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

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 co?peration 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 office, called the Board of Trade, for the subordinate management of their commercial concerns, and appointed eleven of the senior servants to fill the commission.
[Sidenote: Object of powers to Governor-General and Council.]
The powers given by the act to the new Governor-General and Council had for their direct object the kingdom of Bengal and its dependencies. Within that sphere (and it is not a small one) their authority extended over all the Company's concerns of whatever description. In matters of