masters of the Court of Proprietors, as well as extending a powerful
cabal in other places as important, they so completely overturned the
authority of the Court of Directors at home and abroad, that this poor,
baffled government was soon obliged to lower its tone. It was glad to be
admitted into partnership with its own servants. The Court of
Directors, establishing the debt which they had reprobated as a breach
of trust, and which was planned for the subversion of their authority,
settled its payments on a par with those of the public; and even so were
not able to obtain peace, or even equality in their demands. All the
consequences lay in a regular and irresistible train. By employing their
influence for the recovery of this debt, their orders, issued in the
same breath, against creating new debts, only animated the strong
desires of their servants to this prohibited prolific sport, and it soon
produced a swarm of sons and daughters, not in the least degenerated
from the virtue of their parents.

From that moment the authority of the Court of Directors expired in the
Carnatic, and everywhere else. "Every man," says the Presidency, "who
opposes the government and its measures, finds an immediate countenance
from the Nabob; even our discarded officers, however unworthy, are
received into the Nabob's service."[11] It was, indeed, a matter of no
wonderful sagacity to determine whether the Court of Directors, with
their miserable salaries to their servants, of four or five hundred
pounds a year, or the distributor of millions, was most likely to be
obeyed. It was an invention beyond the imagination of all the
speculatists of our speculating age, to see a government quietly settled
in one and the same town, composed of two distinct members: one to pay
scantily for obedience, and the other to bribe high for rebellion and
revolt.