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tion of those pieces was 150,000l. sterling; his wants thus increasing on him, made his government very oppressive, and its oppression increased with them. Whatever support it might have derived from the affection of the inhabitants at his accession, inadequate as it was, was greatly diminished before his death, His prodigality sometimes led him into extravagant acts of what is falsely called liberality; and his public appearance and processions were extremely magnificent. Much oppression may be exercised by a sovereign, yet, with a few well-timed largesses, and splendid public spectacles, it may be a long time before he comes to be hated. His troops were unequal to the protection of his internal government, "unskilful and undisciplined."* But there has not been discovered in all the evidence produced, that they entertained any thing like disaffection to him. The revenues of Oude, at his accession, were relatively in a prosperous state; but from that period to his death, they decreased with the most alarming rapidity; and the government which was transmitted to his successor, was in power much less equal to its own support, than it was when he received it.

"Saadut Al may be considered as the immediate successor of his brother Asoph; (passing by the short occupation of the Musnud by Vizier Ali,) no long period after his accession; the powers of self-support remaining in the government, were found much weaker than they apparently were at the decease of his brother. Let that power be considered in its integral parts successively, as before. Revenue is the sinews of power, internal or external. Notwithstanding the great defalcation of the income of Oude, in the time of Asoph ul Dowlah; it was further greatly decreased in the three first years of Saadut Ali. In 1801, he transmitted to the Marquis Wellesley a statement of the revenue of the country: from this description it is to be understood, that its amount, in divers years, for a considerable period past, was therein given, from which statement the arithmetical deduction was, "that the resources of his dominions were declining, with a rapidity menacing the joint interest of the company, and the nabob in the province of Oude, with utter and speedy destruction. The public income was reduced in every district; and every settlement with new aumils was concluded for a diminished jumma." The aumils are farmers general of the revenue of great districts; and the jumma the yearly rent they agree to pay. These are general positions relating to the whole province: the papers enable us to give, with tolerable exactness, the defalcation of income in some of the greater districts of the nabob's territories. Rohilcund, before it was conquered by the English," paid eighty lacks of rupees a year, and afterwards a crore." § This noble territory our munificence added to the dominions of the nabob of Qude, Lord Cornwallis, after thus stating its former value, adds, forty lacks cannot now be collected from it. In 1801, it was valued by the company's agents at thirty-nine Jacks of rupees. The nabob contended that its true produce was forty-four; and it was settled at forty lacks. At this rate, this ruined and exhausted country, reduced to this state, by our unfortunate liberality, was received in 1801 as part of the territory ceded by the nabob, and a stop thus put to the fatal effects of our former act its progress to the last stage of desolation, and the best hope afforded to it of becoming again, in no long lapse of years, what it was before. And it is to be observed, that the value this gift of ours was taken at, the dreadful abuses of which almost gave us a right to resume it, without any valuable consideration, exceeds two-thirds of that of the whole of the ceded districts. Add the Douab of the Jumpa and the Ganges, a like donation of England to Oude, and abused in the like mode; and it will appear, comparatively speaking, that by the cession, the ancient kingdom of Oude itself has only been amerced in two or three paltry manors."

I am not aware, that any respectable person has yet denied the necessity of reducing the nabob's army. That necessity has been amply demonstrated, as well by the nabob's own appeals to the British government, as by the evidence of every military officer, who has had an opportunity of seeing the troops of Oude. It is also

* Letter of Lord C. to Nabob. 1787. East India Papers, No. 6, p. 4.

East India Papers, No. 3, p. 149.

Ibid, No. 3, p. 143. Colonel Scot.

Letter of Lord Cornwallis to Nabob, 1793. East India Papers, No. 2, p. 16.

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well illustrated by Mr. Brand, in the following statement: "We have an account of the state of this army from the best authorities; for the retaining of which, on foot, the nabob expressed a pertinacity so determined on most occasions, although on some he displayed the utmost apprehension, of what their treachery might attempt against his person. A summary shall be given of its condition and dispositions, abstracted from the public documents. With regard to equipments, many of the battalions were not armed:"* as to "clothing, repairs of arms, and the provision of new arms, nothing had been expended for those purposes since the accession of the nabob." And when the invasion of Zemaun Shah was expected, "there was not a gun found in that part of his dominions, lying near those forts and passes of the Ganges it was judged proper to guard, which was fit for service." Such were the equipments of this army, and such its artillery.

"All these defects, which rendered this half-armed, half-clothed rabble an incumbrance to the general defence of the country, and a formidable enemy only to its inhabitants, are lost sight of when our eyes are turned to the dark and insidious spirit of treachery, which actuated that general mass. It is thus, sir Alured Clarke, commander in chief in Bengal, wrote to the nabob on this most important of subjects in 1799: The conduct of your troops employed to assist in seizing the person of the rebel, and assassin, Vizier Ali, must have satisfied you, that the blackest treachery toward your person and government, is at all times to be apprehended from them." And when our army was obliged to march to defend the nabob's country from a formidable invasion, necessity required the detaching of a part of that force to Lucknow itself, to protect his person "against the evil intention of his own guards, in the centre of his own capital."§

"Nothing but the total reduction of an army so defective in every point of its formation and constitution, so entirely corrupted in every principle, can prevent the otherwise inevitable destruction it must bring upon the state: nothing but the most melancholy frustration of every hope must follow the attempt to reform it. Its whole mass of materials being entirely corrupted, no change of their combination, or re-modeling the form of it, can produce any good effect. The sketch of the new plan may look and be more scientific, more like to answer every military purpose; still the new order must consist of bodies of the same men, however divided, to be re-combined in an apparently better manner; and the individuals of which they will be still formed, being corrupted by long indiscipline, and the worst of habits, every corps of the reformed army, composed exclusively of those individuals, must, in its very initial elements, be corrupt also.

"But I go on with proofs of another and a higher kind of the necessity of reduction. When a nation is sunk to the utmost depression of semi-barbarism, where murder, and the violation of property are become so frequent as to be little regarded, and of course a great part of the population are become a banditti, swarming over the face of the whole country; the first steps to the restoration of any thing like civil government, must be vigorously supported by an armed force:thus must the gangs everywhere traversing the country, be broken and dispersed; and their re-collecting in numbers instantly hindered; such of them as do not fly will be confined again to fixed residence; where they must either perish for want, or have recourse to labour for subsistence. Of this class there is some hope that their predatory manners will be changed, when the stimulus of absolute want is thus removed.

"Here we clearly discern the necessity of an army to begin the restoration of law and order in such a society; and to guard its progress until the reformation has take a due and solid consistence. The operation must of necessity, at the beginning, be summary; but while it is said that it requires all the promptness of military obedience, I also add, that it requires the whole moderation of regularity and discipline. The reform is of the first necessity in the nabob's dominions. The treaty

* Sir James Craig, Minutes, p. 97.

† Colonel Scot to Marquis Wellesley, East India Papers, No. 108,
Sir James Craig, Minutes, p. 90.

|| East India Papers, p. 8.

§ Declaration of Marquis Wellesley, 1801. East India Papers, No. 5, p. 6.

stipulates for it as a most essential condition. His late army was the most unfit for this important duty; a force, therefore, so qualified, was of necessity to be provided; and that undisciplined, infamous rabble, called an army, was very properly

reduced to make room for it.

"The necessity of entirely disbanding the country troops existing in 1801, is likewise shown on another and most important ground. From the necessity of the suppression of anarchy, the creation of a police, and of the introduction of administration of laws in the province of Oude. It is demonstrated, nothing of this is feasible without the possession of an army high in discipline, obedience, and regularity. But that the old army was so corrupt, as to be always glad of a pretence to resist government. And that it was the machine employed by ambitious great men, who perpetually trampled under foot the law, and the nabob in whose name they were administered; and rendered its feeble tribunals nullities; or rather instruments to accumulate oppressions invested with legal forms, on oppressions which did not possess them. And if we come to special authorities, the opinion of a governor-general, lord Cornwallis, has been produced on the necessity of a reduction, between whose maxims for the government of India, and those of the Marquis Wellesley, a certain want of analogy is always supposed to have subsisted; and to this has been added testimonies of the sentiments of the directors at large, and of their secret committee; and the declaration for a long series of years, of the government of Bengal, recorded in their proceedings; upon whose eye all the evils arising from the army formerly existing, and the additions the continuance of it must bring after it, perpetually and necessarily forced themselves. From this accumulated mass of evidence, it follows, that it was the duty of the protecting power, to employ an authority vigorous in the highest moral degree, but not passing its boundary, to annihilate such an army; and it will be proved, that none other was employed by Marquis Wellesley. The nabob is raised to his dignity by our power alone; it is the sole support of the continuance of his government; for withdraw it and it instantly falls. It has been shown, that it is the duty of the India company to see, that the people suffer no grievous oppression from the ruler constituted over them by their act; nor can they demit the power over such ruler, by which this protection may be at all times extended to the people. Their first of duties in the situation they have voluntarily placed themselves, is to take care, né quid detrimenti populus accipiat. By that act they are become the guardians of the ruler; but, by the same act they have imposed upon themselves all the duties of guardians of the people."

(To be Continued.)

STATE PAPERS.

DECLARATION OF THE EMPEROR OF RUSSIA.

ἐσ The greater value the emperor attached to the friendship of his Britannic majesty, the greater was his regret at perceiving that that monarchi altogether separated himself from him.

"Twice has the emperor taken up arms, in which his cause was most directly that of England; and he solicited in vain from England a co-operation which her interest required. He did not demand that her troops should be united with his ; he desired only that they should effect a diversion. He was astonished that in her cause she did not act in union with him; but coolly contemplating a bloody spectacle, in a war which had been kindled at her will, she sent troops to attack Buenos Ayres. One part of her armies, which appeared destined to make a diversion in Italy, quitted at length Sicily, where it was assembled. There was reason to believe that this was done to make an attack upon the coasts of Naples, when it was understood that it was occupied in attempting to seize and appropriate to itself Egypt.

"But what sensibly touched the heart of his imperial majesty was, to perceive that England, contrary to her good faith, and the express and precise terms of treaties, troubled at sea the commerce of his subjects. And at what an epoch! When the blood of Russians was shedding in the most glorious warfares; which drew down, and fixed against the armies of his imperial majesty, all the military force of his majesty the emperor of the French, with whom England was, and is now, at war.

"When the two emperors made peace, his majesty, in spite of his just resent. ments against England, did not refrain from rendering her service. His majesty sti pulated, even in the very treaty, that he would become mediator between her and France and finally he offered his mediation to the king of Great Britain. His majesty announced to the king, that it was with a view to obtain for him honourable conditions. But the British ministry, apparently faithful to that plan which was to loosen and break the bonds which had connected Russia and England, rejected the mediation.

"The peace between Russia and France was to prepare a general peace. Then it was that England suddenly quitted that apparent lethargy to which she had abandoned herself: but it was to cast upon the north of Europe new firebrands, which were to enkindle and nourish the flames of war, which she did not wish to see extinguished. Her fleets and her troops appeared upon the coasts of Denmark, to execute there an act of violence of which history, so fertile in examples, does not furnish a single parallel. A tranquil and oderate power, which, by long and unchanging wisdom, had obtained in the circle of monarchies a moral dignity, sees itself assaulted and treated as if it had been forging plots, and meditating the ruin of England; and all to justify its prompt and total spoliation.

"The emperor, wounded in his dignity, in the interests of his people, in his engagements with the courts of the north, by this act of violence committed in the Baltic, which is an enclosed sea, whose tranquillity had been for a long period, and with the privity of the cabinet of St. James's, the subject of reciprocal guarantee, did not dissemble his resentment against England, and announced to her that he could not remain insensible to it.

"His majesty did not foresee that when England, having employed her force successfully, was about to bear away her prey, she would commit a new outrage against Denmark, and that his majesty was to share in it. New proposals were made, each more insidious than the foregoing, which were to connect with the British power, Denmark subjected, disgraced, and affecting to applaud what had been wrought against her..

"The emperor still less foresaw that it would be proposed to him that he should guarantee this submission, and that he should pledge himself that this act of violence should have no unpleasant consequences to England. Her ambassador believed that it was possible to propose to his majesty's ministry, that his Majesty should become the apologist and the protector of what he had so loudly blamed,

"To this proceeding of the cabinet of St. James's, the emperor paid no other attention than it deserved. He thought it time to put limits to his moderation,

"The prince royal of Denmark, endowed with a character full of energy, and nobleness, and possessing from Providence, a dignity equal to his high rank, had informed the emperor, that justly incensed at what had taken place at Copenhagen, he had not ratified the convention, and considered it as of no effect.

"At this moment he has just communicated to his imperial majesty, new proposals which have been made to him, which serve only to inflame his resistance instead of appeasing it; because they tend to impress upon his actions the seal of degradation, the impression of which they have never borne.

"The emperor, touched with the confidence which the prince royal placed in him, and having considered his own peculiar complaints against England; having maturely examined, too, the engagements which he had entered into with the powers of the north-engagements formed by the empress Catherine, and by his late majesty, the emperor, both of glorious meniory-has resolved to fulfil them. His imperial ma jesty, therefore, breaks off all communication with England; he recals the whole of the mission which he has sent thither, and no longer chuses to keep with him that of his Britannic majesty. There shall, from henceforth, be no connection between the two countries.

"The emperor declares, that he annuls, and for ever, every preceding convention between England and Russia, and particularly that entered into in 1801, the 5th (17th) of the month of June.

"He proclaims anew the principles of the armed neutrality, that monument of the wisdom of the empress Catherine, and engages never to recede from that system.

"He demands of England, complete satisfaction to all his subjects, for their just reclamations of vessels and merchandize, detained against the express tenor of treaties concluded in his own reign.

"The emperor engages, there shall be no re-establishment of concord, between Russia and England, till satisfaction shall have been given to Denmark.

"The emperor expects that his Britannic majesty, instead of suffering his ministers, as he does, to scatter the seeds of fresh war, listening only to his own feelings, will be disposed to conclude such treaty, with his majesty, the emperor of France, as shall prolong, (to use the expression) interminably, (à toute la terme) the invaluable blessings of peace.

"When the emperor shall be satisfied upon all the preceding points, and especially upon that of peace between France and England, without which no part of Europe can promise itself real tranquillity, his imperial majesty will then gladly resume with Great Britain those relations of amity, which, under the just discontent which he could not but feel, he has, perhaps, preserved too long."

Given at St. Petersburgh, 20th (31st) October.·

TRANSLATION OF A TURKISH DISPATCH PRESENTED BY HIS EXCELLENCY MOHAMMED ALI PACHA, GOVERNOR OF EGYPT, TO HIS

HIGHNESS THE CAIMAKAN PACHA.

[Upon the upper margin, to the left, is written the following note, in red letters, probably by the Reis Effendi : "This is a dispatch of your slave, Mohammed

Ali Pacha, governor of Egypt."]

To his Highness the Most High, Most Fortunate, Most Generous Lord, my Most Respectable and Most Honoured Brother.

"The supreme will of his highness being, that the impure presence of the English infidels, who had at the time taken possession, by surprise, of the fortress of Alexandria, should cease to sully this territory, and that the said fortress should be, with the help of the Most High, retaken, and submitted to its lawful possessor, in order to conform to the noble command, the frontispiece of which was decorated with the sacred character of the imperial hand, and addressed to the undersigned, his most humble slave, I hastened to assemble every thing that was necessary to the success of this military expedition; and from the first day of the moon of DjemaziedOughra, (about the 8th of August) I set off from Cairo, at the head of all the cavalry, and the flower of the infantry, and marched straight against the enemy.

"I pitched my camp in the plain of Damenkbor, six leagues from the place called Sed, an intrenched post of the English. I sent, during the night, a few of the light horse to the spot, for the purpose of reconnoitering the position of the English, and the means to be taken for surrounding them. I marched forward myself, and secured the most proper place for the raising of my batteries, and for the introduction of the armed boats and gun-barks into the two lakes, which are upon both flanks of the Sed. This operation, performed in the silence of the night, having lasted for some time, could not be concealed from the knowledge of the boats, which the enemy kept stationed upon the lakes. Accordingly, he fired many cannon shots, which happily did us no damage. However, this first movement on our part had already given him the alarm, and the next day we saw arrive, with the major who had been sent to me twice before as a negociator, the second in command of the English forces, accompanied by two other persons, and who took the title of plenipotentiary, appointed both by the commander of the squadron, and by the general of the land forces to conclude peace. The plenipotentiary produced, in support of his character, his credentials. The sense of these writings, the language of the bearer, and the result of the conference, amounted, upon the whole, to these few words :

Is not the demand you make, in the name of his highness your powerful emperor, the restitution of the fortress of Alexandria? Return us our prisoners who fell into your hands in the two engagements which took place at Rosetta, and we will return you the said place. I should also have restored to you the three armed ships of his highness, had they not been sent to England; and I hereby formally engage to get them directly sent back to the Sublime Porte.'

These propositions, which the English made without there being yet any attack

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