Mr. Hastings, by his confidence in the support derived from this source, or from the habits of independent power, is carried to such a length as to consider a motion to obey the Court of Directors as a degradation of the executive government in his person.  He looks upon a claim under that authority, and a complaint that it has produced no effect, as a piece of daring insolence which he is ashamed that the board has suffered.  The behavior which your Committee consider as so intemperate and despotic he regards as a culpable degree of patience and forbearance.  Major Scott, his agent, enters so much into the principles of Mr. Hastings’s conduct as to tell your Committee that in his opinion Lord Clive would have sent home Mr. Bristow a prisoner upon such an occasion.  It is worthy of remark, that, in the very same breath that Mr. Hastings so heavily condemns a junior officer in the Company’s service (not a servant of the Council, as he hazards to call him, but their fellow-servant) for merely complaining of a supposed injury and requiring redress, he so far forgets his own subordination as to reject the orders of the Court of Directors even as an argument in favor of appointing a person to an office, to presume to censure his undoubted masters, and to accuse them of having been “in a habit of casting reproaches upon him, and heaping indignities on his station.”  And it is to be observed, that this censure was not for the purpose of seeking or obtaining redress for any injury, but appeared rather as a reason for refusing to obey their lawful commands.  It is plainly implied in that minute, that no servant of the Company, in Mr. Bristow’s rank, would dare to act in such a manner, if he had not by indirect means obtained a premature fortune.  This alone is sufficient to show the situation of the Company’s servants in the subordinate situations, when the mere claim of a right, derived from the sovereign legal power, becomes fatal not only to the objects which they pursue, but deeply wounds that reputation both for ability and integrity by which alone they are to be qualified for any other.

If anything could add to the disagreeable situation of those who are submitted to an authority conducted on such principles, it is this:  The Company has ordered that no complaint shall be made in Europe against any of the Council without being previously communicated to them:  a regulation formed upon grave reasons; and it was certainly made in favor of that board.  But if a person, having ground of complaint against the Council, by making use of the mode prescribed in favor of that very Council, and by complaining to themselves, commits an offence for which he may be justly punished, the Directors have not regulated the mode of complaint, they have actually forbidden it; they have, on that supposition, renounced their authority; and the whole system of their officers is delivered over to the arbitrary will of a few of their chief servants.