The plan adopted by your Committee is, first, to consider the law regulating the East India Company, as it now stands,—­and, secondly, to inquire into the circumstances of the two great links of connection by which the territorial possessions in India are united to this kingdom, namely, the Company’s commerce, and the government exercised under the charter and under acts of Parliament.  The last [first] of these objects, the commerce, is taken in two points of view:  the external, or the direct trade between India and Europe, and the internal, that is to say, the trade of Bengal, in all the articles of produce and manufacture which furnish the Company’s investment.

The government is considered by your Committee under the like descriptions of internal and external.  The internal regards the communication between the Court of Directors and their servants in India, the management of the revenue, the expenditure of public money, the civil administration, the administration of justice, and the state of the army.  The external regards, first, the conduct and maxims of the Company’s government with respect to the native princes and people dependent on the British authority,—­and, next, the proceedings with regard to those native powers which are wholly independent of the Company.  But your Committee’s observations on the last division extend to those matters only which are not comprehended in the Report of the Committee of Secrecy.  Under these heads, your Committee refer to the most leading particulars of abuse which prevail in the administration of India,—­deviating only from this order where the abuses are of a complicated nature, and where one cannot be well considered independently of several others.

[Sidenote:  Second attempt made by Parliament for a reformation.]

Your Committee observe, that this is the second attempt made by Parliament for the reformation of abuses in the Company’s government.  It appears, therefore, to them a necessary preliminary to this second undertaking, to consider the causes which, in their opinion, have produced the failure of the first,—­that the defects of the original plan may be supplied, its errors corrected, and such useful regulations as were then adopted may be further explained, enlarged, and enforced.

[Sidenote:  Proceedings of session 1773.]

The first design of this kind was formed in the session of the year 1773.  In that year, Parliament, taking up the consideration of the affairs of India, through two of its committees collected a very great body of details concerning the interior economy of the Company’s possessions, and concerning many particulars of abuse which prevailed at the time when those committees made their ample and instructive reports.  But it does not appear that the body of regulations enacted in that year, that is, in the East India Act of the thirteenth of his Majesty’s reign, were altogether grounded on that information, but were adopted rather