they themselves turn
farmers, what checks can be found for _them_? What security will the
Company have for their property, or where are the ryots to look for
relief against oppressions?"

The reasons assigned for the preceding regulation seem to your Committee
to be perfectly just; but they can by no means be reconciled to those
which induced Mr. Barwell to engage in the salt farms of Selimabad and
Savagepoor. In the first place, his doing so is at length a direct and
avowed, though at first a covert, violation of the public regulation, to
which he was himself a party as a member of the government, as well as
an act of disobedience to the Company's positive orders on this subject.
In their General Letter of the 17th May, 1766, the Court of Directors
say, "We positively order, that no covenanted servant, or Englishman
residing under our protection, shall be suffered to hold any land for
his own account, directly or indirectly, in his own name or that of
others, or to be concerned in any farms or revenues whatsoever."

Secondly, if, instead of letting the Company's lands or farms to
indifferent persons, their agent or trustee be at liberty to hold them
himself, he will always (on principles stated and adhered to in the
defence) have a sufficient reason for farming them on his own account,
since he can at all times make them as profitable as he pleases; or if
he leases them to a third person, yet reserves an intermediate profit
for himself, that profit may be as great as he thinks fit, and must be
necessarily made at the Company's expense. If at the same time he be
collector of the revenues, it will be his interest to recommend
remissions in favor of the nominal farmer, and he will have it in his
power to sink the amount of his collections.

These principles, and the correspondent practices, leave the India
Company without any security that all the leases of the lands of Bengal
may not have been disposed of, under that administration which made the
five years' settlement in 1772, in the same manner and for the same
purpose.

To enable the House to judge how far this apprehension may be founded,
it will be proper to state, that Mr. Nicholas Grueber, who preceded Mr.
Barwell in the Chiefship of Dacca, in a letter dated 29th of April,
1775, declares that he paid to the Committee of Circuit twelve thousand
rupees as their profit on a single salt farm,--which sum, he says, "I
paid the Committee at their request