ry.

On the same principle on which your Committee have generally limited
their researches to the persons placed by Parliament or raised or put in
nomination by the Court of Directors to the highest station in Bengal,
it was also their original wish to limit those inquiries to the period
at which Parliament interposed its authority between the Company and
their servants, and gave a new constitution to the Presidency of Fort
William. If the Company's servants had taken a new date from that
period, and if from thenceforward their conduct had corresponded with
the views of the legislature, it is probable that a review of the
transactions of remoter periods would not have been deemed necessary,
and that the remembrance of them would have been gradually effaced and
finally buried in oblivion. But the reports which your Committee have
already made have shown the House that from the year 1772, when those
proceedings commenced in Parliament on which the act of the following
year was founded, abuses of every kind have prevailed and multiplied in
Bengal to a degree unknown in former times, and are perfectly sufficient
to account for the present distress of the Company's affairs both at
home and abroad. The affair which your Committee now lays before the
House occupies too large a space in the Company's records, and is of too
much importance in every point of view, to be passed over.

Your Committee find that in March, 1775, a petition was presented to the
Governor-General and Council by a person called Coja Kaworke, an
Armenian merchant, resident at Dacca, (of which division Mr. Richard
Barwell had lately been Chief,) setting forth in substance, that in
November, 1772, the petitioner had farmed a certain salt district,
called Savagepoor, and had entered into a contract with the Committee of
Circuit for providing and delivering to the India Company the salt
produced in that district; that in 1773 he farmed another, called
Selimabad, on similar conditions. He alleges, that in February, 1774,
when Mr. Barwell arrived at Dacca, he charged the petitioner with
1,25,500 rupees, (equal to 13,000_l._,) as a contribution, and, in order
to levy it, did the same year deduct 20,799 rupees from the amount of
the _advance money_ which was ordered to be paid to the petitioner, on
account of the India Company, for the provision of salt in the two
farms, and, after doing so, compelled the petitioner to execute and
give him four different bonds fo