The Directors were not suffered either to nominate or to remove those
whom they were empowered to instruct; from masters they were reduced to
the situation of complainants,--a situation the imbecility of which no
laws or regulations could wholly alter; and when the Directors were
afterwards restored in some degree to their ancient power, on the
expiration of the lease given to their principal servants, it became
impossible for them to recover any degree of their ancient respect, even
if they had not in the mean time been so modelled as to be entirely free
from all ambition of that sort.
From that period the orders of the Court of Directors became to be so
habitually despised by their servants abroad, and at length to be so
little regarded even by themselves, that this contempt of orders forms
almost the whole subject-matter of the voluminous reports of two of your
committees. If any doubt, however, remains concerning the cause of this
fatal decline of the authority of the Court of Directors, no doubt
whatsoever can remain of the fact itself, nor of the total failure of
one of the great leading regulations of the act of 1773.
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