ruinous grievance, is merely trivial, when compared with the havoc and waste committed on the manufacture, the commerce, agriculture, and population, by the methods employed to acquire these sums. A herd of hogs, broke into a well dressed vineyard, will gorge their voracious maws; but that which they eat and devour doth not destroy the vineyard; it is their manner of eating, their rutting up, their tearing down, and trampling under foot. Hitherto we have regarded this government in only one point of view: we have seen it acting for itself; but we have not seen the part it acts for the people, in its capacity of a sovereign ruler, administring the government of a mighty state in all its different offices or departments; and entrusted with the care of the whole and entire interests of a numerous commercial nation. But, in the discharge of this sovereign trust, we shall find the government of Bengal a mere _Vis inertiæ_, void of the two efficient principles of action, ability or power of acting, and will or inclination. For how can we expect to find the ability, of governing well, in the men employed by the Company to execute the government of those countries? to attain the knowledge of any one science or mystery, demands an effort of the mind; but it is impossible for the brightest natural genius to arrive at even a moderate degree of skill in the art of governing, which, as it is the most elevated, so is it the most difficult, abstruse, various and complicated of all human sciences, without long and intense application, study, and reflection; and, we may add, a series of practice; and all these gradations to skill, in governing, are wanting to our Bengal governors. Their scholastic education extends no farther than to qualify them for merchants clerks; and, immediately on being taken from school, they are dispatched to India; where the manner of life is consonant to the climate, voluptuous to a degree of dissoluteness, vain, idle, dissipated, and an enemy to study or reflection: the juvenile part of their life being spent in this manner, they arrive at the charge of government with minds perfectly uninformed, and so very averse to application, that they commit and implicitly confide the charge of their own private concerns to servants. If such men should possess the skill or address of governing well, it must certainly be acquired instantaneously and supernaturally; infused into them by miracle, like the gift of speech into the ass of Balaam.