examine into their nature and origin, we are indispensably bound to
direct such an inquiry to be instituted." They then order the President
and Council of Madras to enter into a full examination, &c., &c.

The Directors, having drawn up their order to the Presidency on these
principles, communicated the draught of the general letter in which
those orders were contained to the board of his Majesty's ministers, and
other servants lately constituted by Mr. Pitt's East India Act. These
ministers, who had just carried through Parliament the bill ordering a
specific inquiry, immediately drew up another letter, on a principle
directly opposite to that which was prescribed by the act of Parliament
and followed by the Directors. In these second orders, all idea of an
inquiry into the justice and origin of the pretended debts, particularly
of the last, the greatest, and the most obnoxious to suspicion, is
abandoned. They are all admitted and established without any
investigation whatsoever, (except some private conference with the
agents of the claimants is to pass for an investigation,) and a fund for
their discharge is assigned and set apart out of the revenues of the
Carnatic. To this arrangement in favor of their servants, servants
suspected of corruption and convicted of disobedience, the Directors of
the East India Company were ordered to set their hands, asserting it to
arise from their own conviction and opinion, in flat contradiction to
their recorded sentiments, their strong remonstrance, and their declared
sense of their duty, as well under their general trust and their oath as
Directors, as under the express injunctions of an act of Parliament.

The principles upon which this summary proceeding was adopted by the
ministerial board are stated by themselves in a number in the appendix
to this speech.

By another section of the same act, the same Court of Directors were
ordered to take into consideration and to decide on the indeterminate
rights of the Rajah of Tanjore and the Nabob of Arcot; and in this, as
in the former case, no power of appeal, revision, or alteration was
reserved to any other. It was a jurisdiction, in a cause between party
and party, given to the Court of Directors specifically. It was known
that the territories of the former of these princes had been twice
invaded and pillaged, and the prince deposed and imprisoned, by the
Company's servants, influenced by the intrigues of the latter, and for
th