by the sovereign power, of an original right in the subject, can never be subverted, but by rooting up the holding radical principles of government, and even of society itself.  The charters which we call by distinction great are public instruments of this nature:  I mean the charters of King John and King Henry the Third.  The things secured by these instruments may, without any deceitful ambiguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights of men.

These charters have made the very name of a charter dear to the heart of every Englishman.  But, Sir, there may be, and there are, charters, not only different in nature, but formed on principles the very reverse of those of the Great Charter.  Of this kind is the charter of the East India Company. Magnet Charta is a charter to restrain power and to destroy monopoly.  The East India charter is a charter to establish monopoly and to create power.  Political power and commercial monopoly are not the rights of men; and the rights to them derived from charters it is fallacious and sophistical to call “the chartered rights of men.”  These chartered rights (to speak of such charters and of their effects in terms of the greatest possible moderation) do at least suspend the natural rights of mankind at large, and in their very frame and constitution are liable to fall into a direct violation of them.

It is a charter of this latter description (that is to say, a charter of power and monopoly) which is affected by the bill before you.  The bill, Sir, does without question affect it:  it does affect it essentially and substantially.  But, having stated to you of what description the chartered rights are which this bill touches, I feel no difficulty at all in acknowledging the existence of those chartered rights in their fullest extent.  They belong to the Company in the surest manner, and they are secured to that body by every sort of public sanction.  They are stamped by the faith of the king; they are stamped by the faith of Parliament:  they have been bought for money, for money honestly and fairly paid; they have been bought for valuable consideration, over and over again.

I therefore freely admit to the East India Company their claim to exclude their fellow-subjects from the commerce of half the globe.  I admit their claim to administer an annual territorial revenue of seven millions sterling, to command an army of sixty thousand men, and to dispose (under the control of a sovereign, imperial discretion, and with the due observance of the natural and local law) of the lives and fortunes of thirty millions of their fellow-creatures.  All this they possess by charter, and by Acts of Parliament, (in my opinion,) without a shadow of controversy.

Those who carry the rights and claims of the Company the furthest do not contend for more than this; and all this I freely grant.  But, granting all this, they must grant to me, in my turn, that all political power which is set over men, and that all privilege claimed or exercised in exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and for so much a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit.