The Proper Limits of the Government's Interference with the Affairs of the East-India Company Attempted to be Assigned with some few Reflections Extorted by, and on, the — A Reader’s Guide

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GOVERNMENT'S Interference with the Affairs of the EAST-INDIA COMPANY,

ATTEMPTED TO BE ASSIGNED.

Extorted by, and on, the distracted State of the Times.

By JOHN, EARL of STAIR.

----And beshrew my soul, But I do love the favour and the form Of this most fair occasion; by the which We will untread the steps of damned flight, And, like a 'bated and retiring flood, Leaving our rankness and irregular course, Stoop low within these bounds we have o'erlook'd, And calmly run on in obedience.

PRINTED FOR J. STOCKDALE, OPPOSITE BURLINGTON-HOUSE, PICCADILLY. MDCC LXXXIV.

Entered at Stationers' Hall.

GOVERNMENT'S Interference with the Affairs of the EAST-INDIA COMPANY, &c.

Each day's experience proves the fallibility of conjecture, even when established on apparently the surest foundations.

Having stated, indeed materially and substantially proved, that the annual peace expenditure of the state, if decently, not profusely, nor even amply provided for, could not be performed for less than sixteen millions five hundred thousand pounds; and having asserted, with truth, that the annual receipts have scarcely, on the most productive years of the public revenue, exceeded twelve millions; and the necessary corollary, arising out of these propositions, being an annual surplus or sinking fund to the amount (if at all proportional) of at least fifteen hundred thousand pounds, as a provision for great civil emergencies or future wars, without which no system of finance can be either respectable or assuredly permanent; and it following of necessary consequence from these premises, that the proper peace revenue, from something more than twelve millions, which is its present amount, ought to be raised to eighteen millions yearly:--these matters, I say, being as I have represented them, I firmly believed the public affairs of this country were tolerably embarrassed, and weakly imagined Ministers might find full employment in extricating them, without courting, and eagerly, through right and through wrong, aspiring and grasping at the management of affairs fully in as great a state of confusion as our own. But I find I greatly under-rated the cravings of the appetite of our late rulers, who seem to have had stomach for all difficulties, however remote from the natural and needful course of their public functions, and however averse the parties interested were to trust their concerns to their direction. In consequence of this canine hunger and thirst after regulation, a bill was brought in and passed by a very great majority of the House of Commons, to virtually consolidate the embarrassed concerns of the East-India Company, in direct opposition to the desires of the proprietors, with the no less embarrassed affairs of this unhappy country. This bill has been thrown out by a wise and virtuous majority in the House of Peers; but as the majority there was but small, and threats are thrown out (in order to make it still smaller) against Peers, for exercising their indispensable distinctive prerogative duty of giving honest counsel to their King; and as the same majority, leagued to promote their own advancement and the ruin of the state, still exists and exults in the House of Commons; I doubt not but the same strange destructive measure will be resumed. It therefore becomes the business of every well-wisher to the prosperity of Britain, to oppose and to refute the specious nothings offered to blind and to conceal from the public the designs of a dark and fatal tendency attached to it; and I think it my duty, moreover, and a justice due to the creditors of the public in particular, at least, to such as shall adhere to me, to protest and enter my dissent in their name against any increase of the public debt, by the addition and incorporation of the debts of the East-India Company with those of the public, in any manner, whether openly, or by implication and management.

I now proceed to consider the reasons offered in vindication of the bill by which so daring a violation of every thing the laws hold most sacred was attempted.