The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

into your treasury [the Company's] from its circulation will accelerate the period at which
its ability must cease to pay even the stipulated subsidy." Notwithstanding this state of the
country, of which he was well apprised before he left Calcutta, and the poverty and distress
of the prince having been frequently, but in vain, represented to him, in order to induce him
to forbear his oppressive exactions, he did, in order to furnish the Council with a color for
permitting him to recall the Company's Resident, and to exercise the whole powers of the
Company in his own person, without any check whatsoever, or witness of his proceedings,
except the persons of his own private choice, make the express and positive engagement
aforesaid, which, if understood of a real and substantial discharge of debt for the relief of
the total of the Company's finances, was grossly fallacious: because at the very time he
must have been perfectly sensible, that, in the then state of the revenues and country of
Oude, (which are in effect the Company's revenues and the Company's country,) the debt or
pretended debt aforesaid, asserted to be about five hundred thousand pounds, or
thereabouts, could not be paid without contracting another debt at an usurious interest,
without encroaching on the necessary establishments or on private property or on the pay of
the army, or without grievous oppression of the country, or all these together. And it doth
appear that one hundred thousand pounds towards the said payment of debts was borrowed
at Calcutta by the Nabob's agent there, but at what interest is not known; it appears also that
other sums were borrowed for arrear of the interest, on which forty thousand pounds
sterling appears in the Company's claims for the current year, and that various deductions
were made from the jaghires restored to the Begums, as well as other parts of the Nabob's
family; and it did and doth appear that an arrear is still due to the old and new brigade,—but
whether the same be growing or not doth not appear: yet he hath not hesitated to assert that
he had "provided for the complete discharge, in one year, of a debt contracted by the

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