Many and ingenious have been the attempts to remove this awful opprobrium from our national character. It has been contended that famines are, or were of frequent occurrence in India;—that the natives had no providence; and that to charge the English with the miserable consequences of this famine is unreasonable, because it was what they could neither foresee nor prevent. Of the drought in the previous autumn there is no doubt; but there is unhappily as little, that the regular rapacity of the English had reduced the natives to that condition of poverty, apathy, and despair, in which the slightest derangement of season must superinduce famine;—that they were grown callous to the sufferings of their victims, and were as alive to their gain by the rising price through the scarcity, as they were in all other cases. Their object was sudden wealth, and they cared not, in fact, whether the natives lived or died, so that that object was effected. This is the relation of the Abbé Raynal, a foreign historian, and the light in which this event was beheld by foreign nations.
“It was by a drought in 1769, at the season when the rains are expected, that there was a failure of the great harvest of 1769, and the less harvest of 1770. It is true that the rice on the higher grounds did not suffer greatly by this disturbance of the seasons, but there was far from a sufficient quantity for the nourishment of all the inhabitants of the country; add to which the English, who were engaged beforehand to take proper care of their subsistence, as well as of the Sepoys belonging to them, did not fail to keep locked up in their magazines a part of the grain, though the harvest was insufficient.... This scourge did not fail to make itself felt throughout Bengal. Rice, which is commonly sold for one sol (1/2d.) for three pounds, was gradually raised so high as four or even six sols (3d.) for one pound; neither, indeed, was there any to be found, except in such places where the Europeans had taken care to collect it for their own use.
“The unhappy Indians were perishing every day by thousands under this want of sustenance, without any means of help and without any revenue. They were to be seen in their villages; along the public ways; in the midst of our European colonies,—pale, meagre, emaciated, fainting, consumed by famine—some stretched on the ground in expectation of dying; others scarce able to drag themselves on to seek any nourishment, and throwing themselves at the feet of the Europeans, entreating them to take them in as their slaves.