was encouraged by nothing but the hopes of concealment, it may be presumed that they felt some restraint upon their actions, and that they stood in some awe of the power placed over them; whereas it is to be apprehended that the late conduct of the Court of Directors tells them, in effect, that they have nothing to fear from the certainty of a discovery. On the same principle on which your Committee have generally limited their researches to the persons placed by Parliament or raised or put in nomination by the Court of Directors to the highest station in Bengal, it was also their original wish to limit those inquiries to the period at which Parliament interposed its authority between the Company and their servants, and gave a new constitution to the Presidency of Fort William. If the Company's servants had taken a new date from that period, and if from thenceforward their conduct had corresponded with the views of the legislature, it is probable that a review of the transactions of remoter periods would not have been deemed necessary, and that the remembrance of them would have been gradually effaced and finally buried in oblivion. But the reports which your Committee have already made have shown the House that from the year 1772, when those proceedings commenced in Parliament on which the act of the following year was founded, abuses of every kind have prevailed and multiplied in Bengal to a degree unknown in former times, and are perfectly sufficient to account for the present distress of the Company's affairs both at home and abroad. The affair which your Committee now lays before the House occupies too large a space in the Company's records, and is of too much importance in every point of view, to be passed over. Your Committee find that in March, 1775, a petition was presented to the Governor-General and Council by a person called Coja Kaworke, an Armenian merchant, resident at Dacca, (of which division Mr. Richard Barwell had lately been Chief,) setting forth in substance, that in November, 1772, the petitioner had farmed a certain salt district, called Savagepoor, and had entered into a contract with the Committee of Circuit for providing and delivering to the India Company the salt produced in that district; that in 1773 he farmed another, called Selimabad, on similar conditions. He alleges, that in February, 1774, when Mr. Barwell arrived at Dacca, he charged the petitioner with 1,25,500 rupees, (equal to 13,000_l._,) as a contribution, and, in order to levy it, did the same year deduct 20,799 rupees from the amount of the _advance money_ which was ordered to be paid to the petitioner, on account of the India Company, for the provision of salt in the two farms, and, after doing so, compelled the petitioner to execute and give him four different bonds for 77,627 rupees, in the name of one Porran Paul, for the remainder of such contribution, or unjust profit.