mmissioner with the
tale, and ended with these melancholy words: "I have suffered this
indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me: I call for
justice." He called in vain.

Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive
demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into
despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a
body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers
invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of
circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a
relief, into the prison of their native soil. Not suffered to quit the
district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had
scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of
tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to
exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair
drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most
quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an
universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults,
the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes
the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were
massacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire
to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person
with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been
the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all
these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops,
who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the
impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired
with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel
and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or
even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief
in that province.

In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to
exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into
content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every
moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces
in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers
all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was
feared it would go to England.