, left him no
sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first
letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable
words. "In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the
oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not
enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the
facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not
collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and
every insult of disgrace,--and this not confined to a few, but extended
over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to
servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to
resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot,
when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an
exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half
of that demand,--when he finds himself so far from being released, that
he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his
feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail,
adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the
reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their
attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these
prejudices under such circumstances."

He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every
discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft,
fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion
of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his
employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions
for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements
and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested
reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe,
never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of
Bengal,--of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so
absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in
those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before
Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports,
carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before
you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of
Governor Hastings's general system of bribery.