to us by the Vizier, have any rights whatever annexed to it, and be not a mere empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as are held, countenanced, and established by the law, custom, and usage of the Mogul empire, and not by the provisions of any British act of Parliament hitherto enacted. Those rights, and none other, I have been the involuntary instrument of enforcing.  And if any future act of Parliament shall positively or by implication tend to annihilate those very rights, or their exertion as I have exerted them, I much fear that the boasted sovereignty of Benares, which was held up as an acquisition, almost obtruded on the Company against my consent and opinion, (for I acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and inconveniences in its future exercise,)—­I fear, I say, that this sovereignty will be found a burden instead of a benefit, a heavy clog rather than a precious gem to its present possessors:  I mean, unless the whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made an uniform compact body by one grand and systematic arrangement.—­such an arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass.

“Every part of Hindostan has been constantly exposed to these and similar disadvantages ever since the Mahomedan conquests.  The Hindoos, who never incorporated with their conquerors, were kept in order only by the strong hand of power.  The constant necessity of similar exertions would increase at once their energy and extent; so that rebellion itself is the parent and promoter of despotism.  Sovereignty in India implies nothing else.  For I know not how we can form an estimate of its powers, but from its visible effects; and those are everywhere the same, from Cabool to Assam.  The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power.  To all this I strongly alluded in the minutes I delivered in Council, when the treaty with the new Vizier was on foot in 1775; and I wished to make Cheyt Sing independent, because in India dependence included a thousand evils, many of which I enumerated at that time, and they are entered in the ninth clause of the first section of this charge.  I knew the powers with which an Indian sovereignty is armed, and the dangers to which tributaries are exposed.  I knew, that, from the history of Asia, and from the very nature of mankind, the subjects of a despotic empire are always vigilant for the moment to rebel, and the sovereign is ever jealous of rebellious