are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time
they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence.
And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the
famine. Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses
only a handful of straw, the sale of a _thousand_ of which would not
perhaps produce twenty shillings."

These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was
to obtain a gift of 40,000_l._, over and above a large increase of rent,
over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself
for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit
of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.

Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences. All
this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven
like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by
imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more
than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.

Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive
imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was
not put in practice. On its own day your Lordships will hear, with
astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous
inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded
demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent
on which they were piled.

The country being in many parts left wholly waste and in all parts
considerably depopulated by the first rigors, the full rate of the
district was exacted from the miserable survivors. Their burdens were
increased, as their fellow-laborers, to whose joint efforts they were to
owe the means of payment, diminished. Driven to make payments beyond all
possible calculation, previous to receipts and above their means, in a
very short time they fell into the hands of usurers.

The usurers, who under such a government held their own funds by a
precarious tenure, and were to lend to those whose substance was still
more precarious, to the natural hardness and austerity of that race of
men had additional motives to extortion, and made their terms
accordingly. And what were the terms these poor people were obliged to
consent to, to answer the bribes and peshcush paid to Mr.
Hastings?--five, ten, twenty, forty per cent? No! at an interest of si