authoritatively, upon a country which they all knew, and which one of
them had registered on the records of this House, to be wasted, beyond
all example, by every oppression of an abusive government, and every
ravage of a desolating war? But that you may discern in what manner they
use the correspondence of office, and that thereby you may enter into
the true spirit of the ministerial Board of Control, I desire you, Mr.
Speaker, to remark, that, through their whole controversy with the Court
of Directors, they do not so much as hint at their ever having seen any
other paper from Lord Macartney, or any other estimate of revenue than
this of 1781. To this they hold. Here they take post; here they intrench
themselves.

When I first read this curious controversy between the ministerial
board and the Court of Directors, common candor obliged me to attribute
their tenacious adherence to the estimate of 1781 to a total ignorance
of what had appeared upon the records. But the right honorable gentleman
has chosen to come forward with an uncalled-for declaration; he
boastingly tells you, that he has seen, read, digested, compared
everything,--and that, if he has sinned, he has sinned with his eyes
broad open. Since, then, the ministers will obstinately shut the gates
of mercy on themselves, let them add to their crimes what aggravations
they please. They have, then, (since it must be so,) wilfully and
corruptly suppressed the information which they ought to have produced,
and, for the support of peculation, have made themselves guilty of
spoliation and suppression of evidence.[42] The paper I hold in my hand,
which totally overturns (for the present, at least) the estimate of
1781, they have no more taken notice of, in their controversy with the
Court of Directors, than if it had no existence. It is the report made
by a committee appointed at Madras to manage the whole of the six
countries assigned to the Company by the Nabob of Arcot. This committee