What the grand loan, the bribery loan of 1777, may be is amongst the deepest mysteries of state. It is probably the first debt ever assuming the title of Consolidation that did not express what the amount of the sum consolidated was. It is little less than a contradiction in terms. In the debt of the year 1767 the sum was stated in the act of consolidation, and made to amount to 880,000_l._ capital. When this consolidation of 1777 was first announced at the Durbar, it was represented authentically at 2,400,000_l._ In that, or rather in a higher state, Sir Thomas Rumbold found and condemned it.[26] It afterwards fell into such a terror as to sweat away a million of its weight at once; and it sunk to 1,400,000_l._[27] However, it never was without a resource for recruiting it to its old plumpness. There was a sort of floating debt of about four or five hundred thousand pounds more ready to be added, as occasion should require. In short, when you pressed this sensitive-plant, it always contracted its dimensions. When the rude hand of inquiry was withdrawn, it expanded in all the luxuriant vigor of its original vegetation. In the treaty of 1781, the whole of the Nabob's debt to private Europeans is by Mr. Sulivan, agent to the Nabob and his creditors, stated at 2,800,000_l._, which, if the Cavalry Loan and the remains of the debt of 1767 be subtracted, leaves it nearly at the amount originally declared at the Durbar in 1777: but then there is a private instruction to Mr. Sulivan, which, it seems, will reduce it again to the lower standard of 1,400,000_l._ Failing in all my attempts, by a direct account, to ascertain the extent of the capital claimed, (where in all probability no capital was ever advanced,) I endeavored, if possible, to discover it by the interest which was to be paid. For that purpose, I looked to the several agreements for assigning the territories of the Carnatic to secure the principal and interest of this debt. In one of them,[28] I found, in a sort of postscript, by way of an additional remark, (not in the body of the obligation,) the debt represented at 1,400,000_l._: but when I computed the sums to be paid for interest by instalments in another paper, I found they produced an interest of two millions, at twelve per cent; and the assignment supposed, that, if these instalments might exceed, they might also fall short of, the real provision for that interest.[29] Another instalment-bond was afterwards granted: in that bond the interest exactly tallies with a capital of 1,400,000_l._:[30] but pursuing this capital through the correspondence, I lost sight of it again, and it was asserted that this instalment-bond was considerably short of the interest that ought to be computed to the time mentioned.[31]