Burke was so convinced of the incurable iniquity of the Company, so persuaded that it was not only full of abuses, but, as he said, one of the most corrupt and destructive tyrannies that probably ever existed in the world, as to be content with nothing short of the absolute deprivation of its power.  He avowed himself no lover of names, and that he only contended for good government, from whatever quarter it might come.  But the idea of good government coming from the Company he declared to be desperate and untenable.  This intense animosity, which, considering his long and close familiarity with the infamies of the rule of the Company’s servants, was not unnatural, must be allowed, however, to have blinded him to the grave objections which really existed to his scheme.  In the first place, the Bill was indisputably inconsistent with the spirit of his revered Constitution.  For the legislature to assume the power of naming the members of an executive body was an extraordinary and mischievous innovation.  Then, to put patronage, which has been estimated by a sober authority at about three hundred thousand pounds a year, into the hands of the House of Commons, was still more mischievous and still less justifiable.  Worst of all, from the point of view of the projectors themselves, after a certain time the nomination of the Commissioners would fall to the Crown, and this might in certain contingencies increase to a most dangerous extent the ascendancy of the royal authority.  If Burke’s measure had been carried, moreover, the patronage would have been transferred to a body much less competent than the Directors to judge of the qualities required in the fulfilment of this or that administrative charge.  Indian promotion would have followed parliamentary and party interest.  In the hands of the Directors there was at least a partial security, in their professional knowledge, and their personal interest in the success of their government, that places would not be given away on irrelevant considerations.  Their system, with all its faults, insured the acquisition of a certain considerable competency in administration before a servant reached an elevation at which he could do much harm.

Burke defended the Bill (December 1, 1783) in one of the speeches which rank only below his greatest, and it contains two or three passages of unsurpassed energy and impressiveness.  Everybody knows the fine page about Fox as the descendant of Henry IV. of France, and the happy quotation from Silius Italicus.  Every book of British eloquence contains the magnificent description of the young magistrates who undertake the government and the spoliation of India; how, “animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another, wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and of passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.”