But however natural it may be, at the present moment, to consider questions of this kind, it was perhaps at that time beyond the common course of human thought to entertain doubts on the subject. From an honourable regard for ancient institutions, the mercantile system of the Company was still considered with reverence and respect; it had been at all times the boast and pride of the nation; the services which the Company had rendered to the state in its earlier days, and the immense benefits which the government had been enabled, by its means, to spread among the community at large, had rendered the East India Company and all its privileges, objects of peculiar care and tenderness. The rights of sovereignty which the Company afterwards acquired, were obtained by degrees and almost imperceptibly. Every acquisition of the kind had been considered, at the time, merely as the means of increasing its mercantile profits, and all its territorial rights were looked upon as subservient to its mercantile system.
In consequence of these ideas, after the whole of the northern and eastern coast of Java had been added to the Company's territorial dominions, by a cession in the year 1749, no step seems to have been taken for improving these acquisitions, by any direct use of the supremacy obtained. Some contracts were instituted with the native chiefs, for delivering gratis, or at the lowest possible price, such articles as would serve the Company's investments at home; but taxation, the levy of produce, and the management of police and justice in the inferior courts, were left to the care and conscience of the natives themselves.
Arguments in favour of this system may perhaps be drawn from the respect due to the native usages and institutions, and from a supposed want of power, on the part of the Company, to assume any direct controul over the native population. But whatever influence these ideas may have had on the conduct of the Company, it may be affirmed that an European government, aiming only to see right and justice administered to every class of the population, might and ought to have maintained all the native usages and institutions, not inconsistent with those principles; and that the power, for want of which it withheld its interference, would have been supplied and confirmed by the act of exercising the power which it possessed, and by the resources it might have been the means of drawing from the country.