The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 02 (of 12)

The case of the East India Company is different even from that of the greatest of these corporations. No monopoly of trade, beyond their own limits, is vested in the corporate body of any town or city in the kingdom. Even within these limits the monopoly is not general. The Company has the monopoly of the trade of half the world. The first corporation of the kingdom has for the object of its jurisdiction only a few matters of subordinate police. The East India Company governs an empire, through all its concerns and all its departments, from the lowest office of economy to the highest councils of state,—an empire to which Great Britain is in comparison but a respectable province. To leave these concerns without superior cognizance would be madness; to leave them to be judged in the courts below, on the principles of a confined jurisprudence, would be folly. It is well, if the whole legislative power is competent to the correction of abuses which are commensurate to the immensity of the object they affect. The idea of an absolute power has, indeed, its terrors; but that objection lies to every Parliamentary proceeding; and as no other can regulate the abuses of such a charter, it is fittest that sovereign authority should be exercised, where it is most likely to be attended with the most effectual correctives. These correctives are furnished by the nature and course of Parliamentary proceedings, and by the infinitely diversified characters who compose the two Houses. In effect and virtually, they form a vast number, variety, and succession of judges and jurors. The fulness, the freedom, and publicity of discussion leaves it easy to distinguish what are acts of power, and what the determinations of equity and reason. There prejudice corrects prejudice, and the different asperities of party zeal mitigate and neutralize each other. So far from violence being the general characteristic of the proceedings of Parliament, whatever the beginnings of any Parliamentary process may be, its general fault in the end is, that it is found incomplete and ineffectual.

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The purpose of the misrepresentation being now completely answered, there is no doubt but the committee in this Parliament, appointed by the ministers themselves, will justify the grounds upon which the last Parliament proceeded, and will lay open to the world the dreadful state of the Company's affairs, and the grossness of their own calumnies upon this head. By delay the new assembly is come into the disgraceful situation of allowing a dividend of eight per cent by act of Parliament, without the least matter before them to justify the granting of any dividend at all.

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This will be evident to those who consider the number and description of Directors and servants of the East India Company chosen into the present Parliament. The light in which the present ministers hold the labors of the House of Commons in searching into the disorders in the Indian administration, and all its endeavors for the reformation of the government there, without any distinction of times, or of the persons concerned, will appear from the following extract from a speech of the present Lord Chancellor. After making a high-flown panegyric on those whom the House of Commons had condemned by their resolutions, he said:—"Let us not be misled by reports from committees of another House, to which, I again repeat, I pay as much attention as I would do to the history of Robinson Crusoe, Let the conduct of the East India Company be fairly and fully inquired into. Let it be acquitted or condemned by evidence brought to the bar of the House. Without entering very deeply into the subject, let me reply in a few words to an observation which fell from a noble and learned lord, that the Company's finances are distressed, and that they owe at this moment a million sterling to the nation. When such a charge is brought, will Parliament in its justice forget that the Company is restricted from employing that credit which its great and flourishing situation gives to it?"