ver acuteness and diligence could do has been done.
One person in particular, whose talents and industry peculiarly fitted
him for such investigations, and of whom I can never think without
regret, Mr Hyde Villiers, devoted himself to the examination with an
ardour and a perseverance, which, I believe, shortened a life most
valuable to his country and to his friends. The assistance of the most
skilful accountants has been called in. But the difficulties are such as
no accountant, however skilful, could possibly remove. The difficulties
are not arithmetical, but political. They arise from the constitution
of the Company, from the long and intimate union of the commercial and
imperial characters in one body. Suppose that the treasurer of a charity
were to mix up the money which he receives on account of the charity
with his own private rents and dividends, to pay the whole into his bank
to his own private account, to draw it out again by cheques in exactly
the same form when he wanted it for his private expenses, and when he
wanted it for the purposes of his public trust. Suppose that he were
to continue to act thus till he was himself ignorant whether he were
in advance or in arrear; and suppose that many years after his death a
question were to arise whether his estate were in debt to the charity
or the charity in debt to his estate. Such is the question which is
now before us, with this important difference; that the accounts of an
individual could not be in such a state unless he had been guilty of
fraud, or of that gross negligence which is scarcely less culpable than
fraud, and that the accounts of the Company were brought into this state
by circumstances of a very peculiar kind, by circumstances unparalleled
in the history of the world.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Company was a merely commercial body
till the middle of the last century. Commerce was its chief object; but
in order to enable it to pursue that object, it had been, like the other
Companies which were its rivals, like the Dutch India Company, like the
French India Company, invested from a very early period with political
functions. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, the Company was
in miniature precisely what it now is. It was intrusted with the very
highest prerogatives of sovereignty. It had its forts, and its white
captains, and its black sepoys; it had its civil and criminal tribunals;
it was authorised to proclaim martial law; it sen