Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function,—fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and, amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses,—were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land.
Those who were able to evade this tempest, fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. The alms of the settlement of Madras, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could do; but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its hands for food.
For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by a hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India.
I was going to wake your justice toward 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, 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;—I mean to produce to you more than three witnesses, who will support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed through every part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or seven districts to the north and to the south (and these not wholly untouched) escaped the general ravage.
NOTES.—This selection is an extract from Burke's celebrated speech in Parliament, in 1785, on the Nabob of Arcot's debts; it bore upon the maladministration of Hastings.
Arcot, a district in India, had been ceded to the British on condition that they should pay the former ruler's debts. These were found to be enormous, and the creditors proved to be individuals in the East India Company's employ. The creditors, for their private gain, induced the Nabob to attempt the subjugation of other native princes, among whom was Hyder Ali. The latter at first made successful resistance, and compelled the Nabob and his allies to sign a treaty. The treaty was not kept, and the destruction above recounted took place.
The Carnatic is a province in British India, on the eastern side of the peninsula; it contains about 50,000 square miles. Madras is a city, and Tanjore a town, in this province.