The Directors, having drawn up their order to the Presidency on these principles, communicated the draught of the general letter in which those orders were contained to the board of his Majesty’s ministers, and other servants lately constituted by Mr. Pitt’s East India Act.  These ministers, who had just carried through Parliament the bill ordering a specific inquiry, immediately drew up another letter, on a principle directly opposite to that which was prescribed by the act of Parliament and followed by the Directors.  In these second orders, all idea of an inquiry into the justice and origin of the pretended debts, particularly of the last, the greatest, and the most obnoxious to suspicion, is abandoned.  They are all admitted and established without any investigation whatsoever, (except some private conference with the agents of the claimants is to pass for an investigation,) and a fund for their discharge is assigned and set apart out of the revenues of the Carnatic.  To this arrangement in favor of their servants, servants suspected of corruption and convicted of disobedience, the Directors of the East India Company were ordered to set their hands, asserting it to arise from their own conviction and opinion, in flat contradiction to their recorded sentiments, their strong remonstrance, and their declared sense of their duty, as well under their general trust and their oath as Directors, as under the express injunctions of an act of Parliament.

The principles upon which this summary proceeding was adopted by the ministerial board are stated by themselves in a number in the appendix to this speech.

By another section of the same act, the same Court of Directors were ordered to take into consideration and to decide on the indeterminate rights of the Rajah of Tanjore and the Nabob of Arcot; and in this, as in the former case, no power of appeal, revision, or alteration was reserved to any other.  It was a jurisdiction, in a cause between party and party, given to the Court of Directors specifically.  It was known that the territories of the former of these princes had been twice invaded and pillaged, and the prince deposed and imprisoned, by the Company’s servants, influenced by the intrigues of the latter, and for the purpose of paying his pretended debts.  The Company had, in the year 1775, ordered a restoration of the Rajah to his government, under certain conditions.  The Rajah complained, that his territories had not been completely restored to him, and that no part of his goods, money, revenues, or records, unjustly taken and withheld from him, were ever returned.  The Nabob, on the other hand, never ceased to claim the country itself, and carried on a continued train of negotiation, that it should again be given up to him, in violation of the Company’s public faith.