Secondly, if, instead of letting the Company’s lands or farms to indifferent persons, their agent or trustee be at liberty to hold them himself, he will always (on principles stated and adhered to in the defence) have a sufficient reason for farming them on his own account, since he can at all times make them as profitable as he pleases; or if he leases them to a third person, yet reserves an intermediate profit for himself, that profit may be as great as he thinks fit, and must be necessarily made at the Company’s expense.  If at the same time he be collector of the revenues, it will be his interest to recommend remissions in favor of the nominal farmer, and he will have it in his power to sink the amount of his collections.

These principles, and the correspondent practices, leave the India Company without any security that all the leases of the lands of Bengal may not have been disposed of, under that administration which made the five years’ settlement in 1772, in the same manner and for the same purpose.

To enable the House to judge how far this apprehension may be founded, it will be proper to state, that Mr. Nicholas Grueber, who preceded Mr. Barwell in the Chiefship of Dacca, in a letter dated 29th of April, 1775, declares that he paid to the Committee of Circuit twelve thousand rupees as their profit on a single salt farm,—­which sum, he says, “I paid the Committee at their request, before their departure from Dacca, and reimbursed myself out of the advances directed to be issued for the provision of the salt.”  Thus one illicit and mischievous transaction always leads to another; and the irregular farming of revenue brings on the misapplication of the commercial advances.

Mr. Barwell professes himself to be sensible “that a wish to add to his fortune may possibly have warped his judgment, and that he rather chooses to admit an error than deny a fact.”  But your Committee are of opinion that the extraordinary caution and the intricate contrivances with which his share in this transaction is wrapped up form a sufficient proof that he was not altogether misled in his judgment; and though there might be some merit in acknowledging an error before it was discovered, there could be very little in a confession produced by previous detection.

The reasons assigned by Mr. Barwell, in defence of the clandestine part of this transaction, seem to your Committee to be insufficient in themselves, and not very fit to be urged by a man in his station.  In one place he says, that “it was not thought consistent with the public regulations that the names of any Europeans should appear.”  In another he says, “I am aware of the objection that has been made to the English taking farms under the names of natives, as prohibited by the Company’s orders; and I must deviate a little upon this.  It has been generally understood that the scope and tendency of the Honorable Company’s prohibition