not yet thought proper to ascertain,53 for a military peace establishment the particulars of which they have not yet been pleased to settle.
The next part of their arrangement is with regard to war. As confessedly this prince had no share in stirring up any of the former wars, so all future wars are completely out of his power; for he has no troops whatever, and is under a stipulation not so much as to correspond with any foreign state, except through the Company. Yet, in case the Company's servants should be again involved in war, or should think proper again to provoke any enemy, as in times past they have wantonly provoked all India, he is to be subjected to a new penalty. To what penalty? Why, to no less than the confiscation of all his revenues. But this is to end with the war, and they are to be faithfully returned? Oh, no! nothing like it. The country is to remain under confiscation until all the debt which the Company shall think fit to incur in such war shall be discharged: that is to say, forever. His sole comfort is, to find his old enemy, the Nabob of Arcot, placed in the very same condition.
The revenues of that miserable country were, before the invasion of Hyder, reduced to a gross annual receipt of three hundred and sixty thousand pound.54 From this receipt the subsidy I have just stated is taken. This again, by payments in advance, by extorting deposits of additional sums to a vast amount for the benefit of their soucars, and by an endless variety of other extortions, public and private, is loaded with a debt, the amount of which I never could ascertain, but which is large undoubtedly, generating an usury the most completely ruinous that probably was ever heard of: that is, forty-eight per cent, payable monthly, with compound interest.55
Such is the state to which the Company's servants have reduced that country. Now come the reformers, restorers, and comforters of India. What have they done? In addition to all these tyrannous exactions, with all these ruinous debts in their train, looking to one side of an agreement whilst they wilfully shut their eyes to the other, they withdraw from Tanjore all the benefits of the treaty of 1762, and they subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this harassed nation to be tributary to a person who is himself, by their own arrangement, deprived of the right of war or peace, deprived of the power of the sword, forbid to keep up a single regiment of soldiers, and is therefore wholly disabled from all protection of the country which is the object of the pretended tribute. Tribute hangs on the sword. It is an incident inseparable from real, sovereign power. In the present case, to suppose its existence is as absurd as it is cruel and oppressive. And here, Mr. Speaker, you have a clear exemplification of the use of those false names and false colors which the gentlemen who have lately taken possession of India choose to lay on for the purpose of disguising their plan of oppression. The Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore have, in truth and substance, no more than a merely civil authority, held in the most entire dependence on the Company. The Nabob, without military, without federal capacity, is extinguished as a potentate; but then he is carefully kept alive as an independent and sovereign power, for the purpose of rapine and extortion,—for the purpose of perpetuating the old intrigues, animosities, usuries, and corruptions.
It was not enough that this mockery of tribute was to be continued without the correspondent protection, or any of the stipulated equivalents, but ten years of arrear, to the amount of 400,000l. sterling, is added to all the debts to the Company and to individuals, in order to create a new debt, to be paid (if at all possible to be paid in whole or in part) only by new usuries,—and all this for the Nabob of Arcot, or rather for Mr. Benfield and the corps of the Nabob's creditors and their soucars. Thus these miserable Indian princes are continued in their seats for no other purpose than to render them, in the first instance, objects of every species of extortion, and, in the second, to force them to become, for the sake of a momentary shadow of reduced authority, a sort of subordinate tyrants, the ruin and calamity, not the fathers and cherishers, of their people.
But take this tribute only as a mere charge (without title, cause, or equivalent) on this people; what one step has been taken to furnish grounds for a just calculation and estimate of the proportion of the burden and the ability? None,—not an attempt at it. They do not adapt the burden to the strength, but they estimate the strength of the bearers by the burden they impose. Then what care is taken to leave a fund sufficient to the future reproduction of the revenues that are to bear all these loads? Every one, but tolerably conversant in Indian affairs, must know that the existence of this little kingdom depends on its control over the river Cavery. The benefits of Heaven to any community ought never to be connected with political arrangements, or made to depend on the personal conduct of princes, in which the mistake, or error, or neglect, or distress, or passion of a moment, on either side, may bring famine on millions, and ruin an innocent nation perhaps for ages. The means of the subsistence of mankind should be as immutable as the laws of Nature, let power and dominion take what course they may.—Observe what has been done with regard to this important concern. The use of this river is, indeed, at length given to 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 gentleman56 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, 40,000l. 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.
The right honorable gentleman is of opinion that his judgment in this case can be censured
Appendix, No. 8.
Mr. Petrie's evidence before the Select Committee, Appendix, No. 7.
Appendix, No. 7.
Mr. Dundas.
