eor, which blackened all their
horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down 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, 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 an 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 awake your
justice towards 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,[37] without intermission, this destruction raged
from the gates of Madras to th