are to be
coerced. Mr. Hastings, at the head of the service, with high legal
emoluments, has fouled his hands and sullied his government with bribes.
He has substituted oppression and tyranny in the place of legal
government. With all that unbounded, licentious power which he has
assumed over the public revenues, instead of endeavoring to find a
series of gradual, progressive, honorable, and adequate rewards for the
persons who serve the public in the subordinate, but powerful
situations, he has left them to prey upon the people without the
smallest degree of control. In default of honest emolument, there is the
unbounded license of power; and, as one of the honestest and ablest
servants of the Company said to me in conversation, the civil service of
the Company resembled the military service of the Mahrattas,--little
pay, but unbounded license to plunder. I do not say that some of the
salaries given in India would not sound well here; but when you consider
the nature of the trusts, the dignity of the situation, whatever the
name of them may be, the powers that are granted, the hopes that every
man has of establishing himself at home, I repeat, it is a source of
infinite grievance, of infinite abuse: of which source of corrupt power
we charge Mr. Hastings with having availed himself, in filling up the
void of direct pay by finding out and countenancing every kind of
oblique and unjust emolument; though it must be confessed that he is
far from being solely guilty of this offence.

Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the
youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The
servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress
and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority,
at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in
the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,--they
are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from
perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate
expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors
without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its
temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers
that despotism involves.

It is further remarkable, these servants exercise what your Lordships
are now exercising, high judicial powers, and they exercise them without
the smallest study