the Court of Directors had no authority to dispense with either the
substance or the mode of inquiry prescribed by the act of Parliament. If
they had not, where in the act did the Board of Control acquire that
capacity? Indeed, it was impossible they should acquire it. What must we
think of the fabric and texture of an act of Parliament which should
find it necessary to prescribe a strict inquisition, that should descend
into minute regulations for the conduct of that inquisition, that should
commit this trust to a particular description of men, and in the very
same breath should enable another body, at their own pleasure, to
supersede all the provisions the legislature had made, and to defeat the
whole purpose, end, and object of the law? This cannot be supposed even
of an act of Parliament conceived by the ministers themselves, and
brought forth during the delirium of the last session.

My honorable friend has told you in the speech which introduced his
motion, that fortunately this question is not a great deal involved in
the labyrinths of Indian detail. Certainly not. But if it were, I beg
leave to assure you that there is nothing in the Indian detail which is
more difficult than in the detail of any other business. I admit,
because I have some experience of the fact, that for the interior
regulation of India a minute knowledge of India is requisite. But on
any specific matter of delinquency in its government you are as capable
of judging as if the same thing were done at your door. Fraud,
injustice, oppression, peculation, engendered in India, are crimes of
the same blood, family, and cast with those that are born and bred in
England. To go no farther than the case before us: you are just as
competent to judge whether the sum of four millions sterling ought or
ought not to be passed from the public treasury into a private pocket
without any title except the claim of the parties, when the issue of
fact is laid in Madras, as when it is laid in Westminster. Terms of art,
indeed, are different in different places; but they are generally
understood in none. The technical style of an Indian treasury is not one
jot more remote than the jargon of our own Exchequer from the train of
our ordinary ideas or the idiom of our common language. The difference,
therefore, in the two cases is not in the comparative difficulty or
facility of the two subjects, but in our attention to the one and our
total neglect of the other. Had th