The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII | Page 8

duties of
government were sold, or they were the price paid for acts of partiality,
or, finally, they were sums of money extorted from the givers by the
terrors of power. Against the system of presents, therefore, the new
commission was in general opinion particularly pointed. In the
commencement of reformation, at a period when a rapacious conquest
had overpowered and succeeded to a corrupt government, an act of
indemnity might have been thought advisable; perhaps a new account
ought to have been opened; all retrospect ought to have been forbidden,

at least to certain periods. If this had not been thought advisable, none
in the higher departments of a suspected and decried government ought
to have been kept in their posts, until an examination had rendered their
proceedings clear, or until length of time had obliterated, by an even
course of irreproachable conduct, the errors which so naturally grow
out of a new power. But the policy adopted was different: it was to
begin with examples. The cry against the abuses was strong and
vehement throughout the whole nation, and the practice of presents was
represented to be as general as it was mischievous. In such a case,
indeed in any case, it seemed not to be a measure the most provident,
without a great deal of previous inquiry, to place two persons, who
from their situation must be the most exposed to such imputations, in
the commission which was to inquire into their own conduct,--much
less to place one of them at the head of that commission, and with a
casting vote in case of an equality. The persons who could not be liable
to that charge were, indeed, three to two; but any accidental difference
of opinion, the death of any one of them or his occasional absence or
sickness, threw the whole power into the hands of the other two, who
were Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, one the President, and the other
high in the Council of that establishment on which the reform was to
operate. Thus those who were liable to process as delinquents were in
effect set over the reformers; and that did actually happen which might
be expected to happen from so preposterous an arrangement: a stop was
soon put to all inquiries into the capital abuses.
Nor was the great political end proposed in the formation of a
superintending Council over all the Presidencies better answered than
that of an inquiry into corruptions and abuses. The several Presidencies
have acted in a great degree upon their own separate authority; and as
little of unity, concert, or regular system has appeared in their conduct
as was ever known before this institution. India is, indeed, so vast a
country, and the settlements are so divided, that their intercourse with
each other is liable to as many delays and difficulties as the intercourse
between distant and separate states. But one evil may possibly have
arisen from an attempt to produce an union, which, though undoubtedly
to be aimed at, is opposed in some degree by the unalterable nature of
their situation,--that it has taught the servants rather to look to a

superior among themselves than to their common superiors. This evil,
growing out of the abuse of the principle of subordination, can only be
corrected by a very strict enforcement of authority over that part of the
chain of dependence which is next to the original power.
[Sidenote: Powers given to the ministers of the crown.]
That which your Committee considers as the fifth and last of the capital
objects of the act, and as the binding regulation of the whole, is the
introduction (then for the first time) of the ministers of the crown into
the affairs of the Company. The state claiming a concern and share of
property in the Company's profits, the servants of the crown were
presumed the more likely to preserve with a scrupulous attention the
sources of the great revenues which they were to administer, and for the
rise and fall of which they were to render an account.
The interference of government was introduced by this act in two ways:
one by a control, in effect by a share, in the appointment to vacancies in
the Supreme Council. The act provided that his Majesty's approbation
should be had to the persons named to that duty. Partaking thus in the
patronage of the Company, administration was bound to an attention to
the characters and capacities of the persons employed in that high trust.
The other part of their interference was by way of inspection. By this
right of inspection, everything in the Company's correspondence from
India, which related to the civil or military affairs and government of
the Company, was directed by the act to be within fourteen days after