scaping from fire, sword, and exile, they
fell into the jaws of famine.

The alms of the settlement in this dreadful exigency were certainly
liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could do:
but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched
out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of
sufferance,--whose very excess of luxury in their most plenteous days
had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts,--silent,
patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without
complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every
day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis
of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going
to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens
by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of
hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man,
this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of
us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself
unable to 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 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 those not wholly untouched) escaped the
general ravage.