With him the agents and instruments of his corruption, whom he sees to be omnipotent in England, and who may serve him in future, as they have done in times past, will have precedence, if not an exclusive preference. These leading interests domineer, and have always domineered, over the whole. By this arrangement, the persons seduced are made dependent on their seducers; honesty (comparative honesty at least) must become of the party of fraud, and must quit its proper character and its just claims, to entitle itself to the alms of bribery and peculation.
But be these English creditors what they may, the creditors most certainly not fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched indeed: by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is left for them. They lent bonâ fide; in all probability they were even forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob's obligations. They had no trusts to carry to his market. They had no faith of alliances to sell. They had no nations to betray to robbery and ruin. They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.25
These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason. You see in this instance that the presumption of guilt is not only no exception to the demands on the public treasury, but with these ministers it is a necessary condition to their support. But that you may not think this preference solely owing to their known contempt of the natives, who ought with every generous mind to claim their first charities, you will find the same rule religiously observed with Europeans too. Attend, Sir, to this decisive case. Since the beginning of the war, besides arrears of every kind, a bond-debt has been contracted at Madras, uncertain in its amount, but represented from four hundred thousand pound to a million sterling. It stands only at the low interest of eight per cent. Of the legal authority on which this debt was contracted, of its purposes for the very being of the state, of its publicity and fairness, no doubt has been entertained for a moment. For this debt no sort of provision whatever has been made. It is rejected as an outcast, whilst the whole undissipated attention of the minister has been employed for the discharge of claims entitled to his favor by the merits we have seen.
I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of those demands, in order to see how much, supposing the country in a condition to furnish the fund, may remain to satisfy the public debt and the necessary establishments. But I have been foiled in my attempt.
About one fourth, that is, about 220,000l., of the loan of 1767 remains unpaid. How much interest is in arrear I could never discover: seven or eight years' at least, which would make the whole of that debt about 396,000l. This stock, which the ministers in their instructions to the Governor of Madras state as the least exceptionable, they have thought proper to distinguish by a marked severity, leaving it the only one on which the interest is not added to the principal to beget a new interest.
The Cavalry Loan, by the operation of the same authority, is made up to 294,000l.; and this 294,000l., made up of principal and interest, is crowned with a new interest of twelve per cent.
What the grand loan, the bribery loan of 1777, may be is amongst the deepest mysteries of state. It is probably the first debt ever assuming the title of Consolidation that did not express what the amount of the sum consolidated was. It is little less than a contradiction in terms. In the debt of the year 1767 the sum was stated in the act of consolidation, and made to amount to 880,000l. capital. When this consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was represented authentically at 2,400,000l. In that, or rather in a higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.26 It afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000l.27 However, it never was without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness. There was a sort of floating debt of about four or five hundred thousand pounds more ready to be added, as occasion should require.
In short, when you pressed this sensitive-plant, it always contracted its dimensions. When the rude hand of inquiry was withdrawn, it expanded in all the luxuriant vigor of its original vegetation. In the treaty of 1781, the whole of the Nabob's debt to private Europeans is by Mr. Sulivan, agent to the Nabob and his creditors, stated at 2,800,000l., which, if the Cavalry Loan and the remains of the debt of 1767 be subtracted, leaves it nearly at the amount originally declared at the Durbar in 1777: but then there is a private instruction to Mr. Sulivan, which, it seems, will reduce it again to the lower standard of 1,400,000l.
Failing in all my attempts, by a direct account, to ascertain the extent of the capital claimed, (where in all probability no capital was ever advanced,) I endeavored, if possible, to discover it by the interest which was to be paid. For that purpose, I looked to the several agreements for assigning the territories of the Carnatic to secure the principal and interest of this debt. In one of them,28 I found, in a sort of postscript, by way of an additional remark, (not in the body of the obligation,) the debt represented at 1,400,000l.: but when I computed the sums to be paid for interest by instalments in another paper, I found they produced an interest of two millions, at twelve per cent; and the assignment supposed, that, if these instalments might exceed, they might also fall short of, the real provision for that interest.29 Another instalment-bond was afterwards granted: in that bond the interest exactly tallies with a capital of 1,400,000l.:30 but pursuing this capital through the correspondence, I lost sight of it again, and it was asserted that this instalment-bond was considerably short of the interest that ought to be computed to the time mentioned.31
Here are, therefore, two statements of equal authority, differing at least a million from each other; and as neither persons claiming, nor any special sum as belonging to each particular claimant, is ascertained in the instruments of consolidation, or in the installment-bonds, a large scope was left to throw in any sums for any persons, as their merits in advancing the interest of that loan might require; a power was also left for reduction, in case a harder hand, or more scanty funds, might be found to require it. Stronger grounds for a presumption of fraud never appeared in any transaction. But the ministers, faithful to the plan of the interested persons, whom alone they thought fit to confer with on this occasion, have ordered the payment of the whole mass of these unknown, unliquidated sums, without an attempt to ascertain them. On this conduct, Sir, I leave you to make your own reflections.
It is impossible (at least I have found it impossible) to fix on the real amount of the pretended debts with which your ministers have thought proper to load the Carnatic. They are obscure; they shun inquiry; they are enormous. That is all you know of them.
That you may judge what chance any honorable and useful end of government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country; though in truth my mind revolts from it, though you will hear it with horror, and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with a few words as to the cause.
The great fortunes made in India, in the beginnings of conquest, naturally excited an emulation in all the parts and through the whole succession of the Company's service. But in the Company it gave rise to other sentiments. They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them. On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions and menaces: and that the servants might not be bribed into
Lord Pigot
In Sir Thomas Rumbold's letter to the Court of Directors, March 15th, 1778, he represents it as higher, in the following manner:—"How shall I paint to you my astonishment, on my arrival here, when I was informed, that, independent of this four lacs of pagodas [the Cavalry Loan], independent of the Nabob's debt to his old creditors, and the money due to the Company, he had contracted a debt to the enormous amount of sixty-three lacs of pagodas [2,520,000
Nabob's proposals, November 25th, 1778; and memorial of the creditors, March 1st, 1779.
Nabob's proposals to his new consolidated creditors, November 25th, 1778.
Paper signed by the Nabob, 6th January, 1780.
Kistbundi to July 31, 1780.
Governor's letter to the Nabob, 25th July, 1779.
