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If it should be seen that his ministers may continue in their offices, without any signification to them of his Majesty's displeasure at any of their measures, whilst persons considerable for their rank, and known to have had access to his Majesty's sacred person, can with impunity abuse that advantage, and employ his Majesty's name to disavow and counteract the proceedings of his official servants, nothing but distrust, discord, debility, contempt of all authority, and general confusion, can prevail in his government.

This we lay before his Majesty, with humility and concern, as the inevitable effect of a spirit of intrigue in his executive government; an evil which we have but too much reason to be persuaded exists and increases. During the course of the last session it broke out in a manner the most alarming. This evil was infinitely aggravated by the unauthorized, but not disavowed, use which has been made of his Majesty's name, for the purpose of the most unconstitutional, corrupt, and dishonourable influence on the minds of the members of parliament, that ever was practised in this kingdom. No attention, even to the exterior decorum, in the practice of corruption, and intimidation employed on Peers, was observed: several Peers were obliged under menaces to retract their declarations, and to recall their proxies.

The Commons have the deepest interest in the purity and integrity of the peerage. The Peers dispose of all the property in the kingdom, in the last resort; and they dispose of it on their honour and not on their oaths, as all the members of every other tribunal in the kingdom must do; though in them the proceeding is not conclusive. We have, therefore, a right to demand that no application shall be made to Peers of such a nature as may give room to call in question, much less to attaint, our sole security for all that we possess. This corrupt proceeding appeared to the House of Commons, who are the natural guardians of the purity of parliament, and of the purity of every branch of judicature, a most reprehensible and dangerous practice, tending to shake the very foundation of the authority of the House of Peers;— and they branded it as such by their resolution.

The House had not sufficient evidence to enable them legally to punish this practice, but they had enough to caution them against all confidence in the authors and abet

tors of it. They performed their duty in humbly advising his Majesty against the employment of such ministers; but his Majesty was advised to keep those ministers, and to dissolve that parliament. The House, aware of the importance and urgency of its duty with regard to the British interests in India, which were and are in the utmost disorder, and in the utmost peril, most humbly requested his Majesty not to dissolve the parliament during the course of their very critical proceedings on that subject. His Majesty's gracious condescension to that request was conveyed in the royal. faith, pledged to a House of Parliament, and solemnly delivered from the throne. It was but a very few days after a committee had been, with the consent and concurrence of the chancellor of the exchequer, appointed for an inquiry into certain accounts delivered to the House by the court of directors, and then actually engaged in that inquiry, that the ministers, regardless of the assurance given from the crown to a House of Commons, did dissolve that parliament. We most humbly submit to his Majesty's consideration the consequences of this their breach of public faith.

Whilst the members of the House of Commons, under that security, were engaged in his Majesty's and the national business, endeavours were industriously used to calumniate those whom it was found impracticable to corrupt. The reputation of the members, and the reputation of the House itself, was undermined in every part of the kingdom.

In the speech from the throne relative to India, we are cautioned by the ministers, "not to lose sight of the effect any measure may have on the constitution of our country." We are apprehensive that a calumnious report, spread abroad of an attack upon his Majesty's prerogative by the late House of Commons, may have made an impression on his royal mind, and have given occasion to this unusual admonition to the present. This attack is charged to have been made in the late parliament, by a bill which passed the House of Commons in the late session of that parliament, for the regulation of the affairs, for the preservation of the commerce, and for the amendment of the government of this nation, in the East Indies.

That his Majesty and his people may have an opportunity of entering into the ground of this injurious charge, we beg

leave humbly to acquaint his Majesty, that, far from having made any infringement whatsoever on any part of his royal prerogative, that bill did, for a limited time, give to his Majesty certain powers never before possessed by the crown; and for this his present ministers (who, rather than fall short in the number of their calumnies, employ some that are contradictory) have slandered this House as aiming at the extension of an unconstitutional influence in his Majesty's crown. This pretended attempt to increase the influence of the crown they were weak enough to endeavour to persuade his Majesty's people was amongst the causes which excited his Majesty's resentment against his late ministers.

Further, to remove the impressions of this calumny concerning an attempt in the House of Commons against his prerogative, it is proper to inform his Majesty, that the territorial possessions in the East Indies never have been declared by any public judgment, act, or instrument, or any resolution of parliament whatsoever, to be the subject matter of his Majesty's prerogative; nor have they ever been understood as belonging to his ordinary administration, or to be annexed or united to his crown; but that they are acquisitions of a new and peculiar description,' unknown to the ancient executive constitution of this country.

The territorial possessions in the East Indies were acquired to the Company, in virtue of grants from the Great Mogul in the nature of offices and jurisdictions, to be held under him and dependent upon his crown; with the express condition of being obedient to orders from his court, and of paying an annual tribute to his treasury. It is true that no obedience is yielded to these orders; and for some time past there has been no payment made of this tribute. But it is under a grant, so conditioned, that they still hold. To subject the king of Great Britain as tributary to a foreign power, by the acts of his subjects-to suppose the grant valid, and yet the condition void-to suppose it good for the king, and insufficient for the Company-to suppose it an interest divisible between the parties, these are some few of the many legal difficulties to be surmounted, before the common law of England can acknowledge the East-India Company's Asiatic affairs to be a subject matter of prerogative, so as to bring it within the verge of English jurisprudence. It is a very anomalous species of power and property which is held by the East-India Company. Our English prerogative law does not furnish principles, much less precedents, by which it can be defined or adjusted. Nothing but the eminent dominion of parliament over every British subject in every concern, and in every circumstance in which he is placed, can adjust this

From time to time, therefore, parliament provided for their government according to its discretion, and to its opinion of what was required by the public necessities. We do not know that his Majesty was entitled, by prerogative, to exercise any act of authority whatsoever in the Company's affairs, or that, in effect, such authority has ever been exercised. His Majesty's patronage was not taken away by that bill; because it is notorious that his Majesty never originally had the appointment of a single officer, civil or military, in the Company's establishment in India; nor has the least degree of patronage ever been acquired to the crown in any other manner or measure, than as the power was thought expedient to be granted by act of parliament; that is, by the very same authority by which the offices were disposed of and regulated in the bill, which his Majesty's servants have falsely and injuriously represented as infringing upon the prerogative of the crown.

Before the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East-India Company. The East-India Company is not a branch of his Majesty's prerogative administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority under it, nor indeed from any British title, that does not derive all its legal validity from acts of parliament.

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When a claim was asserted to the India territorial sessions in the occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel of his Majesty's patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient inheritance of his crown. They were claimed for the public. And when, agreements were made with the East-India Company concerning any composition for the holding, or any participation of the profits, of those territories, the agreement was made with the public, and the preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it. These agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with parliament: and the bills making and establishing such agreements always originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the disposition of parliament, without the ceremony of prenew intricate matter. Parliament may act wisely or unwisely, justly or unjustly; but parliament alone is competent to it.

vious consent from the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers: which previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict right, but generally paid when a new appropriation takes place in any part of his Majesty's prerogative revenues.

In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognised, and uniformly acted on, when parliament undertook the reformation of the East-India Company in 1773, a commission was appointed as the commission in the late bill was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were named in parliament, as in the late bill they were named. As they received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown; they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address of either House, or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution observed in the late bill relative to the commissioners proposed therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding, which regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock, as well as by parliament. Their proceedings were, in that bill, directed to be of such a nature, as easily to subject them to the strictest revision of both, in case of any malversation.

In the year 1780, an act of parliament again made provision for the government of those territories for another four years, without any sort of reference to prerogative; nor was the least objection taken at the second, more than at the first, of those periods, as if an infringement had been made upon the rights of the crown; yet his Majesty's ministers have thought fit to represent the late commission as an entire innovation on the constitution, and the setting up a new order and estate in the nation, tending to the subversion of the monarchy itself.

If the government of the East Indies, other than by his Majesty's prerogative, be, in effect, a fourth order in the commonwealth, this order has long existed; because the East-India Company has for many years enjoyed it in the fullest extent, and does at this day enjoy the whole admin

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