of the damages.  Both these were in the charter of justice left entirely to the judges.  It was presumed, and not wholly without reason, that the British subjects were liable to fall into factions and combinations, in order to support themselves in the abuses of an authority of which every man might in his turn become a sharer.  And with regard to the natives, it was presumed (perhaps a little too hastily) that they were not capable of sharing in the functions of jurors.  But it was not foreseen that the judges were also liable to be engaged in the factions of the settlement,—­and if they should ever happen to be so engaged, that the native people were then without that remedy which obviously lay in the chance that the court and jury, though both liable to bias, might not easily unite in the same identical act of injustice.  Your Committee, on full inquiry, are of opinion that the use of juries is neither impracticable nor dangerous in Bengal.

Your Committee refer to their report made in the year 1781, for the manner in which this court, attempting to extend its jurisdiction, and falling with extreme severity on the native magistrates, a violent contest arose between the English judges and the English civil authority.  This authority, calling in the military arm, (by a most dangerous example,) overpowered, and for a while suspended, the functions of the court; but at length those functions, which were suspended by the quarrel of the parties, were destroyed by their reconciliation, and by the arrangements made in consequence of it.  By these the court was virtually annihilated; or if substantially it exists, it is to be apprehended it exists only for purposes very different from those of its institution.

The fourth object of the act of 1773 was the Council-General.  This institution was intended to produce uniformity, consistency, and the effective cooeperation of all the settlements in their common defence.  By the ancient constitution of the Company’s foreign settlements, they were each of them under the orders of a President or Chief, and a Council, more or fewer, according to the discretion of the Company.  Among those, Parliament (probably on account of the largeness of the territorial acquisitions, rather than the conveniency of the situation) chose Bengal for the residence of the controlling power, and, dissolving the Presidency, appointed a new establishment, upon a plan somewhat similar to that which had prevailed before; but the number was smaller.  This establishment was composed of a Governor-General and four Counsellors, all named in the act of Parliament.  They were to hold their offices for five years, after which term the patronage was to revert to the Court of Directors.  In the mean time such vacancies as should happen were to be filled by that court, with the concurrence of the crown.  The first Governor-General and one of the Counsellors had been old servants of the Company; the others were new men.