by the whip of the assignee, and is thus, by a ravenous, because a short-lived succession of claimants, lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn.  Do not think I paint.  Far, very far, from it:  I do not reach the fact, nor approach to it.  Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and the same source.  Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion.  They move in a circle, mutually producing and produced; till at length nothing of humanity is left in the government, no trace of integrity, spirit, or manliness in the people, who drag out a precarious and degraded existence under this system of outrage upon human nature.  Such is the effect of the establishment of a debt to the Company, as it has hitherto been managed, and as it ever will remain, until ideas are adopted totally different from those which prevail at this time.

Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have thought fit to renew the Company’s old order against contracting private debts in future.  They begin by rewarding the violation of the ancient law; and then they gravely reenact provisions, of which they have given bounties for the breach.  This inconsistency has been well exposed.[51] But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid?

I will explain myself.  They order the Nabob, out of the revenues of the Carnatic, to allot four hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year, as a fund for the debts before us.  For the punctual payment of this annuity, they order him to give soucar security.[52] When a soucar, that is, a money-dealer, becomes security for any native prince, the course is for the native prince to counter-secure the money-dealer, by making over to him in mortgage a portion of his territory equal to the sum annually to be paid, with an interest of at least twenty-four per cent.  The point fit for the House to know is, who are these soucars to whom this security on the revenues in favor of the Nabob’s creditors is to be given?  The majority of the House, unaccustomed to these transactions, will hear with astonishment that these soucars are no other than the creditors themselves.  The minister, not content with authorizing these transactions in a manner and to an extent unhoped for by the rapacious expectations of usury itself, loads the broken back of the Indian revenues, in favor of his worthy friends, the soucars, with an additional twenty-four per cent for being security to themselves for their own claims, for condescending to take the country in mortgage to pay to themselves the fruits of their own extortions.