By this extraordinary scheme the Company is totally overturned, and all its relations inverted.  From being a body concerned in trade on their own account, and employing their servants as factors, the servants have at one stroke taken the whole trade into their own hands, on their own capital of 800,000_l._, at their own risk, and the Company are become agents and factors to them, to sell by commission their goods for their profit.

To enable your Committee to form some judgment upon the profit which may accrue to the Company from its new relation and employment, they directed that an estimate should be made of the probable proceeds of an investment conducted on the principles of that intended to be realized for 1783.  By this estimate, which is subjoined,[5] it appears to your Committee, that, so far from any surplus profit from this transaction, the Bengal adventurers themselves, instead of realizing 2_s._ 2_d._ the rupee, (the standard they fix for their payment,) will not receive the 1_s._ 9_d._ which is its utmost value in silver at the Mint, nor probably above 1_s._ 5_d._ With this certain loss before their eyes, it is impossible that they can ever complete their subscription, unless, by management among themselves, they should be able to procure the goods for their own account upon other terms than those on which they purchased them for their masters, or unless they have for the supply of the Company on their hands a quantity of goods which they cannot otherwise dispose of.  This latter case is not very improbable, from their proposing to send ten sixteenths of the whole investment in silk,—­which, as will be seen hereafter, the Company has prohibited to be sent on their account, as a disadvantageous article.  Nothing but the servants being overloaded can rationally account for their choice of so great a proportion of so dubious a commodity.

On the state made by two reports of a committee of the General Court in 1782, their affairs were even then reduced to a low ebb.  But under the arrangement announced by Mr. Hastings and his colleagues, it does not appear, after this period of the servants’ investment, from what fund the proprietors are to make any dividend at all.  The objects of the sale from whence the dividend is to arise are not their goods:  they stand accountable to others for the whole probable produce.  The state of the Company’s commerce will therefore become an object of serious consideration:  an affair, as your Committee apprehends, of as much difficulty as ever tried the faculties of this House.  For, on the one hand, it is plain that the system of providing the Company’s import into Europe, resting almost wholly by an investment from its territorial revenues, has failed:  during its continuance it was supported on principles fatal to the prosperity of that country.  On the other hand, if the nominal commerce of the Company is suffered to be carried on for the account of the servants abroad,