The legislature, in declaring all presents to be the property of the Company, could not consider corruption, extortion, and fraud as any part of their resources.  The property in such presents was declared to be theirs, not as a fund for their benefit, but in order to found a legal title to a civil suit.  It was declared theirs, to facilitate the recovery out of corrupt and oppressive hands of money illegally taken; but this legal fiction of property could not nor ought by the legislature to be considered in any other light than as a trust held by them for those who suffered the injury.  Upon any other construction, the Company would have a right, first, to extract money from the subjects or dependants of this kingdom committed to their care, by means of particular conventions, or by taxes, by rents, and by monopolies; and when they had exhausted every contrivance of public imposition, then they were to be at liberty to let loose upon the people all their servants, from the highest rank to the lowest, to prey upon them at pleasure, and to draw, by personal and official authority, by influence, venality, and terror, whatever was left to them,—­and that all this was justified, provided the product was paid into the Company’s exchequer.

This prohibition and permission of presents, with this declaration of property in the Company, would leave no property to any man in India.  If, however, it should be thought that this clause in the act[45] should be capable, by construction and retrospect, of so legalizing and thus appropriating these presents, (which your Committee conceive impossible,) it is absolutely necessary that it should be very fully explained.

The provision in the act was made in favor of the natives.  If such construction prevails, the provision made as their screen from oppression will become the means of increasing and aggravating it without bounds and beyond remedy.  If presents, which when they are given were unlawful, can afterwards be legalized by an application of them to the Company’s service, no sufferer can even resort to a remedial process at law for his own relief.  The moment he attempts to sue, the money may be paid into the Company’s treasury; it is then lawfully taken, and the party is non-suited.

The Company itself must suffer extremely in the whole order and regularity of their public accounts, if the idea upon which Mr. Hastings justifies the taking of these presents receives the smallest countenance.  On his principles, the same sum may become private property or public, at the pleasure of the receiver; it is in his power, Mr. Hastings says, to conceal it forever.[46] He certainly has it in his power not only to keep it back and bring it forward at his own times, but even to shift and reverse the relations in the accounts (as Mr. Hastings has done) in what manner and proportion seems good to him, and to make himself alternately debtor or creditor for the same sums.