If the power of the sovereign,

office, which they received. from whom they derived these powers, should by any revolution in human affairs be annihilated or suspended, their duty to the people below them, which was created under the Mogul charter, is not annihilated, is not even suspended; and for their responsibility in the performance of that duty, they are thrown back upon that country (thank God, not annihilated) from whence their original power, and all subsequent derivative powers, have flowed. When the company acquired that high office in India, an English corporation became an integral part of the Mogul empire. When Great Britain virtually assented to that grant of office, and afterwards took advantage of it, Great Britain guarantied the performance of all its duties. Great Britain entered into a virtual act of union with that country; by which we bound ourselves as securities to preserve the people in all the rights, laws, and liberties, which their natural original sovereign was bound to support, if he had been in condition to support them. By the disposition of events the two duties, flowing from two different sources, are now united in one. The people of India therefore come, in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, but in their own right, to the bar of this House, before the supreme royal justice of this kingdom, from whence originally all the powers, under which they have suffered, were derived.

It may be a little necessary, when we are stating the powers the company have derived from their charter, and which we state Mr. Hastings to have abused, to state in as short and as comprehensive words as I can (for the matter is large indeed) what the constitution of that company is ; I mean chiefly, what it is in reference to its Indian service, the great theatre of the abuse. Your lordships will naturally conceive, that it is not to inform you, but to revive circumstances in your memory, that I enter into this detail.

You will therefore recollect, that the East-India Company had its origin about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, a period of projects, when all sorts of commercial adventures, companies, and monopolies, were in fashion. At

that time the company was constituted, with extensive powers for increasing the commerce and the honour of this country; because increasing its commerce, without increasing its honour and reputation, would have been thought at that time, and will be thought now, a bad bargain for the country. The powers of the company were, under that charter, merely commercial. By degrees, as the theatre of operation was distant; as its intercourse was with many great, some barbarous, and all of them armed nations; nations, in which not only the sovereign but the subjects were armed; it was found necessary to enlarge their powers. The first power they obtained was a power of naval discipline in their ships; a power, which has been since dropped; the next was a power of law martial; the next was a power of civil, and, to a degree, of criminal jurisdiction, within their own factories, upon their own people, and their own servants; the next was, and here was a stride indeed, the power of peace and war. Those high and almost incommunicable prerogatives of sovereignty, which were hardly ever known before to be parted with to any subjects, and which, in several states, were not wholly entrusted to the prince or head of the commonwealth himself, were given to the East-India Company. That company acquired these powers about the end of the reign of Charles the Second; and they were afterwards more fully, as well as more legally, given by parliament after the revolution. From this time, the East-India Company was no longer merely a mercantile company, formed for the extension of the British commerce; it more nearly resembled a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this kingdom, sent into the East. From that time the company ought to be considered as a subordinate sovereign power; that is, sovereign with regard to the objects, which it touched; subordinate with regard to the power, from whence its great trust was derived. Under these successive arrangements things took a course very different from their usual order. A new disposition took place, not dreamt of in the theories of speculative politicians; and of which few examples, in the least resembling it, have been seen in the modern world, none

at all in the antient. In other instances a political body, that acts as a commonwealth, was first settled, and trade followed as a consequence of the protection obtained by political power; but here the course of affairs was reversed. The constitution of the company began in commerce, and ended in empire. Indeed, wherever the sovereign powers of peace and war are given, there wants but time and circumstance to make these powers supersede every other. The affairs of commerce will fall, at last, into their proper rank and situation. However primary in their original intention, they will become secondary. The possession, therefore, and the power of assertion, of these great authorities, coinciding with the improved state of Europe, with the improved state of arts in Europe, with the improved state of laws, and, what is much more material, the improved state of military discipline, more and more perfected every day with us ;-universal improvement in Europe coinciding with the general decay of Asia (for the proud day of Asia is passed); this improvement coinciding with the relaxation and dissolution of the Mogul government, with the decline of its warlike spirit, with the total disuse of the antient strictness of the military discipline established by Tamerlane; the India company came to be what it is a great empire, carrying on, subordinately, a great commerce: it became that thing, which was supposed by the Roman law irreconcileable to reason and propriety-eundem negotiatorem et dominum: the same power became the general trader, the same power became the supreme lord.

In this exalted situation the India company, however, still preserves traces of its original mercantile character. The whole exteriour order of its political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and mercantile principles. In fact, the East-India Company in Asia is a state in the disguise of a merchant. Its whole service is a system of publick offices in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly, the whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely political.

This system of the company's service, its order and disci

pline, is necessary to be explained to your lordships, that you may see in what manner the abuses have affected it. In the first place, all the persons, who go abroad in the company's civil service, enter as clerks in the countinghouse, and are called by a name to correspond to it, writers. In that condition they are obliged to serve five years. The second step is that of a factor, in which they are obliged to serve three years. The third step they take is that of a junior merchant, in which they are obliged to serve three years more. At that period they become senior merchants, which is the highest stage of advance in the company's service; a rank, by which they had pretensions, before the year 1774, to the council, to the succession of the presidency, and to whatever other honours the company has to bestow.

The company had, in its early times, established factories in certain places; which factories, by degrees, grew to the name of presidencies and council, in proportion as the power and influence of the company increased, and as the political began first to struggle with, and at length to predominate over, the mercantile. In this form it continued till the year 1773; when the legislature broke in, for proper reasons urging them to it, upon that order of the service, and appointed to the superiour department persons, who had no title to that place under the ordinary usage of the service. Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, whatever other titles they might have had, held solely under the act of parliament nominating them to that authority; but in all other respects, except where the act and other subsequent acts have not broken in upon it, the whole course of the service remains upon the antient footing, that is, the commercial footing, as to the gradation and order of service.

Your lordships see here a regular series of gradation, which requires eleven years, before any persons can arrive at the highest trusts and situations. You will therefore be astonished, when so long a probationary service was required, that effects, very different from those to be expected from long probation, have happened; and that in a much shorter time than those eleven years you have seen persons

returning into this kingdom with affluent, with overbearing fortunes. It will be a great part of your inquiry, when we come before your lordships to substantiate evidence against Mr. Hastings, to discover how that order came to be so completely broken down and erased, that scarce a trace of it, for any good purpose, remains. Though I will not deny, that that order, or that any order in a state, may be superseded by the ruling power, when great talents, upon pressing exigencies, are to be called forth; yet I must say, the order itself was formed upon wise principles. It furnished the persons, who were put in that course of probation, with an opportunity (if circumstances enabled them) of acquiring experience in business of revenue, trade, and policy. It gave to those, who watched them, a constant inspection of their conduct through all their progress. On the expectants of office it imposed the necessity of acquiring a character in proportion to their standing; in order that all, which they had gained by the good behaviour of years, should not be lost by the misconduct of an hour. It was a great substantial regulation. But scarce a trace of the true spirit of it remains to be discovered in Mr. Hastings's government; for Mr. Hastings established offices, nay, whole systems of offices, and especially a system of offices in 1781, which being altogether new, none of the rules of gradation applied to them; and he filled those offices in such a manner, as suited best, not the constitution nor the spirit of the service, but his own particular views and purposes. The consequence

has been, that persons, in the most immature stages of life, have been appointed to conduct affairs, which required the greatest maturity of judgment, the greatest possible temper and moderation. Effects naturally consequent have followed upon it. I shall not trouble your lordships with any further observations on this system of gradation.

I must, however, remark, before I go further, that there is something in the representation of the East-India Company, in their oriental territory, different from that, perhaps, of any other nation, that has ever transported any part of its power from one country to another. The East-India Company, in India, is not properly a branch of the British nation;