never originally had the appointment of a single officer, civil or military, in the Company’s establishment in India:  nor has the least degree of patronage ever been acquired to the crown in any other manner or measure than as the power was thought expedient to be granted by act of Parliament,—­that is, by the very same authority by which the offices were disposed of and regulated in the bill which his Majesty’s servants have falsely and injuriously represented as infringing upon the prerogative of the crown.

Before the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East India Company.  The East India Company is not a branch of his Majesty’s prerogative administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority under it, nor indeed from any British title that does not derive all its legal validity from acts of Parliament.

When a claim was asserted to the India territorial possessions in the occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel of his Majesty’s patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient inheritance of his crown:  they were claimed for the public.  And when agreements were made with the East India Company concerning any composition for the holding, or any participation of the profits, of those territories, the agreement was made with the public; and the preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it.  These agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with Parliament:  and the bills making and establishing such agreements always originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the disposition of Parliament, without the ceremony of previous consent from the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers:  which previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict right, but generally paid, when a new appropriation takes place in any part of his Majesty’s prerogative revenues.

In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognized and uniformly acted on, when Parliament undertook the reformation of the East India Company in 1773, a commission was appointed, as the commission in the late bill was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were named in Parliament, as in the late bill they were named.  As they received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown; they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address of either House or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution observed in the late bill relative to the commissioners proposed therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding which regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock, as well as by Parliament.  Their proceedings were, in that bill, directed to be of such a nature as easily to subject them to the strictest revision of both, in case of any malversation.