ed the period
of his tyrannical administration? But so far from surrendering the
Carnatic into my hands, he has, since that event, affixed advertisements
to the walls and gates of the Black Town for letting to the best bidder
the various districts for the term of three years,--and has continued
the Committee of Revenue, which you positively ordered to be abolished,
to whom he has allowed enormous salaries, from 6000 to 4000 pagodas per
annum, which each member has received from the time of his appointment,
though his Lordship well knows that most of them are by your orders
disqualified by being my principal creditors.

If those acts of violence and outrage had been productive of public
advantage, I conceive his Lordship might have held them forward in
extenuation of his conduct; but whilst he cloaks his justification under
the veil of your records, it is impossible to refute his assertions or
to expose to you their fallacy; and when he is no longer able to support
his conduct by argument, he refers to those records, where, I
understand, he has exercised all his sophistry and malicious
insinuations to render me and my family obnoxious in the eyes of the
Company and the British nation. And when the glorious victories of Sir
Eyre Coote have been rendered abortive by a constant deficiency of
supplies,--and when, since the departure of that excellent general to
Bengal, whose loss I must ever regret, a dreadful famine, at the close
of last year, occasioned by his Lordship's neglect to lay up a
sufficient stock of grain at a proper season, and from his prohibitory
orders to private merchants,--and when no exertion has been made, nor
advantage gained over the enemy,--when Hyder's death and Tippoo's return
to his own dominions operated in no degree for the benefit of our
affairs,--in short, when all has been a continued series of
disappointment and disgrace under Lord Macartney's management, (and in
him alone has the management been vested,)--I want words to convey those
ideas of his insufficiency, ignorance, and obstinacy which I am
convinced you would entertain, had you been spectators of his ruinous
and destructive conduct.

But against me, and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, has his Lordship's vengeance
chiefly been exerted: even the Company's own subordinate zemindars have
found better treatment, probably because they were more rich; those of
Nizanagoram have been permitted, contrary to your pointed orders, to
hold their rich zemi