This disposition was to be secured by the Nabob's putting himself under
the guaranty of France, and, by the means of that rival nation,
preventing the English forever from assuming an equality, much less a
superiority, in the Carnatic. In pursuance of this treasonable project,
(treasonable on the part of the English,) they extinguished the Company
as a sovereign power in that part of India; they withdrew the Company's
garrisons out of all the forts and strongholds of the Carnatic; they
declined to receive the ambassadors from foreign courts, and remitted
them to the Nabob of Arcot; they fell upon, and totally destroyed, the
oldest ally of the Company, the king of Tanjore, and plundered the
country to the amount of near five millions sterling; one after
another, in the Nabob's name, but with English force, they brought into
a miserable servitude all the princes and great independent nobility of
a vast country.[33] In proportion to these treasons and violences, which
ruined the people, the fund of the Nabob's debt grew and flourished.

Among the victims to this magnificent plan of universal plunder, worthy
of the heroic avarice of the projectors, you have all heard (and he has
made himself to be well remembered) of an Indian chief called Hyder Ali
Khan. This man possessed the western, as the Company, under the name of
the Nabob of Arcot, does the eastern division of the Carnatic. It was
among the leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to
their own emphatic language) to _extirpate_ this Hyder Ali.[34] They
declared the Nabob of Arcot to be his sovereign, and himself to be a
rebel, and publicly invested their instrument with the sovereignty of
the kingdom of Mysore. But their victim was not of the passive kind.
They were soon obliged to conclude a treaty of peace and close alliance
with this rebel, at the gates of Madras. Both before and since that
treaty, every principle of policy pointed out this power as a natural
alliance; and on his part it was courted by every sort of amicable