situation, possessed of no lucrative offices, without the command of
armies or the known administration of revenues, without profession of
any kind, without any sort of trade sufficient to employ a peddler,
could have, in a few years, (as to some, even in a few months,) amassed
treasures equal to the revenues of a respectable kingdom? Was it not
enough to put these gentlemen, in the novitiate of their administration,
on their guard, and to call upon them for a strict inquiry, (if not to
justify them in a reprobation of those demands without any inquiry at
all,) that, when all England, Scotland, and Ireland had for years been
witness to the immense sums laid out by the servants of the Company in
stocks of all denominations, in the purchase of lands, in the buying and
building of houses, in the securing quiet seats in Parliament or in the
tumultuous riot of contested elections, in wandering throughout the
whole range of those variegated modes of inventive prodigality which
sometimes have excited our wonder, sometimes roused our indignation,
that, after all, India was four millions still in debt to _them_? India
in debt to _them_! For what? Every debt, for which an equivalent of some
kind or other is not given, is, on the face of it, a fraud. What is the
equivalent they have given? What equivalent had they to give? What are
the articles of commerce, or the branches of manufacture, which those
gentlemen have carried hence to enrich India? What are the sciences they
beamed out to enlighten it? What are the arts they introduced to cheer
and to adorn it? What are the religious, what the moral institutions
they have taught among that people, as a guide to life, or as a
consolation when life is to be no more, that there is an eternal debt, a
debt "still paying, still to owe," which must be bound on the present
generation in India, and entailed on their mortgaged posterity forever?
A debt of millions, in favor of a set of men whose names, with few
exceptions, are either buried in the obscurity of their origin and
talents or dragged into light by the enormity of their crimes!