given away in September of that year, the service was raised to the enormous sum of near six thousand pounds a month.  The monthly increase, therefore, being four thousand seven hundred pounds, it constitutes a total increase of charges for the Company, in the five years of the contract, of no less a sum than two hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds.  Now, as the former contract was, without doubt, sufficiently advantageous, a judgment may be formed of the extravagance of the present.  The terms, indeed, pass the bounds of all allowance for negligence and ignorance of office.

The case of Mr. Belli’s contract for supplying provisions to the Fort is of the same description; and what exceedingly increases the suspicion against this profusion, in contracts made in direct violation of orders, is, that they are always found to be given in favor of persons closely connected with Mr. Hastings in his family, or even in his actual service.

The principles upon which Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell justify this disobedience, if admitted, reduce the Company’s government, so far as it regards the Supreme Council, to a mere patronage,—­to a mere power of nominating persons to or removing them from an authority which, is not only despotic with regard to those who are subordinate to it, but in all its acts entirely independent of the legal power which is nominally superior.  These are principles directly leading to the destruction of the Company’s government.  A correspondent practice being established, (as in this case of contracts, as well as others, it has been,) the means are furnished of effectuating this purpose:  for the common superior, the Company, having no power to regulate or to support their own appointments, nor to remove those whom they wish to remove, nor to prevent the contracts from being made use of against their interest, all the English in Bengal must naturally look to the next in authority; they must depend upon, follow, and attach themselves to him solely; and thus a party may be formed of the whole system of civil and military servants for the support of the subordinate, and defiance of the supreme power.

Your Committee being led to attend to the abuse of contracts, which are given upon principles fatal to the subordination of the service, and in defiance of orders, revert to the disobedience of orders in the case of Mahomed Reza Khan.

This transaction is of a piece with those that preceded it.  On the 6th of July, 1781, Mr. Hastings announced to the board the arrival of a messenger and introduced a requisition from the young Nabob Mobarek ul Dowlah, “that he might be permitted to dispose of his own stipend, without being made to depend on the will of another.”  In favor of this requisition Mr. Hastings urged various arguments:—­that the Nabob could no longer be deemed a minor;—­that he was twenty-six years of age, and father of many children;—­that his understanding was much improved of late by an attention to his education;—­that