The general system above stated, relative to the silk trade, must materially have affected the manufactures of Bengal, merely as it was a system of preference.  It does by no means satisfactorily appear to your Committee that the freedom held out by the Company’s various orders has been ever fully enjoyed, or that the grievances of the native merchants and manufacturers have been redressed; for we find, on good authority, that, at that very period at which it might be supposed that these orders had their operation, the oppressions were in full vigor.  They appear to have fallen heaviest on the city of Dacca, formerly the great staple for the finest goods in India,—­a place once full of opulent merchants and dealers of all descriptions.

The city and district of Dacca, before the prevalence of the East India Company’s influence and authority, manufactured annually to about three hundred thousand pounds’ value in cloths.  In the year 1776 it had fallen to about two hundred thousand, or two thirds of its former produce.  Of this the Company’s demand amounted only to a fourth part, that is, about fifty thousand pounds yearly.  This was at that time provided by agents for the Company, under the inspection of their commercial servants.  On pretence of securing an advantage for this fourth part for their masters, they exerted a most violent and arbitrary power over the whole.  It was asserted, that they fixed the Company’s mark to such goods as they thought fit, (to all goods, as stated in one complaint,) and disposed of them as they thought proper, excluding not only all the native dealers, but the Dutch Company, and private English merchants,—­that they made advances to the weavers often beyond their known ability to repay in goods within the year, and by this means, having got them in debt, held them in perpetual servitude.  Their inability to keep accounts left them at the discretion of the agents of the supreme power to make their balances what they pleased, and they recovered them, not by legal process, but by seizure of their goods and arbitrary imprisonment of their persons.  One and the same dealer made the advance, valued the return, stated the account, passed the judgment, and executed the process.

Mr. Rouse, Chief of the Dacca Province, who struggled against those evils, says, that in the year 1773 there were no balances due, as the trade was then carried on by the native brokers.  In less than three years these balances amounted to an immense sum,—­a sum lost to the Company, but existing in full force for every purpose of oppression.  In the amount of these balances almost every weaver in the country bore a part, and consequently they were almost all caught in this snare.  “They are in general,” says Mr. Rouse, in a letter to General Clavering, delivered to your Committee, “a timid, helpless people; many of them poor to the utmost degree of wretchedness; incapable of keeping accounts; industrious as it were by instinct; unable to defend themselves, if oppressed; and satisfied, if with continual labor they derive from the fair dealing and humanity of their employer a moderate subsistence for their families.”