fore the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole
patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East India Company.
The East India Company is not a branch of his Majesty's prerogative
administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority
under it, nor indeed from any British title that does not derive all its
legal validity from acts of Parliament.

When a claim was asserted to the India territorial possessions in the
occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel
of his Majesty's patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient
inheritance of his crown: they were claimed for the public. And when
agreements were made with the East India Company concerning any
composition for the holding, or any participation of the profits, of
those territories, the agreement was made with the public; and the
preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it. These
agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with
Parliament: and the bills making and establishing such agreements always
originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the
disposition of Parliament, without the ceremony of previous consent from
the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers: which
previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict
right, but generally paid, when a new appropriation takes place in any
part of his Majesty's prerogative revenues.

In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognized and uniformly acted
on, when Parliament undertook the reformation of the East India Company
in 1773, a commission was appointed, as the commission in the late bill
was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the
commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were
named in Parliament, as in the late bill they were named. As they
received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown;
they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address
of either House or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution
observed in the late bill relative to the commissioners proposed
therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding which
regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible
abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously
watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock,
as well as by Par