Yet salt, considering it as a necessary of life, was by no means a safe and proper subject for so many experiments and innovations.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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From the preceding facts it appears that in this branch of the Company's government little regard has been paid to the ease and welfare of the natives, and that the Directors have nowhere shown greater inconsistency than in their orders on…
The plan which I am now inclined to recommend for the future management of the salt revenue differs widely from that which I adopted under different circumstances.
Nothing but great and clear advantage to government could account for, and nothing at all perhaps could justify, the revival of a monopoly thus circumstanced.
But if such confederacies, cemented by such means, are suffered to pass without due animadversion, the authority of Parliament must become as inefficacious as all other authorities have proved to restrain the growth of disorders either in…
In a commercial view, it straitened the Company's investment to which it was destined; as a measure of finance, it is a contrivance by which a monopoly formed for the increase of revenue, instead of becoming one of its resources, involves…
On the whole, it appears a mere trading speculation of the Council, invading the department of others, without lights of its own, without authority or information from any other quarter.
The activity, private interest, and the sharp eye of personal superintendency may now and then succeed in such projects; but the remote inspection and unwieldy movements of great public bodies can find nothing but loss in them.
The false principles of this unmercantile transaction (to speak of it in the mildest terms) were too gross not to be visible to those who contrived it.
Thus was this object loaded with a double commission; and every act of partiality to one person produced a chargeable compensation to some other for the injustice that such partiality produced.
Facts, to which there is no testimony but the assertion of those who produce them in apology for the ill consequences of their own irregular actions, cannot be admitted.
No dispute arises amongst the English subjects which does not divulge the misery of the natives; when the former are in harmony, all is well with the latter.
Those whose power entered into the calculation of their profits could offer, as they did offer, terms without comparison better; and therefore one of the English bidders, without partiality, secured the preference.
It can be attributed to this cause, and this only,--that they were conscious, that, without power and influence to subdue the cultivators of the land to their own purposes, they never could afford to engage on the lowest possible terms.
Every step in this business develops more and more the effect of this junction of public monopoly and private influence.
Abuses must exist in a trade and a revenue so constituted, and there is no effectual cure for them but to entirely cut off their cause.
It is such when they trade on a private account; and it is much more so in any authorized monopoly, where the hand of government, which ought never to appear but to protect, is felt as the instrument in every act of oppression.
The English are a people who appear in India as a conquering nation; all dealing with them is therefore, more or less, a dealing with power.
On the other hand, several of the precautions inserted in this contract, and repeated in all the subsequent, strongly indicated the evils against which it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to guard a monopoly of this nature and in…
There was no complaint in those countries of want of advances to cultivators, or of lawsuits and tumults among the factors; nor was there any appearance of the multitude of other evils which had been so much dreaded from the vivacity of…
In these countries no monopoly existed; and yet there the commodity was of such a quality and so abundant as to bear the duty, and even with the duty in some degree to rival the monopolist even in his own market.
The proceedings on this contract demonstrated the futility of all the principles on which the monopoly was founded.
This competition, the operation of which they endeavor to prevent, is the natural corrective of the abuse, and the best remedy which could be applied to the disorder, even supposing its probable existence.
Further reasons, relative to the peace and good order of the province, were assigned for thus preventing the course of trade from the equitable distribution of the advantages of the produce, in which the first, the poorest, and the most…
The fact is, that the forcible direction which the trade of India has had towards Europe, to the neglect, or rather to the total abandoning, of the Asiatic, has of itself tended to carry even the internal business from the native merchant.
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