x
hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day! A tiller of land to pay
six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government! What
exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of
wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder
between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the
country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted,
overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part
of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. An
universal treasury extent and process of execution followed on the
cattle and stock, and was enforced with more or less rigor in every
quarter. We have it in evidence, that in those sales five cows were sold
for not more than seven or eight shillings. All other things were
depreciated in the same proportion. The sale of the instruments of
husbandry succeeded to that of the corn and stock. Instances there are,
where, all other things failing, the farmers were dragged from the court
to their houses, in order to see them first plundered, and then burnt
down before their faces. It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it
was a savage war made upon the country.

The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies.
The families were disposed of. It is a known observation, that those who
have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly
attached to their children and wives. The most tender of parents sold
their children at market. The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their
wives. The tyranny of Mr. Hastings extinguished every sentiment of
father, son, brother, and husband!

I come now to the last stage of their miseries. Everything visible and
vendible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.

It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from
the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors,
all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature,
attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient
rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which
producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow
irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury,
and malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing
their avarice, their vices are no longer human. From cruel men they are
transfor