In this manner, and at such an interest, the ministers have thought proper to dispose of 294,000_l._ of the public revenues, for what is called the Cavalry Loan. After dispatching this, the right honorable gentleman leads to battle his last grand division, the consolidated debt of 1777. But having exhausted all his panegyric on the two first, he has nothing at all to say in favor of the last. On the contrary, he admits that it was contracted in defiance of the Company's orders, without even the pretended sanction of any pretended representatives. Nobody, indeed, has yet been found hardy enough to stand forth avowedly in its defence. But it is little to the credit of the age, that what has not plausibility enough to find an advocate has influence enough to obtain a protector. Could any man expect to find that protector anywhere? But what must every man think, when he finds that protector in the chairman of the Committee of Secrecy[21], who had published to the House, and to the world, the facts that condemn these debts, the orders that forbid the incurring of them, the dreadful consequences which attended them? Even in his official letter, when he tramples on his Parliamentary report, yet his general language is the same. Read the preface to this part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could fall from a vigilant guardian of the public treasury upon those who attempted to rob it. What must be felt by every man who has feeling, when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its authenticity,--without a single step taken to settle even the amount of the demand,--without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand pound, principal money,[22]--without an attempt made to ascertain the proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of Directors,--of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle, by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about for their own particular purposes? My honorable friend who made you the motion has sufficiently exposed the nature of this debt. He has stated to you, that _its own agents_, in the year 1781, in the arrangement _they proposed_ to make at Calcutta, were satisfied to have twenty-five per cent at once struck off from the capital of a great part of this debt, and prayed to have a provision made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all. This was an arrangement of _their own_, an arrangement made by those who best knew the true constitution of their own debt, who knew how little favor it merited,[23] and how little hopes they had to find any persons in authority abandoned enough to support it as it stood.