Company makes up its demands on the Carnatic.  In peace they go the full length, and indeed more than the full length, of what the people can bear for current establishments; then they are absurd enough to consolidate all the calamities of war into debts,—­to metamorphose the devastations of the country into demands upon its future production.  What is this but to avow a resolution utterly to destroy their own country, and to force the people to pay for their sufferings to a government which has proved unable to protect either the share of the husbandman or their own?  In every lease of a farm, the invasion of an enemy, instead of forming a demand for arrear, is a release of rent:  nor for that release is it at all necessary to show that the invasion has left nothing to the occupier of the soil; though in the present case it would be too easy to prove that melancholy fact.[46] I therefore applauded my right honorable friend, who, when he canvassed the Company’s accounts, as a preliminary to a bill that ought not to stand on falsehood of any kind, fixed his discerning eye and his deciding hand on these debts of the Company from the Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore, and at one stroke expunged them all, as utterly irrecoverable:  he might have added, as utterly unfounded.

On these grounds I do not blame the arrangement this day in question, as a preference given to the debt of individuals over the Company’s debt.  In my eye it is no more than the preference of a fiction over a chimera; but I blame the preference given to those fictitious private debts over the standing defence and the standing government.  It is there the public is robbed.  It is robbed in its army; it is robbed in its civil administration; it is robbed in its credit; it is robbed in its investment, which forms the commercial connection between that country and Europe.  There is the robbery.

But my principal objection lies a good deal deeper.  That debt to the Company is the pretext under which all the other debts lurk and cover themselves.  That debt forms the foul, putrid mucus in which are engendered the whole brood of creeping ascarides, all the endless involutions, the eternal knot, added to a knot of those inexpugnable tape-worms which devour the nutriment and eat up the bowels of India.[47] It is necessary, Sir, you should recollect two things.  First, that the Nabob’s debt to the Company carries no interest.  In the next place, you will observe, that, whenever the Company has occasion to borrow, she has always commanded whatever she thought fit at eight per cent.  Carrying in your mind these two facts, attend to the process with regard to the public and private debt, and with what little appearance of decency they play into each other’s hands a game of utter perdition to the unhappy natives of India.  The Nabob falls into an arrear to the Company.  The Presidency presses for payment.  The Nabob’s answer is, “I have no money.”  Good!  But there are soucars who will supply you on the mortgage of your territories.  Then steps forward some Paul Benfield, and, from his grateful compassion to the Nabob, and his filial regard to the Company, he unlocks the treasures of his virtuous industry, and, for a consideration of twenty-four or thirty-six per cent on a mortgage of the territorial revenue, becomes security to the Company for the Nabob’s arrear.