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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12) by Edmund Burke
page 38 of 516 (07%)
Highness's order set apart to discharge the tunkaws [assignments]
granted to the Europeans. The gomastahs [agents] of Mr. Taylor to Mr. De
Fries are there in order to collect those tunkaws; and as they receive
_all_ the revenue that is collected, your Highness's troops have _seven
or eight months' pay due_, which they cannot receive, and are thereby
reduced to the greatest _distress_. _In such times_ it is highly
necessary to provide for the sustenance of the troops, that they may be
ready to exert themselves in the service of your Highness."

Here, Sir, you see how these causes and effects act upon one another.
One body of troops mutinies for want of pay; a debt is contracted to pay
them; and they still remain unpaid. A territory destined to pay other
troops is assigned for this debt; and these other troops fall into the
same state of indigence and mutiny with the first. Bond is paid by bond;
arrear is turned into new arrear; usury engenders new usury; mutiny,
suspended in one quarter, starts up in another; until all the revenues
and all the establishments are entangled into one inextricable knot of
confusion, from which they are only disengaged by being entirely
destroyed. In that state of confusion, in a very few months after the
date of the memorial I have just read to you, things were found, when
the Nabob's troops, famished to feed English soucars, instead of
defending the country, joined the invaders, and deserted in entire
bodies to Hyder Ali.[18]

The manner in which this transaction was carried on shows that good
examples are not easily forgot, especially by those who are bred in a
great school. One of those splendid examples give me leave to mention,
at a somewhat more early period; because one fraud furnishes light to
the discovery of another, and so on, until the whole secret of
mysterious iniquity bursts upon you in a blaze of detection. The paper I
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