Court of Directors, “that they had adopted a new method of keeping up the investment, by private subscribers for eighty lacs of rupees, which will find cargoes for their ships on the usual terms of privilege, at the risk of the individuals, and is to be repaid to them according to the produce of the sales in England,”—­and they tell the Directors, that “a copy of the plan makes a number in their separate dispatches over land.”

It is impossible, in reporting this revolution to the House, to avoid remarking with what fidelity Mr. Hastings and his Council have adhered to the mode of transmitting their accounts which your Committee found it necessary to mark and censure in their First Report.  Its pernicious tendency is there fully set forth.  They were peculiarly called on for a most accurate state of their affairs, in order to explain the necessity of having recourse to such a scheme, as well as for a full and correct account of the scheme itself.  But they send only the above short minute by one dispatch over land, whilst the copy of the plan itself, on which the Directors must form their judgment, is sent separately in another dispatch over land, which has never arrived.  A third dispatch, which also contained the plan, was sent by a sea conveyance, and arrived late.  The Directors have, for very obvious reasons, ordered, by a strict injunction, that they should send duplicates of all their dispatches by every ship.  The spirit of this rule, perhaps, ought to extend to every mode of conveyance.  In this case, so far from sending a duplicate, they do not send even one perfect account.  They announce a plan by one conveyance, and they send it by another conveyance, with other delays and other risks.

At length, at nearly four months’ distance, the plan has been received, and appears to be substantially that which had been announced, but developing in the particulars many new circumstances of the greatest importance.  By this plan it appears that the subscription, even in idea or pretence, is not for the use of the Company, but that the subscribers are united into a sort of society for the remitting their private fortunes:  the goods, indeed, are said to be shipped on the Company’s account, and they are directed to be sold on the same account, and at the usual periods of sales; but, after the payment of duties, and such other allowances as they choose to make, in the eleventh article they provide “that the remainder of the sales shall revert to the subscribers, and be declared to be their property, and divided in proportion to their respective shares.”  The compensation which they allow in this plan to their masters for their brokerage is, that, if, after deducting all the charges which they impose, “the amount of the sales should be found to exceed two shillings and twopence for the current rupee of the invoice account, it shall be taken by the Company.”  For the management