are formed, for the
greater part, of mounds of earth and stones, with sluices of solid
masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and labor, and
maintained at a mighty charge. In the territory contained in that map
alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs, and they
amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from the extent of two or three
acres to five miles in circuit. From these reservoirs currents are
occasionally drawn over the fields, and these watercourses again call
for a considerable expense to keep them properly scoured and duly
levelled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there cannot be
in the Carnatic and Tanjore fewer than ten thousand of these reservoirs
of the larger and middling dimensions, to say nothing of those for
domestic services, and the use of religious purification. These are not
the enterprises of your power, nor in a style of magnificence suited to
the taste of your minister. These are the monuments of real kings, who
were the fathers of their people,--testators to a posterity which they
embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by
ambition,--but by the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not
contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the
contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and
graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty
beyond the limits of Nature, and to perpetuate themselves through
generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the
nourishers of mankind.

Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant
of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious
funds of culture and population, that everywhere the reservoirs were
fallen into a miserable decay.[39] But after those domestic enemies had
provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not
leave it, until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their
avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not
either totally destroyed, or cut through with such gaps as to require a
serious attention and much cost to reestablish them, as the means of
present subsistence to the people and of future revenue to the state.

What, Sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do, on the view of
the ruins of such works before them?--on the view of such a chasm of
desolation as that which yawned in the midst o