manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so
nauseous and disgusting, they are so degrading to the sufferers and to
the hearers, they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on
better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this
hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.

For eighteen months,[37] without intermission, this destruction raged
from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did
these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son,
absolve themselves of their impious vow, that, when the British armies
traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all
directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one
man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any
description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole
region. With the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of
some few forts, I wish to be understood as speaking literally. I mean to
produce to you more than three witnesses, above all exception, who will
support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed
through every part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or
seven districts to the north and to the south (and these not wholly
untouched) escaped the general ravage.

The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure
to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you
sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful
country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the
German Sea, east and west, emptied and embowelled (may God avert the
omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your
imagination a little further, and then suppose your ministers taking a
survey of this scene of waste and desolation. What would be your