In pursuing their inquiries, your Committee have endeavored chiefly to keep in view the conduct of persons in the highest station, particularly of those in whom the legislature, as well as the Company, have placed a special confidence,—­judging that the conduct of such persons is not only most important in itself, but most likely to influence the subordinate ranks of the service.  Your Committee have also examined the proceedings of the Court of Directors on all those instances of the behavior of their servants that seemed to deserve, and did sometimes attract, their immediate attention.  They constantly find that the negligence of the Court of Directors has kept pace with, and must naturally have quickened, the growth of the practices which they have condemned.  Breach of duty abroad will always go hand in hand with neglect of it at home.  In general, the Court of Directors, though sufficiently severe in censuring offences, and sometimes in punishing those whom they have regarded as offenders of a lower rank, appear to have suffered the most conspicuous and therefore the most dangerous examples of disobedience and misconduct in the first department of their service to pass with a feeble and ineffectual condemnation.  In those cases which they have deemed too apparent and too strong to be disregarded even with safety to themselves, and against which their heaviest displeasure has been declared, it appears to your Committee that their interference, such as it was, had a mischievous rather than a useful tendency.  A total neglect of duty in this respect, however culpable, is not to be compared, either in its nature or in its consequences, with the destructive principles on which they have acted.  It has been their practice, if not system, to inquire, to censure, and not to punish.  As long as the misconduct of persons in power in Bengal was encouraged by nothing but the hopes of concealment, it may be presumed that they felt some restraint upon their actions, and that they stood in some awe of the power placed over them; whereas it is to be apprehended that the late conduct of the Court of Directors tells them, in effect, that they have nothing to fear from the certainty of a discovery.

On the same principle on which your Committee have generally limited their researches to the persons placed by Parliament or raised or put in nomination by the Court of Directors to the highest station in Bengal, it was also their original wish to limit those inquiries to the period at which Parliament interposed its authority between the Company and their servants, and gave a new constitution to the Presidency of Fort William.  If the Company’s servants had taken a new date from that period, and if from thenceforward their conduct had corresponded with the views of the legislature, it is probable that a review of the transactions of remoter periods would not have been deemed necessary, and that the remembrance of them would have been gradually effaced and finally buried in oblivion.  But the