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Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797

"The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12)"

Neither shall any European,
directly or indirectly, be permitted to rent lands in any part of
the country."
_Remark by the Board._
17th. "If the collector, or any persons who partake of his
authority, are permitted to be the farmers of the country, no other
persons will dare to be their competitors: of course they will
obtain the farms on their own terms. _It is not fit that the
servants of the Company should be dealers with their masters._ The
collectors are checks on the farmers. If they themselves turn
farmers, what checks can be found for _them_? What security will the
Company have for their property, or where are the ryots to look for
relief against oppressions?"
The reasons assigned for the preceding regulation seem to your Committee
to be perfectly just; but they can by no means be reconciled to those
which induced Mr. Barwell to engage in the salt farms of Selimabad and
Savagepoor. In the first place, his doing so is at length a direct and
avowed, though at first a covert, violation of the public regulation, to
which he was himself a party as a member of the government, as well as
an act of disobedience to the Company's positive orders on this subject.


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