member of your Honourable Board; yet as they may not so for- 
cibly strike every person, we think it would be wanting in justice, 
both to ourselves and to the other servants of the Company, who 
in their turn must fall into our situation, if we let pass by this 
opportunity of pointing out very clearly the nature and cause of 
the peculiar hardship of it; that the Honourable the Court of 
Directors may feel the justice and humanity of approving and 
continuing the means, which we trust you will be pleased to apply 
for the remedy of them. 
To explain this matter clearly, it will be necessary to recur to 
what we conceive to have been, and still to be, the spirit and 
meaning of the Honourable Company in their appointments in the 
civil line of their service. 
From the ideas we ourselves set out to this country with, and 
from those we find to be generally entertained both here and in 
Europe, we conceive that the term of the first station in which the 
civil servants of the Company are introduced into their service, is 
meant as a term of probation; a kind of apprenticeship, to qualify 
them for the future conduct and charge of affairs. The orders of 
the Company justify this description; as by those orders, a writer 
cannot be entrusted with any office where there is a responsibility; 
nor is he admitted of council at any of the subordinates; or even 
joined with a resident. 
Pursuant to this idea, wc conceive the Company regulated 
their appointment to them of thirty rupees per month; which to 
every member of your Honourable Board must appear rather 
meant as a token of their servitude, than as an adequate means of 
subsistence: indeed we have better authority to ground our sup- 
