Read the preface to this
part of the ministerial arrangement, and you would imagine that this
debt was to be crushed, with all the weight of indignation which could
fall from a vigilant guardian of the public treasury upon those who
attempted to rob it. What must be felt by every man who has feeling,
when, after such a thundering preamble of condemnation, this debt is
ordered to be paid without any sort of inquiry into its
authenticity,--without a single step taken to settle even the amount of
the demand,--without an attempt so much as to ascertain the real persons
claiming a sum which rises in the accounts from one million three
hundred thousand pound sterling to two million four hundred thousand
pound, principal money,[22]--without an attempt made to ascertain the
proprietors, of whom no list has ever yet been laid before the Court of
Directors,--of proprietors who are known to be in a collusive shuffle,
by which they never appear to be the same in any two lists handed about
for their own particular purposes?
My honorable friend who made you the motion has sufficiently exposed the
nature of this debt. He has stated to you, that _its own agents_, in the
year 1781, in the arrangement _they proposed_ to make at Calcutta, were
satisfied to have twenty-five per cent at once struck off from the
capital of a great part of this debt, and prayed to have a provision
made for this reduced principal, without any interest at all.
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