CHAPTER XVII
RANK
" The rank is but the guinea's stamp."
Burns, Honest Poverty.
In the early settlements of the Company in India the question of rank seems to have been of Httle importance. The President or Agent of com-se stood first ; the other officers were under his orders. Next to the President came the members of his Council. Wilson, in his Early Annals, Vol. I, p. 62, gives the order of rank at the Hugh factory, then the Company's headquarters in Bengal, towards the end of the seventeenth century, as follows : The governing body consisted of four members : (i) the Agent, who was chief of all the Factories in the Bay ; (2) the Accountant ; (3) the Storekeeper ; (4) the Purser Marine. Fifth in rank was the Secretary. The Chaplain, when there was one, ranked third, next after the Accountant ; the Surgeon sixth, after the secretary. Then came the Steward, and after him the general body of mer- chants, factors, writers, and apprentices. The writers were then, as the name implies, only clerks ; the merchants and factors little more. But from this smaU body of commercial servants has developed the finest governing body in the world, the Indian Civil Service.
In Oct., 1678, Streynsham Master, then Agent at Fort St. George, passed the following orders regarding the relative rank of military and civil officers : — *
" Upon the Petition of the Officers of the Garrison, their places of Precedency were ranked with the Marchants and Factors as followeth ; Captain in the Degree of Senior Marchant, Lieutenant in the Degree of Marchant; Ensigne in the Degree of Factor; Serjeant in the Degree
- Indian Records Series, The Diaries of Streynsham Master, 1675-80 edited
by Sir R. C. Temple, two vols., 1911. The passage quoted is from Vol. I, Intro- duction, p. 73.
