Sir, at this moment, it will not be necessary to consider the various
operations which the capital and interest of this debt have successively
undergone. I shall speak to these operations when I come particularly to
answer the right honorable gentleman on each of the heads, as he has
thought proper to divide them. But this was the exact view in which
these debts first appeared to the Court of Directors, and to the world.
It varied afterwards. But it never appeared in any other than a most
questionable shape. When this gigantic phantom of debt first appeared
before a young minister, it naturally would have justified some degree
of doubt and apprehension. Such a prodigy would have filled any common
man with superstitious fears. He would exorcise that shapeless, nameless
form, and by everything sacred would have adjured it to tell by what
means a small number of slight individuals, of no consequence or
situation, possessed of no lucrative offices, without the command of
armies or the known administration of revenues, without profession of
any kind, without any sort of trade sufficient to employ a peddler,
could have, in a few years, (as to some, even in a few months,) amassed
treasures equal to the revenues of a respectable kingdom? Was it not
enough to put these gentlemen, in the novitiate of their administration,
on their guard, and to call upon them for a strict inquiry, (if not to
justify them in a reprobation of those demands without any inquiry at
all,) that, when all England, Scotland, and Ireland had for years been
witness to the immense sums laid out by the servants of the Company in
stocks of all denominations, in the purchase of lands, in the buying and
building of houses, in the securing quiet seats in Parliament or in the
tumultuous riot of contested elections, in wandering throughout the
whole range of those variegated modes of inventive prodigality which
sometimes have excited our wonder, sometimes roused our indignation,
that, after all, India was four millions still in debt to _them_? India
in debt to _them_! For what? Every debt, for which an equivalent of some
kind or other is not given, is, on the face of it, a fraud.
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