I have explained, or endeavored to explain, to your Lordships these circumstances of the true spirit, genius, and character, more than the ostensible institutions of the Company’s service:  I now shall beg leave to bring before you one institution, taken from the mercantile constitution of the Company, so excellent, that I will venture to say that human wisdom has never exceeded it.  In this excellent institution the counting-house gave lessons to the state.  The active, awakened, and enlightened principle of self-interest will provide a better system for the guard of that interest than the cold, drowsy wisdom of those who provide for a good out of themselves ever contrived for the public.  The plans sketched by private prudence for private interest, the regulations by mercantile men for their mercantile purposes, when they can be applied to the discipline and order of the state, produce a discipline and order which no state should be ashamed to copy.  The Company’s mercantile regulations are admirably fitted for the government of a remote, large, disjointed empire.  As merchants, having factors abroad in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public ministers.  The Company has made it a fundamental part of their constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written government.  Your Lordships will observe, in the course of the proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in the government of India,—­that is, that the Company’s government is a government of writing, a government of record.  The strictest court of justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of record as the India Company’s executive service is, or ought to be, in all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or diary of all their transactions, public and private:  they are bound to do this by an express covenant.  They oblige them, as a corrective upon that diary, to keep a letter-book, in which all their letters are to be regularly entered.  And they are bound by the same covenant to produce all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life.  But as the great corrective of all, they have contrived that every proceeding in public council shall be written,—­no debates merely verbal.  The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and recorded.  All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council, Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves, decisions, and final resolutions of affairs:  the argument, the discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear.  But the Company has proceeded much further, and done much more