to the Company, he unlocks the treasures of his virtuous industry, and, for a consideration of twenty-four or thirty-six per cent on a mortgage of the territorial revenue, becomes security to the Company for the Nabob's arrear.
All this intermediate usury thus becomes sanctified by the ultimate view to the Company's payment. In this case, would not a plain man ask this plain question of the Company: If you know that the Nabob must annually mortgage his territories to your servants to pay his annual arrear to you, why is not the assignment or mortgage made directly to the Company itself? By this simple, obvious operation, the Company would be relieved and the debt paid, without the charge of a shilling interest to that prince. But if that course should be thought too indulgent, why do they not take that assignment with such interest to themselves as they pay to others, that is, eight per cent? Or if it were thought more advisable (why it should I know not) that he must borrow, why do not the Company lend their own credit to the Nabob for their own payment? That credit would not be weakened by the collateral security of his territorial mortgage. The money might still be had at eight per cent. Instead of any of these honest and obvious methods, the Company has for years kept up a show of disinterestedness and moderation, by suffering a debt to accumulate to them from the country powers without any interest at all; and at the same time have seen before their eyes, on a pretext of borrowing to pay that debt, the revenues of the country charged with an usury of twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, and even eight-and-forty per cent, with compound interest,48 for the benefit of their servants. All this time they know that by having a debt subsisting without any interest, which is to be paid by contracting a debt on the highest interest, they manifestly render it necessary to the Nabob of Arcot to give the private demand a preference to the public; and, by binding him and their servants together in a common cause, they enable him to form a party to the utter ruin of their own authority and their own affairs. Thus their false moderation, and their affected purity, by the natural operation of everything false and everything affected, becomes pander and bawd to the unbridled debauchery and licentious lewdness of usury and extortion.
In consequence of this double game, all the territorial revenues have at one time or other been covered by those locusts, the English soucars. Not one single foot of the Carnatic has escaped them: a territory as large as England. During these operations what a scene has that country presented!49 The usurious European assignee supersedes the Nabob's native farmer of the revenue; the farmer flies to the Nabob's presence to claim his bargain; whilst his servants murmur for wages, and his soldiers mutiny for pay. The mortgage to the European assignee is then resumed, and the native farmer replaced,—replaced, again to be removed on the new clamor of the European assignee.50 Every man of rank and landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is thus, by a ravenous, because a short-lived succession of claimants, lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I paint. Far, very far, from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and the same source. Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and that again calls forth tyrannous coercion. They move in a circle, mutually producing and produced; till at length nothing of humanity is left in the government, no trace of integrity, spirit, or manliness in the people, who drag out a precarious and degraded existence under this system of outrage upon human nature. Such is the effect of the establishment of a debt to the Company, as it has hitherto been managed, and as it ever will remain, until ideas are adopted totally different from those which prevail at this time.
Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have thought fit to renew the Company's old order against contracting private debts in future. They begin by rewarding the violation of the ancient law; and then they gravely reenact provisions, of which they have given bounties for the breach. This inconsistency has been well exposed.51 But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid?
I will explain myself. They order the Nabob, out of the revenues of the Carnatic, to allot four hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year, as a fund for the debts before us. For the punctual payment of this annuity, they order him to give soucar security.52 When a soucar, that is, a money-dealer, becomes security for any native prince, the course is for the native prince to counter-secure the money-dealer, by making over to him in mortgage a portion of his territory equal to the sum annually to be paid, with an interest of at least twenty-four per cent. The point fit for the House to know is, who are these soucars to whom this security on the revenues in favor of the Nabob's creditors is to be given? The majority of the House, unaccustomed to these transactions, will hear with astonishment that these soucars are no other than the creditors themselves. The minister, not content with authorizing these transactions in a manner and to an extent unhoped for by the rapacious expectations of usury itself, loads the broken back of the Indian revenues, in favor of his worthy friends, the soucars, with an additional twenty-four per cent for being security to themselves for their own claims, for condescending to take the country in mortgage to pay to themselves the fruits of their own extortions.
The interest to be paid for this security, according to the most moderate strain of soucar demand, comes to 118,000l. a year, which, added to the 480,000l. on which it is to accrue, will make the whole charge amount to 598,000l. a year,—as much as even a long peace will enable those revenues to produce. Can any one reflect for a moment on all those claims of debt, which the minister exhausts himself in contrivances to augment with new usuries, without lifting up his hands and eyes in astonishment at the impudence both of the claim and of the adjudication? Services of some kind or other these servants of the Company must have done, so great and eminent that the Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot think that all they have brought home is half enough. He hallooes after them, "Gentlemen, you have forgot a large packet behind you, in your hurry; you have not sufficiently recovered yourselves; you ought to have, and you shall have, interest upon interest upon a prohibited debt that is made up of interest upon interest. Even this is too little. I have thought of another character for you, by which you may add something to your gains: you shall be security to yourselves; and hence will arise a new usury, which shall efface the memory of all the usuries suggested to you by your own dull inventions."
I have done with the arrangement relative to the Carnatic. After this it is to little purpose to observe on what the ministers have done to Tanjore. Your ministers have not observed even form and ceremony in their outrageous and insulting robbery of that country, whose only crime has been its early and constant adherence to the power of this, and the suffering of an uniform pillage in consequence of it. The debt of the Company from the Rajah of Tanjore is just of the same stuff with that of the Nabob of Arcot.
The subsidy from Tanjore, on the arrear of which this pretended debt (if any there be) has accrued to the Company, is not, like that paid by the Nabob of Arcot, a compensation for vast countries obtained, augmented, and preserved for him; not the price of pillaged treasuries, ransacked houses, and plundered territories: it is a large grant, from a small kingdom not obtained by our arms; robbed, not protected, by our power; a grant for which no equivalent was ever given, or pretended to be given. The right honorable gentleman, however, bears witness in his reports to the punctuality of the payments of this grant of bounty, or, if you please, of fear. It amounts to one hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling net annual subsidy. He bears witness to a further grant of a town and port, with an annexed district of thirty thousand pound a year, surrendered to the Company since the first donation. He has not borne witness, but the fact is, (he will not deny it,) that in the midst of war, and during the ruin and desolation of a considerable part of his territories, this prince made many very large payments. Notwithstanding these merits and services, the first regulation of ministry is to force from him a territory of an extent which
Appendix, No. 7.
For some part of these usurious transactions, see Consultation, 28th January, 1781; and for the Nabob's excusing his oppressions on account of these debts, Consultation, 26th November, 1770. "Still I undertook, first, the payment of the money belonging to the Company, who are my kind friends, and by borrowing, and
See Consultation, 28th January, 1781, where it is asserted, and not denied, that the Nabob's farmers of revenue seldom continue for three months together. From this the state of the country may be easily judged of.
In Mr. Fox's speech.
The amended letter, Appendix, No. 9.
