smitted, duplicate and triplicate, by every ship that sails to
Europe. On this system an able servant of the Company, and high in their
service, has recorded his opinion, and strongly expressed his
sentiments. Writing to the Court of Directors, he says, "It ought to be
remembered, that the basis upon which you rose to power, and have been
able to stand the shock of repeated convulsions, has been the accuracy
and simplicity of mercantile method, which makes every transaction in
your service and every expenditure a matter of record."

My Lords, this method not only must produce to them, if strictly
observed, a more accurate idea of the nature of their affairs and the
nature of their expenditures, but it must afford them no trivial
opportunity and means of knowing the true characters of their servants,
their capacities, their ways of thinking, the turn and bias of their
minds. If well employed, and but a little improved, the East India
Company possessed an advantage unknown before to the chief of a remote
government. In the most remote parts of the world, and in the minutest
parts of a remote service, everything came before the principal with a
domestic accuracy and local familiarity. It was, in the power of a
Director, sitting in London, to form an accurate judgment of every
incident that happened upon the Ganges and the Gogra.

The use of this recorded system did not consist only in the facility of
discovering what the nature of their affairs and the character and
capacity of their servants was, but it furnished the means of detecting
their misconduct, frequently of proving it too, and of producing the
evidence of it judicially under their own hands. For your Lordships must
have observed that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of
evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes
of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct, and simple: guilt is a
crooked, intricate, inconstant, and various thing. The iniquitous job of
to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity
of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons that have colored the first crime may
expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into
contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates,
conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records.
They are flown out of their hands, they are in Europe, they are safe in
the registers of the Company, perhaps they are under the