Siyar al-mutaʾakhkhirin 42.31.6

42.31.6

The two facts are now brought within your recollection. Compare then the two events together, and draw your own conclusions. Only let me ask you this plain question : Do you believe that those men became Protestants at once, in the interval which elapsed between one o'clock and two o'clock in the morning? Rest assured that they must have been long ago so, and were kept down only by the irrefragable argument of fagot and fire, id est bayonets and field-pieces. Another irrefragable fact occurs to my mind, and it is a very melancholy one. All the letters of Admiral Hughes in 1780, of General Cootes, of the Council of Madras, all the private letters, as well as all the public ones, dwell constantly on this melancholy fact, "that from Ganjam "to Cape Comorin there was not a native, but proved disaffected "to the English, &c., &c., so that no intelligence could be had "from any of them ; or if any at all, it was always a suggested "one. What ? after forty years' acquaintance, the English had not acquired a single well-wisher in a country of 250 leages in length ? Then there must be, there is, some radical defect lurking under the English Government. What is it ? But all this is an excursion from my subject, which was not my pamphlet on the Courts of justices of Moorshood-abad, but my History of India.