These are certainly atrocious acts; yet when a British subject reads such passages as the following, in the histories of East India government, he must feel that if they were ten times as infamous and numerous as they are in reality, it becomes not _him_ to censure them. Bolts, who was a judge of the mayor's court of Calcutta, says, in his "Considerations on India Affairs," page 194, "With every species of monopoly, therefore, every kind of oppression to manufacturers of all denominations throughout the whole country has daily increased; insomuch that weavers, for daring to sell their goods, and Dallals and Pykars, for having contributed to, or connived at, such sales, have by the _Company's agents,_ been frequently seized and imprisoned, confined in irons, fined considerable sums of money, flogged, and deprived, in the most ignominious manner, of what they esteem most valuable, their castes. Weavers also, upon their inability to perform such agreements as have been _forced from them by the Company's agents_, universally known in Bengal by the name of _Mutchulcahs_, have had their goods seized and sold on the spot, to make good the deficiency: and the winders of raw silk, called _Nagaards_, have been treated also with such injustice, that instances have been known of their cutting off their thumbs, to prevent their being forced to wind silk. This last kind of workmen were pursued with such rigour, during Lord Clive's late government in Bengal, from a zeal for _increasing the Company's investment_ of raw silk, that the most sacred laws of society were atrociously violated; for it was _a common thing for the Company's scapoys_ to be sent by force of arms to break open the houses of the Armenian merchants established at Sydabad (who have from time immemorial been largely concerned in the silk trade), and forcibly take the _Nagaards_ from their work, and carry them away to the English factory."