for a moment. For this debt no sort of
provision whatever has been made. It is rejected as an outcast, whilst
the whole undissipated attention of the minister has been employed for
the discharge of claims entitled to his favor by the merits we have
seen.

I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of
those demands, in order to see how much, supposing the country in a
condition to furnish the fund, may remain to satisfy the public debt and
the necessary establishments. But I have been foiled in my attempt.

About one fourth, that is, about 220,000_l._, of the loan of 1767
remains unpaid. How much interest is in arrear I could never discover:
seven or eight years' at least, which would make the whole of that debt
about 396,000_l._ This stock, which the ministers in their instructions
to the Governor of Madras state as the least exceptionable, they have
thought proper to distinguish by a marked severity, leaving it the only
one on which the interest is not added to the principal to beget a new
interest.

The Cavalry Loan, by the operation of the same authority, is made up to
294,000_l._; and this 294,000_l._, made up of principal and interest, is
crowned with a new interest of twelve per cent.

What the grand loan, the bribery loan of 1777, may be is amongst the
deepest mysteries of state. It is probably the first debt ever assuming
the title of Consolidation that did not express what the amount of the
sum consolidated was. It is little less than a contradiction in terms.
In the debt of the year 1767 the sum was stated in the act of
consolidation, and made to amount to 880,000_l._ capital. When this
consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was
represented authentically at 2,400,000_l._ In that, or rather in a
higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.[26] It
afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its
weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000_l._[27] However, it never was
without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness. There was a
sort of floating debt of about four or five hundred thousand pounds more
ready to be added, as occasion should require.

In short, when you pressed this sensitive-plant, it always contracted
its dimensions. When the rude hand of inquiry was withdrawn, it expanded
in all the luxuriant vigor of its original vegetation. In the treaty of
1781, the whole of the Nabob's debt to private Europeans is by Mr.