kingdom, of a kingdom to be compared to France, was
set up to public auction! They set up (Mr. Hastings set up) the whole
nobility, gentry, and freeholders to the highest bidder. No preference
was given to the ancient proprietors. They must bid against every
usurer, every temporary adventurer, every jobber and schemer, every
servant of every European,--or they were obliged to content themselves,
in lieu of their extensive domains, with their house, and such a
pension as the state auctioneers thought fit to assign. In this general
calamity, several of the first nobility thought (and in all appearance
justly) that they had better submit to the necessity of this pension,
than continue, under the name of zemindars, the objects and instruments
of a system by which they ruined their tenants and were ruined
themselves. Another reform has since come upon the back of the first;
and a pension having been assigned to these unhappy persons, in lieu of
their hereditary lands, a new scheme of economy has taken place, and
deprived them of that pension.

The menial servants of Englishmen, persons (to use the emphatical phrase
of a ruined and patient Eastern chief) "_whose fathers they would not
have set with the dogs of their flock_" entered into their patrimonial
lands. Mr. Hastings's banian was, after this auction, found possessed of
territories yielding a rent of one hundred and forty thousand pounds a
year.

Such an universal proscription, upon any pretence, has few examples.
Such a proscription, without even a pretence of delinquency, has none.
It stands by itself. It stands as a monument to astonish the
imagination, to confound the reason of mankind. I confess to you, when I
first came to know this business in its true nature and extent, my
surprise did a little suspend my indignation. I was in a manner
stupefied by the desperate boldness of a few obscure young men, who,
having obtained, by ways which they could not comprehend, a power of
which they saw neither the purposes nor the limits, tossed about,
subverted, and tore to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of a boyish
unluckiness and malice, the most established rights, and the most
ancient and most revered institutions, of ages and nations. Sir, I will
not now trouble you with any detail with regard to what they have since
done with these same lands and landholders, only to inform you that
nothing has been suffered to settle for two seasons together upon any
basis, and