his oppressive exactions, he did, in order to
furnish the Council with a color for permitting him to recall the
Company's Resident, and to exercise the whole powers of the Company in
his own person, without any check whatsoever, or witness of his
proceedings, except the persons of his own private choice, make the
express and positive engagement aforesaid, which, if understood of a
real and substantial discharge of debt for the relief of the total of
the Company's finances, was grossly fallacious: because at the very time
he must have been perfectly sensible, that, in the then state of the
revenues and country of Oude, (which are in effect the Company's
revenues and the Company's country,) the debt or pretended debt
aforesaid, asserted to be about five hundred thousand pounds, or
thereabouts, could not be paid without contracting another debt at an
usurious interest, without encroaching on the necessary establishments
or on private property or on the pay of the army, or without grievous
oppression of the country, or all these together. And it doth appear
that one hundred thousand pounds towards the said payment of debts was
borrowed at Calcutta by the Nabob's agent there, but at what interest is
not known; it appears also that other sums were borrowed for arrear of
the interest, on which forty thousand pounds sterling appears in the
Company's claims for the current year, and that various deductions were
made from the jaghires restored to the Begums, as well as other parts of
the Nabob's family; and it did and doth appear that an arrear is still
due to the old and new brigade,--but whether the same be growing or not
doth not appear: yet he hath not hesitated to assert that he had
"provided for the _complete_ discharge, in _one_ year, of a debt
contracted by _the accumulation of many_, and from a country whose
resources have been wasted and dissipated by three successive years of
drought and one of anarchy." But the said Hastings never did even
realize the payments to be made in the first year, (as he confesses in
the said letter,) except by an anticipation of the second; and though he
states in his letter aforesaid the following facts and engagements, that
is to say, "_that a recovery of so large a part of your property_ [the
Company's] will afford a seasonable and substantial relief to the
necessities of your government, and enable it (for such is my confident
hope) _to begin on the reduction of your debt at interest_ befo