This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or
doing. A ministry of another kind would first have improved the country,
and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future
force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country, there
is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers,
from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by
fire, sword, and famine; their sympathies took another direction: they
were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless
itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long
missed the harvest of its returning months; they felt for peculation,
which had been for so many years raking in the dust of an empty
treasury; they were melted into compassion for rapine and oppression,
licking their dry, parched, unbloody jaws. These were the objects of
their solicitude. These were the necessities for which they were
studious to provide.

To state the country and its revenues in their real condition, and to
provide for those fictitious claims consistently with the support of an
army and a civil establishment, would have been impossible; therefore
the ministers are silent on that head, and rest themselves on the
authority of Lord Macartney, who in a letter to the court of directors
written in the year 1781, speculating on what might be the result of a
wise management of the countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates
the revenues, as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a
year, as he does those of the King of Tanjore (which had not been
assigned) at four hundred and fifty. On this Lord Macartney grounds his
calculations, and on this they choose to ground theirs. It was on this
calculation that the ministry, in direct opposition to the remonstrances
of the court of directors, have compelled that miserable enslaved body
to put their hands to an order for appropriating the enormous sum of
L480,000 annually, as a fund for paying to their rebellious servants a
debt contracted in defiance of their clearest and most positive
injunctions.

The authority and information of Lord Macartney is held high on this
occasion, though it is totally rejected in every other particular of
this business. I believe I have the honor of being almost as old an
acquaintance as any Lord Macartney has. A constant and unbroken
friendship has subsisted between us from a very early period;