That you may judge what chance any honorable and useful end of government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country; though in truth my mind revolts from it, though you will hear it with horror, and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding dispensations of Providence.  I shall first trouble you with a few words as to the cause.

The great fortunes made in India, in the beginnings of conquest, naturally excited an emulation in all the parts and through the whole succession of the Company’s service.  But in the Company it gave rise to other sentiments.  They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them.  On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs.  They began also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of war had given.  Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions and menaces:  and that the servants might not be bribed into them by the native princes, they were strictly forbidden to take any money whatsoever from their hands.  But vehement passion is ingenious in resources.  The Company’s servants were not only stimulated, but better instructed by the prohibition.  They soon fell upon a contrivance which answered their purposes far better than the methods which were forbidden:  though in this also they violated an ancient, but they thought, an abrogated order.  They reversed their proceedings.  Instead of receiving presents, they made loans.  Instead of carrying on wars in their own name, they contrived an authority, at once irresistible and irresponsible, in whose name they might ravage at pleasure; and being thus freed from all restraint, they indulged themselves in the most extravagant speculations of plunder.  The cabal of creditors who have been the object of the late bountiful grant from his Majesty’s ministers, in order to possess themselves, under the name of creditors and assignees, of every country in India, as fast as it should be conquered, inspired into the mind of the Nabob of Arcot (then a dependant on the Company of the humblest order) a scheme of the most wild and desperate ambition that I believe ever was admitted into the thoughts of a man so situated.[32] First, they persuaded him to consider himself as a principal member in the political system of Europe.  In the next place, they held out to him, and he readily imbibed, the idea of the general empire of Hindostan.  As a preliminary to this undertaking, they prevailed on him to propose a tripartite division of that vast country:  one part to the Company; another to the Mahrattas; and the third to himself.  To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Deccan.