The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII | Page 5

was
rendered more permanent, and the tenure itself diversified by a varied
and intricate rotation. At the same time their authority was held high
over their servants of all descriptions; and the only rule prescribed to
the Council-General of Bengal, in the exercise of the large and
ill-defined powers given to them, was that they were to yield obedience
to the orders of the Court of Directors. As to the Court of Directors
itself, it was left with very little regulation. The custom of ballot,
infinitely the most mischievous in a body possessed of all the ordinary
executive powers, was still left; and your Committee have found the ill
effects of this practice in the course of their inquiries. Nothing was
done to oblige the Directors to attend to the promotion of their servants
according to their rank and merits. In judging of those merits nothing
was done to bind them to any observation of what appeared on their
records. Nothing was done to compel them to prosecution or complaint
where delinquency became visible. The act, indeed, prescribed that no
servant of the Company abroad should be eligible into the direction
until two years after his return to England. But as this regulation rather

presumes than provides for an inquiry into their conduct, a very
ordinary neglect in the Court of Directors might easily defeat it, and a
short remission might in this particular operate as a total indemnity. In
fact, however, the servants have of late seldom attempted a seat in the
direction,--an attempt which might possibly rouse a dormant spirit of
inquiry; but, satisfied with an interest in the proprietary, they have,
through that name, brought the direction very much under their own
control.
As to the general authority of the Court of Directors, there is reason to
apprehend that on the whole it was somewhat degraded by the act
whose professed purpose was to exalt it, and that the only effect of the
Parliamentary sanction to their orders has been, that along with those
orders the law of the land has been despised and trampled under foot.
The Directors were not suffered either to nominate or to remove those
whom they were empowered to instruct; from masters they were
reduced to the situation of complainants,--a situation the imbecility of
which no laws or regulations could wholly alter; and when the
Directors were afterwards restored in some degree to their ancient
power, on the expiration of the lease given to their principal servants, it
became impossible for them to recover any degree of their ancient
respect, even if they had not in the mean time been so modelled as to be
entirely free from all ambition of that sort.
From that period the orders of the Court of Directors became to be so
habitually despised by their servants abroad, and at length to be so little
regarded even by themselves, that this contempt of orders forms almost
the whole subject-matter of the voluminous reports of two of your
committees. If any doubt, however, remains concerning the cause of
this fatal decline of the authority of the Court of Directors, no doubt
whatsoever can remain of the fact itself, nor of the total failure of one
of the great leading regulations of the act of 1773.
[Sidenote: Supreme Court of Judicature.]
The third object was a new judicial arrangement, the chief purpose of
which was to form a strong and solid security for the natives against the
wrongs and oppressions of British subjects resident in Bengal. An

operose and expensive establishment of a Supreme Court was made,
and charged upon the revenues of the country. The charter of justice
was by the act left to the crown, as well as the appointment of the
magistrates. The defect in the institution seemed to be this,--that no rule
was laid down, either in the act or the charter, by which the court was
to judge. No descriptions of offenders or species of delinquency were
properly ascertained, according to the nature of the place, or to the
prevalent mode of abuse. Provision was made for the administration of
justice in the remotest part of Hindostan as if it were a province in
Great Britain. Your Committee have long had the constitution and
conduct of this court before them, and they have not yet been able to
discover very few instances (not one that appears to them of leading
importance) of relief given to the natives against the corruptions or
oppressions of British subjects in power,--though they do find one very
strong and marked instance of the judges having employed an
unwarrantable extension or application of the municipal law of England,
to destroy a person of the highest rank among those natives whom they
were sent to protect. One circumstance rendered the proceeding in this