y man of rank and
landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable
last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by
the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is
thus, by a ravenous, because a short-lived succession of claimants,
lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is
left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I
paint. Far, very far, from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to
it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English
yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands
of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and
the same source. Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and
that again calls forth tyrannous coercion. They move in a circle,
mutually producing and produced; till at length nothing of humanity is
left in the government, no trace of integrity, spirit, or manliness in
the people, who drag out a precarious and degraded existence under this
system of outrage upon human nature. Such is the effect of the
establishment of a debt to the Company, as it has hitherto been managed,
and as it ever will remain, until ideas are adopted totally different
from those which prevail at this time.

Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have
thought fit to renew the Company's old order against contracting private
debts in future. They begin by rewarding the violation of the ancient
law; and then they gravely reenact provisions, of which they have given
bounties for the breach. This inconsistency has been well exposed.[51]
But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive
directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid?

I will explain myself. They order the Nabob, out of the revenues of the
Carnatic, to allot four hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year, as a
fund for the debts before us. For the punctual payment of this annuity,
they order him to give soucar security.[52] When a soucar, that is, a
money-dealer, becomes security for any native prince, the course is for
the native prince to counter-secure the money-dealer, by making over to
him in mortgage a portion of his territory equal to the sum annually to
be paid, with an interest of at least twenty-four per cent. The point
fit for the House to know is, who are these soucars to whom this
secur