in the force of a faction among Directors or proprietors to bear them out, and possibly to vote them the fruit of their crimes as a reward of their discovery, they find that their bold avowal of their offences is not only to produce indemnity, but to be rated for merit. If once a presumption is admitted, that, wherever something is divulged, nothing is hid, the discovering of one offence may become the certain means of concealing a multitude of others. The contrivance is easy and trivial, and lies open to the meanest proficient in this kind of art; it will not only become an effectual cover to such practices, but will tend infinitely to increase them. In that case, sums of money will be taken for the purpose of discovery and making merit with the Company, and other sums will be taken for the private advantage of the receiver. It must certainly be impossible for the natives to know what presents are for one purpose, or what for the other. It is not for a Gentoo or a Mahometan landholder at the foot of the remotest mountains in India, who has no access to our records and knows nothing of our language, to distinguish what lacs of rupees, which he has given _eo nomine_ as a present to a Company's servant, are to be authorized by his masters in Leadenhall Street as proper and legal, or carried to their public account at their pleasure, and what are laid up for his own emolument. The legislature, in declaring all presents to be the property of the Company, could not consider corruption, extortion, and fraud as any part of their resources. The property in such presents was declared to be theirs, not as a fund for their benefit, but in order to found a legal title to a civil suit. It was declared theirs, to facilitate the recovery out of corrupt and oppressive hands of money illegally taken; but this legal fiction of property could not nor ought by the legislature to be considered in any other light than as a trust held by them for those who suffered the injury. Upon any other construction, the Company would have a right, first, to extract money from the subjects or dependants of this kingdom committed to their care, by means of particular conventions, or by taxes, by rents, and by monopolies; and when they had exhausted every contrivance of public imposition, then they were to be at liberty to let loose upon the people all their servants, from the highest rank to the lowest, to prey upon them at pleasure, and to draw, by personal and official authority, by influence, venality, and terror, whatever was left to them,--and that all this was justified, provided the product was paid into the Company's exchequer.