Sir, is a melancholy fact. It at once reduces the public revenue and the company's commercial profits; and, what is worse, it shows that, since the consumption is certainly not lessened, the trade is falling again into the hands of smugglers. But the noble Lord looks forward to better times, and relies, with a confidence that seems to be attached to his station, on the flourishing circumstances abroad, which are to arise hereafter from the acquisitions made in the present wars Our Indian prosperity is always in the future tense. I must do him the justice to admit that, in every respect but one, he seems to me to be the full and legitimate successor of the noble Lord who for many years presided at the same board. He has succeeded to the office, to the promises, to the hopes, to the estimates, to the sanguine disposition of that noble Lord, and to his perpetual disappointments. Now, Sir, it is rather odd that, in the course of twenty-one years, the result in any year has never made good the promise of the preceding. Much less have the general promises made to the nation by the act of 1793, by which the charter was renewed, been realized, or, in all appearance, ever will. But then there was always a good reason for it. Only wait another year, and every thing will come right. In one article only, the noble Lord has not accepted the succession to his predecessor. He has not taken upon him the specific engagement so often and so regularly repeated in this house from year to year, exactly in the following terms, To save any gentleman the trouble of putting the question to me, whether I adhere to the hopes I gave last year, 66 that the day is much nearer, when the resources of India will administer aid to the revenues of this country than that on which we are to apprehend that India will call for aid from the finances of Great Britain, I anticipate the question, and answer in the affirmative. The only, difference is, that I am more sanguine in those hopes than I was at the time I first asserted thein," and so on in every succeeding year in the same strain, till he resigned in 1801. To the specific question put to the noble Lord by my noble friend near me, (Lord Archibald Hamilton,) whether he took that engagement upon himself, he made no reply. But, in a general way, his hopes and his estimates are as good as ever. We are to be reimbursed and enriched, some day or other, by the territorial acquisitions made in this war. I ask him a plain question: Have any acquisitions made by war in the last twenty years, paid the expence of the war, provided for all the new establishments, and left a surplus applicable to trade or tribute through the medium of investment? No; so far from it, that whereas the pretended plan and promise of the act of 1793 was to reduce the company's Indian debt to two millions sterling, it was twenty millions a year ago, though two millions are said to have been bought up by the commissioners of the sinking tund. Since the promise of an annual reduction, the real increase of debt has exceeded two millious a year communibus annis; and now we have a new war, on a most extensive and expensive scale, the charge of which cannot yet be known here, but which, I suppose, will appear in the accounts of the present year or in those those of the next. One of the April 1804, reckon upon buliion expected to be received from England, as part of their ways and means applicable to current services, equal to 640,000l. and so they go on. You have a military wasting establishment of 20,000 Europeans in India to be kept up by a perpetual supply of recruits from Britain; and, in aid of that and other expences, there is and must be an annual remittance of specie. I desire you to consider whether England can support these perpetual drains of men and treasure; and, if she could, what is the real effective benefit in a na. tional view, of holding this Indian dominion on such terms? The noble Lord meets all questions of this sort with great equanimity, He says it is better economy to send out money, than to borrow it in India at the high interest of that country. If that were all, I should think it very little worth inquiring which of the two was the shortest road to ruin; or I should leave it to the directors to settle that question for the company. But I say you do both. The specie you send out is absorbed in expences, and the governments abroad go on as usual, drawing heavy bills on the directors, and borrowing on the spot to any amount for which lenders can be found. Hitherto it has beeg generally understood that the country which receives its ba lance from another in specie, is the gainer; and that which pays it is the loser by their mutual intercourse, If bullion had been imported from India into England we should have heard another story, set off with many fine phrases.—I shall now, sir take a short notice of some particulars in the home account, and then proceed proceed to my conclusion. In the computation of the company's stuck, the apparent balance is in their favour, and is stated at 5,675,3791.-but by an order of the house of commons, which I have sufficiently explained to the committee and to the public a year ago, the capital subscribed by the proprietors, and actually received by the corporation, viz.7,780,000l. is omitted ou the debit side, where it should and always did appear. I suppose it might have excited some alarm, or at least some curiosity, if the balance on the face of the account had been left on the wrong side. In the opposite credits, which include the whole of what the Noble Lord calls the company's assets, there are some very important and other very questionable items. This word assets is handy and convenient; but I do not think that, with reference to these accounts, it is distinctly understood or properly applied. In a testamentary sense, in which it is most commonly used,it signifies a sufficiency, either in cash, or in property convertible into cash, to discharge debts and legacies. Any species of proper ty which does not possess that quality, does not properly fall within the description of assets. Passive credits cannot fairly be opposed to active debts. With plenty of such credits on his books, a wealthy merchant may find himself a bankrupt, if he has no other means to satisfy the bills whichhe has accepted. In this view, I take it, the India Company are not much the richer for many articles in their quick stocks in India, or for their dead stock in Leadenhall-street. But leaving this inquiry for the present, I at tach myself now to one item only, to which I have repeatedly endea voured to draw the attention of parliament without success. It comes before us again in a more questionable shape, but with some explanations which we never had before: I mean the sum of 4,018,000l. for which this account takes credit, for stores and supplies to his Majesty's troops. In the last year this demand on Government stood at: 3,573,3391. One million was paid on account, by authority of parliament, very improperly obtained as I conceive, and 501,0661, more for interest, without any authority at all ; and all this upon a mere claim stated, subject to adjustment. You would naturally expect to find the claim diminished by 1,500,0001, On the contrary, it stands now at 4,018,0001, and we are informed by a memorandum," that the Company's claims on Government for the expences of the army sent from India to Egypt will probably amount to 2,000,0001. more. This debt is certainly a thriving plant, the more you prune it the faster it grows. Now look at the particulars. Does the public know, has parlia ment to this hour ever heard that government owes the Company 3,130,5911. for the capture and possession of Ceylon; 1,023,9951. for the capture and possession of French and Dutch settlements on the peninsula; 563,0681. for intended expeditions to Mauritius and Manilla; and that, on the capital of this unadjusted claim, the public is paying interest at 4 per cent, as if the debt had been finally liquidated and funded. Of the Company's right to the amount of their demand, I say nothing: it may, for aught I know, be perfectly well founded; but I think I think it cannot be disputed that it should not have been kept out of sight for so many years. The directors themselves should have brought it before parliament. The whole has accrued since the act of 1793. On this point however I think I have gained some ground since last year. The Noble Lord has come round to my opinion. He thinks that the claim ought to be examined, and finally adjusted; and he informs us that commissioners on both sides have been appointed for that purpose. In the first place, I never heard till now of the existence of such a commission; and then I assert that a demand of such importance as 5,500,000l. ought to have been submitted to parliament in the first instance, and investigated by a committee of this house, or at least by commissioners acting under parliamentary authority. The Noble Lord, I presume, has examined the report made by these commissioners, for he says that it appears that 900,0001. is certainly due to the Company. If that be all, their stock account takes credit for 3,100,0001. more than they are worth. But suppose this had been the state of the case last year, when the Chancel lor of the Exchequer moved and carried a resolution to pay them one million on account without inquiry here, or any evidence whatever produced to the house. It is plain that he would have paid them 100,000l. too much. On the whole of these transactions I shall content myself with saying, that a very different prospect was held out to the public when it was proposed to renew the Company's charter. The act of 1793 was an act of ostentation, and nothing else. Almost all the great objects, which it professed to provide for, have failed. Some of the principal calculations, for which unbounded personal credit was taken, have not merely failed, but are reversed. The law is now in effect little more than a dead letter. It promised to secure 500,000l. a year to the public:one year only has been paid. It promised to reduce the Indian debt from 7 to 2 millions, sterling.-On the 30th of April, 1803, this debt was 20,000,000l. It promised to reduce the bond debt in Great Britain to 1,500,0001.— The capital of their debt at home including 700,000l. borrowed of the Bank, amounted to2,544,567). on the 1st of March, 1804. It promised to exibit a surplus " to be reserved and retained by the Company for their own use, and applied in augmentation of the dividends on their capital stock ;" and finally it promised to provide a fund of 12,000,000l. sterling, to be vested in the stocks, as a guarantee fund for the better securing to the India Company their capital stock, or the value thereof;" after which the supposed surplus, of which that fund was to be formed, was to become the property of the public in full right. I need not tell you, that not one shilling has ever been produced to make good any portion of these three last provisions. Have I not then a right to conclude that, as far as relates to the company's finances, the whole measure is a nullity, if not a deception, under the imposing name and authority of an act of parliament? The Noble Lord's predecessor, who brought in that bill, did not con fine his hopes within the limits even of that Battering prospect. In his letter to the directors, daf ed ed the 30th of June, 1801, he states an opinion in which he says there would be much sound policy, viz. that it would be wise, after the example of other Indian powers, to have always a depôt of treasure in your coffers in India, to the amount of three or four millions sterling, to meet any sudden emergency, and to save you the necessity of having immediate recourse to large loans!" On the wisdom of such a measure we may debate hereafter; that is, if any of us live to see the day when the supposed deposit of treasure shall exist any where but in the noble Lord's imagination. There is not a glimpse or a shadow of it within our present Indian horizon. Sir, I do not mean to oppose the passing of these resolutions: on the contrary, I wish to see them recorded on the journals, in order that the substance of them, with the whole state of our Indian acquisitions, and of the company's affairs, may be open to a fair and full investigation; not in a little, annual, wrangling committee, of fireen or twenty members, but upon a scale of inquiry commensurate to the object, the magnitude of the dominion, the company's safety, and the important national interests connected with that territory and that trade. I know I am unequal to the task; but if it be not undertaken by others, my intention is to attempt it myself, and as early as possible in the next session. I shall propose it to the house to inquire, through the medium of special committees, into the principal transactions which have happened in India since the year 1782, and into the changes produced by those events in the go neral state of the company's af fairs. On that review of the whole subject, I shall call on parlament to determine and pronounce, either that they adhere to the fundamental principles of policy, justice, and honour, laid down by their own solemn resolutions at that time, and soon after adopted by the legislature; or that the force of events compels them to abandon that system, and to set up a new principle for the future government of India. It is not prudent, it is not honourable, it is not safe, that, in the management of that great dominion, alt your principles, all your laws, and all your institutions, should appear on one side, and all your practice on the other. Mr. CHARLES GRANT said, that he had no objection to examine the affairs of the East India company, however minutely, provided that such an examination should be fair and impartial, and unmarked by any party spirit. It was a national misfortune, he admitted, that the affairs of India were so little known and so little attended to. In the affair of the company's claim on government, for the actual balance of which they took credit in the present computation of their stock, viz. 4,018,000l. he thought they had bcen very ill used. They had bor rowed in India the money with which they had supplied the ser vices of government at a very high interest several years ago; and it was only in the last year, that & small part of their just demand had been allowed. He wondered to hear a gentleman (Mr. Francis) for whose abilities and knowledge he had long entertained the highest respect, complain of the export of bullion to India, as if the company or the nation were losers, |