The resolution in Bengal being thus decisively taken, it came to the turn of the Court of Directors to act their part.  They did act their part exactly in their old manner:  they had recourse to their old remedy of repeating orders which had been disobeyed.  The Directors declare to Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, though without any apparent reason, that “they have read with astonishment their formal resolution to suspend the execution of their orders; that they shall take such measures as appear necessary for preserving the authority of the Court of Directors, and for preventing such instances of direct and wilful disobedience in their servants in time to come.”  They then renew their directions concerning Mr. Fowke.  The event of this sole measure taken to preserve their authority, and to prevent instances of direct and wilful disobedience, your Committee will state in its proper place,—­taking into consideration, for the present, the proceedings relative to Mr. Bristow, and to Mahomed Reza Khan, which were altogether in the same spirit; but as they were diversified in the circumstances of disobedience, as well from the case of Mr. Fowke as from one another, and as these circumstances tend to discover other dangerous principles of abuse, and the general prostrate condition of the authority of Parliament in Bengal, your Committee proceed first to make some observations upon them.

The province of Oude, enlarged by the accession of several extensive and once flourishing territories, that is, by the country of the Rohillas, the district of Corah and Allahabad, and other provinces betwixt the Ganges and Jumna, is under the nominal dominion of one of the princes of the country, called Asoph ul Dowlah.  But a body of English troops is kept up in his country; and the greatest part of his revenues are, by one description or another, substantially under the administration of English subjects.  He is to all purposes a dependent prince.  The person to be employed in his dominions to act for the Committee [Company?] was therefore of little consequence in his capacity of negotiator; but he was vested with a trust, great and critical, in all pecuniary affairs.  These provinces of dependence lie out of the system of the Company’s ordinary administration, and transactions there cannot be so readily brought under the cognizance of the Court of Directors.  This renders it the more necessary that the Residents in such places should be persons not disapproved of by the Court of Directors.  They are to manage a permanent interest, which is not, like a matter of political negotiation, variable, and which, from circumstances, might possibly excuse some degree of discretionary latitude in construing their orders.  During the lifetime of General Clavering and Colonel Monson, Mr. Bristow was appointed to this Presidency, and that appointment, being approved and confirmed by the Court of Directors, became in effect their own.  Mr. Bristow appears to have shown himself a man of talents and activity.  He had been principally concerned in the negotiations by which the Company’s interest in the higher provinces had been established; and those services were considered by the Presidency of Calcutta as so meritorious, that they voted him ten thousand pounds as a reward, with many expressions of esteem and honor.