The next part of their arrangement is with regard to war.  As confessedly this prince had no share in stirring up any of the former wars, so all future wars are completely out of his power; for he has no troops whatever, and is under a stipulation not so much as to correspond with any foreign state, except through the Company.  Yet, in case the Company’s servants should be again involved in war, or should think proper again to provoke any enemy, as in times past they have wantonly provoked all India, he is to be subjected to a new penalty.  To what penalty?  Why, to no less than the confiscation of all his revenues.  But this is to end with the war, and they are to be faithfully returned?  Oh, no! nothing like it.  The country is to remain under confiscation until all the debt which the Company shall think fit to incur in such war shall be discharged:  that is to say, forever.  His sole comfort is, to find his old enemy, the Nabob of Arcot, placed in the very same condition.

The revenues of that miserable country were, before the invasion of Hyder, reduced to a gross annual receipt of three hundred and sixty thousand pound.[54] From this receipt the subsidy I have just stated is taken.  This again, by payments in advance, by extorting deposits of additional sums to a vast amount for the benefit of their soucars, and by an endless variety of other extortions, public and private, is loaded with a debt, the amount of which I never could ascertain, but which is large undoubtedly, generating an usury the most completely ruinous that probably was ever heard of:  that is, forty-eight per cent, payable monthly, with compound interest.[55]

Such is the state to which the Company’s servants have reduced that country.  Now come the reformers, restorers, and comforters of India.  What have they done?  In addition to all these tyrannous exactions, with all these ruinous debts in their train, looking to one side of an agreement whilst they wilfully shut their eyes to the other, they withdraw from Tanjore all the benefits of the treaty of 1762, and they subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot:  a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression.  After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this harassed nation to be tributary to a person who is himself, by their own arrangement, deprived of the right of war or peace, deprived of the power of the sword, forbid to keep up a single regiment of soldiers, and is therefore wholly disabled from all protection of the country which is the object of the pretended tribute.  Tribute hangs on the