from which they are only disengaged by being entirely destroyed. In that state of confusion, in a very few months after the date of the memorial I have just read to you, things were found, when the nabob's troops, famished to feed English soucars, instead of defending the country, joined the invaders, and deserted in entire bodies to Hyder Ali.

The manner in which this transaction was carried on, shows that good examples are not easily forgot, especially by those who are bred in a great school. One of those splendid examples, give me leave to mention at a somewhat more early period, because one fraud furnishes light to the discovery of another, and so on, until the whole secret of mysterious iniquity bursts upon you in a blaze of detection. The paper I shall read you, is not on record. If you please, you may take it on my word. It is a letter written from one of undoubted information in Madras, to Sir John Clavering, describing the practice that prevailed there, whilst the company's allies were under sale, during the time of governour Winch's administration.

One mode," says Clavering's correspondent, "of amassing money at the nabob's cost is curious. He is generally in arrears to the company. Here the governour, being cash-keeper, is generally on good terms with the banker, who manages matters thus: The governour presses the nabob for the balance due from him; the nabob flies to his banker for relief; the banker engages to pay the money, money, and grants his notes accordingly, which he puts in the cash-book as ready money; the nabob pays him an interest for it at two and three per cent. per mensem, till the tunkaws he grants on the particular districts for it are paid. Matters in the mean time are so managed, that there is no call for this money for the company's service, till the tunkaws become due. By this means not a cash is advanced by the banker, though he receives a heavy interest from the nabob, which is divided as lawful spoil.”

Here Mr. Speaker, you have the whole art and mystery, the true freemason secret of the profession

of soucaring; by which a few innocent, inexperienced young Englishmen, such as Mr. Paul Benfield, for instance, without property upon which any one would lend to themselves a single shilling, are enabled at once to take provinces in mortgage, to make princes their debtors, and to become creditors for millions.

But it seems the right honourable gentleman's favourite soucar cavalry, have proved the payment before the Mayor's court at Madras! Have they so? Why then defraud our anxiety and their characters of that proof? Is it not enough that the charges which I have laid before you, have stood on record against these poor injured gentlemen for eight years? Is it not enough that they are in print by the orders of the East-India company for five years? After these gentlemen have born all the odium of this publication, and all the indignation of the directors, with such unexampled equanimity, now that they are at length stimulated into feeling, are you to deny them their just relief? But will the right honourable gentleman be pleased to tell us, how they came not to give this satisfaction to the court of directors, their lawful masters, during all the eight years of this litigated claim? Were they not bound, by every tie that can bind man, to give them this satisfaction? This day, for the first time, we hear of the proofs. But when were these proofs offered? In what cause? Who were the parties? Who inspected? Who contested this belated account? Let us see something to oppose to the body of record which appears against them. The mayor's court! the mayor's court! Pleasant! Does not the honourable gentleman know, that the first corps of creditors [the creditors of 1767] stated it as a sort of hardship to them, that they could not have justice at Madras, from the impossibility of their supporting their claims in the mayor's court? Why? because, say they, the members of that court were themselves creditors, and therefore could not sit as judges. Are we ripe to say that no creditor under similar circumstances

was member of the court, when the payment which is the ground of this cavalry debt was put in proof? Nay, are we not in a manner compelled to conclude, that the court was so constituted, when we know there is scarcely a man in Madras, who has not some participation in these transactions? It is a shame to hear such proofs mentioned, instead of the honest, vigorous scrutiny which the circumstances of such an affair so indispensably call for.

But his majesty's ministers, indulgent enough to other scrutinies, have not been satisfied with authorizing the payment of this demand without such inquiry as the act has prescribed; but they have added the arrear of twelve per cent. interest, from the year 1777 to the year 1784, to make a new capital, raising thereby 160 to 294,000l. Then they charge a new twelve per cent. on the whole from that period, for a transaction, in which it will be a miracle if a single penny will be ever found really advanced from the private stock of the pretended creditors.

In this manner, and at such an interest, the ministers have thought proper to dispose of 294,000l. of the publick revenues, for what is called the cavalry loan. After despatching this, the right honourable gentleman leads to battle his last grand division, the consolidated debt of 1777. But having exhausted all his panegyrick on the two first, he has nothing at all to say in favour of the last. On the contrary, he

admits that it was contracted in defiance of the company's orders, without even the pretended sanction of any pretended representatives. Nobody, indeed, has yet been found hardy enough to stand forth avowedly in its defence. But it is little to the credit of the age, that what has not plausibility enough to find an advocate, has influence enough to obtain a protector. Could any man expect to find that protector any where? But what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman of the committee of secrecy,* who had published to the

* Right honourable Henry Dundas.

house, and to the world, the facts that condemn these debts-the orders that forbid the incurring of them— the dreadful consequences which attended them. Even in his official letter, when he tramples on his parliamentary report, yet his general language is the same. Read the preface to this part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could fall from a vigilant guardian of the publick treasury, upon those who attempted to rob it. What must be felt by every man who has feeling, when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its authenticity? without a single step taken to settle even the amount of the demand? without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons claiming a sum, which rises in the accounts from one million three hundred thousand pounds sterling to two millions four hundred thousand pounds principal money? without an attempt made to ascertain the proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the court of directors; of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle, by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists, handed about for their own particular pur poses?

My honourable friend who made you the motion, has sufficiently exposed the nature of this debt. He has stated to you that its own agents in the year 1781, in the arrangement they proposed to make at Calcutta, were satisfied to have twenty-five per cent. at once struck off from the capital of a great part of this debt; and prayed to have a provision made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all. This was an arrangement of their own, an arrangement made by those who best knew the true constitution of their own debt; who knew how little favour it merited, and how little hopes they had to find any persons in authority abandoned enough to support it as it

stood.

But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations of a sanguine avarice, had not the confidence to propose, they have found a chancellor of the exchequer in England hardy enough to undertake for them. He has cheered their drooping spirits. He has thanked the peculators for not despairing of their commonwealth. He has told them they were too modest. He has re

placed the twenty-five per cent. which, in order to lighten themselves, they had abandoned in their conscious terrour. Instead of cutting off the interest, as they had themselves consented to do, with the fourth of the capital, he has added the whole growth of four years' usury of twelve per cent. to the first overgrown principal; and has again grafted on this meliorated stock a perpetual annuity of six per cent. to take place from the year 1781. Let no man hereafter talk of the decaying energies of nature. All the acts and monuments in the records of peculation; the consolidated corruption of ages; the patterns of exemplary plunder in the heroick times of Roman iniquity, never equalled the gigantick corruption of this single act. Never did Nero, in all the insolent prodigality of despotism, deal out to his pretorian guards a donation fit to be named with the largess showered down by the bounty of our chancellor of the exchequer on the faithful band of his Indian sepoys.

The right honourable gentleman* lets you freely and voluntarily into the whole transaction. So perfectly has his conduct confounded his understanding, that he fairly tells you, that through the course of the whole business he has never conferred with any but the agents of the pretended creditors. After this, do you want more to establish a secret understanding with the parties? to fix, beyond a doubt, their collusion and participation in a common fraud? If this were not enough, he has furnished you with other presumptions that are not to be shaken. It is one of the known indications of guilt to stagger and prevaricate in a story; and to vary in the motives that

*Mr. Dundas.