Carnatic owes a shilling to the Company,--whatever the Company may be
indebted to that undone country. It owes nothing to the Company, for
this plain and simple reason: the territory charged with the debt is
their own. To say that their revenues fall short, and owe them money, is
to say they are in debt to themselves, which is only talking nonsense.
The fact is, that, by the invasion of an enemy, and the ruin of the
country, the Company, either in its own name, or in the names of the
Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore, has lost for several years what it
might have looked to receive from its own estate. If men were allowed to
credit themselves upon such principles, any one might soon grow rich by
this mode of accounting. A flood comes down upon a man's estate in the
Bedford Level of a thousand pounds a year, and drowns his rents for ten
years. The Chancellor would put that man into the hands of a trustee,
who would gravely make up his books, and for this loss credit himself in
his account for a debt due to him of 10,000_l._ It is, however, on this
principle the Company makes up its demands on the Carnatic. In peace
they go the full length, and indeed more than the full length, of what
the people can bear for current establishments; then they are absurd
enough to consolidate all the calamities of war into debts,--to
metamorphose the devastations of the country into demands upon its
future production. What is this but to avow a resolution utterly to
destroy their own country, and to force the people to pay for their
sufferings to a government which has proved unable to protect either the
share of the husbandman or their own? In every lease of a farm, the
invasion of an enemy, instead of forming a demand for arrear, is a
release of rent: nor for that release is it at all necessary to show
that the invasion has left nothing to the occupier of the soil; though
in the present case it would be too easy to prove that melancholy
fact.[46] I therefore applauded my right honorable friend, who, when he
canvassed the Company's accounts, as a preliminary to a bill that ought