All this intermediate usury thus becomes sanctified by the ultimate view to the Company’s payment.  In this case, would not a plain man ask this plain question of the Company:  If you know that the Nabob must annually mortgage his territories to your servants to pay his annual arrear to you, why is not the assignment or mortgage made directly to the Company itself?  By this simple, obvious operation, the Company would be relieved and the debt paid, without the charge of a shilling interest to that prince.  But if that course should be thought too indulgent, why do they not take that assignment with such interest to themselves as they pay to others, that is, eight per cent?  Or if it were thought more advisable (why it should I know not) that he must borrow, why do not the Company lend their own credit to the Nabob for their own payment?  That credit would not be weakened by the collateral security of his territorial mortgage.  The money might still be had at eight per cent.  Instead of any of these honest and obvious methods, the Company has for years kept up a show of disinterestedness and moderation, by suffering a debt to accumulate to them from the country powers without any interest at all; and at the same time have seen before their eyes, on a pretext of borrowing to pay that debt, the revenues of the country charged with an usury of twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, and even eight-and-forty per cent, with compound interest,[48] for the benefit of their servants.  All this time they know that by having a debt subsisting without any interest, which is to be paid by contracting a debt on the highest interest, they manifestly render it necessary to the Nabob of Arcot to give the private demand a preference to the public; and, by binding him and their servants together in a common cause, they enable him to form a party to the utter ruin of their own authority and their own affairs.  Thus their false moderation, and their affected purity, by the natural operation of everything false and everything affected, becomes pander and bawd to the unbridled debauchery and licentious lewdness of usury and extortion.

In consequence of this double game, all the territorial revenues have at one time or other been covered by those locusts, the English soucars.  Not one single foot of the Carnatic has escaped them:  a territory as large as England.  During these operations what a scene has that country presented![49] The usurious European assignee supersedes the Nabob’s native farmer of the revenue; the farmer flies to the Nabob’s presence to claim his bargain; whilst his servants murmur for wages, and his soldiers mutiny for pay.  The mortgage to the European assignee is then resumed, and the native farmer replaced,—­replaced, again to be removed on the new clamor of the European assignee.[50] Every man of rank and landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by the farmer, has it again flayed