5. The accounts between the Public and the Company must be referred for investigation to Commissioners of Inquiry, to be finally settled and adjusted. It is now for the Proprietors, after well considering these two alternatives, to determine, under _which of the two_ their dividend will be _most secure_. With regard to Constitutional objections against taking the Government of India out of the hands of the Company (upon which objection their confidence in their present pretensions chiefly reposes), it is difficult to conceive that the wisdom of Parliament, after the experience of so many years, is unequal to the task of devising a system as good as that of the Company, without incurring the evil which those Constitutional objections suppose. The Company's Government, it must be recollected, has been a production of chance, and has grown by the progress of accidental events. It has, indeed, answered far better in practice than could have been expected, if we consider its origin; and therefore, it is not desirable that it should be materially altered; neither is it likely that any such alteration of the system should be contemplated, unless the indiscretion of the Company should impose upon Parliament the necessity of resorting to that measure. But it certainly does not seem to be a measure insuperably difficult, to preserve whatever is really good in the present system, and even to remedy some of its defects, without departing from the path of experience, and resorting to improvements of theory and experiment. There is one point of view, however, in which such a system would acquire an evident advantage over that which has hitherto obtained: viz. that it would, in every Session, be liable to the revision of Parliament, and to the immediate correction of every error which might be observed, and to such further continual improvements as experience might direct; _not being embarrassed by the compact of a Charter_. GRACCHUS. LETTER VIII. _Wednesday, February 17, 1813._ It is very observable, that the objections which have been made by the East India Company to the admission of ships, returning from India, to import and dispose of their cargoes at any other place than the Port of London, are not founded so much upon any statement of the injury which the trade of the Company would sustain by admitting them, as upon a provident regard for the adventurers themselves, and a caution held out to them not to entertain an expectation of benefiting by any commercial speculation in India; since the long experience of the Company has enabled them to show, that it must be ultimately ruinous to the speculator. The sum of the experience, alleged by those who have come forward to defend this point, is, "_That it is not practicable to extend the consumption of European manufactures generally in India_;" and the facts which they have asserted in support of this experimental argument, and upon which they rest its strength, are these four following: