y came to be what it is, a great empire, carrying on,
subordinately, a great commerce; it became that thing which was supposed
by the Roman law irreconcilable to reason and propriety,--_eundem
negotiatorem et dominum_: the same power became the general trader, the
same power became the supreme lord.

In this exalted situation, the India Company, however, still preserves
traces of its original mercantile character. The whole exterior order of
its political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and
mercantile principles. In fact, the East India Company in Asia is a
state in the disguise of a merchant. Its whole service is a system of
public offices in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly, the
whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is
commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely
political.

This system of the Company's service, its order and discipline, is
necessary to be explained to your Lordships, that you may see in what
manner the abuses have affected it. In the first place, all the persons
who go abroad in the Company's civil service enter as clerks in the
counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to
it,--_writers_. In that condition they are obliged to serve five years.
The second step is that of a _factor_, in which they are obliged to
serve three years. The third step they take is that of a _junior
merchant_, in which they are obliged to serve three years more. At that
period they become _senior merchants_, which is the highest stage of
advance in the Company's service,--a rank by which they had pretensions,
before the year 1774, to the Council, to the succession of the
Presidency, and to whatever other honors the Company has to bestow.

The Company had, in its early times, established factories in certain
places; which factories by degrees grew to the name of Presidencies and
Council, in proportion as the power and influence of the Company
increased, and as the political began first to struggle with, and at
length to predominate over, the mercantile. In this form it continued
till the year 1773, when the legislature broke in, for proper reasons
urging them to it, upon that order of the service, and appointed to the
superior department persons who had no title to that place under the
ordinary usage of the service. Mr. Hastings and Mr. Harwell, whatever
other titles they might have had, held solely under the act of
Parliament nominating