Their
inability to keep accounts left them at the discretion of the agents of
the supreme power to make their balances what they pleased, and they
recovered them, not by legal process, but by seizure of their goods and
arbitrary imprisonment of their persons. One and the same dealer made
the advance, valued the return, stated the account, passed the judgment,
and executed the process.
Mr. Rouse, Chief of the Dacca Province, who struggled against those
evils, says, that in the year 1773 there were no balances due, as the
trade was then carried on by the native brokers. In less than three
years these balances amounted to an immense sum,--a sum lost to the
Company, but existing in full force for every purpose of oppression. In
the amount of these balances almost every weaver in the country bore a
part, and consequently they were almost all caught in this snare. "They
are in general," says Mr. Rouse, in a letter to General Clavering,
delivered to your Committee, "a timid, helpless people; many of them
poor to the utmost degree of wretchedness; incapable of keeping
accounts; industrious as it were by instinct; unable to defend
themselves, if oppressed; and satisfied, if with continual labor they
derive from the fair dealing and humanity of their employer a moderate
subsistence for their families.
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