It is not contended that the act of Parliament did not expressly ordain an inquiry.  It is not asserted that this inquiry was not, with equal precision of terms, specially committed, under particular regulations, to the Court of Directors.  I conceive, therefore, the Board of Control had no right whatsoever to intermeddle in that business.  There is nothing certain in the principles of jurisprudence, if this be not undeniably true, that when, a special authority is given to any persons by name to do some particular act, that no others, by virtue of general powers, can obtain a legal title to intrude themselves into that trust, and to exercise those special functions in their place.  I therefore consider the intermeddling of ministers in this affair as a downright usurpation.  But if the strained construction by which they have forced themselves into a suspicious office (which every man delicate with regard to character would rather have sought constructions to avoid) were perfectly sound and perfectly legal, of this I am certain, that they cannot be justified in declining the inquiry which had been prescribed to the Court of Directors.  If the Board of Control did lawfully possess the right of executing the special trust given to that court, they must take it as they found it, subject to the very same regulations which bound the Court of Directors.  It will be allowed that the Court of Directors had no authority to dispense with either the substance or the mode of inquiry prescribed by the act of Parliament.  If they had not, where in the act did the Board of Control acquire that capacity?  Indeed, it was impossible they should acquire it.  What must we think of the fabric and texture of an act of Parliament which should find it necessary to prescribe a strict inquisition, that should descend into minute regulations for the conduct of that inquisition, that should commit this trust to a particular description of men, and in the very same breath should enable another body, at their own pleasure, to supersede all the provisions the legislature had made, and to defeat the whole purpose, end, and object of the law?  This cannot be supposed even of an act of Parliament conceived by the ministers themselves, and brought forth during the delirium of the last session.

My honorable friend has told you in the speech which introduced his motion, that fortunately this question is not a great deal involved in the labyrinths of Indian detail.  Certainly not.  But if it were, I beg leave to assure you that there is nothing in the Indian detail which is more difficult than in the detail of any other business.  I admit, because I have some experience of the fact, that for the interior regulation of India a minute knowledge of India is requisite.  But on any specific matter of delinquency in its government you are as capable of judging as if the same thing were done at your door.  Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation, engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and cast with