tremely difficult of detection anywhere, but especially in India; but
all restraint upon that grand fundamental abuse of presents is gone
forever, if the servants of the Company can derive safety from a
defiance of the law, when they can no longer hope to screen themselves
by an evasion of it. All hope of reformation is at an end, if, confiding
in the force of a faction among Directors or proprietors to bear them
out, and possibly to vote them the fruit of their crimes as a reward of
their discovery, they find that their bold avowal of their offences is
not only to produce indemnity, but to be rated for merit. If once a
presumption is admitted, that, wherever something is divulged, nothing
is hid, the discovering of one offence may become the certain means of
concealing a multitude of others. The contrivance is easy and trivial,
and lies open to the meanest proficient in this kind of art; it will not
only become an effectual cover to such practices, but will tend
infinitely to increase them. In that case, sums of money will be taken
for the purpose of discovery and making merit with the Company, and
other sums will be taken for the private advantage of the receiver.

It must certainly be impossible for the natives to know what presents
are for one purpose, or what for the other. It is not for a Gentoo or a
Mahometan landholder at the foot of the remotest mountains in India, who
has no access to our records and knows nothing of our language, to
distinguish what lacs of rupees, which he has given _eo nomine_ as a
present to a Company's servant, are to be authorized by his masters in
Leadenhall Street as proper and legal, or carried to their public
account at their pleasure, and what are laid up for his own emolument.

The legislature, in declaring all presents to be the property of the
Company, could not consider corruption, extortion, and fraud as any part
of their resources. The property in such presents was declared to be
theirs, not as a fund for their benefit, but in order to found a legal
title to a civil suit. It was declared theirs, to facilitate the
recovery out of corrupt and oppressive hands of money illegally taken;
but this legal fiction of property could not nor ought by the
legislature to be considered in any other light than as a trust held by
them for those who suffered the injury. Upon any other construction, the
Company would have a right, first, to extract money from the subjects or
dependants of this