artered rights in their
fullest extent. They belong to the Company in the surest manner, and
they are secured to that body by every sort of public sanction. They are
stamped by the faith of the king; they are stamped by the faith of
Parliament: they have been bought for money, for money honestly and
fairly paid; they have been bought for valuable consideration, over and
over again.

I therefore freely admit to the East India Company their claim to
exclude their fellow-subjects from the commerce of half the globe. I
admit their claim to administer an annual territorial revenue of seven
millions sterling, to command an army of sixty thousand men, and to
dispose (under the control of a sovereign, imperial discretion, and with
the due observance of the natural and local law) of the lives and
fortunes of thirty millions of their fellow-creatures. All this they
possess by charter, and by Acts of Parliament, (in my opinion,) without
a shadow of controversy.

Those who carry the rights and claims of the Company the furthest do not
contend for more than this; and all this I freely grant. But, granting
all this, they must grant to me, in my turn, that all political power
which is set over men, and that all privilege claimed or exercised in
exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and for so much a derogation
from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or
other exercised ultimately for their benefit.

If this is true with regard to every species of political dominion and
every description of commercial privilege, none of which can be
original, self-derived rights, or grants for the mere private benefit of
the holders, then such rights, or privileges, or whatever else you
choose to call them, are all in the strictest sense _a trust_: and it is
of the very essence of every trust to be rendered _accountable_,--and
even totally to _cease_, when it substantially varies from the purposes
for which alone it could have a lawful existence.

This I conceive, Sir, to be true of trusts of power vested in the
highest hands, and of such, as seem to hold of no human creature. But
about the application of this principle to subordinate _derivative_
trusts I do not see how a controversy can be maintained. To whom, then,
would I make the East India Company accountable? Why, to Parliament, to
be sure,--to Parliament, from whom their trust was derived,--to
Parliament, which alone is capable of comprehending the magnitude