Page:History of India Vol 8.djvu/275

GRAVE FAULTS OF THE NEW SYSTEM 233 argued, on the part of the Company, that they held the country by grants from the Delhi emperor and treaties with native princes, whereby the jurisdiction of the judges appointed by the Bang of England was greatly restricted and, as it were, cut off at the base. Or it might be maintained that all the possessions of the Company fell naturally to the Crown, whence it followed that the writs of the Supreme Court ran wher- ever the Company exercised public authority, that the judges at Calcutta could control the native courts, and that the procedure of Westminster Hall was applicable to every Bengali landholder. For since jurisdiction was given by the statute over all servants of the Company, it was held by the Court that the whole body of land- owners in Bengal, who collected the land revenue and paid over the state's share to the Company, might fall within their purview. At any rate, if any one demurred to the jurisdiction, he was held bound to appear to plead his objection before the judges, although the cost and trouble of answering a summons to Calcutta might be ruinous to a native at a distance in the interior districts and totally ignorant of these technicalities. With a prolix and costly procedure, with strange unintelligible powers resembling the attributes of some mysterious divinity, the Supreme Court was soon re- garded by the natives as an engine of outlandish oppres- sion rather than as a bulwark against executive tyranny. " So far," says Burke 's Report, " as your Committee have been able to discover, the Court has been generally terrible to the natives, and has distracted the govern-