the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic.

Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart
conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war
before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of
universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every
temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in
part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the
respect of rank, or sacredness of function,--fathers torn from children,
husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and, amidst the
goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses,--were
swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land.

Those who were able to evade this tempest, fled to the walled cities; but
escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.
The alms of the settlement of Madras, in this dreadful exigency, were
certainly liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could
do; but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out
its hands for food.

For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and
luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of
our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or
disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by a hundred a day in the
streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the
streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary
of India.

I was going to wake your justice toward this unhappy part of our
fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this
plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of
man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest
of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is.

But I find myself unable to manage it with decorum. These details are of a
species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the
sufferers and to the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature
itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall
over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the
gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these
masters