Читать книгу The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12) - Edmund Burke - Страница 5

The internal trade of Bengal has next attracted the inquiries of your Committee.

The great and valuable articles of the Company's investment, drawn from the articles of internal trade, are raw silk, and various descriptions of piece-goods made of silk and cotton. These articles are not under any formal monopoly; nor does the Company at present exercise a declared right of preëmption with regard to them. But it does not appear that the trade in these particulars is or can be perfectly free,—not so much on account of any direct measures taken to prevent it as from the circumstances of the country, and the manner of carrying on business there: for the present trade, even in these articles, is built from the ruins of old monopolies and preëmptions, and necessarily partakes of the nature of its materials.

In order to show in what manner manufactures and trade so constituted contribute to the prosperity of the natives, your Committee conceives it proper to take, in this place, a short general view of the progress of the English policy with relation to the commerce of Bengal, and the several stages and gradations by which it has been brought into its actual state. The modes of abuse, and the means by which commerce has suffered, will be considered in greater detail under the distinct heads of those objects which have chiefly suffered by them.

During the time of the Mogul government, the princes of that race, who omitted nothing for the encouragement of commerce in their dominions, bestowed very large privileges and immunities on the English East India Company, exempting them from several duties to which their natural-born subjects were liable. The Company's dustuck, or passport, secured to them this exemption at all the custom-houses and toll-bars of the country. The Company, not being able or not choosing to make use of their privilege to the full extent to which it might be carried, indulged their servants with a qualified use of their passport, under which, and in the name of the Company, they carried on a private trade, either by themselves or in society with natives, and thus found a compensation for the scanty allowances made to them by their masters in England. As the country government was at that time in the fulness of its strength, and that this immunity existed by a double connivance, it was naturally kept within tolerable limits.

But by the revolution in 1757 the Company's servants obtained a mighty ascendant over the native princes of Bengal, who owed their elevation to the British arms. The Company, which was new to that kind of power, and not yet thoroughly apprised of its real character and situation, considered itself still as a trader in the territories of a foreign potentate, in the prosperity of whose country it had neither interest nor duty. The servants, with the same ideas, followed their fortune in the channels in which it had hitherto ran, only enlarging them with the enlargement of their power. For their first ideas of profit were not official; nor were their oppressions those of ordinary despotism. The first instruments of their power were formed out of evasions of their ancient subjection. The passport of the Company in the hands of its servants was no longer under any restraint; and in a very short time their immunity began to cover all the merchandise of the country. Cossim Ali Khân, the second of the Nabobs whom they had set up, was but ill disposed to the instruments of his greatness. He bore the yoke of this imperious commerce with the utmost impatience: he saw his subjects excluded as aliens from their own trade, and the revenues of the prince overwhelmed in the ruin of the commerce of his dominions. Finding his reiterated remonstrances on the extent and abuse of the passport ineffectual, he had recourse to an unexpected expedient, which was, to declare his resolution at once to annul all the duties on trade, setting it equally free to subjects and to foreigners.

Never was a method of defeating the oppressions of monopoly more forcible, more simple, or more equitable: no sort of plausible objection could be made; and it was in vain to think of evading it. It was therefore met with the confidence of avowed and determined injustice. The Presidency of Calcutta openly denied to the prince the power of protecting the trade of his subjects by the remission of his own duties. It was evident that his authority drew to its period: many reasons and motives concurred, and his fall was hastened by the odium of the oppressions which he exercised voluntarily, as well as of those to which he was obliged to submit.

When this example was made, Jaffier Ali Khân, who had been deposed to make room for the last actor, was brought from penury and exile to a station the terms of which he could not misunderstand. During his life, and in the time of his children who succeeded to him, parts of the territorial revenue were assigned to the Company; and the whole, under the name of residency at the Nabob's court, was brought, directly or indirectly, under the control of British subjects. The Company's servants, armed with authorities delegated from the nominal government, or attended with what was a stronger guard, the fame of their own power, appeared as magistrates in the markets in which they dealt as traders. It was impossible for the natives in general to distinguish, in the proceedings of the same persons, what was transacted on the Company's account from what was done on their own; and it will ever be so difficult to draw this line of distinction, that as long as the Company does, directly or indirectly, aim at any advantage to itself in the purchase of any commodity whatever, so long will it be impracticable to prevent the servants availing themselves of the same privilege.

The servants, therefore, for themselves or for their employers, monopolized every article of trade, foreign and domestic: not only the raw merchantable commodities, but the manufactures; and not only these, but the necessaries of life, or what in these countries habit has confounded with them,—not only silk, cotton, piece-goods, opium, saltpetre, but not unfrequently salt, tobacco, betel-nut, and the grain of most ordinary consumption. In the name of the country government they laid on or took off, and at their pleasure heightened or lowered, all duties upon goods: the whole trade of the country was either destroyed or in shackles. The acquisition of the Duanné, in 1765, bringing the English into the immediate government of the country in its most essential branches, extended and confirmed all the former means of monopoly.

In the progress of these ruinous measures through all their details, innumerable grievances were suffered by the native inhabitants, which were represented in the strongest, that is, their true colors, in England. Whilst the far greater part of the British in India were in eager pursuit of the forced and exorbitant gains of a trade carried on by power, contests naturally arose among the competitors: those who were overpowered by their rivals became loud in their complaints to the Court of Directors, and were very capable, from experience, of pointing out every mode of abuse.

The Court of Directors, on their part, began, though very slowly, to perceive that the country which was ravaged by this sort of commerce was their own. These complaints obliged the Directors to a strict examination into the real sources of the mismanagement of their concerns in India, and to lay the foundations of a system of restraint on the exorbitancies of their servants. Accordingly, so early as the year 1765, they confine them to a trade only in articles of export and import, and strictly prohibit them from all dealing in objects of internal consumption. About the same time the Presidency of Calcutta found it necessary to put a restraint upon themselves, or at least to make show of a disposition (with which the Directors appear much satisfied) to keep their own enormous power within bounds.

But whatever might have been the intentions either of the Directors or the Presidency, both found themselves unequal to the execution of a plan which went to defeat the projects of almost all the English in India,—possibly comprehending some who were makers of the regulations. For, as the complaint of the country or as their own interest predominated with the Presidency, they were always shifting from one course to the other; so that it became as impossible for the natives to know upon what principle to ground any commercial speculation, from the uncertainty of the law under which they acted, as it was when they were oppressed by power without any color of law at all: for the Directors, in a few months after they had given these tokens of approbation to the above regulations in favor of the country trade, tell the Presidency, "It is with concern we see in every page of your Consultations restrictions, limitations, prohibitions, affecting various articles of trade." On their side, the Presidency freely confess that these monopolies of inland trade "were the foundation of all the bloodsheds, massacres, and confusions which have happened of late in Bengal."

Pressed in this urgent manner, the Directors came more specifically to the grievance, and at once annul all the passports with which their servants traded without duties, holding out means of compensation, of which it does not appear that any advantage was taken. In order that the duties which existed should no longer continue to burden the trade either of the servants or natives, they ordered that a number of oppressive toll-bars should be taken away, and the whole number reduced to nine of the most considerable.

When Lord Clive was sent to Bengal to effect a reformation of the many abuses which prevailed there, he considered monopoly to be so inveterate and deeply rooted, and the just rewards of the Company's servants to be so complicated with that injustice to the country, that the latter could not easily be removed without taking away the former. He adopted, therefore, a plan for dealing in certain articles, which, as he conceived, rather ought to be called "a regulated and restricted trade" than a formal monopoly. By this plan he intended that the profits should be distributed in an orderly and proportioned manner for the reward of services, and not seized by each individual according to the measure of his boldness, dexterity, or influence.

But this scheme of monopoly did not subsist long, at least in that mode and for those purposes. Three of the grand monopolies, those of opium, salt, and saltpetre, were successively by the Company taken into their own hands. The produce of the sale of the two former articles was applied to the purchase of goods for their investment; the latter was exported in kind for their sales in Europe. The senior servants had a certain share of emolument allotted to them from a commission on the revenues. The junior servants were rigorously confined to salaries, on which they were unable to subsist according to their rank. They were strictly ordered to abstain from all dealing in objects of internal commerce. Those of export and import were left open to young men without mercantile experience, and wholly unprovided with mercantile capitals, but abundantly furnished with large trusts of the public money, and with all the powers of an absolute government. In this situation, a religious abstinence from all illicit game was prescribed to men at nine thousand miles' distance from the seat of the supreme authority.

Your Committee is far from meaning to justify, or even to excuse, the oppressions and cruelties used by many in supplying the deficiencies of their regular allowances by all manner of extortion; but many smaller irregularities may admit some alleviation from thence. Nor does your Committee mean to express any desire of reverting to the mode (contrived in India, but condemned by the Directors) of rewarding the servants of an higher class by a regulated monopoly. Their object is to point out the deficiencies in the system, by which restrictions were laid that could have little or no effect whilst want and power were suffered to be united.

But the proceedings of the Directors at that time, though not altogether judicious, were in many respects honorable to them, and favorable, in the intention at least, to the country they governed. For, finding their trading capital employed against themselves and against the natives, and struggling in vain against abuses which were inseparably connected with the system of their own preference in trade, in the year 1773 they came to the manly resolution of setting an example to their servants, and gave up all use of power and influence in the two grand articles of their investment, silk and piece-goods. They directed that the articles should be bought at an equal and public market from the native merchants; and this order they directed to be published in all the principal marts of Bengal.

Your Committee are clearly of opinion that no better method of purchase could be adopted. But it soon appeared that in deep-rooted and inveterate abuses the wisest principles of reform may be made to operate so destructively as wholly to discredit the design, and to dishearten all persons from the prosecution of it. The Presidency, who seemed to yield with the utmost reluctance to the execution of these orders, soon made the Directors feel their evil influence upon their own investment; for they found the silk and cotton cloths rose twenty-five per cent above their former price, and a further rise of forty per cent was announced to them.