These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason.  You see in this instance that the presumption of guilt is not only no exception to the demands on the public treasury, but with these ministers it is a necessary condition to their support.  But that you may not think this preference solely owing to their known contempt of the natives, who ought with every generous mind to claim their first charities, you will find the same rule religiously observed with Europeans too.  Attend, Sir, to this decisive case.  Since the beginning of the war, besides arrears of every kind, a bond-debt has been contracted at Madras, uncertain in its amount, but represented from four hundred thousand pound to a million sterling.  It stands only at the low interest of eight per cent.  Of the legal authority on which this debt was contracted, of its purposes for the very being of the state, of its publicity and fairness, no doubt has been entertained for a moment.  For this debt no sort of provision whatever has been made.  It is rejected as an outcast, whilst the whole undissipated attention of the minister has been employed for the discharge of claims entitled to his favor by the merits we have seen.

I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of those demands, in order to see how much, supposing the country in a condition to furnish the fund, may remain to satisfy the public debt and the necessary establishments.  But I have been foiled in my attempt.

About one fourth, that is, about 220,000_l._, of the loan of 1767 remains unpaid.  How much interest is in arrear I could never discover:  seven or eight years’ at least, which would make the whole of that debt about 396,000_l._ This stock, which the ministers in their instructions to the Governor of Madras state as the least exceptionable, they have thought proper to distinguish by a marked severity, leaving it the only one on which the interest is not added to the principal to beget a new interest.

The Cavalry Loan, by the operation of the same authority, is made up to 294,000_l._; and this 294,000_l._, made up of principal and interest, is crowned with a new interest of twelve per cent.

What the grand loan, the bribery loan of 1777, may be is amongst the deepest mysteries of state.  It is probably the first debt ever assuming the title of Consolidation that did not express what the amount of the sum consolidated was.  It is little less than a contradiction in terms.  In the debt of the year 1767 the sum was stated in the act of consolidation, and made to amount to 880,000_l._ capital.  When this consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was represented authentically at 2,400,000_l._ In that, or rather in a higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.[26] It afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000_l._[27] However, it never was without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness.  There was a sort of floating debt of about four or five hundred thousand pounds more ready to be added, as occasion should require.