took this two hundred pounds a day for his own pay.  “It was necessary to begin with reforming the useless servants of the court, and retrenching the idle parade of elephants, menageries, &c., which loaded the civil list.  This cost little regret in performing; but the Resident, who took upon himself the chief share in this business, acknowledges that he suffered considerably in his feelings, when he came to touch on the pension list.  Some hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of the country, excluded, under our government, from almost all employments, civil or military, had, ever since the revolution, depended on the bounty of the Nabob; and near ten lacs were bestowed that way.  It is not that the distribution was always made with judgment or impartial, and much room was left for a reform; but when the question was to cut off entirely the greatest part, it could not fail to be accompanied with circumstances of real distress.  The Resident declares, that, even with some of the highest rank, he could not avoid discovering, under all the pride of Eastern manners, the manifest marks of penury and want.  There was, however, no room left for hesitation:  to confine the Nabob’s expenses within the limited sum, it was necessary that pensions should be set aside.”

Here, my Lords, is a man sent to execute one of the most dreadful offices that was ever executed by man,—­to cut off, as he says himself, with a bleeding heart, the only remaining allowance made for hundreds of the decayed nobility and gentry of a great kingdom, driven by our government from the offices upon which they existed.  In this moment of anxiety and affliction, when he says he felt pain and was cut to the heart to do it,—­at this very moment, when he was turning over fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry of this country to downright want of bread,—­just at that moment, while he was doing this act, and feeling this act in this manner, from the collected morsels forced from the mouths of that indigent and famished nobility he gorged his own ravenous maw with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for his entertainment.  As we see him in this business, this man is unlike any other:  he is also never corrupt but he is cruel; he never dines without creating a famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity of standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent, the oppressed, and ruined; he takes to himself double what would maintain them.  His is unlike the generous rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like that of the ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed, the sickly, the dying, and the dead, and only anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.  His cruelty is beyond his corruption:  but there is something in his hypocrisy which is more terrible than his cruelty; for, at the very time when with double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription, and sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility and gentry of a great country, his eyes overflow with tears, and he turns the precious balm that bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine, into fatal, rancorous, mortal poison to the human race.