some that are contradictory) have slandered this House, as aiming at the extension of an unconstitutional influence in his Majesty's crown. This pretended attempt to increase the influence of the crown they were weak enough to endeavor to persuade his Majesty's people was amongst the causes which excited his Majesty's resentment against his late ministers.

Further, to remove the impressions of this calumny concerning an attempt in the House of Commons against his prerogative, it is proper to inform his Majesty, that the territorial possessions in the East Indies never have been declared by any public judgment, act, or instrument, or any resolution of Parliament whatsoever, to be the subject matter of his Majesty's prerogative; nor have they ever been understood as belonging to his ordinary administration, or to be annexed or united to his crown; but that they are acquisitions of a new and peculiar description,* unknown to the ancient executive constitution of this country.

From time to time, therefore, Parliament provided for their government according to its discretion, and to its opinion of what was required by the public ne

*The territorial possessions in the East Indies were acquired to the Company, in virtue of grants from the Great Mogul, in the nature of offices and jurisdictions, to be held under him, and dependent upon his crown, with the express condition of being obedient to orders from his court, and of paying an annual tribute to his treasury. It is true that no obedience is yielded to these orders, and for some time past there has been no payment made of this tribute. But it is under a grant so conditioned that they still hold. To subject the King of Great Britain as tributary to a foreign power by the acts of his subjects; to suppose the grant valid, and yet the condition void; to suppose it good for the king, and insufficient for the Company; to suppose it an interest divisible between the parties: these are some

cessities. We do not know that his Majesty was entitled, by prerogative, to exercise any act of authority whatsoever in the Company's affairs, or that, in effect, such authority has ever been exercised. His Majesty's patronage was not taken away by that bill; because it is notorious that his Majesty never originally had the appointment of a single officer, civil or military, in the Company's establishment. in India: nor has the least degree of patronage ever been acquired to the crown in any other manner or measure than as the power was thought expedient to be granted by act of Parliament, that is, by the very same authority by which the offices were disposed of and regulated in the bill which his Majesty's servants have falsely and injuriously represented as infringing upon the prerogative of the crown.

Before the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East India Company. The East India Company is not a branch of his Majesty's prerogative administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority under it, nor indeed from any British title that does not derive all its legal validity from acts of Parliament.

few of the many legal difficulties to be surmounted, before the Common Law of England can acknowledge the East India Company's Asiatic affairs to be a subject matter of prerogative, so as to bring it within the verge of English jurisprudence. It is a very anomalous species of power and property which is held by the East India Company. Our English prerogative law does not furnish principles, much less precedents, by which it can be defined or adjusted. Nothing but the eminent dominion of Parliament over every British subject, in every concern, and in every circumstance in which he is placed, can adjust this new, intricate matter. Parliament may act wisely or unwisely, justly or unjustly; but Parliament alone is competent to it.

When a claim was asserted to the India territorial possessions in the occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel of his Majesty's patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient inheritance of his crown: they were claimed for the public. And when agreements were made with the East India Company concerning any composition for the holding, or any participation of the profits, of those territories, the agreement was made with the public; and the preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it. These agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with Parliament: and the bills making and establishing such agreements always originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the disposition of Parlia ment, without the ceremony of previous consent from the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers which previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict right, but generally paid, when a new appropriation takes place in any part of his Majesty's prerogative revenues.

In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognized and uniformly acted on, when Parliament undertook the reformation of the East India Company in 1773, a commission was appointed, as the commission in the late bill was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were named in Parliament, as in the late bill they were named. As they received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown; they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address of either House or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution observed in the late bill relative

to the commissioners proposed therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding which regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock, as well as by Parliament. Their proceedings were, in that bill, directed to be of such a nature as easily to subject them to the strictest revision of both, in case of any malversation.

In the year 1780, an act of Parliament again made. provision for the government of those territories for another four years, without any sort of reference to prerogative; nor was the least objection taken at the second, more than at the first of those periods, as if an infringement had been made upon the rights of the crown yet his Majesty's ministers have thought fit to represent the late commission as an entire innovation on the Constitution, and the setting up a new order and estate in the nation, tending to the subversion of the monarchy itself.

If the government of the East Indies, other than by his Majesty's prerogative, be in effect a fourth order in the commonwealth, this order has long existed; because the East India Company has for many years enjoyed it in the fullest extent, and does at this day enjoy the whole administration of those provinces, and the patronage to offices throughout that great empire, except as it is controlled by act of Parlia

ment.

It was the ill condition and ill administration of the Company's affairs which induced this House (merely as a temporary establishment) to vest the same powers which the Company did before possess.

(and no other,) for a limited time, and under very strict directions, in proper hands, until they could be restored, or further provision made concerning them. It was therefore no creation whatever of a new power, but the removal of an old power, long since created, and then existing, from the management of those persons who had manifestly and dangerously abused their trust. This House, which well knows the Parliamentary origin of all the Company's powers and privileges, and is not ignorant or negligent of the authority which may vest those powers and privileges in others, if justice and the public safety so require, is conscious to itself that it no more creates a new order in the state, by making occasional trustees for the direction of the Company, than it originally did in giving a much more permanent trust to the Directors or to the General Court of that body. The monopoly of the East India Company was a derogation from the general freedom of trade belonging to his Majesty's people. The powers of government, and of peace and war, are parts of prerogative of the highest order. Of our competence to restrain the rights of all his subjects by act of Parliament, and to vest those high and eminent prerogatives even in a particular company of merchants, there has been no question. We beg leave most humbly to claim as our right, and as a right which this House has always used, to frame such bills for the regulation of that commerce, and of the territories held by the East India Company, and everything relating to them, as to our discretion shall seem fit; and we assert and maintain that therein we follow, and do not innovate on, the Constitution.

That his Majesty's ministers, misled by their am