The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII | Page 6

case fatal to all the good purposes for which the court had been
established. The sufferer (the Rajah Nundcomar) appears, at the very
time of this extraordinary prosecution, a discoverer of some particulars
of illicit gain then charged upon Mr. Hastings, the Governor-General.
Although in ordinary cases, and in some lesser instances of grievance,
it is very probable that this court has done its duty, and has been, as
every court must be, of some service, yet one example of this kind must
do more towards deterring the natives from complaint, and
consequently from the means of redress, than many decisions favorable
to them, in the ordinary course of proceeding, can do for their
encouragement and relief. So far as your Committee has been able to
discover, the court has been generally terrible to the natives, and has
distracted the government of the Company without substantially
reforming any one of its abuses.
This court, which in its constitution seems not to have had sufficiently
in view the necessities of the people for whose relief it was intended,
and was, or thought itself, bound in some instances to too strict an
adherence to the forms and rules of English practice, in others was

framed upon principles perhaps too remote from the constitution of
English tribunals. By the usual course of English practice, the far
greater part of the redress to be obtained against oppressions of power
is by process in the nature of civil actions. In these a trial by jury is a
necessary part, with regard to the finding the offence and to the
assessment of the damages. Both these were in the charter of justice left
entirely to the judges. It was presumed, and not wholly without reason,
that the British subjects were liable to fall into factions and
combinations, in order to support themselves in the abuses of an
authority of which every man might in his turn become a sharer. And
with regard to the natives, it was presumed (perhaps a little too hastily)
that they were not capable of sharing in the functions of jurors. But it
was not foreseen that the judges were also liable to be engaged in the
factions of the settlement,--and if they should ever happen to be so
engaged, that the native people were then without that remedy which
obviously lay in the chance that the court and jury, though both liable
to bias, might not easily unite in the same identical act of injustice.
Your Committee, on full inquiry, are of opinion _that the use of juries
is neither impracticable nor dangerous in Bengal_.
Your Committee refer to their report made in the year 1781, for the
manner in which this court, attempting to extend its jurisdiction, and
falling with extreme severity on the native magistrates, a violent
contest arose between the English judges and the English civil authority.
This authority, calling in the military arm, (by a most dangerous
example,) overpowered, and for a while suspended, the functions of the
court; but at length those functions, which were suspended by the
quarrel of the parties, were destroyed by their reconciliation, and by the
arrangements made in consequence of it. By these the court was
virtually annihilated; or if substantially it exists, it is to be apprehended
it exists only for purposes very different from those of its institution.
The fourth object of the act of 1773 was the Council-General. This
institution was intended to produce uniformity, consistency, and the
effective coöperation of all the settlements in their common defence.
By the ancient constitution of the Company's foreign settlements, they
were each of them under the orders of a President or Chief, and a

Council, more or fewer, according to the discretion of the Company.
Among those, Parliament (probably on account of the largeness of the
territorial acquisitions, rather than the conveniency of the situation)
chose Bengal for the residence of the controlling power, and, dissolving
the Presidency, appointed a new establishment, upon a plan somewhat
similar to that which had prevailed before; but the number was smaller.
This establishment was composed of a Governor-General and four
Counsellors, all named in the act of Parliament. They were to hold their
offices for five years, after which term the patronage was to revert to
the Court of Directors. In the mean time such vacancies as should
happen were to be filled by that court, with the concurrence of the
crown. The first Governor-General and one of the Counsellors had been
old servants of the Company; the others were new men.
On this new arrangement the Courts of Proprietors and Directors
considered the details of commerce as not perfectly consistent with the
enlarged sphere of duty and the reduced number of the Council.
Therefore, to relieve them from this burden, they instituted a new