heir servants has
been driven from that court.

This, Sir, has been their conduct: and it has been the result of the
alteration which was insensibly made in their constitution. The change
was made insensibly; but it is now strong and adult, and as public and
declared as it is fixed beyond all power of reformation: so that there
is none who hears me that is not as certain as I am, that the Company,
in the sense in which it was formerly understood, has no existence.

The question is not, what injury you may do to the proprietors of India
stock; for there are no such men to be injured. If the active, ruling
part of the Company, who form the General Court, who fill the offices
and direct the measures, (the rest tell for nothing,) were persons who
held their stock as a means of their subsistence, who in the part they
took were only concerned in the government of India for the rise or fall
of their dividend, it would be indeed a defective plan of policy. The
interest of the people who are governed by them would not be their
primary object,--perhaps a very small part of their consideration at
all. But then they might well be depended on, and perhaps more than
persons in other respects preferable, for preventing the peculations of
their servants to their own prejudice. Such a body would not easily have
left their trade as a spoil to the avarice of those who received their
wages. But now things are totally reversed. The stock is of no value,
whether it be the qualification of a Director or Proprietor; and it is
impossible that it should. A Director's qualification may be worth about
two thousand five hundred pounds,--and the interest, at eight per cent,
is about one hundred and sixty pounds a year. Of what value is that,
whether it rise to ten, or fall to six, or to nothing; to him whose son,
before he is in Bengal two months, and before he descends the stops of
the Council-Chamber, sells the grant of a single contract for forty
thousand pounds? Accordingly, the stock is bought up in qualifications.
The vote is not to protect the stock, but the stock is bought to acquire
the vote; and the end of the vote is to cover and support, against
justice, some man of power who has made an obnoxious fortune in India,
or to maintain in power those who are actually employing it in the
acquisition of such a fortune,--and to avail themselves, in return, of
his patronage, that he may shower the spoils of the East, "barbaric
pearl and gold," on