Edmund Burke

Ample salaries were provided for them, which indeed removed the necessity, but by no means the inducements to corruption and oppression.

Armed as they were with an authority in itself so ample, and by abuse so capable of an unlimited extent, very few, and these very insufficient correctives, were administered.

The Governor-General and Council, therefore, immediately gave constructions to their ill-defined authority which rendered it perfectly despotic,--constructions which if they were allowed, no action of theirs ought to be regarded as…

Where legislative and merely executive powers were lodged in the same hands, the legislative, which is the larger and the more ready for all occasions, was constantly resorted to.

Their legislative and executive capacities were not so accurately drawn, and marked by such strong and penal lines of distinction, as to keep these capacities separate.

The first exception leaves it open to the subordinate to judge of the necessity of measures which, when taken, bind or involve the superior: the second refers a question of peace or war to two jurisdictions, which may give different…

But the law is loose and defective, where it professes to restrain the subordinate Presidencies from making war without the consent and approbation of the Supreme Council.

By these the court was virtually annihilated; or if substantially it exists, it is to be apprehended it exists only for purposes very different from those of its institution.

It was presumed, and not wholly without reason, that the British subjects were liable to fall into factions and combinations, in order to support themselves in the abuses of an authority of which every man might in his turn become a sharer.

So far as your Committee has been able to discover, the court has been generally terrible to the natives, and has distracted the government of the Company without substantially reforming any one of its abuses.

From that period the orders of the Court of Directors became to be so habitually despised by their servants abroad, and at length to be so little regarded even by themselves, that this contempt of orders forms almost the whole…

In proportion as these interests prevailed, the means of cabal, of concealment, and of corrupt confederacy became far more easy than before.

To add to the votes, which is adding to the power in proportion to the wealth, of men whose very offences were supposed to consist in acts which lead to the acquisition of enormous riches, appears by no means a well-considered method of…

Against the great, predominant, radical corruption of the Court of Proprietors the raising the qualification proved no sort of remedy.

Whilst the votes of the smaller proprietors continued, a door was left open for the public sense to enter into that society: since that door has been closed, the proprietary has become, even more than formerly, an aggregate of private…

The India proprietor, therefore, will always be, in the first instance, a politician; and the bolder his enterprise, and the more corrupt his views, the less will be his consideration of the price to be paid for compassing them.

The East India Company is not, like the Bank of England, a mere moneyed society for the sole purpose of the preservation or improvement of their capital; and therefore every attempt to regulate it upon the same principles must inevitably…

Against this evil large pecuniary interests were rather the reverse of a remedy.

In no case could these principles be less depended upon than in the affairs of the East India Company.

The whole of the regulations concerning the Court of Proprietors relied upon two principles, which have often proved fallacious: namely, that small numbers were a security against faction and disorder; and that integrity of conduct would…

Nothing was done or attempted to prevent the operation of the interest of delinquent servants of the Company in the General Court, by which they might even come to be their own judges, and, in effect, under another description, to become…

In this case, as in almost all the rest, the remedy was not applied directly to the disease.

The establishment of a court of justice capable of protecting the natives from the oppressions of British subjects.

The Norman Conquest is the great era of our laws.

But we see that even before that period the English law began to be improved by taking in foreign learning; we see the canons of several councils mixed indiscriminately with the civil constitutions; and, indeed, the greatest part of the…