um dicere_."
This country, in all its de nominations, is about 46,000 square miles.
It may be affirmed universally, that not one person of substance or
property, landed, commercial, or moneyed, excepting two or three
bankers, who are necessary deposits and distributors of the general
spoil, is left in all that region. In that country, the moisture, the
bounty of Heaven, is given but at a certain season. Before the era of
our influence, the industry of man carefully husbanded that gift of God.
The Gentoos preserved, with a provident and religious care, the precious
deposit of the periodical rain in reservoirs, many of them works of
royal grandeur; and from these, as occasion demanded, they fructified
the whole country. To maintain these reservoirs, and to keep up an
annual advance to the cultivators for seed and cattle, formed a
principal object of the piety and policy of the priests and rulers of
the Gentoo religion.

This object required a command of money; and there was no pollam, or
castle, which in the happy days of the Carnatic was without some hoard
of treasure, by which the governors were enabled to combat with the
irregularity of the seasons, and to resist or to buy off the invasion of
an enemy. In all the cities were multitudes of merchants and bankers,
for all occasions of moneyed assistance; and on the other hand, the
native princes were in condition to obtain credit from them. The
manufacturer was paid by the return of commodities, or by imported
money, and not, as at present, in the taxes that had been originally
exacted from his industry. In aid of casual distress, the country was
full of choultries, which were inns and hospitals, where the traveller
and the poor were relieved. All ranks of people had their place in the
public concern, and their share in the common stock and common
prosperity. But _the chartered rights of men_, and the right which it
was thought proper to set up in the Nabob of Arcot, introduced a new
system. It was their policy to consider hoards of money as crimes,--to
regard moderate rents as frauds on the sovereign,--and to view, in the
lesser princes, any claim of exemption from more than settled tribute as
an act of rebellion. Accordingly, all the castles were, one after the
other, plundered and destroyed; the native princes were expelled; the
hospitals fell to ruin; the reservoirs of water went to decay; the
merchants, bankers, and manufacturers disappeared; and sterility,
indigenc