Kitobni o'qish: «The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)», sahifa 3

However, so far as the reality of the dealing goes, all is hitherto fair and plausible; and here the right honorable gentleman concludes, with commendable prudence, his account of the business. But here it is I shall beg leave to commence my supplement: for the gentleman's discreet modesty has led him to cut the thread of the story somewhat abruptly. One of the most essential parties is quite forgotten. Why should the episode of the poor Nabob be omitted? When that prince chooses it, nobody can tell his story better. Excuse me, if I apply again to my book, and give it you from the first hand: from the Nabob himself.

"Mr. Stratton became acquainted with this, and got Mr. Taylor and others to lend me four lacs of pagodas towards discharging the arrears of pay of my troops. Upon this, I wrote a letter of thanks to Mr. Stratton; and upon the faith of this money being paid immediately, I ordered many of my troops to be discharged by a certain day, and lessened the number of my servants. Mr. Taylor, &c., some time after acquainted me, that they had no ready money, but they would grant teeps payable in four months. This astonished me; for I did not know what might happen, when the sepoys were dismissed from my service. I begged of Mr. Taylor and the others to pay this sum to the officers of my regiments at the time they mentioned; and desired the officers, at the same time, to pacify and persuade the men belonging to them that their pay would be given to them at the end of four months, and that, till those arrears were discharged, their pay should be continued to them. Two years are nearly expired since that time, but Mr. Taylor has not yet entirely discharged the arrears of those troops, and I am obliged to continue their pay from that time till this. I hoped to have been able, by this expedient, to have lessened the number of my troops, and discharged the arrears due to them, considering the trifle of interest to Mr. Taylor and the others as no great matter; but instead of this, I am oppressed with the burden of pay due to those troops, and the interest, which is going on to Mr. Taylor from the day the teeps were granted to him." What I have read to you is an extract of a letter from the Nabob of the Carnatic to Governor Rumbold, dated the 22d, and received the 24th of March, 1779.¹⁷

Suppose his Highness not to be well broken in to things of this kind, it must, indeed, surprise so known and established a bond-vender as the Nabob of Arcot, one who keeps himself the largest bond-warehouse in the world, to find that he was now to receive in kind: not to take money for his obligations, but to give his bond in exchange for the bond of Messieurs Taylor, Majendie, and Call, and to pay, besides, a good, smart interest, legally twelve per cent, (in reality, perhaps, twenty or twenty-four per cent,) for this exchange of paper. But his troops were not to be so paid, or so disbanded. They wanted bread, and could not live by cutting and shuffling of bonds. The Nabob still kept the troops in service, and was obliged to continue, as you have seen, the whole expense to exonerate himself from which he became indebted to the soucars.

Had it stood here, the transaction would have been of the most audacious strain of fraud and usury perhaps ever before discovered, whatever might have been practised and concealed. But the same authority (I mean the Nabob's) brings before you something, if possible, more striking. He states, that, for this their paper, he immediately handed over to these gentlemen something very different from paper,—that is, the receipt of a territorial revenue, of which, it seems, they continued as long in possession as the Nabob himself continued in possession of anything. Their payments, therefore, not being to commence before the end of four months, and not being completed in two years, it must be presumed (unless they prove the contrary) that their payments to the Nabob were made out of the revenues they had received from his assignment. Thus they condescended to accumulate a debt of 160,000l. with an interest of twelve per cent, in compensation for a lingering payment to the Nabob of 160,000l. of his own money.

Still we have not the whole. About two years after the assignment of those territorial revenues to these gentlemen, the Nabob receives a remonstrance from his chief manager in a principal province, of which this is the tenor. "The entire revenue of those districts is by your Highness's order set apart to discharge the tunkaws [assignments] granted to the Europeans. The gomastahs [agents] of Mr. Taylor to Mr. De Fries are there in order to collect those tunkaws; and as they receive all the revenue that is collected, your Highness's troops have seven or eight months' pay due, which they cannot receive, and are thereby reduced to the greatest distress. In such times it is highly necessary to provide for the sustenance of the troops, that they may be ready to exert themselves in the service of your Highness."

Here, Sir, you see how these causes and effects act upon one another. One body of troops mutinies for want of pay; a debt is contracted to pay them; and they still remain unpaid. A territory destined to pay other troops is assigned for this debt; and these other troops fall into the same state of indigence and mutiny with the first. Bond is paid by bond; arrear is turned into new arrear; usury engenders new usury; mutiny, suspended in one quarter, starts up in another; until all the revenues and all the establishments are entangled into one inextricable knot of confusion, from which they are only disengaged by being entirely destroyed. In that state of confusion, in a very few months after the date of the memorial I have just read to you, things were found, when the Nabob's troops, famished to feed English soucars, instead of defending the country, joined the invaders, and deserted in entire bodies to Hyder Ali.¹⁸

The manner in which this transaction was carried on shows that good examples are not easily forgot, especially by those who are bred in a great school. One of those splendid examples give me leave to mention, at a somewhat more early period; because one fraud furnishes light to the discovery of another, and so on, until the whole secret of mysterious iniquity bursts upon you in a blaze of detection. The paper I shall read you is not on record. If you please, you may take it on my word. It is a letter written from one of undoubted information in Madras to Sir John Clavering, describing the practice that prevailed there, whilst the Company's allies were under sale, during the time of Governor Winch's administration.

"One mode," says Clavering's correspondent, "of amassing money at the Nabob's cost is curious. He is generally in arrears to the Company. Here the Governor, being cash-keeper, is generally on good terms with the banker, who manages matters thus. The Governor presses the Nabob for the balance due from him; the Nabob flies to his banker for relief; the banker engages to pay the money, and grants his notes accordingly, which he puts in the cash-book as ready money; the Nabob pays him an interest for it at two and three per cent per mensem, till the tunkaws he grants on the particular districts for it are paid. Matters in the mean time are so managed that there is no call for this money for the Company's service till the tunkaws become due. By this means not a cash is advanced by the banker, though he receives a heavy interest from the Nabob, which is divided as lawful spoil."

Here, Mr. Speaker, you have the whole art and mystery, the true free-mason secret, of the profession of soucaring; by which a few innocent, inexperienced young Englishmen, such as Mr. Paul Benfield, for instance, without property upon which any one would lend to themselves a single shilling, are enabled at once to take provinces in mortgage, to make princes their debtors, and to become creditors for millions.

But it seems the right honorable gentleman's favorite soucar cavalry have proved the payment before the Mayor's Court at Madras! Have they so? Why, then, defraud our anxiety and their characters of that proof? Is it not enough that the charges which I have laid before you have stood on record against these poor injured gentlemen for eight years? Is it not enough that they are in print by the orders of the East India Company for five years? After these gentlemen have borne all the odium of this publication and all the indignation of the Directors with such unexampled equanimity, now that they are at length stimulated into feeling are you to deny them their just relief? But will the right honorable gentleman be pleased to tell us how they came not to give this satisfaction to the Court of Directors, their lawful masters, during all the eight years of this litigated claim? Were they not bound, by every tie that can bind man, to give them this satisfaction? This day, for the first time, we hear of the proofs. But when were these proofs offered? In what cause? Who were the parties? Who inspected, who contested this belated account? Let us see something to oppose to the body of record which appears against them. The Mayor's Court! the Mayor's Court! Pleasant! Does not the honorable gentleman know that the first corps of creditors (the creditors of 1767) stated it as a sort of hardship to them, that they could not have justice at Madras, from the impossibility of their supporting their claims in the Mayor's Court? Why? Because, say they, the members of that court were themselves creditors, and therefore could not sit as judges.¹⁹ Are we ripe to say that no creditor under similar circumstances was member of the court, when the payment which is the ground of this cavalry debt was put in proof?²⁰ Nay, are we not in a manner compelled to conclude that the court was so constituted, when we know there is scarcely a man in Madras who has not some participation in these transactions? It is a shame to hear such proofs mentioned, instead of the honest, vigorous scrutiny which the circumstances of such an affair so indispensably call for.

But his Majesty's ministers, indulgent enough to other scrutinies, have not been satisfied with authorizing the payment of this demand without such inquiry as the act has prescribed; but they have added the arrear of twelve per cent interest, from the year 1777 to the year 1784, to make a new capital, raising thereby 160 to 294,000l. Then they charge a new twelve per cent on the whole from that period, for a transaction in which it will be a miracle if a single penny will be ever found really advanced from the private stock of the pretended creditors.

In this manner, and at such an interest, the ministers have thought proper to dispose of 294,000l. of the public revenues, for what is called the Cavalry Loan. After dispatching this, the right honorable gentleman leads to battle his last grand division, the consolidated debt of 1777. But having exhausted all his panegyric on the two first, he has nothing at all to say in favor of the last. On the contrary, he admits that it was contracted in defiance of the Company's orders, without even the pretended sanction of any pretended representatives. Nobody, indeed, has yet been found hardy enough to stand forth avowedly in its defence. But it is little to the credit of the age, that what has not plausibility enough to find an advocate has influence enough to obtain a protector. Could any man expect to find that protector anywhere? But what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman of the Committee of Secrecy²¹, who had published to the House, and to the world, the facts that condemn these debts, the orders that forbid the incurring of them, the dreadful consequences which attended them? Even in his official letter, when he tramples on his Parliamentary report, yet his general language is the same. Read the preface to this part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could fall from a vigilant guardian of the public treasury upon those who attempted to rob it. What must be felt by every man who has feeling, when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its authenticity,—without a single step taken to settle even the amount of the demand,—without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand pound, principal money,²²—without an attempt made to ascertain the proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of Directors,—of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle, by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about for their own particular purposes?

My honorable friend who made you the motion has sufficiently exposed the nature of this debt. He has stated to you, that its own agents, in the year 1781, in the arrangement they proposed to make at Calcutta, were satisfied to have twenty-five per cent at once struck off from the capital of a great part of this debt, and prayed to have a provision made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all. This was an arrangement of their own, an arrangement made by those who best knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor it merited,²³ and how little hopes they had to find any persons in authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.

But what corrupt men, in the fond imaginations of a sanguine avarice, had not the confidence to propose, they have found a Chancellor of the Exchequer in England hardy enough to undertake for them. He has cheered their drooping spirits. He has thanked the peculators for not despairing of their commonwealth. He has told them they were too modest. He has replaced the twenty-five per cent which, in order to lighten themselves, they had abandoned in their conscious terror. Instead of cutting off the interest, as they had themselves consented to do, with the fourth of the capital, he has added the whole growth of four years' usury of twelve per cent to the first overgrown principal; and has again grafted on this meliorated stock a perpetual annuity of six per cent, to take place from the year 1781. Let no man hereafter talk of the decaying energies of Nature. All the acts and monuments in the records of peculation, the consolidated corruption of ages, the patterns of exemplary plunder in the heroic times of Roman iniquity, never equalled the gigantic corruption of this single act. Never did Nero, in all the insolent prodigality of despotism, deal out to his prætorian guards a donation fit to be named with the largess showered down by the bounty of our Chancellor of the Exchequer on the faithful band of his Indian sepoys.

The right honorable gentleman²⁴ lets you freely and voluntarily into the whole transaction. So perfectly has his conduct confounded his understanding, that he fairly tells you that through the course of the whole business he has never conferred with any but the agents of the pretended creditors. After this, do you want more to establish a secret understanding with the parties,—to fix, beyond a doubt, their collusion and participation in a common fraud?

If this were not enough, he has furnished you with other presumptions that are not to be shaken. It is one of the known indications of guilt to stagger and prevaricate in a story, and to vary in the motives that are assigned to conduct. Try these ministers by this rule. In their official dispatch, they tell the Presidency of Madras that they have established the debt for two reasons: first, because the Nabob (the party indebted) does not dispute it; secondly, because it is mischievous to keep it longer afloat, and that the payment of the European creditors will promote circulation in the country. These two motives (for the plainest reasons in the world) the right honorable gentleman has this day thought fit totally to abandon. In the first place, he rejects the authority of the Nabob of Arcot. It would, indeed, be pleasant to see him adhere to this exploded testimony. He next, upon grounds equally solid, abandons the benefits of that circulation which was to be produced by drawing out all the juices of the body. Laying aside, or forgetting, these pretences of his dispatch, he has just now assumed a principle totally different, but to the full as extraordinary. He proceeds upon a supposition that many of the claims may be fictitious. He then finds, that, in a case where many valid and many fraudulent claims are blended together, the best course for their discrimination is indiscriminately to establish them all. He trusts, (I suppose,) as there may not be a fund sufficient for every description of creditors, that the best warranted claimants will exert themselves in bringing to light those debts which will not bear an inquiry. What he will not do himself he is persuaded will be done by others; and for this purpose he leaves to any person a general power of excepting to the debt. This total change of language and prevarication in principle is enough, if it stood alone, to fix the presumption of unfair dealing. His dispatch assigns motives of policy, concord, trade, and circulation: his speech proclaims discord and litigations, and proposes, as the ultimate end, detection.

But he may shift his reasons, and wind and turn as he will, confusion waits him at all his doubles. Who will undertake this detection? Will the Nabob? But the right honorable gentleman has himself this moment told us that no prince of the country can by any motive be prevailed upon to discover any fraud that is practised upon him by the Company's servants. He says what (with the exception of the complaint against the Cavalry Loan) all the world knows to be true: and without that prince's concurrence, what evidence can be had of the fraud of any the smallest of these demands? The ministers never authorized any person to enter into his exchequer and to search his records. Why, then, this shameful and insulting mockery of a pretended contest? Already contests for a preference have arisen among these rival bond-creditors. Has not the Company itself struggled for a preference for years, without any attempt at detection of the nature of those debts with which they contended? Well is the Nabob of Arcot attended to in the only specific complaint he has ever made. He complained of unfair dealing in the Cavalry Loan. It is fixed upon him with interest on interest; and this loan is excepted from all power of litigation.

This day, and not before, the right honorable gentleman thinks that the general establishment of all claims is the surest way of laying open the fraud of some of them. In India this is a reach of deep policy. But what would be thought of this mode of acting on a demand upon the Treasury in England? Instead of all this cunning, is there not one plain way open,—that is, to put the burden of the proof on those who make the demand? Ought not ministry to have said to the creditors, "The person who admits your debt stands excepted to as evidence; he stands charged as a collusive party, to hand over the public revenues to you for sinister purposes. You say, you have a demand of some millions on the Indian Treasury; prove that you have acted by lawful authority; prove, at least, that your money has been bonâ fide advanced; entitle yourself to my protection by the fairness and fulness of the communications you make"? Did an honest creditor ever refuse that reasonable and honest test?

There is little doubt that several individuals have been seduced by the purveyors to the Nabob of Arcot to put their money (perhaps the whole of honest and laborious earnings) into their hands, and that at such high interest as, being condemned at law, leaves them at the mercy of the great managers whom they trusted. These seduced creditors are probably persons of no power or interest either in England or India, and may be just objects of compassion. By taking, in this arrangement, no measures for discrimination and discovery, the fraudulent and the fair are in the first instance confounded in one mass. The subsequent selection and distribution is left to the Nabob. With him the agents and instruments of his corruption, whom he sees to be omnipotent in England, and who may serve him in future, as they have done in times past, will have precedence, if not an exclusive preference. These leading interests domineer, and have always domineered, over the whole. By this arrangement, the persons seduced are made dependent on their seducers; honesty (comparative honesty at least) must become of the party of fraud, and must quit its proper character and its just claims, to entitle itself to the alms of bribery and peculation.

But be these English creditors what they may, the creditors most certainly not fraudulent are the natives, who are numerous and wretched indeed: by exhausting the whole revenues of the Carnatic, nothing is left for them. They lent bonâ fide; in all probability they were even forced to lend, or to give goods and service for the Nabob's obligations. They had no trusts to carry to his market. They had no faith of alliances to sell. They had no nations to betray to robbery and ruin. They had no lawful government seditiously to overturn; nor had they a governor, to whom it is owing that you exist in India, to deliver over to captivity, and to death in a shameful prison.²⁵

These were the merits of the principal part of the debt of 1777, and the universally conceived causes of its growth; and thus the unhappy natives are deprived of every hope of payment for their real debts, to make provision for the arrears of unsatisfied bribery and treason. You see in this instance that the presumption of guilt is not only no exception to the demands on the public treasury, but with these ministers it is a necessary condition to their support. But that you may not think this preference solely owing to their known contempt of the natives, who ought with every generous mind to claim their first charities, you will find the same rule religiously observed with Europeans too. Attend, Sir, to this decisive case. Since the beginning of the war, besides arrears of every kind, a bond-debt has been contracted at Madras, uncertain in its amount, but represented from four hundred thousand pound to a million sterling. It stands only at the low interest of eight per cent. Of the legal authority on which this debt was contracted, of its purposes for the very being of the state, of its publicity and fairness, no doubt has been entertained for a moment. For this debt no sort of provision whatever has been made. It is rejected as an outcast, whilst the whole undissipated attention of the minister has been employed for the discharge of claims entitled to his favor by the merits we have seen.

I have endeavored to find out, if possible, the amount of the whole of those demands, in order to see how much, supposing the country in a condition to furnish the fund, may remain to satisfy the public debt and the necessary establishments. But I have been foiled in my attempt.

About one fourth, that is, about 220,000l., of the loan of 1767 remains unpaid. How much interest is in arrear I could never discover: seven or eight years' at least, which would make the whole of that debt about 396,000l. This stock, which the ministers in their instructions to the Governor of Madras state as the least exceptionable, they have thought proper to distinguish by a marked severity, leaving it the only one on which the interest is not added to the principal to beget a new interest.

The Cavalry Loan, by the operation of the same authority, is made up to 294,000l.; and this 294,000l., made up of principal and interest, is crowned with a new interest of twelve per cent.

What the grand loan, the bribery loan of 1777, may be is amongst the deepest mysteries of state. It is probably the first debt ever assuming the title of Consolidation that did not express what the amount of the sum consolidated was. It is little less than a contradiction in terms. In the debt of the year 1767 the sum was stated in the act of consolidation, and made to amount to 880,000l. capital. When this consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was represented authentically at 2,400,000l. In that, or rather in a higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.²⁶ It afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000l.²⁷ However, it never was without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness. There was a sort of floating debt of about four or five hundred thousand pounds more ready to be added, as occasion should require.

In short, when you pressed this sensitive-plant, it always contracted its dimensions. When the rude hand of inquiry was withdrawn, it expanded in all the luxuriant vigor of its original vegetation. In the treaty of 1781, the whole of the Nabob's debt to private Europeans is by Mr. Sulivan, agent to the Nabob and his creditors, stated at 2,800,000l., which, if the Cavalry Loan and the remains of the debt of 1767 be subtracted, leaves it nearly at the amount originally declared at the Durbar in 1777: but then there is a private instruction to Mr. Sulivan, which, it seems, will reduce it again to the lower standard of 1,400,000l.

Failing in all my attempts, by a direct account, to ascertain the extent of the capital claimed, (where in all probability no capital was ever advanced,) I endeavored, if possible, to discover it by the interest which was to be paid. For that purpose, I looked to the several agreements for assigning the territories of the Carnatic to secure the principal and interest of this debt. In one of them,²⁸ I found, in a sort of postscript, by way of an additional remark, (not in the body of the obligation,) the debt represented at 1,400,000l.: but when I computed the sums to be paid for interest by instalments in another paper, I found they produced an interest of two millions, at twelve per cent; and the assignment supposed, that, if these instalments might exceed, they might also fall short of, the real provision for that interest.²⁹ Another instalment-bond was afterwards granted: in that bond the interest exactly tallies with a capital of 1,400,000l.:³⁰ but pursuing this capital through the correspondence, I lost sight of it again, and it was asserted that this instalment-bond was considerably short of the interest that ought to be computed to the time mentioned.³¹

Here are, therefore, two statements of equal authority, differing at least a million from each other; and as neither persons claiming, nor any special sum as belonging to each particular claimant, is ascertained in the instruments of consolidation, or in the installment-bonds, a large scope was left to throw in any sums for any persons, as their merits in advancing the interest of that loan might require; a power was also left for reduction, in case a harder hand, or more scanty funds, might be found to require it. Stronger grounds for a presumption of fraud never appeared in any transaction. But the ministers, faithful to the plan of the interested persons, whom alone they thought fit to confer with on this occasion, have ordered the payment of the whole mass of these unknown, unliquidated sums, without an attempt to ascertain them. On this conduct, Sir, I leave you to make your own reflections.

It is impossible (at least I have found it impossible) to fix on the real amount of the pretended debts with which your ministers have thought proper to load the Carnatic. They are obscure; they shun inquiry; they are enormous. That is all you know of them.

That you may judge what chance any honorable and useful end of government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country; though in truth my mind revolts from it, though you will hear it with horror, and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with a few words as to the cause.

The great fortunes made in India, in the beginnings of conquest, naturally excited an emulation in all the parts and through the whole succession of the Company's service. But in the Company it gave rise to other sentiments. They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them. On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions and menaces: and that the servants might not be bribed into them by the native princes, they were strictly forbidden to take any money whatsoever from their hands. But vehement passion is ingenious in resources. The Company's servants were not only stimulated, but better instructed by the prohibition. They soon fell upon a contrivance which answered their purposes far better than the methods which were forbidden: though in this also they violated an ancient, but they thought, an abrogated order. They reversed their proceedings. Instead of receiving presents, they made loans. Instead of carrying on wars in their own name, they contrived an authority, at once irresistible and irresponsible, in whose name they might ravage at pleasure; and being thus freed from all restraint, they indulged themselves in the most extravagant speculations of plunder. The cabal of creditors who have been the object of the late bountiful grant from his Majesty's ministers, in order to possess themselves, under the name of creditors and assignees, of every country in India, as fast as it should be conquered, inspired into the mind of the Nabob of Arcot (then a dependant on the Company of the humblest order) a scheme of the most wild and desperate ambition that I believe ever was admitted into the thoughts of a man so situated.³² First, they persuaded him to consider himself as a principal member in the political system of Europe. In the next place, they held out to him, and he readily imbibed, the idea of the general empire of Hindostan. As a preliminary to this undertaking, they prevailed on him to propose a tripartite division of that vast country: one part to the Company; another to the Mahrattas; and the third to himself. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Deccan.