The situation of the Company, under this perpetual variation in the system of their investment, is truly perplexing.  The manner in which they arrive at any knowledge of it is no less so.  The letter to Lord Macartney, by which the variation is discovered, was not intended for transmission to the Directors.  It was merely for the information of those who were admitted to a share of the subscription at Madras.  When Mr. Hastings sent this information to those subscribers, he might well enough have presumed an event to happen which did happen,—­that is, that a vessel might be dispatched from Madras to Europe:  and indeed, by that, and by every devisable means, he ought not only to have apprised the Directors of this most material change in the plan of the investment, but to have entered fully into the grounds and reasons of his making it.

It appears to your Committee that the ships which brought to England the plan of the 8th of April did not sail from Bengal until the 1st of May.  If the change had been in contemplation for any time before the 30th of April, two days would have sufficed to send an account of it, and it might have arrived along with the plan which it affected.  If, therefore, such a change was in agitation before the sailing of the ships, and yet was concealed when it might have been communicated, the concealment is censurable.  It is not improbable that some change of the kind was made or meditated before the sailing of the ships for Europe:  for it is hardly to be imagined that reasons wholly unlooked-for should appear for setting aside a plan concerning the success of which the Council-General seemed so very confident, that a new one should be proposed, that its merits should be discussed among the moneyed men, that it should be adopted in Council, and officially ready for transmission to Madras, in twelve or thirteen days.  In this perplexity of plan and of transmission, the Court of Directors may have made an arrangement of their affairs on the groundwork of the first scheme, which was officially and authentically conveyed to them.  The fundamental alteration of that plan in India might require another of a very different kind in England, which the arrangements taken in consequence of the first might make it difficult, if not impossible, to execute.  What must add to the confusion is, that the alteration has not the regular and official authority of the original plan, and may be presumed to indicate with certainty nothing more than that the business is again afloat, and that no scheme is finally determined on.  Thus the Company is left without any fixed data upon which they can make a rational disposition of their affairs.