to have said to the creditors, “The person who admits your debt stands excepted to as evidence; he stands charged as a collusive party, to hand over the public revenues to you for sinister purposes.  You say, you have a demand of some millions on the Indian Treasury; prove that you have acted by lawful authority; prove, at least, that your money has been bona fide advanced; entitle yourself to my protection by the fairness and fulness of the communications you make”?  Did an honest creditor ever refuse that reasonable and honest test?

There is little doubt that several individuals have been seduced by the purveyors to the Nabob of Arcot to put their money (perhaps the whole of honest and laborious earnings) into their hands, and that at such high interest as, being condemned at law, leaves them at the mercy of the great managers whom they trusted.  These seduced creditors are probably persons of no power or interest either in England or India, and may be just objects of compassion.  By taking, in this arrangement, no measures for discrimination and discovery, the fraudulent and the fair are in the first instance confounded in one mass.  The subsequent selection and distribution is left to the Nabob.  With him the agents and instruments of his corruption, whom he sees to be omnipotent in England, and who may serve him in future, as they have done in times past, will have precedence, if not an exclusive preference.  These leading interests domineer, and have always domineered, over the whole.  By this arrangement, the persons seduced are made dependent on their seducers; honesty (comparative honesty at least) must become of the party of fraud, and must quit its proper character and its just claims, to entitle itself to the alms of bribery and peculation.

But be these English creditors what they may, the creditors most certainly not fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched indeed:  by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is left for them.  They lent bona fide; in all probability they were even forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob’s obligations.  They had no trusts to carry to his market.  They had no faith of alliances to sell.  They had no nations to betray to robbery and ruin.  They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.[25]