Under these successive arrangements things took a course very different from their usual order.  A new disposition took place, not dreamt of in the theories of speculative politicians, and of which few examples in the least resembling it have been seen in the modern world, none at all in the ancient.  In other instances, a political body that acts as a commonwealth was first settled, and trade followed as a consequence of the protection obtained by political power; but here the course of affairs was reversed.  The constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in empire.  Indeed, wherever the sovereign powers of peace and war are given, there wants but time and circumstance to make these powers supersede every other.  The affairs of commerce will fall at last into their proper rank and situation.  However primary in their original intention, they will become secondary.  The possession, therefore, and the power of assertion of these great authorities coinciding with the improved state of Europe, with the improved state of arts in Europe, with the improved state of laws, and, what is much more material, the improved state of military discipline, more and more perfected every day with us,—­universal improvement in Europe coinciding with the general decay of Asia, (for the proud day of Asia is passed,) this improvement coinciding with the relaxation and dissolution of the Mogul government, with the decline of its warlike spirit, with the total disuse of the ancient strictness of the military discipline established by Tamerlane, the India Company came to be what it is, a great empire, carrying on, subordinately, a great commerce; it became that thing which was supposed by the Roman law irreconcilable to reason and propriety,—­eundem negotiatorem et dominum:  the same power became the general trader, the same power became the supreme lord.

In this exalted situation, the India Company, however, still preserves traces of its original mercantile character.  The whole exterior order of its political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and mercantile principles.  In fact, the East India Company in Asia is a state in the disguise of a merchant.  Its whole service is a system of public offices in the disguise of a counting-house.  Accordingly, the whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely political.

This system of the Company’s service, its order and discipline, is necessary to be explained to your Lordships, that you may see in what manner the abuses have affected it.  In the first place, all the persons who go abroad in the Company’s civil service enter as clerks in the counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to it,—­writers.  In that condition they are obliged to serve five years.  The second step is that of a factor, in which they are obliged to serve three years.  The third step they take is that of a junior merchant, in which they are obliged to serve three years more.  At that period they become senior merchants, which is the highest stage of advance in the Company’s service,—­a rank by which they had pretensions, before the year 1774, to the Council, to the succession of the Presidency, and to whatever other honors the Company has to bestow.