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me to carry into effect, I made it a part of my public duty.
"During the ten years I was Chief Justice and President of Her Majesty's Council on that island, I endeavoured to collect all the documents in India, Java, Manilla, and China which could throw any light upon the several systems of administering justice which had been, from time to time, established in any part of Asia by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, French, and Danish Governments, in order that the British Government might, whenever it pleased, be enabled to form a correct judgment, from well-authenticated facts, of the merits and demerits of those systems, and of the moral and political effects which each had produced, and of the character and conduct of the various classes of native inhabitants who had lived within their respective jurisdictions.
Having, from my situation in Ceylon, had great facilities in obtaining from the Archives of the Portuguese Government, a very accurate & account