The monthly increase, therefore, being four thousand seven
hundred pounds, it constitutes a total increase of charges for the
Company, in the five years of the contract, of no less a sum than two
hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds. Now, as the former contract
was, without doubt, sufficiently advantageous, a judgment may be formed
of the extravagance of the present. The terms, indeed, pass the bounds
of all allowance for negligence and ignorance of office.
The case of Mr. Belli's contract for supplying provisions to the Fort is
of the same description; and what exceedingly increases the suspicion
against this profusion, in contracts made in direct violation of orders,
is, that they are always found to be given in favor of persons closely
connected with Mr. Hastings in his family, or even in his actual
service.
The principles upon which Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell justify this
disobedience, if admitted, reduce the Company's government, so far as it
regards the Supreme Council, to a mere patronage,--to a mere power of
nominating persons to or removing them from an authority which, is not
only despotic with regard to those who are subordinate to it, but in all
its acts entirely independent of the legal power which is nominally
superior.
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