“Our leaders pursued other things; the welfare of the public was entirely forgotten, private interests, pleasure, luxury were come to a stupendous height. They were warned three months before Hyder’s invasion but they despised the warning saying, ‘Hyder might as well fly as come into the Carnatic!’ None could persuade them to the contrary till they saw his horse at their garden houses. Then consternation seized them, nothing but confusion was visible. Hyder pursued his plan, took one fort after another, till he got possession of Arcot.... Now what is to be done? I say with Jeremy! ‘Be thou not terrible unto me, O God’. This calamity is from the Lord and doubtless He intends to purge us from our sins and take away our dross ... our infidelity, our contempt of divine things is beyond description and brings upon us the wrath of God. Heathens and nominal Christians were asleep and minding nothing but the things of this world. Who knows but they may arise on hearing the thundering voice of the law.” The grain stores having been destroyed by the enemy, no seed was sown, no harvest could be reaped, and famine, gaunt and deadly, stalked through the land. No strong men were left, only wandering skeletons were met within the miserable and devastated villages. Hyder carried off the healthy children and the flower of the people, the rest were left to die, as Schwartz says: “When passing through the streets early in the morning, the dead were lying in heaps on the dunghills.” And here in this extremity we see the forethought and practical wisdom of Schwartz. With the anticipation of such a famine he had purchased twelve thousand bushels of rice, and when it seemed as if the soldiers would die for want of food, he went to the natives, who had lost all confidence in the word of a European, and got them to bring in their animals and stores, making himself personally responsible that they should be duly paid. “I afterwards settled with the natives and they went home quite satisfied. The Lord also enabled me to consider the poor, so that I had it in my power to feed a large number for the space of seventeen months.”