On this new arrangement the Courts of Proprietors and Directors considered the details of commerce as not perfectly consistent with the enlarged sphere of duty and the reduced number of the Council.  Therefore, to relieve them from this burden, they instituted a new office, called the Board of Trade, for the subordinate management of their commercial concerns, and appointed eleven of the senior servants to fill the commission.

[Sidenote:  Object of powers to Governor-General and Council.]

The powers given by the act to the new Governor-General and Council had for their direct object the kingdom of Bengal and its dependencies.  Within that sphere (and it is not a small one) their authority extended over all the Company’s concerns of whatever description.  In matters of peace and war it seems to have been meant that the other Presidencies should be subordinate to their board.  But the law is loose and defective, where it professes to restrain the subordinate Presidencies from making war without the consent and approbation of the Supreme Council.  They are left free to act without it in cases of imminent necessity, or where they shall have received special orders from the Company.  The first exception leaves it open to the subordinate to judge of the necessity of measures which, when taken, bind or involve the superior:  the second refers a question of peace or war to two jurisdictions, which may give different judgments.  In both instances cases in point have occurred.[1] With regard to their local administration, their powers were exceedingly and dangerously loose and undetermined.  Their powers were not given directly, but in words of reference, in which neither the objects related to nor the mode of the relation were sufficiently expressed.  Their legislative and executive capacities were not so accurately drawn, and marked by such strong and penal lines of distinction, as to keep these capacities separate.  Where legislative and merely executive powers were lodged in the same hands, the legislative, which is the larger and the more ready for all occasions, was constantly resorted to.  The Governor-General and Council, therefore, immediately gave constructions to their ill-defined authority which rendered it perfectly despotic,—­constructions which if they were allowed, no action of theirs ought to be regarded as criminal.

Armed as they were with an authority in itself so ample, and by abuse so capable of an unlimited extent, very few, and these very insufficient correctives, were administered.  Ample salaries were provided for them, which indeed removed the necessity, but by no means the inducements to corruption and oppression.  Nor was any barrier whatsoever opposed on the part of the natives against their injustice, except the Supreme Court of Judicature, which never could be capable of controlling a government with such powers, without becoming such a government itself.