This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said.
This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or
doing. A ministry of another kind would have first improved the country,
and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future
force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country there
is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers,
from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by
fire, sword, and famine: their sympathies took another direction; they
were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless
itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long
missed the harvest of its returning months;[40] they felt for
peculation, which had been for so many years raking in the dust of an
empty treasury; they were melted into compassion for rapine and
oppression, licking their dry, parched, unbloody jaws. These were the
objects of their solicitude. These were the necessities for which they
were studious to provide.
To state the country and its revenues in their real condition, and to
provide for those fictitious claims, consistently with the support of an
army and a civil establishment, would have been impossible; therefore
the ministers are silent on that head, and rest themselves on the
authority of Lord Macartney, who, in a letter to the Court of Directors,
written in the year 1781, speculating on what might be the result of a
wise management of the countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates
the revenue, as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a
year, as he does those of the king of Tanjore (which had not been
assigned) at four hundred and fifty.
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