East India Company’s Petition to Parliament, January 1858.—(See p. [563].)
To the Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament assembled; The humble Petition of the East India Company, Sheweth:
That your petitioners, at their own expense, and by the agency of their own civil and military servants, originally acquired for this country its magnificent empire in the East.
That the foundations of this empire were laid by your petitioners, at that time neither aided nor controlled by parliament, at the same period at which a succession of administrations under the control of parliament were losing to the Crown of Great Britain another great empire on the opposite side of the Atlantic.
That during the period of about a century, which has since elapsed, the Indian possessions of this country have been governed and defended from the resources of those possessions, without the smallest cost to the British exchequer, which, to the best of your petitioners’ knowledge and belief, cannot be said of any other of the numerous foreign dependencies of the Crown.
That it being manifestly improper that the administration of any British possession should be independent of the general government of the empire, parliament provided in 1783 that a department of the imperial government should have full cognizance of, and power of control over, the acts of your petitioners in the administration of India; since which time the home branch of the Indian government has been conducted by the joint counsels and on the joint responsibility of your petitioners and of a minister of the Crown.
That this arrangement has at subsequent periods undergone reconsideration from the legislature, and various comprehensive and careful parliamentary inquiries have been made into its practical operation; the result of which has been, on each occasion, a renewed grant to your petitioners of the powers exercised by them in the administration of India.
That the last of these occasions was so recent as 1853, in which year the arrangements which had existed for nearly three-quarters of a century were, with certain modifications, re-enacted, and still subsist.
That, notwithstanding, your petitioners have received an intimation from her Majesty’s ministers of their intention to propose to parliament a bill for the purpose of placing the government of her Majesty’s East Indian dominions under the direct authority of the Crown: a change necessarily involving the abolition of the East India Company as an instrument of government.