opinion of the expediency of them, that he transmitted to the Court of
Directors a draught of an act of Parliament to confirm them. By this act
it was his intention to place them beyond the possibility of mutation.
Whatever opinion others might entertain of their weakness, inefficacy,
or other defects, Mr. Hastings found no such things in them. He had
declared in the beginning that he considered them as a sort of
experiment, but that in the progress he found them answer so perfectly
well that he proposed even an act of Parliament to support them. The
Court of Directors, knowing the mischiefs that innovation had produced
in their service, and the desolations which it had brought on the
country, commanded him not to take any step for changing them, without
their orders. Contrary, however, to his own declarations, contrary to
the sketch of an act of Parliament, which, for aught he knew, the
legislature might then have passed, (I know that it was in contemplation
to pass, about that time, several acts for regulating the Company's
affairs, and, for one, I should have been, as I always have been, a good
deal concerned in whatever tended to fix some kind of permanent and
settled government in Bengal,)--in violation, I say, of his duty, and in
contradiction to his own opinion, he at that time, without giving the
parties notice, turns out of their employments, situations, and bread,
the Provincial Councils.

And who were the members of those Provincial Councils? They were of high
rank in the Company's service; they were not junior servants, boys of a
day, but persons who had gone through some probation, who knew something
of the country, who were conversant in its revenues and in the course of
its business; they were, in short, men of considerable rank in the
Company's service. What did he do with these people? Without any regard
to their rank in the service,--no more than he had regarded the rank of
the nobility of the country,--he sweeps them all, in one day, from their
independent situations, without reference to the Directors, and turns
them all into pensioners upon the Company. And for what purpose was this
done? It was done in order to reduce the Company's servants, who, in
their independent situations, were too great a mass and volume for him
to corrupt, to an abject dependence upon his absolute power. It was,
that he might tell them, "You have lost your situations; you have
nothing but small alimentary pensions, nothing