wisely, because they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided, either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written,—­the proposition, the argument, the dissent.  This is not confined to their great Council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, (and I see considerable traces of it in practice,) in every Provincial Council, whilst the Provincial Councils existed, and even down to the minutest ramification of their service.  These books, in a progression from the lowest Councils to the highest Presidency, are ordered to be transmitted, 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,