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

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 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