"But if the servants of the Company are to be loaded with the demerit of every misfortune in India, let them also have the merit they are entitled to. The Court of Directors, surely, will not claim the merit of those advantages which the nation and the Company are at present in possession of. The officers of the navy and army have had great share in the execution; but the Company's servants were the Cabinet Council who planned every thing, and to them also may be ascribed some part of the merit of our great acquisitions."
After having shown that the system was more to blame than the men, that much of the defect of regulation and control which rendered abuses inevitable in India was owing to the very persons who were loudest in their complaints, he next turned the attention of the House to the state of India itself; a country which, he affirmed, yielded a clear produce to the public and to individuals of between two and three millions sterling per annum. He asked what could be substituted for this, were it lost; and pointed to the dangers it actually ran, during a recent difference with the French Court. But it was certain, that our affairs in Bengal were in a very deplorable condition. This he ascribed to mismanagement. The public trade he showed, from official returns, to have more than doubled since the acquisition of the dewannee; while the inland trade, upon which the happiness and prosperity of the people must chiefly depend, had, by a change of system, and under pretence of freedom of trade, been thrown into total confusion, as the Company's servants and their agents had in reality taken it into their own hands, and, by trading not only as merchants but as sovereigns, had taken the bread out of the mouth of thousands of native merchants, whom they reduced to beggary. By official returns he proved that, since the acquisition of the dewannee, the revenues had suffered but a very inconsiderable decrease; while in every year since he left Bengal there had been a rapid increase in the military and civil charges, which threatened to consume the whole of the collections, and leave no surplus whatever. "Here," says he truly, "lies the danger. The evil is not so much in the revenues falling short, as in the expenses increasing. The best means of raising the revenues is to reduce the civil and military charges.... It is not the simple pay of officers and men upon the civil and military establishment which occasions our enormous expense, but the contingent bills of contractors, commissaries, engineers, &c., out of which, I am sure, great savings might be made.... Every man now, who is permitted to make a bill, makes a fortune. These intolerable expenses have alarmed the Directors, and persuaded them to come to Parliament for assistance. And, if I mistake not, they will soon go to the Administration and tell them they cannot pay the 400,000_l._, and that they must lower the dividends to the Proprietors."