ich they
produce to the House. Their opinions are not of a judicial nature. Your
Committee has taken abundant care that every important fact in their
Report should be attended with the authority for it, either in the
course of their reflections or in the Appendix: to report everything
upon every subject before them which is to be found on the records of
the Company would be to transcribe, and in the event to print, almost
the whole of those voluminous papers. The matter which appears before
them is in a summary manner this.

The Dacca merchants begin by complaining that in November, 1773, Mr.
Richard Barwell, then Chief of Dacca, had deprived them of their
employment and means of subsistence; that he had extorted from them
44,224 Arcot rupees (4,731_l._) by the terror of his threats, by long
imprisonment, and cruel confinement in the stocks; that afterwards they
were confined in a small room near the factory-gate, under a guard of
sepoys; that their food was stopped, and they remained starving a whole
day; that they were not permitted to take their food till next day at
noon, and were again brought back to the same confinement, in which they
were continued for six days, and were not set at liberty until they had
given Mr. Barwell's banian a certificate for forty thousand rupees; that
in July, 1774, when Mr. Barwell had left Dacca, they went to Calcutta to
seek justice; that Mr. Barwell confined them in his house at Calcutta,
and sent them back under a guard of peons to Dacca; that in December,
1774, on the arrival of the gentlemen from Europe, they returned to
Calcutta, and preferred their complaint to the Supreme Court of
Judicature.

The bill in Chancery filed against Richard Barwell, John Shakespeare,
and others, contains a minute specification of the various acts of
personal cruelty said to be practised by Mr. Barwell's orders, to extort
money from these people. Among other acts of a similar nature he is
charged with having ordered the appraiser of the Company's cloths, who
was an old man, and who asserts that he had faithfully served the
Company above sixteen years without the least censure on his conduct, to
be severely flogged without reason.

In the _manner_ of confining the delals, with ten of their servants, it
is charged on him, that, "when he first ordered them to be put into the
stocks, it was at a time when the weather was exceedingly bad and the
rain very heavy, without allowing them the least covering