Excerpt from The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 4 of 8: A New Edition The directors having drawn up their order to the presidency on these principles, communicated the draught of the general letter in which those orders were contained to the board of his majesty's ministers, and other servants lately constituted by Mr. Pitt's East India Act. These ministers, who had just carried through parlia ment the bill ordering a specific inquiry, immediately drew up another letter, on a principle directly opposite to that which was prescribed by the act of parliament, and followed by the directors. In these second orders, all idea of an inquiry into the justice and origin of the pretended debts, particularly of the last, the greatest, and the most obnoxious to suspicion, is abandoned. They are all admitted and established without any investigation whatsoever; except some private conference with the agents of the claimants is to pass for an investigation; and a fund for their discharge is assigned and set apart out of the revenues of the Carnatic. - To this arrangement in favour of their servants, servants suspected of corruption, and convicted of disobedience, the directors of the East India Company were ordered to set their hands, asserting it to arise from their own conviction and opinion, in at contradiction to their recorded sentiments, their strong remonstrance, and their declared sense of their duty, as well under their general trust and their oath as directors, as under the express injunctions of an act of parliament. The principles upon which this summary proceeding was adopted by the ministerial board are stated by themselves in a number in the appendix to this speech. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."