of its
object, and its abuse, and alone capable of an effectual legislative
remedy. The very charter, which is held out to exclude Parliament from
correcting malversation with regard to the high trust vested in the
Company, is the very thing which at once gives a title and imposes a
duty on us to interfere with effect, wherever power and authority
originating from ourselves are perverted from their purposes, and become
instruments of wrong and violence.

If Parliament, Sir, had nothing to do with this charter, we might have
some sort of Epicurean excuse to stand aloof, indifferent spectators of
what passes in the Company's name in India and in London. But if we are
the very cause of the evil, we are in a special manner engaged to the
redress; and for us passively to bear with oppressions committed under
the sanction of our own authority is in truth and reason for this House
to be an active accomplice in the abuse.

That the power, notoriously grossly abused, has been bought from us is
very certain. But this circumstance, which is urged against the bill,
becomes an additional motive for our interference, lest we should be
thought to have sold the blood of millions of men for the base
consideration of money. We sold, I admit, all that we had to sell,--that
is, our authority, not our control. We had not a right to make a market
of our duties.

I ground myself, therefore, on this principle:--that, if the abuse is
proved, the contract is broken, and we reenter into all our rights, that
is, into the exercise of all our duties. Our own authority is, indeed,
as much a trust originally as the Company's authority is a trust
derivatively; and it is the use we make of the resumed power that must
justify or condemn us in the resumption of it. When we have perfected
the plan laid before us by the right honorable mover, the world will
then see what it is we destroy, and what it is we create. By that test
we stand or fall; and by that test I trust that it will be found, in the
issue, that we are going to supersede a charter abused to the full
extent of all the powers which it could abuse, and exercised in the
plenitude of despotism, tyranny, and corruption,--and that in one and
the same plan we provide a real chartered security for _the rights of
men_, cruelly violated under that charter.

This bill, and those connected with it, are intended to form the _Magna
Charta_ of Hindostan. Whatever the Treaty of Westphalia is to the
libe