In consequence of these ideas, after the whole of the northern and eastern coast of Java had been added to the Company's territorial dominions, by a cession in the year 1749, no step seems to have been taken for improving these acquisitions, by any direct use of the supremacy obtained. Some contracts were instituted with the native chiefs, for delivering gratis, or at the lowest possible price, such articles as would serve the Company's investments at home; but taxation, the levy of produce, and the management of police and justice in the inferior courts, were left to the care and conscience of the natives themselves. Arguments in favour of this system may perhaps be drawn from the respect due to the native usages and institutions, and from a supposed want of power, on the part of the Company, to assume any direct controul over the native population. But whatever influence these ideas may have had on the conduct of the Company, it may be affirmed that an European government, aiming only to see right and justice administered to every class of the population, might and ought to have maintained all the native usages and institutions, not inconsistent with those principles; and that the power, for want of which it withheld its interference, would have been supplied and confirmed by the act of exercising the power which it possessed, and by the resources it might have been the means of drawing from the country. Considering, therefore, the propensity inherent in every native authority to abuse its influence, and to render it oppressive to the population at large; the ascendancy of Europeans in general, even over the class of native chieftains; the scantiness of many of the establishments proposed in the plan of the Indian Commissioners; the manifest inadequacy of the remuneration of the civil servants which it recommended, and the narrow scale on which all expenses were calculated; no very durable benefits could have been reasonably expected from it. The discretionary power being left in the hands of the native chieftains, the whole of the lower class of the population would have remained at their disposal; the ascendancy of the European servants would have subjected both to peculations, which the insufficiency of their salaries would constantly have tempted them to practice; the administration of justice not meeting with a proper remuneration would have been ineffectual, perhaps corrupt; the reduction of the military establishment would have left the possessions an easy prey to the first invader; and the original sources of the Company's revenues in India remaining the same, it seems probable, that in a short time, the same scenes which had hitherto met with so much reprobation, would have been acted over again, and to a still more disgraceful extent.