This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said.  This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or doing.  A ministry of another kind would have first improved the country, and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future force.  But on this grand point of the restoration of the country there is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers, from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by fire, sword, and famine:  their sympathies took another direction; they were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long missed the harvest of its returning months;[40] they felt for peculation, which had been for so many years raking in the dust of an empty treasury; they were melted into compassion for rapine and oppression, licking their dry, parched, unbloody jaws.  These were the objects of their solicitude.  These were the necessities for which they were studious to provide.

To state the country and its revenues in their real condition, and to provide for those fictitious claims, consistently with the support of an army and a civil establishment, would have been impossible; therefore the ministers are silent on that head, and rest themselves on the authority of Lord Macartney, who, in a letter to the Court of Directors, written in the year 1781, speculating on what might be the result of a wise management of the countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates the revenue, as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a year, as he does those of the king of Tanjore (which had not been assigned) at four hundred and fifty.  On this Lord Macartney grounds his calculations, and on this they choose to ground theirs.  It was on this calculation that the ministry, in direct opposition to the remonstrances of the Court of Directors, have compelled that miserable enslaved body to put their hands to an order for appropriating the enormous sum of 480,000_l._ annually, as a fund for paying to their rebellious servants a debt contracted in defiance of their clearest and most positive injunctions.

The authority and information of Lord Macartney is held high on this occasion, though it is totally rejected in every other particular of this business.  I believe I have the honor of being almost as old an acquaintance as any Lord Macartney has.  A constant and unbroken friendship has subsisted between us from a very early period; and I trust he thinks, that, as I respect his character, and in general admire his conduct, I am one of those who feel no common interest in his reputation.  Yet I do not hesitate wholly to disallow the calculation of 1781, without any apprehension that I shall appear to distrust his veracity or his judgment.  This peace estimate of revenue was not grounded on the state of the Carnatic, as it then, or as it had recently, stood.  It was a statement