150 THE END OF THE STRUGGLE was such a case. It stands on the forefront of our history in the East as an example of the danger of combining the executive and the judicial authority in the same hands. That danger the English have striven to guard against by the separation of judicial and exec- utive offices— a process commenced almost from the foundation of their territorial rule in India, yet reach- ing its final stages only in our own time. But if we view with charity the cruel blunder of the Amboyna Council as a whole, it is difficult to extend to either the governor or the prosecuting fiscal the benefit of the doubt. The fiscal, Isaac de Bruyne, ap- pears throughout the records in a sinister light. Intent on obtaining a conviction, he constantly urged on Van Speult, and forced incriminating answers upon the wit- nesses till the council itself had to interpose. His rec- ord of the trial was so irregular and incomplete as to render impossible a fair judicial review of the proceed- ings. On the face of the record as it stands, the accused were improperly condemned. Bruyne 's conduct called forth the reprobation of his superiors at Amboyna, and in the English depositions he appears as " the greatest adversary against the English.' ' "Whatever may have been Van Speult 's own preconception as to their guilt during the first excited days of the prosecution, he can scarcely, after the seizure of the English factory and the perusal of Towerson's correspondence with the English president at Batavia, have believed in the plot. But by that time he may have felt that he had gone too far to retrace his steps. Or he may have simply
