sh East India
Company, exempting them from several duties to which their natural-born
subjects were liable. The Company's _dustuck_, or passport, secured to
them this exemption at all the custom-houses and toll-bars of the
country. The Company, not being able or not choosing to make use of
their privilege to the full extent to which it might be carried,
indulged their servants with a qualified use of their passport, under
which, and in the name of the Company, they carried on a private trade,
either by themselves or in society with natives, and thus found a
compensation for the scanty allowances made to them by their masters in
England. As the country government was at that time in the fulness of
its strength, and that this immunity existed by a double connivance, it
was naturally kept within tolerable limits.

But by the revolution in 1757 the Company's servants obtained a mighty
ascendant over the native princes of Bengal, who owed their elevation to
the British arms. The Company, which was new to that kind of power, and
not yet thoroughly apprised of its real character and situation,
considered itself still as a trader in the territories of a foreign
potentate, in the prosperity of whose country it had neither interest
nor duty. The servants, with the same ideas, followed their fortune in
the channels in which it had hitherto ran, only enlarging them with the
enlargement of their power. For their first ideas of profit were not
official; nor were their oppressions those of ordinary despotism. The
first instruments of their power were formed out of evasions of their
ancient subjection. The passport of the Company in the hands of its
servants was no longer under any restraint; and in a very short time
their immunity began to cover all the merchandise of the country. Cossim
Ali Khan, the second of the Nabobs whom they had set up, was but ill
disposed to the instruments of his greatness. He bore the yoke of this
imperious commerce with the utmost impatience: he saw his subjects
excluded as aliens from their own trade, and the revenues of the prince
overwhelmed in the ruin of the commerce of his dominions. Finding his
reiterated remonstrances on the extent and abuse of the passport
ineffectual, he had recourse to an unexpected expedient, which was, to
declare his resolution at once to annul all the duties on trade, setting
it equally free to subjects and to foreigners.

Never was a method of defeating the oppressions of m