The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
In consequence of this double game, all the territorial revenues have at
one time or other been covered by those locusts, the English soucars.
Not one single foot of the Carnatic has escaped them: a territory as
large as England. During these operations what a scene has that country
presented![49] The usurious European assignee supersedes the Nabob's
native farmer of the revenue; the farmer flies to the Nabob's presence
to claim his bargain; whilst his servants murmur for wages, and his
soldiers mutiny for pay. The mortgage to the European assignee is then
resumed, and the native farmer replaced,--replaced, again to be removed
on the new clamor of the European assignee.[50] Every man of rank and
landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable
last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by
the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is
thus, by a ravenous, because a short-lived succession of claimants,
lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is
left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I
paint. Far, very far, from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to
it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English
yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands
of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and
the same source. Tyrannous exaction brings on servile concealment; and
that again calls forth tyrannous coercion. They move in a circle,
mutually producing and produced; till at length nothing of humanity is
left in the government, no trace of integrity, spirit, or manliness in
the people, who drag out a precarious and degraded existence under this
system of outrage upon human nature. Such is the effect of the
establishment of a debt to the Company, as it has hitherto been managed,
and as it ever will remain, until ideas are adopted totally different
from those which prevail at this time.
Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have
thought fit to renew the Company's old order against contracting private
debts in future. They begin by rewarding the violation of the ancient
law; and then they gravely reenact provisions, of which they have given
bounties for the breach. This inconsistency has been well exposed.[51]
But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive
directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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