[63] By an act of Parliament, the Directors of the East India Company are restrained from acceptance of bills drawn, from India, beyond a certain amount, without the consent of the Commissioners of the Treasury.  The late House of Commons, finding bills to an immense amount drawn upon that body by their servants abroad, and knowing their circumstances to be exceedingly doubtful, came to a resolution providently, cautioning the Lords of the Treasury against the acceptance of these bills, until the House should otherwise direct.  The Court Lords then took occasion to declare against the resolution as illegal, by the Commons undertaking to direct in the execution of a trust created by act of Parliament.  The House, justly alarmed at this resolution, which went to the destruction of the whole of its superintending capacity, and particularly in matters relative to its own province of money, directed a committee to search the journals, and they found a regular series of precedents, commencing from the remotest of those records, and carried on to that day, by which it appeared that the House interfered, by an authoritative advice and admonition, upon every act of executive government without exception, and in many much stronger cases than that which the Lords thought proper to quarrel with.

[64] “I observe, at the same time, that there is no charge or complaint suggested against my present ministers.”—­The King’s Answer, 25th February, 1784, to the Address of the House of Common. Vide Resolutions of the House of Commons, printed for Debrett, p. 31.

[65] The territorial possessions in the East Indies were acquired to the Company, in virtue of grants from the Great Mogul, in the nature of offices and jurisdictions, to be held under him, and dependent upon his crown, with the express condition of being obedient to orders from his court, and of paying an annual tribute to his treasury.  It is true that no obedience is yielded to these orders, and for some time past there has been no payment made of this tribute.  But it is under a grant so conditioned that they still hold.  To subject the King of Great Britain as tributary to a foreign power by the acts of his subjects; to suppose the grant valid, and yet the condition void; to suppose it good for the king, and insufficient for the Company; to suppose it an interest divisible between the parties:  these are some few of the many legal difficulties to be surmounted, before the Common Law of England can acknowledge the East India Company’s Asiatic affairs to be a subject matter of prerogative, so as to bring it within the verge of English jurisprudence.  It is a very anomalous species of power and property which is held by the East India Company.  Our English prerogative law does not furnish principles, much less precedents, by which it can be defined or adjusted.  Nothing but the eminent dominion of Parliament over every British subject, in every concern, and in every circumstance in which he is placed, can adjust this new, intricate matter.  Parliament may act wisely or unwisely, justly or unjustly; but Parliament alone is competent to it.