And who were the members of those Provincial Councils?  They were of high rank in the Company’s service; they were not junior servants, boys of a day, but persons who had gone through some probation, who knew something of the country, who were conversant in its revenues and in the course of its business; they were, in short, men of considerable rank in the Company’s service.  What did he do with these people?  Without any regard to their rank in the service,—­no more than he had regarded the rank of the nobility of the country,—­he sweeps them all, in one day, from their independent situations, without reference to the Directors, and turns them all into pensioners upon the Company.  And for what purpose was this done?  It was done in order to reduce the Company’s servants, who, in their independent situations, were too great a mass and volume for him to corrupt, to an abject dependence upon his absolute power.  It was, that he might tell them, “You have lost your situations; you have nothing but small alimentary pensions, nothing more than a maintenance; and you must depend upon me whether you are to have anything more or not.”  Thus at one stroke a large division of the Company’s servants, and one of the highest orders of them, were reduced, for their next bread, to an absolute, submissive dependence upon his will; and the Company was loaded with the pensions of all these discarded servants.  Thus were persons in an honorable, independent situation, earned by long service in that country, and who were subject to punishment for their crimes, if proved against them, all deprived, unheard, of their employments.  You would imagine that Mr. Hastings had at least charged them with corruption.  No, you will see upon your minutes, that, when he abolished the Provincial Councils, he declared at the same time that he found no fault with the persons concerned in them.

Thus, then, he has got rid, as your Lordships see, of one whole body of the Company’s servants; he has systematically corrupted the rest, and provided, as far as lay in his power, for the perpetuation of their corruption; he has connived at all their delinquencies, and has destroyed the independence of all the superior orders of them.

Now hear what he does with regard to the Council-General itself.  They had, by the act that made Mr. Hastings Governor, the management of the revenues vested in them.  You have been shown by an honorable and able fellow Manager of mine, that he took the business of this department wholly out of the hand of the Council; that he named a committee for the management of it, at an enormous expense,—­committee made up of his own creatures and dependants; and that, after destroying the Provincial Councils, he brought down the whole management of the revenue to Calcutta.  This committee took this important business entirely out of the hands of the Council, in which the act had vested it, and this committee he formed without the orders of the Court of Directors, and directly contrary to the act, which put the superintendence in the hands of the Council.