I was going to awake your
justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing
before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger: of all
the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the
nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels
himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to
manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so
nauseous and disgusting, they are so degrading to the sufferers and to
the hearers, they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on
better thoughts, I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this
hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.
For eighteen months,[37] without intermission, this destruction raged
from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did
these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son,
absolve themselves of their impious vow, that, when the British armies
traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all
directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one
man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any
description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole
region. With the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of
some few forts, I wish to be understood as speaking literally.
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