If this is true with regard to every species of political dominion and every description of commercial privilege, none of which can be original, self-derived rights, or grants for the mere private benefit of the holders, then such rights, or privileges, or whatever else you choose to call them, are all in the strictest sense a trust:  and it is of the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable,—­and even totally to cease, when it substantially varies from the purposes for which alone it could have a lawful existence.

This I conceive, Sir, to be true of trusts of power vested in the highest hands, and of such, as seem to hold of no human creature.  But about the application of this principle to subordinate derivative trusts I do not see how a controversy can be maintained.  To whom, then, would I make the East India Company accountable?  Why, to Parliament, to be sure,—­to Parliament, from whom their trust was derived,—­to Parliament, which alone is capable of comprehending the magnitude of its object, and its abuse, and alone capable of an effectual legislative remedy.  The very charter, which is held out to exclude Parliament from correcting malversation with regard to the high trust vested in the Company, is the very thing which at once gives a title and imposes a duty on us to interfere with effect, wherever power and authority originating from ourselves are perverted from their purposes, and become instruments of wrong and violence.

If Parliament, Sir, had nothing to do with this charter, we might have some sort of Epicurean excuse to stand aloof, indifferent spectators of what passes in the Company’s name in India and in London.  But if we are the very cause of the evil, we are in a special manner engaged to the redress; and for us passively to bear with oppressions committed under the sanction of our own authority is in truth and reason for this House to be an active accomplice in the abuse.

That the power, notoriously grossly abused, has been bought from us is very certain.  But this circumstance, which is urged against the bill, becomes an additional motive for our interference, lest we should be thought to have sold the blood of millions of men for the base consideration of money.  We sold, I admit, all that we had to sell,—­that is, our authority, not our control.  We had not a right to make a market of our duties.

I ground myself, therefore, on this principle:—­that, if the abuse is proved, the contract is broken, and we reenter into all our rights, that is, into the exercise of all our duties.  Our own authority is, indeed, as much a trust originally as the Company’s authority is a trust derivatively; and it is the use we make of the resumed power that must justify or condemn us in the resumption of it.  When we have perfected the plan laid before us by the right honorable mover, the world will then see what it is we destroy, and what it is we create.  By that test we stand or fall; and by that test I trust that it will be found, in the issue, that we are going to supersede a charter abused to the full extent of all the powers which it could abuse, and exercised in the plenitude of despotism, tyranny, and corruption,—­and that in one and the same plan we provide a real chartered security for the rights of men, cruelly violated under that charter.