Your Committee find that his Majesty has not yet given his approbation to the nomination, made by the Court of Directors on the 30th of August, 1781, of Messrs. Stuart and Sulivan to succeed to the Supreme Council on the first vacancies, though the Court applied for the royal approbation so long ago as the 19th of September, 1781; and in these instances the king’s ministers performed their duty, in withholding their countenance from a proceeding so exceptionable and of so dangerous an example.

Your Committee, from a full view of the situation and duties of the Court of Directors, are of opinion that effectual means ought to be taken for regulating that court in such a manner as to prevent either rivalship with or subserviency to their servants.  It might, therefore, be proper for the House to consider whether it is fit that those who are, or have been within some given time, Directors of the Company, should be capable of an appointment to any offices in India.  Directors can never properly govern those for whose employments they are or may be themselves candidates; they can neither protect nor coerce them with due impartiality or due authority.

If such rules as are stated by your Committee under this head were observed in the regular service at home and abroad, the necessity of superseding the regular service by strangers would be more rare; and whenever the servants were so superseded, those who put forward other candidates would be obliged to produce a strong plea of merit and ability, which, in the judgment of mankind, ought to overpower pretensions so authentically established, and so rigorously guarded from abuse.

[Sidenote:  Deficiency of powers to ministers of government.]

The second object, in this part of the plan, of the act of 1773, namely, that of inspection by the ministers of the crown, appears not to have been provided for, so as to draw the timely and productive attention of the state on the grievances of the people of India, and on the abuses of its government.  By the Regulating Act, the ministers were enabled to inspect one part of the correspondence, that which was received in England, but not that which went outward.  They might know something, but that very imperfectly and unsystematically, of the state of affairs; but they were neither authorized to advance nor to retard any measure taken by the Directors in consequence of that state:  they were not provided even with sufficient means of knowing what any of these measures were.  And this imperfect information, together with the want of a direct call to any specific duty, might have, in some degree, occasioned that remissness which rendered even the imperfect powers originally given by the act of 1773 the less efficient.  This defect was in a great measure remedied by a subsequent act; but that act was not passed until the year 1780.

[Sidenote:  Disorders increased since 1773.]