17 2 
appeared to them a mode of relief; by permitting five and twenty 
of their servants at this presidency to be removed to the Bengal 
establishment as writers of the year 1773. We humbly conceive 
that they saw some advantages to us in this offer, that would 
amply compensate for the sacrifice of those rewards which every 
servant has a right to look to, after a course of fifteen or six- 
teen years faithfully devoted to their service, in an unpropitious 
climate, and banished from our country and our friends; or com- 
mon humanity would not have permitted them to address those 
servants in the language their letter by the Gatlon in fact amounts 
to. “ You have served us twenty years, we cannot but say irre- 
“ proachably: by the reduction of our system you are thrown out 
“ of employ, and of course out of bread. We cannot help it: 
“ there is no remedy: but if you choose it, you may begin a fresh 
44 course of service in another quarter.” We conceive, that without 
the supposition above alluded to, their humanity would have con- 
ferred on us some rank more proportioned to the length of our 
services: it might have been a hardship to some of their servants 
at Bengal, but in strictness, we conceive it could not have been 
an i injustice: it would not have been strangers to the Company, 
who, by mere force of private interest, robbed them of their cove- 
nanted rights; but servants of the same masters; equally, though 
less beneficial, labourers with themselves; whom the necessities of 
those masters compelled to provide for in a different line of ser- 
vice; and therefore they might have borne this without just cause 
of complaint, in the same manner that every person connected with 
the Honourable Company must in some shape participate in all 
their distresses. 
