THE SPEECH FROM THE THRONE.
LUNae, 14 DIE JUNII, 1784.
A motion was made, That a representation be presented to his Majesty, most humbly to offer to his royal consideration, that the address of this House, upon his Majesty"s speech from the throne, was dictated solely by our conviction of his Majesty"s own most gracious intentions towards his people, which, as we feel with grat.i.tude, so we are ever ready to acknowledge with cheerfulness and satisfaction.
Impressed with these sentiments, we were willing to separate from our general expressions of duty, respect, and veneration to his Majesty"s royal person and his princely virtues all discussion whatever with relation to several of the matters suggested and several of the expressions employed in that speech.
That it was not fit or becoming that any decided opinion should be formed by his faithful Commons on that speech, without a degree of deliberation adequate to the importance of the object. Having afforded ourselves due time for that deliberation, we do now most humbly beg leave to represent to his Majesty, that, in the speech from the throne, his ministers have thought proper to use a language of a very alarming import, unauthorized by the practice of good times, and irreconcilable to the principles of this government.
Humbly to express to his Majesty, that it is the privilege and duty of this House to guard the Const.i.tution from all infringement on the part of ministers, and, whenever the occasion requires it, to warn them against any abuse of the authorities committed to them; but it is very lately,[59] that, in a manner not more unseemly than irregular and preposterous, ministers have thought proper, by admonition from the throne, implying distrust and reproach, to convey the expectations of the people to us, their sole representatives,[60] and have presumed to caution us, the natural guardians of the Const.i.tution, against any infringement of it on our parts.
This dangerous innovation we, his faithful Commons, think it our duty to mark; and as these admonitions from the throne, by their frequent repet.i.tion, seem intended to lead gradually to the establishment of an usage, we hold ourselves bound thus solemnly to protest against them.
This House will be, as it ever ought to be, anxiously attentive to the inclinations and interests of its const.i.tuents; nor do we desire to straiten any of the avenues to the throne, or to either House of Parliament. But the ancient order in which the rights of the people have been exercised is not a restriction of these rights. It is a method providently framed in favor of those privileges which it preserves and enforces, by keeping in that course which has been found the most effectual for answering their ends. His Majesty may receive the opinions and wishes of individuals under their signatures, and of bodies corporate under their seals, as expressing their own particular sense; and he may grant such redress as the legal powers of the crown enable the crown to afford. This, and the other House of Parliament, may also receive the wishes of such corporations and individuals by pet.i.tion. The collective sense of his people his Majesty is to receive from his Commons in Parliament a.s.sembled. It would destroy the whole spirit of the Const.i.tution, if his Commons were to receive that sense from the ministers of the crown, or to admit them to be a proper or a regular channel for conveying it.
That the ministers in the said speech declare, "His Majesty has a just and confident reliance that we (his faithful Commons) are animated with the same sentiments of loyalty, and the same attachment to our excellent Const.i.tution which he had the happiness to see so fully manifested in every part of the kingdom."
To represent, that his faithful Commons have never foiled in loyalty to his Majesty. It is new to them to be reminded of it. It is unnecessary and invidious to press it upon them by any example. This recommendation of loyalty, after his Majesty has sat for so many years, with the full support of all descriptions of his subjects, on the throne of this kingdom, at a time of profound peace, and without any pretence of the existence or apprehension of war or conspiracy, becomes in itself a source of no small jealousy to his faithful Commons; as many circ.u.mstances lead us to apprehend that therein the ministers have reference to some other measures and principles of loyalty, and to some other ideas of the Const.i.tution, than the laws require, or the practice of Parliament will admit.
No regular communication of the proofs of loyalty and attachment to the Const.i.tution, alluded to in the speech from the throne, have been laid before this House, in order to enable us to judge of the nature, tendency, or occasion of them, or in what particular acts they were displayed; but if we are to suppose the manifestations of loyalty (which are held out to us as an example for imitation) consist in certain addresses delivered to his Majesty, promising support to his Majesty in the exercise of his prerogative, and thanking his Majesty for removing certain of his ministers, on account of the votes they have given upon bills depending in Parliament,--if this be the example of loyalty alluded to in the speech from the throne, then we must beg leave to express our serious concern for the impression which has been made on any of our fellow-subjects by misrepresentations which have seduced them into a seeming approbation of proceedings subversive of their own freedom. We conceive that the opinions delivered in these papers were not well considered; nor were the parties duly informed of the nature of the matters on which they were called to determine, nor of those proceedings of Parliament which they were led to censure.
We shall act more advisedly.--The loyalty we shall manifest will not be the same with theirs; but, we trust, it will be equally sincere, and more enlightened. It is no slight authority which shall persuade us (by receiving as proofs of loyalty the mistaken principles lightly taken up in these addresses) obliquely to criminate, with the heavy and ungrounded charge of disloyalty and disaffection, an uncorrupt, independent, and reforming Parliament.[61] Above all, we shall take care that none of the rights and privileges, always claimed, and since the accession of his Majesty"s ill.u.s.trious family constantly exercised by this House, (and which we hold and exercise in trust for the Commons of Great Britain, and for their benefit,) shall be constructively surrendered, or even weakened and impaired, under ambiguous phrases and implications of censure on the late Parliamentary proceedings. If these claims are not well founded, they ought to be honestly abandoned; if they are just, they ought to be steadily and resolutely maintained.
Of his Majesty"s own gracious disposition towards the true principles of our free Const.i.tution his faithful Commons never did or could entertain a doubt; but we humbly beg leave to express to his Majesty our uneasiness concerning other new and unusual expressions of his ministers, declaratory of a resolution "to support in their _just balance_ the rights and privileges of every branch of the legislature."
It were desirable that all hazardous theories concerning a balance of rights and privileges (a mode of expression wholly foreign to Parliamentary usage) might have been forborne. His Majesty"s faithful Commons are well instructed in their own rights and privileges, which they are determined to maintain on the footing upon which they were handed down from their ancestors; they are not unacquainted with the rights and privileges of the House of Peers; and they know and respect the lawful prerogatives of the crown: but they do not think it safe to admit anything concerning the existence of a balance of those rights, privileges, and prerogatives; nor are they able to discern to what objects ministers would apply their fiction of a balance, nor what they would consider as a just one. These unauthorized doctrines have a tendency to stir improper discussions, and to lead to mischievous innovations in the Const.i.tution.[62]
That his faithful Commons most humbly recommend, instead of the inconsiderate speculations of unexperienced men, that, on all occasions, resort should be had to the happy practice of Parliament, and to those solid maxims of government which have prevailed since the accession of his Majesty"s ill.u.s.trious family, as furnishing the only safe principles on which the crown and Parliament can proceed.
We think it the more necessary to be cautious on this head, as, in the last Parliament, the present ministers had thought proper to countenance, if not to suggest, an attack upon the most clear and undoubted rights and privileges of this House.[63]
Fearing, from these extraordinary admonitions, and from the new doctrines, which seem to have dictated several unusual expressions, that his Majesty has been abused by false representations of the late proceedings in Parliament, we think it our duty respectfully to inform his Majesty, that no attempt whatever has been made against his lawful prerogatives, or against the rights and privileges of the Peers, by the late House of Commons, in any of their addresses, votes, or resolutions; neither do we know of any proceeding by bill, in which it was proposed to abridge the extent of his royal prerogative: but, if such provision had existed in any bill, we protest, and we declare, against all speeches, acts, or addresses, from any persons whatsoever, which have a tendency to consider such bills, or the persons concerned in them, as just objects of any kind of censure and punishment from the throne.
Necessary reformations may hereafter require, as they have frequently done in former times, limitations and abridgments, and in some cases an entire extinction, of some branch of prerogative. If bills should be improper in the form in which they appear in the House where they originate, they are liable, by the wisdom of this Const.i.tution, to be corrected, and even to be totally set aside, elsewhere. This is the known, the legal, and the safe remedy; but whatever, by the manifestation of the royal displeasure, tends to intimidate individual members from proposing, or this House from receiving, debating, and pa.s.sing bills, tends to prevent even the beginning of every reformation in the state, and utterly destroys the deliberative capacity of Parliament. We therefore claim, demand, and insist upon it, as our undoubted right, that no persons shall be deemed proper objects of animadversion by the crown, in any mode whatever, for the votes which they give or the propositions which they make in Parliament.
We humbly conceive, that besides its share of the legislative power, and its right of impeachment, that, by the law and usage of Parliament, this House has other powers and capacities, which it is bound to maintain.
This House is a.s.sured that our humble advice on the exercise of prerogative will be heard with the same attention with which it has ever been regarded, and that it will be followed by the same effects which it has ever produced, during the happy and glorious reigns of his Majesty"s royal progenitors,--not doubting but that, in all those points, we shall be considered as a council of wisdom and weight to advise, and not merely as an accuser of competence to criminate.[64] This House claims both capacities; and we trust that we shall be left to our free discretion which of them we shall employ as best calculated for his Majesty"s and the national service. Whenever we shall see it expedient to offer our advice concerning his Majesty"s servants, who are those of the public, we confidently hope that the personal favor of any minister, or any set of ministers, will not be more dear to his Majesty than the credit and character of a House of Commons. It is an experiment full of peril to put the representative wisdom and justice of his Majesty"s people in the wrong; it is a crooked and desperate design, leading to mischief, the extent of which no human wisdom can foresee, to attempt to form a prerogative party in the nation, to be resorted to as occasion shall require, in derogation, from the authority of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament a.s.sembled; it is a contrivance full of danger, for ministers to set up the representative and const.i.tuent bodies of the Commons of this kingdom as two separate and distinct powers, formed to counterpoise each other, leaving the preference in the hands of secret advisers of the crown. In such a situation of things, these advisers, taking advantage of the differences which may accidentally arise or may purposely be fomented between them, will have it in their choice to resort to the one or the other, as may best suit the purposes of their sinister ambition. By exciting an emulation and contest between the representative and the const.i.tuent bodies, as parties contending for credit and influence at the throne, sacrifices will be made by both; and the whole can end in nothing else than the destruction of the dearest rights and liberties of the nation. If there must be another mode of conveying the collective sense of the people to the throne than that by the House of Commons, it ought to be fixed and defined, and its authority ought to be settled: it ought not to exist in so precarious and dependent a state as that ministers should have it in their power, at their own mere pleasure, to acknowledge it with respect or to reject it with scorn.
It is the undoubted prerogative of the crown to dissolve Parliament; but we beg leave to lay before his Majesty, that it is, of all the trusts vested in his Majesty, the most critical and delicate, and that in which this House has the most reason to require, not only the good faith, but the favor of the crown. His Commons are not always upon a par with his ministers in an application to popular judgment; it is not in the power of the members of this House to go to their election at the moment the most favorable for them. It is in the power of the crown to choose a time for their dissolution whilst great and arduous matters of state and legislation are depending, which may be easily misunderstood, and which cannot be fully explained before that misunderstanding may prove fatal to the honor that belongs and to the consideration that is due to members of Parliament.
With his Majesty is the gift of all the rewards, the honors, distinctions, favors, and graces of the state; with his Majesty is the mitigation of all the rigors of the law: and we rejoice to see the crown possessed of trusts calculated to obtain good-will, and charged with duties which are popular and pleasing. Our trusts are of a different kind. Our duties are harsh and invidious in their nature; and justice and safety is all we can expect in the exercise of them. We are to offer salutary, which is not always pleasing counsel: we are to inquire and to accuse; and the objects of our inquiry and charge will be for the most part persons of wealth, power, and extensive connections: we are to make rigid laws for the preservation of revenue, which of necessity more or less confine some action or restrain some function which before was free: what is the most critical and invidious of all, the whole body of the public impositions originate from us, and the hand of the House of Commons is seen and felt in every burden that presses on the people.
Whilst ultimately we are serving them, and in the first instance whilst we are serving his Majesty, it will be hard indeed, if we should see a House of Commons the victim of its zeal and fidelity, sacrificed by his ministers to those very popular discontents which shall be excited by our dutiful endeavors for the security and greatness of his throne. No other consequence can result from such an example, but that, in future, the House of Commons, consulting its safety at the expense of its duties, and suffering the whole energy of the state to be relaxed, will shrink from every service which, however necessary, is of a great and arduous nature,--or that, willing to provide for the public necessities, and at the same time to secure the means of performing that task, they will exchange independence for protection, and will court a subservient existence through the favor of those ministers of state or those secret advisers who ought themselves to stand in awe of the Commons of this realm.
A House of Commons respected by his ministers is essential to his Majesty"s service: it is fit that they should yield to Parliament, and not that Parliament should be new-modelled until it is fitted to their purposes. If our authority is only to be held up when we coincide in opinion with his Majesty"s advisers, but is to be set at nought the moment it differs from them, the House of Commons will sink into a mere appendage of administration, and will lose that independent character which, inseparably connecting the honor and reputation with the acts of this House, enables us to afford a real, effective, and substantial support to his government. It is the deference shown to our opinion, when we dissent from the servants of the crown, which alone can give authority to the proceedings of this House, when it concurs with their measures.
That authority once lost, the credit of his Majesty"s crown will be impaired in the eyes of all nations. Foreign powers, who may yet wish to revive a friendly intercourse with this nation, will look in vain for that hold which gave a connection with Great Britain the preference to an affiance with any other state. A House of Commons of which ministers were known to stand in awe, where everything was necessarily discussed on principles fit to be openly and publicly avowed, and which could not be retracted or varied without danger, furnished a ground of confidence in the public faith which the engagement of no state dependent on the fluctuation of personal favor and private advice can ever pretend to. If faith with the House of Commons, the grand security for the national faith itself, can be broken with impunity, a wound is given to the political importance of Great Britain which will not easily be healed.
That there was a great variance between the late House of Commons and certain persons, whom his Majesty has been advised to make and continue as ministers, in defiance of the advice of that House, is notorious to the world. That House did not confide in those ministers; and they withheld their confidence from them for reasons for which posterity will honor and respect the names of those who composed that House of Commons, distinguished for its independence. They could not confide in persons who have shown a disposition to dark and dangerous intrigues. By these intrigues they have weakened, if not destroyed, the clear a.s.surance which his Majesty"s people, and which all nations, ought to have of what are and what are not the real acts of his government.
If it should be seen that his ministers may continue in their offices without any signification to them of his Majesty"s displeasure at any of their measures, whilst persons considerable for their rank, and known to have had access to his Majesty"s sacred person, can with impunity abuse that advantage, and employ his Majesty"s name to disavow and counteract the proceedings of his official servants, nothing but distrust, discord, debility, contempt of all authority, and general confusion, can prevail in his government.
This we lay before his Majesty, with humility and concern, as the inevitable effect of a spirit of intrigue in his executive government: an evil which we have but too much reason to be persuaded exists and increases. During the course of the last session it broke out in a manner the most alarming. This evil was infinitely aggravated by the unauthorized, but not disavowed, use which has been made of his Majesty"s name, for the purpose of the most unconst.i.tutional, corrupt, and dishonorable influence on the minds of the members of Parliament that ever was practised in this kingdom. No attention even to exterior decorum, in the practice of corruption and intimidation employed on peers, was observed: several peers were obliged under menaces to retract their declarations and to recall their proxies.
The Commons have the deepest interest in the purity and integrity of the Peerage. The Peers dispose of all the property in the kingdom, in the last resort; and they dispose of it on their honor, and not on their oaths, as all the members of every other tribunal in the kingdom must do,--though in them the proceeding is not conclusive. We have, therefore, a right to demand that no application shall be made to peers of such a nature as may give room to call in question, much less to attaint, our sole security for all that we possess. This corrupt proceeding appeared to the House of Commons, who are the natural guardians of the purity of Parliament, and of the purity of every branch of judicature, a most reprehensible and dangerous practice, tending to shake the very foundation of the authority of the House of Peers; and they branded it as such by their resolution.
The House had not sufficient evidence to enable them legally to punish this practice, but they had enough to caution them against all confidence in the authors and abettors of it. They performed their duty in humbly advising his Majesty against the employment of such ministers; but his Majesty was advised to keep those ministers, and to dissolve that Parliament. The House, aware of the importance and urgency of its duty with regard to the British interests in India, which were and are in the utmost disorder, and in the utmost peril, most humbly requested his Majesty not to dissolve the Parliament during the course of their very critical proceedings on that subject. His Majesty"s gracious condescension to that request was conveyed in the royal faith, pledged to a House of Parliament, and solemnly delivered from the throne. It was but a very few days after a committee had been, with the consent and concurrence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed for an inquiry into certain accounts delivered to the House by the Court of Directors, and then actually engaged in that inquiry, that the ministers, regardless of the a.s.surance given from the crown to a House of Commons, did dissolve that Parliament. We most humbly submit to his Majesty"s consideration the consequences of this their breach of public faith.
Whilst the members of the House of Commons, under that security, were engaged in his Majesty"s and the national business, endeavors were industriously used to calumniate those whom it was found impracticable to corrupt. The reputation of the members, and the reputation of the House itself, was undermined in every part of the kingdom.
In the speech from the throne relative to India, we are cautioned by the ministers "not to lose sight of the effect any measure may have on the Const.i.tution of our country." We are apprehensive that a calumnious report, spread abroad, of an attack upon his Majesty"s prerogative by the late House of Commons, may have made an impression on his royal mind, and have given occasion to this unusual admonition to the present.
This attack is charged to have been made in the late Parliament by a bill which pa.s.sed the House of Commons, in the late session of that Parliament, for the regulation of the affairs, for the preservation of the commerce, and for the amendment of the government of this nation, in the East Indies.
That his Majesty and his people may have an opportunity of entering into the ground of this injurious charge, we beg leave humbly to acquaint his Majesty, that, far from having made any infringement whatsoever on any part of his royal prerogative, that bill did, for a limited time, give to his Majesty certain powers never before possessed by the crown; and for this his present ministers (who, rather than fall short in the number of their calumnies, employ some that are contradictory) have slandered this House, as aiming at the extension of an unconst.i.tutional influence in his Majesty"s crown. This pretended attempt to increase the influence of the crown they were weak enough to endeavor to persuade his Majesty"s people was amongst the causes which excited his Majesty"s resentment against his late ministers.
Further, to remove the impressions of this calumny concerning an attempt in the House of Commons against his prerogative, it is proper to inform his Majesty, that the territorial possessions in the East Indies never have been declared by any public judgment, act, or instrument, or any resolution of Parliament whatsoever, to be the subject matter of his Majesty"s prerogative; nor have they ever been understood as belonging to his ordinary administration, or to be annexed or united to his crown; but that they are acquisitions of a new and peculiar description,[65]
unknown to the ancient executive const.i.tution of this country.
From time to time, therefore, Parliament provided for their government according to its discretion, and to its opinion of what was required by the public necessities. We do not know that his Majesty was ent.i.tled, by prerogative, to exercise any act of authority whatsoever in the Company"s affairs, or that, in effect, such authority has ever been exercised. His Majesty"s patronage was not taken away by that bill; because it is notorious that his Majesty never originally had the appointment of a single officer, civil or military, in the Company"s establishment in India: nor has the least degree of patronage ever been acquired to the crown in any other manner or measure than as the power was thought expedient to be granted by act of Parliament,--that is, by the very same authority by which the offices were disposed of and regulated in the bill which his Majesty"s servants have falsely and injuriously represented as infringing upon the prerogative of the crown.
Before the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East India Company.
The East India Company is not a branch of his Majesty"s prerogative administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority under it, nor indeed from any British t.i.tle that does not derive all its legal validity from acts of Parliament.
When a claim was a.s.serted to the India territorial possessions in the occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel of his Majesty"s patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient inheritance of his crown: they were claimed for the public. And when agreements were made with the East India Company concerning any composition for the holding, or any partic.i.p.ation of the profits, of those territories, the agreement was made with the public; and the preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it. These agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with Parliament: and the bills making and establishing such agreements always originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the disposition of Parliament, without the ceremony of previous consent from the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers: which previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict right, but generally paid, when a new appropriation takes place in any part of his Majesty"s prerogative revenues.
In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognized and uniformly acted on, when Parliament undertook the reformation of the East India Company in 1773, a commission was appointed, as the commission in the late bill was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were named in Parliament, as in the late bill they were named. As they received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown; they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address of either House or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution observed in the late bill relative to the commissioners proposed therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding which regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock, as well as by Parliament. Their proceedings were, in that bill, directed to be of such a nature as easily to subject them to the strictest revision of both, in case of any malversation.
In the year 1780, an act of Parliament again made provision for the government of those territories for another four years, without any sort of reference to prerogative; nor was the least objection taken at the second, more than at the first of those periods, as if an infringement had been made upon the rights of the crown: yet his Majesty"s ministers have thought fit to represent the late commission as an entire innovation on the Const.i.tution, and the setting up a new order and estate in the nation, tending to the subversion of the monarchy itself.
If the government of the East Indies, other than by his Majesty"s prerogative, be in effect a fourth order in the commonwealth, this order has long existed; because the East India Company has for many years enjoyed it in the fullest extent, and does at this day enjoy the whole administration of those provinces, and the patronage to offices throughout that great empire, except as it is controlled by act of Parliament.
It was the ill condition and ill administration of the Company"s affairs which induced this House (merely as a temporary establishment) to vest the same powers which the Company did before possess, (and no other,) for a limited time, and under very strict directions, in proper hands, until they could be restored, or farther provision made concerning them.
It was therefore no creation whatever of a new power, but the removal of an old power, long since created, and then existing, from the management of those persons who had manifestly and dangerously abused their trust.
This House, which well knows the Parliamentary origin of all the Company"s powers and privileges, and is not ignorant or negligent of the authority which may vest those powers and privileges in others, if justice and the public safety so require, is conscious to itself that it no more creates a new order in the state, by making occasional trustees for the direction of the Company, than it originally did in giving a much more permanent trust to the Directors or to the General Court of that body. The monopoly of the East India Company was a derogation from the general freedom of trade belonging to his Majesty"s people. The powers of government, and of peace and war, are parts of prerogative of the highest order. Of our competence to restrain the rights of all his subjects by act of Parliament, and to vest those high and eminent prerogatives even in a particular company of merchants, there has been no question. We beg leave most humbly to claim as our right, and as a right which this House has always used, to frame such bills for the regulation of that commerce, and of the territories held by the East India Company, and everything relating to them, as to our discretion shall seem fit; and we a.s.sert and maintain that therein we follow, and do not innovate on, the Const.i.tution.
That his Majesty"s ministers, misled by their ambition, have endeavored, if possible, to form a faction in the country against the popular part of the Const.i.tution; and have therefore thought proper to add to their slanderous accusation against a House of Parliament, relative to his Majesty"s prerogative, another of a different nature, calculated for the purpose of raising fears and jealousies among the corporate bodies of the kingdom, and of persuading uninformed persons belonging to those corporations to look to and to make addresses to them, as protectors of their rights, under their several charters, from the designs which they, without any ground, charged the then House of Commons to have formed against _charters in general_. For this purpose they have not scrupled to a.s.sert that the exertion of his Majesty"s prerogative in the late precipitate change in his administration, and the dissolution of the late Parliament, were measures adopted in order to rescue the people and their rights out of the hands of the House of Commons, their representatives.
We trust that his Majesty"s subjects are not yet so far deluded as to believe that the charters, or that any other of their local or general privileges, can have a solid security in any place but where that security has always been looked for, and always found,--in the House of Commons. Miserable and precarious indeed would be the state of their franchises, if they were to find no defence but from that quarter from whence they have always been attacked![66] But the late House of Commons, in pa.s.sing that bill, made no attack upon any powers or privileges, except such as a House of Commons has frequently attacked, and will attack, (and they trust, in the end, with their wonted success,)--that is, upon those which are corruptly and oppressively administered; and this House do faithfully a.s.sure his Majesty, that we will correct, and, if necessary for the purpose, as far as in us lies, will wholly destroy, every species of power and authority exercised by British subjects to the oppression, wrong, and detriment of the people, and to the impoverishment and desolation of the countries subject to it.
The propagators of the calumnies against that House of Parliament have been indefatigable in exaggerating the supposed injury done to the East India Company by the suspension of the authorities which they have in every instance abused,--as if power had been wrested by wrong and violence from just and prudent hands; but they have, with equal care, concealed the weighty grounds and reasons on which that House had adopted the most moderate of all possible expedients for rescuing the natives of India from oppression, and for saving the interests of the real and honest proprietors of their stock, as well as that great national, commercial concern, from imminent ruin.
The ministers aforesaid have also caused it to be reported that the House of Commons have confiscated the property of the East India Company. It is the reverse of truth. The whole management was a trust for the proprietors, under their own inspection, (and it was so provided for in the bill,) and under the inspection of Parliament. That bill, so far from confiscating the Company"s property, was the only one which, for several years past, did not, in some shape or other, affect their property, or restrain them in the disposition of it.
It is proper that his Majesty and all his people should be informed that the House of Commons have proceeded, with regard to the East India Company, with a degree of care, circ.u.mspection, and deliberation, which has not been equalled in the history of Parliamentary proceedings. For sixteen years the state and condition of that body has never been wholly out of their view. In the year 1767 the House took those objects into consideration, in a committee of the whole House. The business was pursued in the following year. In the year 1772 two committees were appointed for the same purpose, which examined into their affairs with much diligence, and made very ample reports. In the year 1773 the proceedings were carried to an act of Parliament, which proved ineffectual to its purpose. The oppressions and abuses in India have since rather increased than diminished, on account of the greatness of the temptations, and convenience of the opportunities, which got the better of the legislative provisions calculated against ill practices then in their beginnings; insomuch that, in 1781, two committees were again inst.i.tuted, who have made seventeen reports. It was upon the most minute, exact, and laborious collection and discussion of facts, that the late House of Commons proceeded in the reform which they attempted in the administration of India, but which has been frustrated by ways and means the most dishonorable to his Majesty"s government, and the most pernicious to the Const.i.tution of this kingdom. His Majesty was so sensible of the disorders in the Company"s administration, that the consideration of that subject was no less than six times recommended to this House in speeches from the throne.
The result of the Parliamentary inquiries has been, that the East India Company was found totally corrupted, and totally perverted from the purposes of its inst.i.tution, whether political or commercial; that the powers of war and peace given by the charter had been abused, by kindling hostilities in every quarter for the purposes of rapine; that almost all the treaties of peace they have made have only given cause to so many breaches of public faith; that countries once the most flourishing are reduced to a state of indigence, decay, and depopulation, to the diminution of our strength, and to the infinite dishonor of our national character; that the laws of this kingdom are notoriously, and almost in every instance, despised; that the servants of the Company, by the purchase of qualifications to vote in the General Court, and, at length, by getting the Company itself deeply in their debt, have obtained the entire and absolute mastery in the body by which they ought to have been ruled and coerced. Thus their malversations in office are supported, instead of being checked by the Company. The whole of the affairs of that body are reduced to a most perilous situation; and many millions of innocent and deserving men, who are under the protection of this nation, and who ought to be protected by it, are oppressed by a most despotic and rapacious tyranny. The Company and their servants, having strengthened themselves by this confederacy, set at defiance the authority and admonitions of this House employed to reform them; and when this House had selected certain princ.i.p.al delinquents, whom they declared it the duty of the Company to recall, the Company held out its legal privileges against all reformation, positively refused to recall them, and supported those who had fallen under the just censure of this House with new and stronger marks of countenance and approbation.
The late House, discovering the reversed situation of the Company, by which the nominal servants are really the masters, and the offenders are become their own judges, thought fit to examine into the state of their commerce; and they have also discovered that their commercial affairs are in the greatest disorder; that their debts have acc.u.mulated beyond any present or obvious future means of payment, at least under the actual administration of their affairs; that this condition of the East India Company has begun to affect the sinking fund itself, on which the public credit of the kingdom rests,--a million and upwards being due to the customs, which that House of Commons whose intentions towards the Company have been so grossly misrepresented were indulgent enough to respite. And thus, instead of confiscating their property, the Company received without interest (which in such a case had been before charged) the use of a very large sum of the public money. The revenues are under the peculiar care of this House, not only as the revenues originate from us, but as, on every failure if the funds set apart for the support of the national credit, or to provide for the national strength and safety, the task of supplying every deficiency falls upon his Majesty"s faithful Commons, this House must, in effect, tax the people. The House, therefore, at every moment, incurs the hazard of becoming obnoxious to its const.i.tuents.