ng factors abroad
in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness
and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which
no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public
ministers. The Company has made it a fundamental part of their
constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written
government. Your Lordships will observe, in the course of the
proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in
the government of India,--that is, that the Company's government is a
government of writing, a government of record. The strictest court of
justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of
record as the India Company's executive service is, or ought to be, in
all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or
diary of all their transactions, public and private: they are bound to
do this by an express covenant. They oblige them, as a corrective upon
that diary, to keep a letter-book, in which all their letters are to be
regularly entered. And they are bound by the same covenant to produce
all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with
affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of
commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life.
But as the great corrective of all, they have contrived that every
proceeding in public council shall be written,--no debates merely
verbal. The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and
recorded. All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council,
Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves,
decisions, and final resolutions of affairs: the argument, the
discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear. But the
Company has proceeded much further, and done much more wisely, because
they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided,
either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written,--the
proposition, the argument, the dissent. This is not confined to their
great Council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, (and
I see considerable traces of it in practice,) in every Provincial
Council, whilst the Provincial Councils existed, and even down to the
minutest ramification of their service. These books, in a progression
from the lowest Councils to the highest Presidency, are ordered to be
tran