subsequent selection and
distribution is left to the Nabob. With him the agents and instruments
of his corruption, whom he sees to be omnipotent in England, and who may
serve him in future, as they have done in times past, will have
precedence, if not an exclusive preference. These leading interests
domineer, and have always domineered, over the whole. By this
arrangement, the persons seduced are made dependent on their seducers;
honesty (comparative honesty at least) must become of the party of
fraud, and must quit its proper character and its just claims, to
entitle itself to the alms of bribery and peculation.

But be these English creditors what they may, the creditors most
certainly not fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched
indeed: by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is
left for them. They lent _bona fide_; in all probability they were even
forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob's
obligations. They had no trusts to carry to his market. They had no
faith of alliances to sell. They had no nations to betray to robbery and
ruin. They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had
they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver
over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.[25]

These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the
universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives
are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make
provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason. You see in
this instance that the presumption of guilt is not only no exception to
the demands on the public treasury, but with these ministers it is a
necessary condition to their support. But that you may not think this
preference solely owing to their known contempt of the natives, who
ought with every generous mind to claim their first charities, you will
find the same rule religiously observed with Europeans too. Attend, Sir,
to this decisive case. Since the beginning of the war, besides arrears
of every kind, a bond-debt has been contracted at Madras, uncertain in
its amount, but represented from four hundred thousand pound to a
million sterling. It stands only at the low interest of eight per cent.
Of the legal authority on which this debt was contracted, of its
purposes for the very being of the state, of its publicity and fairness,
no doubt has been entertained