In the present state of power and patronage in India, and during the relations which are permitted to subsist between the judges, the prosecuting officers, and the Council-General, your Committee is very doubtful whether the mode of prosecuting the highest members in the Bengal government, before a court at Calcutta, could have been almost in any case advisable.

It is possible that particular persons, in high judicial and political situations, may, by force of an unusual strain of virtue, be placed far above the influence of those circumstances which in ordinary cases are known to make an impression on the human mind.  But your Committee, sensible that laws and public proceedings ought to be made for general situations, and not for personal dispositions, are not inclined to have any confidence in the effect of criminal proceedings, where no means are provided for preventing a mutual connection, by dependencies, agencies, and employments, between the parties who are to prosecute and to judge and those who are to be prosecuted and to be tried.

Your Committee, in a former Report, have stated the consequences which they apprehended from the dependency of the judges on the Governor-General and Council of Bengal; and the House has entered into their ideas upon this subject.  Since that time it appears that Sir Elijah Impey has accepted of the guardianship of Mr. Barwell’s children, and was the trustee for his affairs.  There is no law to prevent this sort of connection, and it is possible that it might not at all affect the mind of that judge, or (upon his account) indirectly influence the conduct of his brethren; but it must forcibly affect the minds of those who have matter of complaint against government, and whose cause the Court of Directors appear to espouse, in a country where the authority of the Court of Directors has seldom been exerted but to be despised, where the operation of laws is but very imperfectly understood, but where men are acute, sagacious, and even suspicious of the effect of all personal connections.  Their suspicions, though perhaps not rightly applied to every individual, will induce them to take indications from the situations and connections of the prosecuting parties, as well as of the judges.  It cannot fail to be observed, that Mr. Naylor, the Company’s attorney, lived in Mr. Barwell’s house; the late Mr. Bogle, the Company’s commissioner of lawsuits, owed his place to the patronage of Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, by whom the office was created for him; and Sir John Day, the Company’s advocate, who arrived in Bengal in February, 1779, had not been four months in Calcutta, when Mr. Hastings, Mr. Barwell, and Sir Eyre Coote doubled his salary, contrary to the opinion of Mr. Francis and Mr. Wheler.