tory charges of the Company's agents on the native
merchants have made very little impression on your Committee. We have
nothing in favor of them, but the assertion of a party powerful and
interested. In such cases of mutual assertion and denial, your Committee
are led irresistibly to attach abuse to power, and to presume that
suffering and hardship are more likely to attend on weakness than that
any combination of unprotected individuals is of force to prevail over
influence, power, wealth, and authority. The complaints of the native
merchants ought not to have been treated in any of those modes in which
they were then treated. And when men are in the situation of
complainants against unbounded power, their abandoning their suit is far
from a full and clear proof of their complaints being groundless. It is
not because redress has been rendered impracticable that oppression does
not exist; nor is the despair of sufferers any alleviation of their
afflictions. A review of some of the most remarkable of the complaints
made by the native merchants in that province is so essential for laying
open the true spirit of the commercial administration, and the real
condition of those concerned in trade there, that your Committee
observing the records on this subject and at this period full of them,
they could not think themselves justifiable in not stating them to the
House.

Your Committee have found many heavy charges of oppression against Mr.
Barwell, whilst Factory Chief at Dacca; which oppressions are stated to
have continued, and even to have been aggravated, on complaint at
Calcutta. These complaints appear in several memorials presented to the
Supreme Council of Calcutta, of which Mr. Barwell was a member. They
appeared yet more fully and more strongly in a bill in Chancery filed in
the Supreme Court, which was afterwards recorded before the
Governor-General and Council, and transmitted to the Court of Directors.

Your Committee, struck with the magnitude and importance of these
charges, and finding that with regard to those before the Council no
regular investigation has ever taken place, and finding also that Mr.
Barwell had asserted in a Minute of Council that he had given a full
answer to the allegations in that bill, ordered a copy of the answer to
be laid before your Committee, that they might be enabled to state to
the House how far it appeared to them to be full, how far the charges
were denied as to the fact, or,