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
creditors and soucars, whom every man, who did not fall in love with
oppression and corruption on an experience of the calamities they
produced, would have raised wall before wall and mound before mound to
keep from a possibility of entrance, a more destructive enemy than Hyder
Ali is introduced into that kingdom. By this part of their arrangement,
in which they establish a debt to the Nabob of Arcot, in effect and
substance, they deliver over Tanjore, bound hand and foot, to Paul
Benfield, the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of a
country which has for years been an object of an unremitted, but,
unhappily, an unequal struggle, between the bounties of Providence to
renovate and the wickedness of mankind to destroy.
The right honorable gentleman[56] talks of his fairness in determining
the territorial dispute between the Nabob of Arcot and the prince of
that country, when he superseded the determination of the Directors, in
whom the law had vested the decision of that controversy. He is in this
just as feeble as he is in every other part. But it is not necessary to
say a word in refutation of any part of his argument. The mode of the
proceeding sufficiently speaks the spirit of it. It is enough to fix his
character as a judge, that he _never heard the Directors in defence of
their adjudication, nor either of the parties in support of their
respective claims_. It is sufficient for me that he takes from the Rajah
of Tanjore by this pretended adjudication, or rather from his unhappy
subjects, 40,000_l._ a year of his and their revenue, and leaves upon
his and their shoulders all the charges that can be made on the part of
the Nabob, on the part of his creditors, and on the part of the Company,
without so much as hearing him as to right or to ability. But what
principally induces me to leave the affair of the territorial dispute
between the Nabob and the Rajah to another day is this,--that, both the
parties being stripped of their all, it little signifies under which of
their names the unhappy, undone people are delivered over to the
merciless soucars, the allies of that right honorable gentleman and the
Chancellor of the Exchequer. In them ends the account of this long
dispute of the Nabob of Arcot and the Rajah of Tanjore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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