a
power provided for its enjoyment _at his own charge_; but the means of
furnishing that charge (and a mighty one it is) are wholly out off. This
use of the water, which ought to have no more connection than clouds and
rains and sunshine with the politics of the Rajah, the Nabob, or the
Company, is expressly contrived as a means of enforcing demands and
arrears of tribute. This horrid and unnatural instrument of extortion
had been a distinguishing feature in the enormities of the Carnatic
politics, that loudly called for reformation. But the food of a whole
people is by the reformers of India conditioned on payments from its
prince, at a moment that he is overpowered with a swarm of their
demands, without regard to the ability of either prince or people. In
fine, by opening an avenue to the irruption of the Nabob of Arcot's
creditors and soucars, whom every man, who did not fall in love with
oppression and corruption on an experience of the calamities they
produced, would have raised wall before wall and mound before mound to
keep from a possibility of entrance, a more destructive enemy than Hyder
Ali is introduced into that kingdom. By this part of their arrangement,
in which they establish a debt to the Nabob of Arcot, in effect and
substance, they deliver over Tanjore, bound hand and foot, to Paul
Benfield, the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of a
country which has for years been an object of an unremitted, but,
unhappily, an unequal struggle, between the bounties of Providence to
renovate and the wickedness of mankind to destroy.

The right honorable gentleman[56] talks of his fairness in determining
the territorial dispute between the Nabob of Arcot and the prince of
that country, when he superseded the determination of the Directors, in
whom the law had vested the decision of that controversy. He is in this
just as feeble as he is in every other part. But it is not necessary to
say a word in refutation of any part of his argument. The mode of the
proceeding sufficiently speaks the spirit of it. It is enough to fix his
character as a judge, that he _never heard the Directors in defence of
their adjudication, nor either of the parties in support of their
respective claims_. It is sufficient for me that he takes from the Rajah
of Tanjore by this pretended adjudication, or rather from his unhappy
subjects, 40,000_l._ a year of his and their revenue, and leaves upon
his and their shoulders all the charge