in all the rights, laws, and liberties which their natural, original sovereign was bound to support, if he had been in condition to support them.  By the disposition of events, the two duties, flowing from two different sources, are now united in one.  The people of India, therefore, come in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, but in their own right, to the bar of this House, before the supreme royal justice of this kingdom, from whence originally all the powers under which they have suffered were derived.

It may be a little necessary, when we are stating the powers the Company have derived from their charter, and which we state Mr. Hastings to have abused, to state in as short and as comprehensive words as I can (for the matter is large indeed) what the constitution of that Company is,—­I mean chiefly, what it is in reference to its Indian service, the great theatre of the abuse.  Your Lordships will naturally conceive that it is not to inform you, but to revive circumstances in your memory, that I enter into this detail.

You will therefore recollect, that the East India Company had its origin about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, a period of projects, when all sorts of commercial adventures, companies, and monopolies were in fashion.  At that time the Company was constituted with extensive powers for increasing the commerce and the honor of this country; because increasing its commerce, without increasing its honor and reputation, would have been thought at that time, and will be thought now, a bad bargain for the country.  The powers of the Company were, under that charter, merely commercial.  By degrees, as the theatre of operation was distant, as its intercourse was with many great, some barbarous, and all of them armed nations, nations in which not only the sovereign, but the subjects, were armed, it was found necessary to enlarge their powers.  The first power they obtained was a power of naval discipline in their ships,—­a power which has been since dropped; the next was a power of law martial; the next was a power of civil, and, to a degree, of criminal jurisdiction, within their own factories, upon their own people and their own servants; the next was (and here was a stride indeed) the power of peace and war.  Those high and almost incommunicable prerogatives of sovereignty, which were hardly ever known before to be parted with to any subjects, and which in several states were not wholly intrusted to the prince or head of the commonwealth himself, were given to the East India Company.  That Company acquired these powers about the end of the reign of Charles the Second; and they were afterwards more fully, as well as more legally, given by Parliament after the Revolution.  From this time, the East India Company was no longer merely a mercantile company, formed for the extension of the British commerce:  it more nearly resembled a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East.  From that time the Company ought to be considered as a subordinate sovereign power:  that is, sovereign with regard to the objects which it touched; subordinate with regard to the power from whence its great trust was derived.