The reasons assigned for the preceding regulation seem to your Committee to be perfectly just; but they can by no means be reconciled to those which induced Mr. Barwell to engage in the salt farms of Selimabad and Savagepoor. In the first place, his doing so is at length a direct and avowed, though at first a covert, violation of the public regulation, to which he was himself a party as a member of the government, as well as an act of disobedience to the Company's positive orders on this subject. In their General Letter of the 17th May, 1766, the Court of Directors say, "We positively order, that no covenanted servant, or Englishman residing under our protection, shall be suffered to hold any land for his own account, directly or indirectly, in his own name or that of others, or to be concerned in any farms or revenues whatsoever." Secondly, if, instead of letting the Company's lands or farms to indifferent persons, their agent or trustee be at liberty to hold them himself, he will always (on principles stated and adhered to in the defence) have a sufficient reason for farming them on his own account, since he can at all times make them as profitable as he pleases; or if he leases them to a third person, yet reserves an intermediate profit for himself, that profit may be as great as he thinks fit, and must be necessarily made at the Company's expense. If at the same time he be collector of the revenues, it will be his interest to recommend remissions in favor of the nominal farmer, and he will have it in his power to sink the amount of his collections. These principles, and the correspondent practices, leave the India Company without any security that all the leases of the lands of Bengal may not have been disposed of, under that administration which made the five years' settlement in 1772, in the same manner and for the same purpose. To enable the House to judge how far this apprehension may be founded, it will be proper to state, that Mr. Nicholas Grueber, who preceded Mr. Barwell in the Chiefship of Dacca, in a letter dated 29th of April, 1775, declares that he paid to the Committee of Circuit twelve thousand rupees as their profit on a single salt farm,--which sum, he says, "I paid the Committee at their request, before their departure from Dacca, and reimbursed myself out of _the advances_ directed to be issued for the provision of the salt." Thus one illicit and mischievous transaction always leads to another; and the irregular farming of revenue brings on the misapplication of the commercial advances.