The East India Company is not, like the Bank of England,
a mere moneyed society for the sole purpose of the preservation or
improvement of their capital; and therefore every attempt to regulate it
upon the same principles must inevitably fail. When it is considered
that a certain share in the stock gives a share in the government of so
vast an empire, with such a boundless patronage, civil, military,
marine, commercial, and financial, in every department of which such
fortunes have been made as could be made nowhere else, it is impossible
not to perceive that capitals far superior to any qualifications
appointed to proprietors, or even to Directors, would readily be laid
out for a participation in that power. The India proprietor, therefore,
will always be, in the first instance, a politician; and the bolder his
enterprise, and the more corrupt his views, the less will be his
consideration of the price to be paid for compassing them. The new
regulations did not reduce the number so low as not to leave the
assembly still liable to all the disorder which might be supposed to
arise from multitude.
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