are gone. I am far
from knowing or believing that this bill will increase the influence of
the crown. We all know that the crown has ever had some influence in the
Court of Directors, and that it has been extremely increased by the acts
of 1773 and 1780. The gentlemen who, as part of their reformation,
propose "a more active control on the part of the crown," which is to
put the Directors under a Secretary of State specially named for that
purpose, must know that their project will increase it further. But that
old influence has had, and the new will have, incurable inconveniences,
which cannot happen under the Parliamentary establishment proposed in
this bill. An honorable gentleman,[58] not now in his place, but who is
well acquainted with the India Company, and by no means a friend to this
bill, has told you that a ministerial influence has always been
predominant in that body,--and that to make the Directors pliant to
their purposes, ministers generally caused persons meanly qualified to
be chosen Directors. According to his idea, to secure subserviency, they
submitted the Company's affairs to the direction of incapacity. This was
to ruin the Company in order to govern it. This was certainly influence
in the very worst form in which it could appear. At best it was
clandestine and irresponsible. Whether this was done so much upon system
as that gentleman supposes, I greatly doubt. But such in effect the
operation of government on that court unquestionably was; and such,
under a similar constitution, it will be forever. Ministers must be
wholly removed from the management of the affairs of India, or they will
have an influence in its patronage. The thing is inevitable. Their
scheme of a new Secretary of State, "with a more vigorous control," is
not much better than a repetition of the measure which we know by
experience will not do. Since the year 1773 and the year 1780, the
Company has been under the control of the Secretary of State's office,
and we had then three Secretaries of State. If more than this is done,
then they annihilate the direction which they pretend to support; and
they augment the influence of the crown, of whose growth they affect so
great an horror. But in truth this scheme of reconciling a direction
really and truly deliberative with an office really and substantially
controlling is a sort of machinery that can be kept in order but a very
short time. Either the Directors will dwindle into clerks, o