provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason. You see in
this instance that the presumption of guilt is not only no exception to
the demands on the public treasury, but with these ministers it is a
necessary condition to their support. But that you may not think this
preference solely owing to their known contempt of the natives, who
ought with every generous mind to claim their first charities, you will
find the same rule religiously observed with Europeans too. Attend, Sir,
to this decisive case. Since the beginning of the war, besides arrears
of every kind, a bond-debt has been contracted at Madras, uncertain in
its amount, but represented from four hundred thousand pound to a
million sterling. It stands only at the low interest of eight per cent.
Of the legal authority on which this debt was contracted, of its
purposes for the very being of the state, of its publicity and fairness,
no doubt has been entertained for a moment. For this debt no sort of
provision whatever has been made. It is rejected as an outcast, whilst
the whole undissipated attention of the minister has been employed for
the discharge of claims entitled to his favor by the merits we have
seen.

I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of
those demands, in order to see how much, supposing the country in a
condition to furnish the fund, may remain to satisfy the public debt and
the necessary establishments. But I have been foiled in my attempt.

About one fourth, that is, about 220,000_l._, of the loan of 1767
remains unpaid. How much interest is in arrear I could never discover:
seven or eight years' at least, which would make the whole of that debt
about 396,000_l._ This stock, which the ministers in their instructions
to the Governor of Madras state as the least exceptionable, they have
thought proper to distinguish by a marked severity, leaving it the only