The Works of Edmund Burke

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III.?EFFECT OF THE REVENUE INVESTMENT ON THE COMPANY. HITHERTO, Your Committee has considered this system of Revenue Investment, substituted in the place of a commercial link between India and Europe, so far as it affects India only: they are now to consider it as it affects the Company. So long as that Corporation continued to receive a vast quantity of merchantable goods without any disbursement for the purchase, so long it possessed wherewithal to continue a dividend to pay debts, and to contribute to the State. But jt must have been always evident to considerate persons, that this vast extraction of wealth from a country, lessening in its resources in proportion to the increase of its burthens, was not calculated for a very long duration. For a while the Company's Servants kept up this Investment, not by improving commerce, manufactures, or agriculture, but by forcibly raising the Land--Rents on the principles and in the manner hereafter to be described. When these extortions disappointed, or threatened to disappoint, expectation, in order to purvey for the avarice, which raged in England, they sought for expedients in breaches of all the agreements, by which they were bound by any payment to the Country Powers, and in exciting disturbances among all the neighbouringbouring Princes. Stimulating their ambition, and fomenting their mutual animosities, they sold to them reciprocally their common servitude and ruin. The Governour-General, Mr. Hastings, and the Council, tell the Directors, that the supply for the Investment has arisen from casual and ex- traordinary resources, which they could not expect always to command. In an earlier Minute he expresses himself still more distinctly; he says, If the internal resources of a State fail it, or are not equal to it...