increased, and made the instrument of the most austere tyranny, of the basest peculations, and the most scandalous and iniquitous extortions.

In the description I have given of banyans a distinction is to be made. Your lordships must distinguish the banyans of the British servants in subordinate situations, and the banyans, who are such to persons in higher authority. In the latter case the banyan is in strict subordination, because he may always be ruined by his superiour; whereas in the former, it is always in his power to ruin his nominal superiour. It was not through fear, but voluntarily, and not for the banyan's purposes, but his own, Mr. Hastings has brought forward his banyan. He seated him in the houses of the principal nobility, and invested him with farms of the revenue; he has given him enormous jobs; he has put him over the heads of a nobility, which, for their grandeur, antiquity and dignity, might almost be matched with your lordships. He has made him supreme ecclesiastical judge, judge even of the very casts, in the preservation of the separate rules and separate privileges of which that people exists. He, who has dominion over the cast, has an absolute power over something more than life and fortune.

Such is that first or last (I know not which to call it) order in the company's service called a banyan. The mutseddies, clerks, accountants, of Calcutta, generally fall under this description. Your lordships will see hereafter the necessity of giving you, in the opening of the case, an idea of the situation of a banyan. You will see, as no Englishman, properly speaking, acts by himself, that he must be made responsible for that person called his banyan; for the power he either uses under him, or the power he has acquired over him. The banyan escapes, in the night of his complexion and situation, the inquiry, that a white man cannot stand before in this country. Through the banyans, or other black natives, a bad servant of the company receives his bribes. Through them he decides falsely against the titles of litigants in the court of casts, or in the offices of publick registry. Through them Mr. Hastings has exercised oppressions, which, I will venture to say, in his own name, in his own character,

daring as he is (and he is the most daring criminal, that ever existed) he never would dare to practice. Many, if not most, of the iniquities of his interiour bad administration have been perpetrated through these banyans, or other native agents and confidants; and we shall show you, that he is not satisfied with one of them; confiding few of his secrets to Europeans, and hardly any of his instruments, either native or European, knowing the secrets of each other. This is the system of banyanism, and of concealment, which Mr. Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into that dark and insidious cha

racter.

I have explained, or endeavoured to explain, to your lordships these circumstances of the true spirit, genius, and character, more than the ostensible institutions, of the company's service. I now shall beg leave to bring before you one institution, taken from the mercantile constitution of the company, so excellent, that I will venture to say, that human wisdom has never exceeded it. In this excellent institution the counting-house gave lessons to the state. The active, awakened, and enlightened principle of self-interest will provide a better system for the guard of that interest, than the cold, drowsy wisdom of those, who provide for a good out of themselves, ever contrived for the publick. The plans sketched by private prudence for private interest, the regulations by mercantile men for their mercantile purposes, when they can be applied to the discipline and order of the state, produce a discipline and order, which no state should be ashamed to copy. The company's mercantile regulations are admirably fitted for the government of a remote, large, disjointed empire. As merchants, having factors abroad in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its publick ministers. The company has made it a fundamental part of their constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written government. Your lordships will observe, in the course of the proceeding, the

propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in the government of India; that is, that the company's government is a government of writing; a government of record. The strictest court of justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of record as the India company's executive service is, or ought to be, in all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or diary of all their transactions, publick and private: they are bound to do this by an express covenant. They oblige them, as a corrective upon that diary, to keep a letterbook, in which all their letters are to be regularly entered. And they are bound, by the same covenant, to produce all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life. But, as the great corrective of all, they have contrived, that every proceeding in publick council shall be written :-no debates merely verbal. The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and recorded. All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council, Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves, decisions, and final resolutions of affairs; the argument, the discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear. But the company has proceeded much further, and done much more wisely, because they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided, either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written, the proposition, the argument, the dissent. This is not confined to their great council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, and I see considerable traces of it in practice, in every provincial council, whilst the provincial councils existed, and even down to the minutest ramification of their service. These books, in a progression from the lowest councils to the highest presidency, are ordered to be transmitted, duplicate and triplicate, by every ship, that sails to Europe. On this system an able servant of the company, and high in their service, has recorded his opinion, and strongly expressed his sentiments. Writing to the court of directors, he says, "It ought to be remembered, that the

basis, upon which you rose to power, and have been able to stand the shock of repeated convulsions, has been the accuracy and simplicity of mercantile method, which makes every transaction in your service, and every expenditure, a matter of record."

My lords, this method not only must produce to them, if strictly observed, a more accurate idea of the nature of their affairs, and the nature of their expenditures, but it must afford them no trivial opportunity and means of knowing the true characters of their servants, their capacities, their ways of thinking, the turn and bias of their minds. If well employed, and but a little improved, the East-India Company possessed an advantage unknown before to the chief of a remote government. In the most remote parts of the world, and in the minutest parts of a remote service, every thing came before the principal with a domestick accuracy and local familiarity. It was in the power of a director, sitting in London, to form an accurate judgment of every incident, that happened upon the Ganges and the Gogra.

The use of this recorded system did not consist only in the facility of discovering what the nature of their affairs, and the character and capacity of their servants, was; but it furnished the means of detecting their misconduct; frequently of proving it too, and of producing the evidence to it judicially under their own hands. For your lordships must have observed, that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct and simple: guilt is a crooked, intricate, inconstant and various thing. The iniquitous job of to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons, that have coloured the first crime, may expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records. They are flown out of their hands; they are in Europe; they are safe in the registers of the company; perhaps they are under the eye of parliament, before the writers of them 6

VOL. VII.

have time to invent an excuse for a direct contrary conduct to that, to which their former pretended principles applied. This is a great, a material part of the constitution of the company. My lords, I do not think it to be much apologized for, if I repeat, that this is the fundamental regulation of that service; and which, if preserved in the first instance, as it ought to be, in official practice in India, and then used as it ought to be in England, would afford such a mode of governing a great, foreign, dispersed empire, as, I will venture to say, few countries ever possessed even in governing the most limited and narrow jurisdiction.

It was the great business of Mr. Hastings's policy to subvert this great political edifice. His first mode of subverting it was by commanding the publick ministers, paid by the company, to deliver their correspondence upon the most critical and momentous affairs to him, in order to be suppressed and destroyed at his pleasure. To support him in this plan of spoliation, he has made a mischievous distinction in publick business between publick and private correspondence. The company's orders and covenants made none. There are, readily admit, thousands of occasions, in which it is not proper to divulge promiscuously a private correspondence, though on publick affairs, to the world; but there is no occasion, in which it is not a necessary duty, on requisition, to communicate your correspondence to those, who form the paramount government, on whose interests, and on whose concerns, and under whose authority, this correspondence has been carried on. The very same reasons, which require secrecy with regard to others, demand the freest communication to them. But Mr. Hastings has established principles of confidence and secrecy towards himself, which have cut off all confidence between the directors and their ministers, and effectually kept them at least out of the secret of their own affairs.

Without entering into all the practices, by which he has attempted to maim the company's records, I shall state one more to your lordships; that is, his avowed appointment of spies and under-agents, who shall carry on the real state business, while there are publick and ostensible agents, who