In fact, the East India Company in Asia is a state in the disguise of a merchant.

Its whole service is a system of public offices in the disguise of a counting-house.

Accordingly, the whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely political.
This system of the Company's service, its order and discipline, is necessary to be explained to your Lordships, that you may see in what manner the abuses have affected it.

In the first place, all the persons who go abroad in the Company's civil service enter as clerks in the counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to it,--_writers_.

In that condition they are obliged to serve five years.
The second step is that of a _factor_, in which they are obliged to serve three years.