Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a relief, into the prison of their native soil. Not suffered to quit the district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults, the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were massacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops, who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief in that province. In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was feared it would go to England. The English Chief in the province, Mr. Goodlad, represented it to Mr. Hastings's Revenue Committee to be (what it was) the greatest and most serious disturbance that ever happened in Bengal. But, good easy man, he was utterly unable to guess to what cause it was to be attributed. He thought there was some irregularity in the collection, but on the whole judged that it had little other cause than a general conspiracy of the husbandmen and landholders, who, as Debi Sing's lease was near expiring, had determined not to pay any more revenue.