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e consideration. In no affair has the connection between servants abroad and persons in power among the proprietors of the India Company been more discernible than in this. But if such confederacies, cemented by such means, are suffered to pass without due animadversion, the authority of Parliament must become as inefficacious as all other authorities have proved to restrain the growth of disorders either in India or in Europe. SALT. The reports made by the two committees of the House which sat in the years 1772 and 1773 of the state and conduct of the inland trade of Bengal up to that period have assisted the inquiries of your Committee with respect to the third and last article of monopoly, viz., that of salt, and made it unnecessary for them to enter into so minute a detail on that subject as they have done on some others. Your Committee find that the late Lord Clive constantly asserted that the salt trade in Bengal had been a monopoly time immemorial,--that it ever was and ever must be a monopoly,--and that Coja Wazid, and other merchants long before him, had given to the Nabob and his ministers two hundred thousand pounds per annum for the exclusive privilege. The Directors, in their letter of the 24th December, 1776, paragraph 76, say, "that it has ever been in a great measure an exclusive trade." The Secret Committee report,[8] that under the government of the Nabobs the duty on salt made in Bengal was two and an half per cent paid by Mussulmen, and five per cent paid by Gentoos. On the accession of Mir Cassim, in 1760, the claim of the Company's servants to trade in salt duty-free was first avowed. Mr. Vansittart made an agreement with him by which the duties should be fixed at nine per cent. The Council annulled the agreement, and reduced the duty to two and an half per cent. On this Mir Cassim ordered that no customs or duties whatsoever should be collected for the future. But a majority of the Council (22nd March, 1763) resolved, that the making the exemption general was a breach of the Company's privileges, and that the Nabob should be positively required to recall it, and collect duties as before from the country merchants, and all other persons who had not the protection of the Company's _dustuck_. The Directors, as the evident reason of the thing and as their duty required, disapproved highly of these transactions, and ordered (8th February, 1764) _a final and effectual stop to be put to the i
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