"This country of Cuttah, which formerly depended on the Rohilla States, and which I consider as now appertaining to the Company, was very populous and flourishing; but since the commencement of the Nabob Vizier's government, the farmers appointed by his ministers have desolated the country. Its situation is at present very ruinous; thousands of villages, formerly populous, are now utterly deserted, and no trace left of them. I have already written to Roy Buckstowr Sing a full account of the tyranny and oppression exercised by the farmers, to be communicated to you: the constant revenue of a country depends on the care of its rulers to preserve it in a flourishing state. I have been induced to make the representation by my attachment to the interest of the Company; for otherwise it is no concern of mine. Should these oppressions continue one or two years longer, and the rulers take no measures to put a stop to them, the whole country will be a desert." My Lords, upon these statements I have only to make this remark,--that you have seen the first state of this country, and that the period when it had fallen into the state last described was about two years after Mr. Hastings had obtained the majority in the Council and began to govern this country by his lieutenants. We know that the country was put by him under military collectors: you see the consequences. The person who makes this representation to Mr. Hastings of the state of the country, of its distress and calamity, and of the desolation of a thousand of the villages formerly flourishing in it, is no less a person than a prince of a neighboring country, a person of whom you have often heard, and to whom the cause of humanity is much indebted, namely, Fyzoola Khân,--a prince whose country the English Resident, travelling through, declares to be cultivated like a garden. That this was the state of the Rohilla country is owing to its having very fortunately been one of those that escaped the dominion of Mr. Hastings. We will now read to your Lordships a letter from Sir Eyre Coote to the board at Calcutta, dated the 11th of September, 1779.