The first object of the policy of this act was to improve the constitution of the Court of Proprietors. In this case, as in almost all the rest, the remedy was not applied directly to the disease. The complaint was, that factions in the Court of Proprietors had shown, in several instances, a disposition to support the servants of the Company against the just coercion and legal prosecution of the Directors. Instead of applying a corrective to the distemper, a change was proposed in the constitution. By this reform, it was presumed that an interest would arise in the General Court more independent in itself, and more connected with the commercial prosperity of the Company. Under the new constitution, no proprietor, not possessed of a thousand pounds capital stock, was permitted to vote in the General Court: before the act, five hundred pounds was a sufficient qualification for one vote; and no value gave more. But as the lower classes were disabled, the power was increased in the higher: proprietors of three thousand pounds were allowed two votes; those of six thousand were entitled to three; ten thousand pounds was made the qualification for four. The votes were thus regulated in the scale and gradation of property. On this scale, and on some provisions to prevent occasional qualifications and splitting of votes, the whole reformation rested. [Sidenote: The ballot.] [Sidenote: Indian interest.] Several essential points, however, seem to have been omitted or misunderstood. No regulation was made to abolish the pernicious custom of voting by _ballot_, by means of which acts of the highest concern to the Company and to the state might be done by individuals with perfect impunity; and even the body itself might be subjected to a forfeiture of all its privileges for defaults of persons who, so far from being under control, could not be so much as known in any mode of legal cognizance. Nothing was done or attempted to prevent the operation of the interest of delinquent servants of the Company in the General Court, by which they might even come to be their own judges, and, in effect, under another description, to become the masters in that body which ought to govern them. Nor was anything provided to secure the independency of the proprietary body from the various exterior interests by which it might be disturbed, and diverted from the conservation of that pecuniary concern which the act laid down as the sole security for preventing a collusion between the General Court and the powerful delinquent servants in India. The whole of the regulations concerning the Court of Proprietors relied upon two principles, which have often proved fallacious: namely, that small numbers were a security against faction and disorder; and that integrity of conduct would follow the greater property. In no case could these principles be less depended upon than in the affairs of the East India Company. However, by wholly cutting off