the Parliamentary establishment proposed in this bill.  An honorable gentleman,[58] not now in his place, but who is well acquainted with the India Company, and by no means a friend to this bill, has told you that a ministerial influence has always been predominant in that body,—­and that to make the Directors pliant to their purposes, ministers generally caused persons meanly qualified to be chosen Directors.  According to his idea, to secure subserviency, they submitted the Company’s affairs to the direction of incapacity.  This was to ruin the Company in order to govern it.  This was certainly influence in the very worst form in which it could appear.  At best it was clandestine and irresponsible.  Whether this was done so much upon system as that gentleman supposes, I greatly doubt.  But such in effect the operation of government on that court unquestionably was; and such, under a similar constitution, it will be forever.  Ministers must be wholly removed from the management of the affairs of India, or they will have an influence in its patronage.  The thing is inevitable.  Their scheme of a new Secretary of State, “with a more vigorous control,” is not much better than a repetition of the measure which we know by experience will not do.  Since the year 1773 and the year 1780, the Company has been under the control of the Secretary of State’s office, and we had then three Secretaries of State.  If more than this is done, then they annihilate the direction which they pretend to support; and they augment the influence of the crown, of whose growth they affect so great an horror.  But in truth this scheme of reconciling a direction really and truly deliberative with an office really and substantially controlling is a sort of machinery that can be kept in order but a very short time.  Either the Directors will dwindle into clerks, or the Secretary of State, as hitherto has been the course, will leave everything to them, often through design, often through neglect.  If both should affect activity, collision, procrastination, delay, and, in the end, utter confusion, must ensue.

But, Sir, there is one kind of influence far greater than that of the nomination to office.  This gentlemen in opposition have totally overlooked, although it now exists in its full vigor; and it will do so, upon their scheme, in at least as much force as it does now.  That influence this bill cuts up by the roots.  I mean the influence of protection.  I shall explain myself.—­The office given to a young man going to India is of trifling consequence.  But he that goes out an insignificant boy in a few years returns a great nabob.  Mr. Hastings says he has two hundred and fifty of that kind of raw materials, who expect to be speedily manufactured into the merchantable quality I mention.  One of these gentlemen, suppose, returns hither laden with odium and with riches.  When he comes to England, he comes as to a prison, or as to a sanctuary; and either is ready for him,