the Rajah, and a power provided for its enjoyment at his own charge; but the means of furnishing that charge (and a mighty one it is) are wholly out off.  This use of the water, which ought to have no more connection than clouds and rains and sunshine with the politics of the Rajah, the Nabob, or the Company, is expressly contrived as a means of enforcing demands and arrears of tribute.  This horrid and unnatural instrument of extortion had been a distinguishing feature in the enormities of the Carnatic politics, that loudly called for reformation.  But the food of a whole people is by the reformers of India conditioned on payments from its prince, at a moment that he is overpowered with a swarm of their demands, without regard to the ability of either prince or people.  In fine, by opening an avenue to the irruption of the Nabob of Arcot’s creditors and soucars, whom every man, who did not fall in love with oppression and corruption on an experience of the calamities they produced, would have raised wall before wall and mound before mound to keep from a possibility of entrance, a more destructive enemy than Hyder Ali is introduced into that kingdom.  By this part of their arrangement, in which they establish a debt to the Nabob of Arcot, in effect and substance, they deliver over Tanjore, bound hand and foot, to Paul Benfield, the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of a country which has for years been an object of an unremitted, but, unhappily, an unequal struggle, between the bounties of Providence to renovate and the wickedness of mankind to destroy.

The right honorable gentleman[56] talks of his fairness in determining the territorial dispute between the Nabob of Arcot and the prince of that country, when he superseded the determination of the Directors, in whom the law had vested the decision of that controversy.  He is in this just as feeble as he is in every other part.  But it is not necessary to say a word in refutation of any part of his argument.  The mode of the proceeding sufficiently speaks the spirit of it.  It is enough to fix his character as a judge, that he never heard the Directors in defence of their adjudication, nor either of the parties in support of their respective claims.  It is sufficient for me that he takes from the Rajah of Tanjore by this pretended adjudication, or rather from his unhappy subjects, 40,000_l._ a year of his and their revenue, and leaves upon his and their shoulders all the charges that can be made on the part of the Nabob, on the part of his creditors, and on the part of the Company, without so much as hearing him as to right or to ability.  But what principally induces me to leave the affair of the territorial dispute between the Nabob and the Rajah to another day is this,—­that, both the parties being stripped of their all, it little signifies under which of their names the unhappy, undone people are delivered over to the merciless soucars, the allies of that right honorable gentleman and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  In them ends the account of this long dispute of the Nabob of Arcot and the Rajah of Tanjore.