try were, before the invasion of
Hyder, reduced to a _gross_ annual receipt of three hundred and sixty
thousand pound.[54] From this receipt the subsidy I have just stated is
taken. This again, by payments in advance, by extorting deposits of
additional sums to a vast amount for the benefit of their soucars, and
by an endless variety of other extortions, public and private, is loaded
with a debt, the amount of which I never could ascertain, but which is
large undoubtedly, generating an usury the most completely ruinous that
probably was ever heard of: _that is, forty-eight per cent, payable
monthly, with compound interest_.[55]

Such is the state to which the Company's servants have reduced that
country. Now come the reformers, restorers, and comforters of India.
What have they done? In addition to all these tyrannous exactions, with
all these ruinous debts in their train, looking to one side of an
agreement whilst they wilfully shut their eyes to the other, they
withdraw from Tanjore all the benefits of the treaty of 1762, and they
subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to
the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to
_him_, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now
stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of
oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of
territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own
protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without
discounting a shilling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this
harassed nation to be tributary to a person who is himself, by their own
arrangement, deprived of the right of war or peace, deprived of the
power of the sword, forbid to keep up a single regiment of soldiers, and
is therefore wholly disabled from all protection of the country which is
the object of the pretended tribute. Tribute hangs on the sword. It is
an incident inseparable from real, sovereign power. In the present case,
to suppose its existence is as absurd as it is cruel and oppressive. And
here, Mr. Speaker, you have a clear exemplification of the use of those
false names and false colors which the gentlemen who have lately taken
possession of India choose to lay on for the purpose of disguising their
plan of oppression. The Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore have, in
truth and substance, no more than a merely civil authority, held in the
most en