This positive rule is opposed to the positive directions of the Company to employ those obnoxious persons by preference.  How far this violent use of authority for the purpose of destroying rivalship has succeeded in reducing the price of goods to the Company has been made manifest by the facts before stated in their place.

The recriminatory charges of the Company’s agents on the native merchants have made very little impression on your Committee.  We have nothing in favor of them, but the assertion of a party powerful and interested.  In such cases of mutual assertion and denial, your Committee are led irresistibly to attach abuse to power, and to presume that suffering and hardship are more likely to attend on weakness than that any combination of unprotected individuals is of force to prevail over influence, power, wealth, and authority.  The complaints of the native merchants ought not to have been treated in any of those modes in which they were then treated.  And when men are in the situation of complainants against unbounded power, their abandoning their suit is far from a full and clear proof of their complaints being groundless.  It is not because redress has been rendered impracticable that oppression does not exist; nor is the despair of sufferers any alleviation of their afflictions.  A review of some of the most remarkable of the complaints made by the native merchants in that province is so essential for laying open the true spirit of the commercial administration, and the real condition of those concerned in trade there, that your Committee observing the records on this subject and at this period full of them, they could not think themselves justifiable in not stating them to the House.

Your Committee have found many heavy charges of oppression against Mr. Barwell, whilst Factory Chief at Dacca; which oppressions are stated to have continued, and even to have been aggravated, on complaint at Calcutta.  These complaints appear in several memorials presented to the Supreme Council of Calcutta, of which Mr. Barwell was a member.  They appeared yet more fully and more strongly in a bill in Chancery filed in the Supreme Court, which was afterwards recorded before the Governor-General and Council, and transmitted to the Court of Directors.

Your Committee, struck with the magnitude and importance of these charges, and finding that with regard to those before the Council no regular investigation has ever taken place, and finding also that Mr. Barwell had asserted in a Minute of Council that he had given a full answer to the allegations in that bill, ordered a copy of the answer to be laid before your Committee, that they might be enabled to state to the House how far it appeared to them to be full, how far the charges were denied as to the fact, or, where the facts might be admitted, what justification was set up.  It appeared necessary, in order to determine on the true situation of the trade and the merchants of that great city and district.