In his letter of the 23rd March, 1775, he says, that he engaged for Savagepoor in the persuasion of its being a very profitable farm. In this place your Committee think it proper to state the 17th article of the regulations of the Committee of Circuit, formed in May, 1772, by the President and Council, of which Mr. Barwell was a member, together with their own observations thereupon.
17th. "That no peshcar, banian, or other servant, of whatever denomination, of the collector, or relation or dependant of any such servant, be allowed to farm lands, nor directly or indirectly to hold a concern in any farm, nor to be security for any farmer; that the collector be strictly enjoined to prevent such practices; and that, if it shall be discovered that any one, under a false name, or any kind of collusion, hath found means to evade this order, he shall be subject to an heavy fine, proportionate to the amount of the farm, and the farm shall be re-let, or made khas: and if it shall appear that the collector shall have countenanced, approved, or connived at a breach of this regulation, he shall stand ipso facto dismissed from his collectorship. 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. In their General Letter of the 17th May, 1766, the Court of Directors say, "We positively order, that no covenanted servant, or Englishman residing under our protection, shall be suffered to hold any land for his own account, directly or indirectly, in his own name or that of others, or to be concerned in any farms or revenues whatsoever."
Secondly, if, instead of letting the Company's lands or farms to indifferent persons, their agent or trustee be at liberty to hold them himself, he will always (on principles stated and adhered to in the defence) have a sufficient reason for farming them on his own account, since he can at all times make them as profitable as he pleases; or if he leases them to a third person, yet reserves an intermediate profit for himself, that profit may be as great as he thinks fit, and must be necessarily made at the Company's expense. If at the same time he be collector of the revenues, it will be his interest to recommend remissions in favor of the nominal farmer, and he will have it in his power to sink the amount of his collections.
These principles, and the correspondent practices, leave the India Company without any security that all the leases of the lands of Bengal may not have been disposed of, under that administration which made the five years' settlement in 1772, in the same manner and for the same purpose.
To enable the House to judge how far this apprehension may be founded, it will be proper to state, that Mr. Nicholas Grueber, who preceded Mr. Barwell in the Chiefship of Dacca, in a letter dated 29th of April, 1775, declares that he paid to the Committee of Circuit twelve thousand rupees as their profit on a single salt farm,—which sum, he says, "I paid the Committee at their request, before their departure from Dacca, and reimbursed myself out of the advances directed to be issued for the provision of the salt." Thus one illicit and mischievous transaction always leads to another; and the irregular farming of revenue brings on the misapplication of the commercial advances.
Mr. Barwell professes himself to be sensible "that a wish to add to his fortune may possibly have warped his judgment, and that he rather chooses to admit an error than deny a fact." But your Committee are of opinion that the extraordinary caution and the intricate contrivances with which his share in this transaction is wrapped up form a sufficient proof that he was not altogether misled in his judgment; and though there might be some merit in acknowledging an error before it was discovered, there could be very little in a confession produced by previous detection.