when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is
ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its
authenticity,--without a single step taken to settle even the amount of
the demand,--without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons
claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three
hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand
pound, principal money,[22]--without an attempt made to ascertain the
proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of
Directors,--of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle,
by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about
for their own particular purposes?

My honorable friend who made you the motion has sufficiently exposed the
nature of this debt. He has stated to you, that _its own agents_, in the
year 1781, in the arrangement _they proposed_ to make at Calcutta, were
satisfied to have twenty-five per cent at once struck off from the
capital of a great part of this debt, and prayed to have a provision
made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all. This was
an arrangement of _their own_, an arrangement made by those who best
knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor
it merited,[23] and how little hopes they had to find any persons in
authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.

But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations of a sanguine avarice,
had not the confidence to propose, they have found a Chancellor of the
Exchequer in England hardy enough to undertake for them. He has cheered
their drooping spirits. He has thanked the peculators for not despairing
of their commonwealth. He has told them they were too modest. He has
replaced the twenty-five per cent which, in order to lighten themselves,
they had abandoned in their conscious terror. Instead of cutting off the