rsons concerned in them, should be called for
by the House, it is our wish to avoid entering into it. On one example
only your Committee think it just and proper to insist, stating first to
the House on what principles they have made this selection.

In pursuing their inquiries, your Committee have endeavored chiefly to
keep in view the conduct of persons in the highest station, particularly
of those in whom the legislature, as well as the Company, have placed a
special confidence,--judging that the conduct of such persons is not
only most important in itself, but most likely to influence the
subordinate ranks of the service. Your Committee have also examined the
proceedings of the Court of Directors on all those instances of the
behavior of their servants that seemed to deserve, and did sometimes
attract, their immediate attention. They constantly find that the
negligence of the Court of Directors has kept pace with, and must
naturally have quickened, the growth of the practices which they have
condemned. Breach of duty abroad will always go hand in hand with
neglect of it at home. In general, the Court of Directors, though
sufficiently severe in censuring offences, and sometimes in punishing
those whom they have regarded as offenders of a lower rank, appear to
have suffered the most conspicuous and therefore the most dangerous
examples of disobedience and misconduct in the first department of their
service to pass with a feeble and ineffectual condemnation. In those
cases which they have deemed too apparent and too strong to be
disregarded even with safety to themselves, and against which their
heaviest displeasure has been declared, it appears to your Committee
that their interference, such as it was, had a mischievous rather than a
useful tendency. A total neglect of duty in this respect, however
culpable, is not to be compared, either in its nature or in its
consequences, with the destructive principles on which they have acted.
It has been their practice, if not system, to inquire, to censure, and
not to punish. As long as the misconduct of persons in power in Bengal
was encouraged by nothing but the hopes of concealment, it may be
presumed that they felt some restraint upon their actions, and that they
stood in some awe of the power placed over them; whereas it is to be
apprehended that the late conduct of the Court of Directors tells them,
in effect, that they have nothing to fear from the certainty of a
discove