interest as, being condemned at law, leaves them at the mercy of the
great managers whom they trusted. These seduced creditors are probably
persons of no power or interest either in England or India, and may be
just objects of compassion. By taking, in this arrangement, no measures
for discrimination and discovery, the fraudulent and the fair are in the
first instance confounded in one mass. The subsequent selection and
distribution is left to the Nabob. With him the agents and instruments
of his corruption, whom he sees to be omnipotent in England, and who may
serve him in future, as they have done in times past, will have
precedence, if not an exclusive preference. These leading interests
domineer, and have always domineered, over the whole. By this
arrangement, the persons seduced are made dependent on their seducers;
honesty (comparative honesty at least) must become of the party of
fraud, and must quit its proper character and its just claims, to
entitle itself to the alms of bribery and peculation.

But be these English creditors what they may, the creditors most
certainly not fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched
indeed: by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is
left for them. They lent _bonâ fide_; in all probability they were even
forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob's
obligations. They had no trusts to carry to his market. They had no
faith of alliances to sell. They had no nations to betray to robbery and
ruin. They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had
they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver
over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.[25]

These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the
universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives
are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make