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T11E NATURE AND CAUSES OF

veral very important alterations were made in the constitutionof their government, botli at home and abroad. In India ,their principal settlements of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta ,which had before been altogether independent of one another,were subjected to a governor-general, assisted by a council offour assessors, parliament assuming to itself the first nomi-nation of this governor and council who were to reside atCalcutta ; that city having now become, what Madras wasbefore, the most important of the English settlements in India .The court of the mayor of Calcutta , originally instituted forthe trial of mercantile causes, which arose in the city andneighbourhood, had gradually extended its jurisdiction withthe extension of the empire. It was now reduced and confinedto the original purpose of its institution. Instead of it anewsupreme court of judicature was established, consisting of achief justice and three judges to be appointed by the crown.In J^urope the qualification necessary to entitle a proprietor tovote at their general courts was raised, from five hundredpounds, the original price of a share in the stock of the com-pany, to a thousand pounds. In order to vote upon this qua-lification too, it was declared necessary, that he should havepossessed it, if acquired by his own purchase, and not by in-heritance, for at least one year, instead of six months, theterm requisite before. The court of twenty-four directors hadbefore been chosen annually ; but it was now enacted thateach director should, for the future, be chosen for lour years;six of them, however, to go out of office by rotation everyyear, and not to be capable of being re-chosen at the electionof the six new directors for the ensuing year. In consequenceof these alterations, the courts, both of the proprietors and di-rectors, it was expected, would be likely to act with more dig-nity and steadiness than they had usually done before. Butit seems impossible, by any alterations, to render those courts,in any respect, fit to govern, or even to share in the govern-ment of a great empire; because the greater part of theirmembers must always have too little interest in the prosperityof that empire, to give any serious attention to what may pro-mote it. Frequently a man of great, sometimes even a manof small fortune, is willing to purchase a thousand pounds’share in India stock, merely for the influence which he ex-pects to acquire by a vote in the court of proprietors. It giveshim a share, though not in the plunder, yet in the appoint-ment of the plunderers of India : the court of directors,