It is impossible, in reporting this revolution to the House, to avoid remarking with what fidelity Mr. Hastings and his Council have adhered to the mode of transmitting their accounts which your Committee found it necessary to mark and censure in their First Report. Its pernicious tendency is there fully set forth. They were peculiarly called on for a most accurate state of their affairs, in order to explain the necessity of having recourse to such a scheme, as well as for a full and correct account of the scheme itself. But they send only the above short minute by one dispatch over land, whilst the copy of the plan itself, on which the Directors must form their judgment, is sent separately in another dispatch over land, which has never arrived. A third dispatch, which also contained the plan, was sent by a sea conveyance, and arrived late. The Directors have, for very obvious reasons, ordered, by a strict injunction, that they should send _duplicates of all_ their dispatches by _every ship_. The spirit of this rule, perhaps, ought to extend to every mode of conveyance. In this case, so far from sending a duplicate, they do not send even one perfect account. They announce a plan by one conveyance, and they send it by another conveyance, with other delays and other risks. At length, at nearly four months' distance, the plan has been received, and appears to be substantially that which had been announced, but developing in the particulars many new circumstances of the greatest importance. By this plan it appears that the subscription, even in idea or pretence, is not for the use of the Company, but that the subscribers are united into a sort of society for the remitting their _private fortunes_: the goods, indeed, are said to be _shipped on the Company's account_, and they are directed to be sold on the same account, and at the usual periods of sales; but, after the payment of duties, and such other allowances as they choose to make, in the eleventh article they provide "that _the remainder of the sales shall revert to the subscribers_, and be declared to be _their property_, and divided in proportion to _their_ respective shares." The compensation which they allow in this plan to their masters for their brokerage is, that, if, after deducting all the charges which they impose, "the amount of the sales _should be found_ to exceed two shillings and twopence for the current rupee of the invoice account, it shall be taken by the Company." For the management of this concern in Bengal they choose commissioners by their own authority. By the same authority they form them into a body, they put them under rules and regulations, and they empower them also to make regulations of their own. They remit, by the like authority, the duties to which all private trade is subject; and they charge the whole concern with seven per cent, to be paid from the net produce of the sales in England, as a recompense to the commissioners: