interest, which is to be paid by contracting a debt on the highest
interest, they manifestly render it necessary to the Nabob of Arcot to
give the private demand a preference to the public; and, by binding him
and their servants together in a common cause, they enable him to form a
party to the utter ruin of their own authority and their own affairs.
Thus their false moderation, and their affected purity, by the natural
operation of everything false and everything affected, becomes pander
and bawd to the unbridled debauchery and licentious lewdness of usury
and extortion.

In consequence of this double game, all the territorial revenues have at
one time or other been covered by those locusts, the English soucars.
Not one single foot of the Carnatic has escaped them: a territory as
large as England. During these operations what a scene has that country
presented![49] The usurious European assignee supersedes the Nabob's
native farmer of the revenue; the farmer flies to the Nabob's presence
to claim his bargain; whilst his servants murmur for wages, and his
soldiers mutiny for pay. The mortgage to the European assignee is then
resumed, and the native farmer replaced,--replaced, again to be removed
on the new clamor of the European assignee.[50] Every man of rank and
landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable
last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by
the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is
thus, by a ravenous, because a short-lived succession of claimants,
lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is
left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I
paint. Far, very far, from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to
it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English
yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands
of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and