The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III | Page 3

for their payment.
But with the positive injunctions of the act before us to examine into
their nature and origin, we are indispensably bound to direct such an
inquiry to be instituted." They then order the President and Council of
Madras to enter into a full examination, &c., &c.
The Directors, having drawn up their order to the Presidency on these
principles, communicated the draught of the general letter in which
those orders were contained to the board of his Majesty's ministers, and
other servants lately constituted by Mr. Pitt's East India Act. These
ministers, who had just carried through Parliament the bill ordering a
specific inquiry, immediately drew up another letter, on a principle
directly opposite to that which was prescribed by the act of Parliament
and followed by the Directors. In these second orders, all idea of an
inquiry into the justice and origin of the pretended debts, particularly of
the last, the greatest, and the most obnoxious to suspicion, is abandoned.
They are all admitted and established without any investigation
whatsoever, (except some private conference with the agents of the
claimants is to pass for an investigation,) and a fund for their discharge
is assigned and set apart out of the revenues of the Carnatic. To this
arrangement in favor of their servants, servants suspected of corruption
and convicted of disobedience, the Directors of the East India Company
were ordered to set their hands, asserting it to arise from their own
conviction and opinion, in flat contradiction to their recorded
sentiments, their strong remonstrance, and their declared sense of their
duty, as well under their general trust and their oath as Directors, as
under the express injunctions of an act of Parliament.
The principles upon which this summary proceeding was adopted by
the ministerial board are stated by themselves in a number in the
appendix to this speech.
By another section of the same act, the same Court of Directors were
ordered to take into consideration and to decide on the indeterminate
rights of the Rajah of Tanjore and the Nabob of Arcot; and in this, as in
the former case, no power of appeal, revision, or alteration was
reserved to any other. It was a jurisdiction, in a cause between party

and party, given to the Court of Directors specifically. It was known
that the territories of the former of these princes had been twice
invaded and pillaged, and the prince deposed and imprisoned, by the
Company's servants, influenced by the intrigues of the latter, and for
the purpose of paying his pretended debts. The Company had, in the
year 1775, ordered a restoration of the Rajah to his government, under
certain conditions. The Rajah complained, that his territories had not
been completely restored to him, and that no part of his goods, money,
revenues, or records, unjustly taken and withheld from him, were ever
returned. The Nabob, on the other hand, never ceased to claim the
country itself, and carried on a continued train of negotiation, that it
should again be given up to him, in violation of the Company's public
faith.
The Directors, in obedience to this part of the act, ordered an inquiry,
and came to a determination to restore certain of his territories to the
Rajah. The ministers, proceeding as in the former case, without hearing
any party, rescinded the decision of the Directors, refused the
restitution of the territory, and, without regard to the condition of the
country of Tanjore, which had been within a few years four times
plundered, (twice by the Nabob of Arcot, and twice by enemies brought
upon it solely by the politics of the same Nabob, the declared enemy of
that people,) and without discounting a shilling for their sufferings,
they accumulate an arrear of about four hundred thousand pounds of
pretended tribute to this enemy; and then they order the Directors to put
their hands to a new adjudication, directly contrary to a judgment in a
judicial character and trust solemnly given by them and entered on their
records.
These proceedings naturally called for some inquiry. On the 28th of
February, 1785, Mr. Fox made the following motion in the House of
Commons, after moving that the clauses of the act should be
read:--"That the proper officer do lay before this House copies or
extracts of all letters and orders of the Court of Directors of the United
East India Company, in pursuance of the injunctions contained in the
37th and 38th clauses of the said act"; and the question being put, it
passed in the negative by a very great majority.
The last speech in the debate was the following; which is given to the
public, not as being more worthy of its attention than others, (some of

which were of consummate ability,) but as entering