Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic.

Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell.  All the horrors of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc.  A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple.  The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function,—­fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and, amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses,—­were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land.

Those who were able to evade this tempest, fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.  The alms of the settlement of Madras, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could do; but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food.

For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by a hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India.

I was going to wake your justice toward this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger.  Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is.

But I find myself unable to manage it with decorum.  These details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali, and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic, for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man—­not one woman—­not one child—­not one four-footed beast of any description whatever!  One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region.