Such were the people who stood accused by the Company’s agents as pretending grievances, in order to be excused the payment of their balances.  As to the commercial state of the province in general, Mr. Rouse represents it “to be for those two years a perpetual scene of complaint and disputation;—­the Company’s agents professing to pay higher rates to weavers, whilst the Leadenhall sales showed an heavy loss to the Company; the weavers have even travelled in multitudes to prefer their complaints at the Presidency; the amount of the investment comparatively small, with balances comparatively large, and, as I understand, generally contested by the weavers; the native merchants, called delals, removed from their influence, as prejudicial to the Company’s concerns; and European merchants complaining against undue influence of the Company’s commercial agents, in preventing the free purchase even of those goods which the Company never takes.”

The spirit of those agents will be fully comprehended from a state of the proceedings before Mr. Rouse and Council, on the complaint of a Mr. Cree, an English free merchant at Dacca, who had been twice treated in the same injurious manner by the agents of Mr. Hurst, the Commercial Chief at that place.  On his complaint to the board of the seizure of the goods, and imprisonment of his agents, Mr. Hurst was called upon for an explanation.  In return he informed them that he had sent to one of the villages to inquire concerning the matter of fact alleged.  The impartial person sent to make this inquiry was the very man accused of the oppressions into which he was sent to examine.  The answer of Mr. Hurst is in an high and determined tone.  He does not deny that there are some instances of abuse of power.  “But I ask,” says he, “what authority can guard against the conduct of individuals? but that a single instance cannot be brought of a general depravity.”  Your Committee have reason to believe these coercive measures to have been very general, though employed according to the degree of resistance opposed to the monopoly; for we find at one time the whole trade of the Dutch involved in the general servitude.  But it appears very extraordinary that nothing but the actual proof of a general abuse could affect a practice the very principle of which tends to make the coercion as general as the trade.  Mr. Hurst’s reflection concerning the abuse of authority is just, but in this case it is altogether inapplicable; because the complaint was not of the abuse, but of the use of authority in matters of trade, which ought to have been free.  He throws out a variety of invidious reflections against the Council, as if they wanted zeal for the Company’s service; his justification of his practices, and his declaration of his resolution to persevere in them, are firm and determined,—­asserting the right and policy of such restraints, and laying down a rule for his conduct at the factory, which,