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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)

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Title: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)

Author: Edmund Burke


        
Release date: April 17, 2006 [eBook #18192]

Language: English

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Produced by Paul Murray, Susan Skinner and the Online
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file was produced from images generously made available
by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
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THE WORKS

OF

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

EDMUND BURKE


IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME THE TENTH


[Illustration: Burke Coat of Arms.]


LONDON
JOHN C. NIMMO
14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W.C.
MDCCCLXXXVII




CONTENTS OF VOL. X.


SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,
  LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.

    SPEECH IN OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.
      THIRD DAY: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1788                             3
      FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19                                99

    SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
      FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789                             149
      SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25                                 240
      THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5                                      306
      FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7                                    396




SPEECHES

IN

THE IMPEACHMENT

OF

WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE

LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.



SPEECH IN OPENING.

(CONTINUED.)

FEBRUARY, 1788.




SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

THIRD DAY: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1788.


My Lords,--The gentlemen who are appointed by the Commons to manage this
prosecution, have directed me to inform your Lordships, that they have
very carefully and attentively weighed the magnitude of the subject
which they bring before you with the time which the nature and
circumstances of affairs allow for their conducting it.

My Lords, on that comparison, they are very apprehensive, that, if I
should go very largely into a preliminary explanation of the several
matters in charge, it might be to the prejudice of an early trial of the
substantial merits of each article. We have weighed and considered this
maturely. We have compared exactly the time with the matter, and we have
found that we are obliged to do as all men must do who would manage
their affairs practicably, to make our opinion of what might be most
advantageous to the business conform to the time that is left to perform
it in. We must, as all men must, submit affairs to time, and not think
of making time conform to our wishes; and therefore, my Lords, I very
willingly fall in with the inclinations of the gentlemen with whom I
have the honor to act, to come as soon as possible to close fighting,
and to grapple immediately and directly with the corruptions of
India,--to bring before your Lordships the direct articles, to apply the
evidence to the articles, and to bring the matter forward for your
Lordships' decision in that manner which the confidence we have in the
justice of our cause demands from the Commons of Great Britain.

My Lords, these are the opinions of those with whom I have the honor to
act, and in their opinions I readily acquiesce. For I am far from
wishing to waste any of your Lordships' time upon any matter merely
through any opinion I have of the nature of the business, when at the
same time I find that in the opinion of others it might militate against
the production of its full, proper, and (if I may so say) its immediate
effect.

It was my design to class the crimes of the late Governor of Bengal,--to
show their mutual bearings,--how they were mutually aided and grew and
were formed out of each other. I proposed first of all to show your
Lordships that they have their root in that which is the origin of all
evil, avarice and rapacity,--to show how that led to prodigality of the
public money,--and how prodigality of the public money, by wasting the
treasures of the East India Company, furnished an excuse to the
Governor-General to break its faith, to violate all its most solemn
engagements, and to fall with a hand of stern, ferocious, and
unrelenting rapacity upon all the allies and dependencies of the
Company. But I shall be obliged in some measure to abridge this plan;
and as your Lordships already possess, from what I had the honor to
state on Saturday, a general view of this matter, you will be in a
condition to pursue it when the several articles are presented.

My Lords, I have to state to-day the root of all these
misdemeanors,--namely, the pecuniary corruption and avarice which gave
rise and primary motion to all the rest of the delinquencies charged to
be committed by the Governor-General.

My Lords, pecuniary corruption forms not only, as your Lordships will
observe in the charges before you, an article of charge by itself, but
likewise so intermixes with the whole, that it is necessary to give, in
the best manner I am able, a history of that corrupt system which
brought on all the subsequent acts of corruption. I will venture to say
there is no one act, in which tyranny, malice, cruelty, and oppression
can be charged, that does not at the same time carry evident marks of
pecuniary corruption.

I stated to your Lordships on Saturday last the principles upon which
Mr. Hastings governed his conduct in India, and upon which he grounds
his defence. These may all be reduced to one short word,--_arbitrary
power_. My Lords, if Mr. Hastings had contended, as other men have often
done, that the system of government which he patronizes, and on which he
acted, was a system tending on the whole to the blessing and benefit of
mankind, possibly something might be said for him for setting up so
wild, absurd, irrational, and wicked a system,--something might be said
to qualify the act from the intention; but it is singular in this man,
that, at the time he tells you he acted on the principles of arbitrary
power, he takes care to inform you that he was not blind to the
consequences. Mr. Hastings foresaw that the consequences of this system
was corruption. An arbitrary system, indeed, must always be a corrupt
one. My Lords, there never was a man who thought he had no law but his
own will, who did not soon find that he had no end but his own profit.
Corruption and arbitrary power are of natural unequivocal generation,
necessarily producing one another. Mr. Hastings foresees the abusive and
corrupt consequences, and then he justifies his conduct upon the
necessities of that system. These are things which are new in the world;
for there never was a man, I believe, who contended for arbitrary power,
(and there have been persons wicked and foolish enough to contend for
it,) that did not pretend, either that the system was good in itself, or
that by their conduct they had mitigated or had purified it, and that
the poison, by passing through their constitution, had acquired salutary
properties. But if you look at his defence before the House of Commons,
you will see that that very system upon which he governed, and under
which he now justifies his actions, did appear to himself a system
pregnant with a thousand evils and a thousand mischiefs.

The next thing that is remarkable and singular in the principles upon
which the Governor-General acted is, that, when he is engaged in a
vicious system which clearly leads to evil consequences, he thinks
himself bound to realize all the evil consequences involved in that
system. All other men have taken a directly contrary course: they have
said, "I have been engaged in an evil system, that led, indeed, to
mischievous consequences, but I have taken care, by my own virtues, to
prevent the evils of the system under which I acted."

We say, then, not only that he governed arbitrarily, but
corruptly,--that is to say, that he was a giver and receiver of bribes,
and formed a system for the purpose of giving and receiving them. We
wish your Lordships distinctly to consider that he did not only give and
receive bribes accidentally, as it happened, without any system and
design, merely as the opportunity or momentary temptation of profit
urged him to it, but that he has formed plans and systems of government
for the very purpose of accumulating bribes and presents to himself.
This system of Mr. Hastings's government is such a one, I believe, as
the British nation in particular will disown; for I will venture to say,
that, if there is any one thing which distinguishes this nation
eminently above another, it is, that in its offices at home, both
judicial and in the state, there is less suspicion of pecuniary
corruption attaching to them than to any similar offices in any part of
the globe, or that have existed at any time: so that he who would set up
a system of corruption, and attempt to justify it upon the principle of
utility, that man is staining not only the nature and character of
office, but that which is the peculiar glory of the official and
judicial character of this country; and therefore, in this House, which
is eminently the guardian of the purity of all the offices of this
kingdom, he ought to be called eminently and peculiarly to account.
There are many things, undoubtedly, in crimes, which make them frightful
and odious; but bribery, filthy hands, a chief governor of a great
empire receiving bribes from poor, miserable, indigent people, this is
what makes government itself base, contemptible, and odious in the eyes
of mankind.

My Lords, it is certain that even tyranny itself may find some specious
color, and appear as a more severe and rigid execution of justice.
Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken
and over-zealous piety. Conquest may cover its baldness with its own
laurels, and the ambition of the conqueror may be hid in the secrets of
his own heart under a veil of benevolence, and make him imagine he is
bringing temporary desolation upon a country only to promote its
ultimate advantage and his own glory. But in the principles of that
governor who makes nothing but money his object there can be nothing of
this. There are here none of those specious delusions that look like
virtues, to veil either the governed or the governor. If you look at Mr.
Hastings's merits, as he calls them, what are they? Did he improve the
internal state of the government by great reforms? No such thing. Or by
a wise and incorrupt administration of justice? No. Has he enlarged the
boundary of our government? No: there are but too strong proofs of his
lessening it. But his pretensions to merit are, that he squeezed more
money out of the inhabitants of the country than other persons could
have done,--money got by oppression, violence, extortion from the poor,
or the heavy hand of power upon the rich and great.

These are his merits. What we charge as his demerits are all of the same
nature; for, though there is undoubtedly oppression, breach of faith,
cruelty, perfidy, charged upon him, yet the great ruling principle of
the whole, and that from which you can never have an act free, is
money,--it is the vice of base avarice, which never is, nor ever appears
even to the prejudices of mankind to be, anything like a virtue. Our
desire of acquiring sovereignty in India undoubtedly originated first in
ideas of safety and necessity; its next step was a step of ambition.
That ambition, as generally happens in conquest, was followed by gains
of money; but afterwards there was no mixture at all; it was, during Mr.
Hastings's time, altogether a business of money. If he has extirpated a
nation, I will not say whether properly or improperly, it is because
(says he) you have all the benefit of conquest without expense; you have
got a large sum of money from the people, and you may leave them to be
governed by whom and as they will. This is directly contrary to the
principles of conquerors. If he has at any time taken any money from the
dependencies of the Company, he does not pretend that it was obtained
from their zeal and affection to our cause, or that it made their
submission more complete: very far from it. He says they ought to be
independent, and all that you have to do is to squeeze money from them.
In short, money is the beginning, the middle, and the end of every kind
of act done by Mr. Hastings: pretendedly for the Company, but really for
himself.

Having said so much about the origin, the first principle, both of that
which he makes his merit and which we charge as his demerit, the next
step is, that I should lay open to your Lordships, as clearly as I can,
what the sense of his employers, the East India Company, and what the
sense of the legislature itself, has been upon those merits and demerits
of money.

My Lords, the Company, knowing that these money transactions were likely
to subvert that empire which was first established upon them, did, in
the year 1765, send out a body of the strongest and most solemn
covenants to their servants, that they should take no presents from the
country powers, under any name or description, except those things which
were publicly and openly taken for the use of the Company,--namely,
_territories_ or _sums of money_ which might be obtained by treaty. They
distinguished such presents as were taken from any persons privately,
and unknown to them, and without their authority, from subsidies: and
that this is the true nature and construction of their order I shall
contend and explain afterwards to your Lordships. They have said,
nothing shall be taken for their private use; for though in that and in
every state there may be subsidiary treaties by which sums of money may
be received, yet they forbid their servants, their governors, whatever
application they might pretend to make of them, to receive, under any
other name or pretence, more than a certain, marked, simple sum of
money, and this not without the consent and permission of the Presidency
to which they belong. This is the substance, the principle, and the
spirit of the covenants, and will show your Lordships how radicated an
evil this of bribery and presents was judged to be.

When these covenants arrived in India, the servants refused at first to
execute them,--and suspended the execution of them, till they had
enriched themselves with presents. Eleven months elapsed, and it was not
till Lord Clive reached the place of his destination that the covenants
were executed: and they were not executed then without some degree of
force. Soon afterwards the treaty was made with the country powers by
which Sujah ul Dowlah was reëstablished in the province of Oude, and
paid a sum of 500,000_l._ to the Company for it. It was a public
payment, and there was not a suspicion that a single shilling of private
emolument attended it. But whether Mr. Hastings had the example of
others or not, their example could not justify his briberies. He was
sent there to put an end to all those examples. The Company did
expressly vest him with that power. They declared at that time, that the
whole of their service was totally corrupted by bribes and presents, and
by extravagance and luxury, which partly gave rise to them, and these,
in their turn, enabled them to pursue those excesses. They not only
reposed trust in the integrity of Mr. Hastings, but reposed trust in his
remarkable frugality and order in his affairs, which they considered as
things that distinguished his character. But in his defence we have him
quite in another character,--no longer the frugal, attentive servant,
bred to business, bred to book-keeping, as all the Company's servants
are; he now knows nothing of his own affairs, knows not whether he is
rich or poor, knows not what he has in the world. Nay, people are
brought forward to say that they know better than he does what his
affairs are. He is not like a careful man bred in a counting-house, and
by the Directors put into an office of the highest trust on account of
the regularity of his affairs; he is like one buried in the
contemplation of the stars, and knows nothing of the things in this
world. It was, then, on account of an idea of his great integrity that
the Company put him into this situation. Since that he has thought
proper to justify himself, not by clearing himself of receiving bribes,
but by saying that no bad consequences resulted from it, and that, if
any such evil consequences did arise from it, they arose rather from his
inattention to money than from his desire of acquiring it.

I have stated to your Lordships the nature of the covenants which the
East India Company sent out. Afterwards, when they found their servants
had refused to execute these covenants, they not only very severely
reprehended even a moment's delay in their execution, and threatened the
exacting the most strict and rigorous performance of them, but they sent
a commission to enforce the observance of them more strongly; and that
commission had it specially in charge never to receive presents. They
never sent out a person to India without recognizing the grievance, and
without ordering that presents should not be received, as the main
fundamental part of their duty, and upon which all the rest depended, as
it certainly must: for persons at the head of government should not
encourage that by example which they ought by precept, authority, and
force to restrain in all below them. That commission failing, another
commission was preparing to be sent out with the same instructions, when
an act of Parliament took it up; and that act, which gave Mr. Hastings
power, did mould in the very first stamina of his power this principle,
in words the most clear and forcible that an act of Parliament could
possibly devise upon the subject. And that act was made not only upon a
general knowledge of the grievance, but your Lordships will see in the
reports of that time that Parliament had directly in view before them
the whole of that monstrous head of corruption under the name of
presents, and all the monstrous consequences that followed it.

Now, my Lords, every office of trust, in its very nature, forbids the
receipt of bribes. But Mr. Hastings was forbidden it, first, by his
official situation,--next, by covenant,--and lastly, by act of
Parliament: that is to say, by all the things that bind mankind, or that
can bind them,--first, moral obligation inherent in the duty of their
office,--next, the positive injunctions of the legislature of the
country,--and lastly, a man's own private, particular, voluntary act and
covenant. These three, the great and only obligations that bind mankind,
all united in the focus of this single point,--that they should take no
presents.

I am to mark to your Lordships, that this law and this covenant did
consider indirect ways of taking presents--taking them by others, and
such like--directly in the very same light as they considered taking
them by themselves. It is perhaps a much more dangerous way; because it
adds to the crime a false, prevaricating mode of concealing it, and
makes it much more mischievous by admitting others into the
participation of it. Mr. Hastings has said, (and it is one of the
general complaints of Mr. Hastings,) that he is made answerable for the
acts of other men. It is a thing inherent in the nature of his
situation. All those who enjoy a great superintending trust, which is to
regulate the whole affairs of an empire, are responsible for the acts
and conduct of other men, so far as they had anything to do with
appointing them, or holding them in their places, or having any sort of
inspection into their conduct. But when a Governor presumes to remove
from their situations those persons whom the public authority and
sanction of the Company have appointed, and obtrudes upon them by
violence other persons, superseding the orders of his masters, he
becomes doubly responsible for their conduct. If the persons he names
should be of notorious evil character and evil principles, and if this
should be perfectly known to himself, and of public notoriety to the
rest of the world, then another strong responsibility attaches on him
for the acts of those persons.

Governors, we know very well, cannot with their own hands be continually
receiving bribes,--for then they must have as many hands as one of the
idols in an Indian temple, in order to receive all the bribes which a
Governor-General may receive,--but they have them vicariously. As there
are many offices, so he has had various officers for receiving and
distributing his bribes; he has a great many, some white and some black
agents. The white men are loose and licentious; they are apt to have
resentments, and to be bold in revenging them. The black men are very
secret and mysterious; they are not apt to have very quick resentments,
they have not the same liberty and boldness of language which
characterize Europeans; and they have fears, too, for themselves, which
makes it more likely that they will conceal anything committed to them
by Europeans. Therefore Mr. Hastings had his black agents, not one, two,
three, but many, disseminated through the country: no two of them,
hardly, appear to be in the secret of any one bribe. He has had likewise
his white agents,--they were necessary,--a Mr. Larkins and a Mr.
Croftes. Mr. Croftes was sub-treasurer, and Mr. Larkins
accountant-general. These were the last persons of all others that
should have had anything to do with bribes; yet these were some of his
agents in bribery. There are few instances, in comparison of the whole
number of bribes, but there are some, where two men are in the secret of
the same bribe. Nay, it appears that there was one bribe divided into
different payments at different times,--that one part was committed to
one black secretary, another part to another black secretary. So that it
is almost impossible to make up a complete body of all his bribery: you
may find the scattered limbs, some here and others there; and while you
are employed in picking them up, he may escape entirely in a prosecution
for the whole.

The first act of his government in Bengal was the most bold and
extraordinary that I believe ever entered into the head of any man,--I
will say, of any tyrant. It was no more or less than a general, almost
exceptless confiscation, in time of profound peace, of all the landed
property in Bengal, upon most extraordinary pretences. Strange as this
may appear, he did so confiscate it; he put it up to a pretended public,
in reality to a private corrupt auction; and such favored landholders as
came to it were obliged to consider themselves as not any longer
proprietors of the estates, but to recognize themselves as farmers under
government: and even those few that were permitted to remain on their
estates had their payments raised at his arbitrary discretion; and the
rest of the lands were given to farmers-general, appointed by him and
his committee, at a price fixed by the same arbitrary discretion.

It is necessary to inform your Lordships that the revenues of Bengal
are, for the most part, territorial revenues, great quit-rents issuing
out of lands. I shall say nothing either of the nature of this property,
of the rights of the people to it, or of the mode of exacting the rents,
till that great question of revenues, one of the greatest which we shall
have to lay before you, shall be brought before your Lordships
particularly and specially as an article of charge. I only mention it
now as an exemplification of the great principle of corruption which
guided Mr. Hastings's conduct.

When the ancient nobility, the great princes, (for such I may call
them,) a nobility, perhaps, as ancient as that of your Lordships, (and a
more truly noble body never existed in that character,)--my Lords, when
all the nobility, some of whom have borne the rank and port of princes,
all the gentry, all the freeholders of the country, had their estates in
that manner confiscated,--that is, either given to themselves to hold on
the footing of farmers, or totally confiscated,--when such an act of
tyranny was done, no doubt some good was pretended. This confiscation
was made by Mr. Hastings, and the lands let to these farmers for five
years, upon an idea which always accompanies his acts of oppression, the
idea of _moneyed merit_. He adopted this mode of confiscating the
estates, and letting them to farmers, for the avowed purpose of seeing
how much it was possible to take out of them. Accordingly, he set them
up to this wild and wicked auction, as it would have been, if it had
been a real one,--corrupt and treacherous, as it was,--he set these
lands up for the purpose of making that discovery, and pretended that
the discovery would yield a most amazing increase of rent. And for some
time it appeared so to do, till it came to the touchstone of experience;
and then it was found that there was a defalcation from these monstrous
raised revenues which were to cancel in the minds of the Directors the
wickedness of so atrocious, flagitious, and horrid an act of treachery.
At the end of five years what do you think was the failure? No less than
2,050,000_l._ Then a new source of corruption was opened,--that is, how
to deal with the balances: for every man who had engaged in these
transactions was a debtor to government, and the remission of that debt
depended upon the discretion of the Governor-General. Then the persons
who were to settle the composition of that immense debt, who were to see
how much was recoverable and how much not, were able to favor, or to
exact to the last shilling; and there never existed a doubt but that not
only upon the original cruel exaction, but upon the remission
afterwards, immense gains were derived. This will account for the manner
in which those stupendous fortunes which astonish the world have been
made. They have been made, first by a tyrannous exaction from the people
who were suffered to remain in possession of their own land as
farmers,--then by selling the rest to farmers at rents and under hopes
which could never be realized, and then getting money for the relaxation
of their debts. But whatever excuse, and however wicked, there might
have been for this wicked act, namely, that it carried upon the face of
it some sort of appearance of public good,--that is to say, that sort of
public good which Mr. Hastings so often professed, of ruining the
country for the benefit of the Company,--yet, in fact, this business of
balances is that _nidus_ in which have been nustled and bred and born
all the corruptions of India, first by making extravagant demands, and
afterwards by making corrupt relaxations of them.

Besides this monstrous failure, in consequence of a miserable exaction
by which more was attempted to be forced from the country than it was
capable of yielding, and this by way of experiment, when your Lordships
come to inquire who the farmers-general of the revenue were, you would
naturally expect to find them to be the men in the several countries who
had the most interest, the greatest wealth, the best knowledge of the
revenue and resources of the country in which they lived. Those would be
thought the natural, proper farmers-general of each district. No such
thing, my Lords. They are found in the body of people whom I have
mentioned to your Lordships. They were almost all let to Calcutta
banians. Calcutta banians were the farmers of almost the whole. They
sub-delegated to others, who sometimes had sub-delegates under them _ad
infinitum_. The whole formed a system together, through the succession
of black tyrants scattered through the country, in which you at last
find the European at the end, sometimes indeed not hid very deep, not
above one between him and the farmer, namely, his banian directly, or
some other black person to represent him. But some have so managed the
affair, that, when you inquire who the farmer is,--Was such a one
farmer? No. Cantoo Baboo? No. Another? No,--at last you find three deep
of fictitious farmers, and you find the European gentlemen, high in
place and authority, the real farmers of the settlement. So that the
zemindars were dispossessed, the country racked and ruined, for the
benefit of an European, under the name of a farmer: for you will easily
judge whether these gentlemen had fallen so deeply in love with the
banians, and thought so highly of their merits and services, as to
reward _them_ with all the possessions of the great landed interest of
the country. Your Lordships are too grave, wise, and discerning, to make
it necessary for me to say more upon that subject. Tell me that the
banians of English gentlemen, dependants on them at Calcutta, were the
farmers throughout, and I believe I need not tell your Lordships for
whose benefit they were farmers.

But there is one of these who comes so nearly, indeed so precisely,
within this observation, that it is impossible for me to pass him by.
Whoever has heard of Mr. Hastings's name, with any knowledge of Indian
connections, has heard of his banian, Cantoo Baboo. This man is well
known in the records of the Company, as his agent for receiving secret
gifts, confiscations, and presents. You would have imagined that he
would at least have kept _him_ out of these farms, in order to give the
measure a color at least of disinterestedness, and to show that this
whole system of corruption and pecuniary oppression was carried on for
the benefit of the Company. The Governor-General and Council made an
ostensible order by which no collector, or person concerned in the
revenue, should have any connection with these farms. This order did not
include the Governor-General in the words of it, but more than included
him in the spirit of it; because his power to protect a farmer-general
in the person of his own servant was infinitely greater than that of any
subordinate person. Mr. Hastings, in breach of this order, gave farms to
his own banian. You find him the farmer of great, of vast and extensive
farms. Another regulation that was made on that occasion was, that no
farmer should have, except in particular cases, which were marked,
described, and accurately distinguished, a greater farm than what paid
10,000_l._ a year to government. Mr. Hastings, who had broken the first
regulation by giving any farm at all to his banian, finding himself
bolder, broke the second too, and, instead of 10,000_l._, gave him farms
paying a revenue of 130,000_l._ a year to government. Men undoubtedly
have been known to be under the dominion of their domestics; such
things have happened to great men: they never have happened justifiably
in my opinion. They have never happened excusably; but we are acquainted
sufficiently with the weakness of human nature to know that a domestic
who has served you in a near office long, and in your opinion
faithfully, does become a kind of relation; it brings on a great
affection and regard for his interest. Now was this the case with Mr.
Hastings and Cantoo Baboo? Mr. Hastings was just arrived at his
government, and Cantoo Baboo had been but a year in his service; so that
he could not in that time have contracted any great degree of friendship
for him. These people do not live in your house; the Hindoo servants
never sleep in it; they cannot eat with your servants; they have no
second table, in which they can be continually about you, to be
domesticated with yourself, a part of your being, as people's servants
are to a certain degree. These persons live all abroad; they come at
stated hours upon matters of business, and nothing more. But if it had
been otherwise, Mr. Hastings's connection with Cantoo Baboo had been but
of a year's standing; he had before served in that capacity Mr. Sykes,
who recommended him to Mr. Hastings. Your Lordships, then, are to judge
whether such outrageous violations of all the principles by which Mr.
Hastings pretended to be guided in the settlement of these farms were
for the benefit of this old, decayed, affectionate servant of one year's
standing: your Lordships will judge of that.

I have here spoken only of the beginning of a great, notorious system of
corruption, which branched out so many ways and into such a variety of
abuses, and has afflicted that kingdom with such horrible evils from
that day to this, that I will venture to say it will make one of the
greatest, weightiest, and most material parts of the charge that is now
before you; as I believe I need not tell your Lordships that an attempt
to set up the whole landed interest of a kingdom to auction must be
attended, not only in that act, but every consequential act, with most
grievous and terrible consequences.

My Lords, I will now come to a scene of peculation of another kind:
namely, a peculation by the direct sale of offices of justice,--by the
direct sale of the successions of families,--by the sale of
guardianships and trusts, held most sacred among the people of India: by
the sale of them, not, as before, to farmers, not, as you might imagine,
to near relations of the families, but a sale of them to the unfaithful
servants of those families, their own perfidious servants, who had
ruined their estates, who, if any balances had accrued to the
government, had been the cause of those debts. Those very servants were
put in power over their estates, their persons, and their families, by
Mr. Hastings, for a shameful price. It will be proved to your Lordships,
in the course of this business, that Mr. Hastings has done this in
another sacred trust, the most sacred trust a man can have,--that is, in
the case of those _vakeels_, (as they call them,) agents, or attorneys,
who had been sent to assert and support the rights of their miserable
masters before the Council-General. It will be proved that these vakeels
were by Mr. Hastings, for a price to be paid for it, put in possession
of the very power, situation, and estates of those masters who sent them
to Calcutta to defend them from wrong and violence. The selling offices
of justice, the sale of succession in families, of guardianships and
other sacred trusts, the selling masters to their servants, and
principals to the attorneys they employed to defend themselves, were all
parts of the same system; and these were the horrid ways in which he
received bribes beyond any common rate.

When Mr. Hastings was appointed in the year 1773 to be Governor-General
of Bengal, together with Mr. Barwell, General Clavering, Colonel Monson,
and Mr. Francis, the Company, knowing the former corrupt state of their
service, (but the whole corrupt system of Mr. Hastings at that time not
being known or even suspected at home,) did order them, in discharge of
the spirit of the act of Parliament, to make an inquiry into all manner
of corruptions and malversations in office, without the exception of any
persons whatever. Your Lordships are to know that the act did expressly
authorize the Court of Directors to frame a body of instructions, and to
give orders to their new servants appointed under the act of Parliament,
lest it should be supposed that they, by their appointment under the
act, could supersede the authority of the Directors. The Directors,
sensible of the power left in them over their servants by the act of
Parliament, though their nomination was taken from them, did, agreeably
to the spirit and power of that act, give this order.

The Council consisted of two parties: Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, who
were chosen and kept there upon the idea of their local knowledge; and
the other three, who were appointed on account of their great parts and
known integrity. And I will venture to say that those three gentlemen
did so execute their duty in India, in all the substantial parts of it,
that they will serve as a shield to cover the honor of England, whenever
this country is upbraided in India.

They found a rumor running through the country of great peculations and
oppressions. Soon after, when it was known what their instructions were,
and that the Council was ready, as is the first duty of all governors,
even when there is no express order, to receive complaints against the
oppressions and corruptions of government in any part of it, they found
such a body (and that body shall be produced to your Lordships) of
corruption and peculation in every walk, in every department, in every
situation of life, in the sale of the most sacred trusts, and in the
destruction of the most ancient families of the country, as I believe in
so short a time never was unveiled since the world began.

Your Lordships would imagine that Mr. Hastings would at least ostensibly
have taken some part in endeavoring to bring these corruptions before
the public, or that he would at least have acted with some little
management in his opposition. But, alas! it was not in his power; there
was not one, I think, but I am sure very few, of these general articles
of corruption, in which the most eminent figure in the crowd, the
principal figure as it were in the piece, was not Mr. Hastings himself.
There were a great many others involved; for all departments were
corrupted and vitiated. But you could not open a page in which you did
not see Mr. Hastings, or in which you did not see Cantoo Baboo. Either
the black or white side of Mr. Hastings constantly was visible to the
world in every part of these transactions.

With the other gentlemen, who were visible too, I have at present no
dealing. Mr. Hastings, instead of using any management on that occasion,
instantly set up his power and authority, directly against the majority
of the Council, directly against his colleagues, directly against the
authority of the East India Company and the authority of the act of
Parliament, to put a dead stop to all these inquiries. He broke up the
Council, the moment they attempted to perform this part of their duty.
As the evidence multiplied upon him, the daring exertions of his power
in stopping all inquiries increased continually. But he gave a credit
and authority to the evidence by these attempts to suppress it.

Your Lordships have heard that among the body of the accusers of this
corruption there was a principal man in the country, a man of the first
rank and authority in it, called Nundcomar, who had the management of
revenues amounting to 150,000_l._ a year, and who had, if really
inclined to play the small game with which he has been charged by his
accusers, abundant means to gratify himself in playing great ones; but
Mr. Hastings has himself given him, upon the records of the Company, a
character which would at least justify the Council in making some
inquiry into charges made by him.

First, he was perfectly competent to make them, because he was in the
management of those affairs from which Mr. Hastings is supposed to have
received corrupt emolument. He and his son were the chief managers in
those transactions. He was therefore perfectly competent to it.--Mr.
Hastings has cleared his character; for though it is true, in the
contradictions in which Mr. Hastings has entangled himself, he has
abused and insulted him, and particularly after his appearance as an
accuser, yet before this he has given this testimony of him, that the
hatred that had been drawn upon him, and the general obloquy of the
English nation, was on account of his attachment to his own prince and
the liberties of his country. Be he what he might, I am not disposed,
nor have I the least occasion, to defend either his conduct or his
memory.

It is to no purpose for Mr. Hastings to spend time in idle objections to
the character of Nundcomar. Let him be as bad as Mr. Hastings represents
him. I suppose he was a caballing, bribing, intriguing politician, like
others in that country, both black and white. We know associates in dark
and evil actions are not generally the best of men; but be that as it
will, it generally happens that they are the best of all discoverers. If
Mr. Hastings were the accuser of Nundcomar, I should think the
presumptions equally strong against Nundcomar, if he had acted as Mr.
Hastings has acted.--He was not only competent, but the most competent
of all men to be Mr. Hastings's accuser. But Mr. Hastings has himself
established both his character and his competency by employing him
against Mahomed Reza Khân. He shall not blow hot and cold. In what
respect was Mr. Hastings better than Mahomed Reza Khân, that the whole
rule, principle, and system of accusation and inquiry should be totally
reversed in general, nay, reversed in the particular instance, the
moment he became accuser against Mr. Hastings?--Such was the accuser. He
was the man that gave the bribes, and, in addition to his own evidence,
offers proof by other witnesses.

What was the accusation? Was the accusation improbable, either on
account of the subject-matter or the actor in it? Does such an
appointment as that of Munny Begum, in the most barefaced evasion of his
orders, appear to your Lordships a matter that contains no just
presumptions of guilt, so that, when a charge of bribery comes upon it,
you are prepared to reject it, as if the action were so clear and proper
that no man could attribute it to an improper motive? And as to the
man,--is Mr. Hastings a man against whom a charge of bribery is
improbable? Why, he owns it. He is a professor of it. He reduces it into
scheme and system. He glories in it. He turns it to merit, and declares
it is the best way of supplying the exigencies of the Company. Why,
therefore, should it be held improbable?--But I cannot mention this
proceeding without shame and horror.

My Lords, when this man appeared as an accuser of Mr. Hastings, if he
was a man of bad character, it was a great advantage to Mr. Hastings to
be accused by a man of that description. There was no likelihood of any
great credit being given to him.

This person, who, in one of those sales of which I have already given
you some account in the history of the last period of the revolutions of
Bengal, had been, or thought he had been, cheated of his money, had made
some discoveries, and been guilty of that great irremissible sin in
India, the disclosure of peculation. He afterwards came with a second
disclosure, and was likely to have odium enough upon the occasion. He
directly charged Mr. Hastings with the receipt of bribes, amounting
together to about 40,000_l._ sterling, given by himself, on his own
account and that of Munny Begum. The charge was accompanied with every
particular which could facilitate proof or detection,--time, place,
persons, species, to whom paid, by whom received. Here was a fair
opportunity for Mr. Hastings at once to defeat the malice of his enemies
and to clear his character to the world. His course was different. He
railed much at the accuser, but did not attempt to refute the
accusation. He refuses to permit the inquiry to go on, attempts to
dissolve the Council, commands his banian not to attend. The Council,
however, goes on, examines to the bottom, and resolves that the charge
was proved, and that the money ought to go to the Company. Mr. Hastings
then broke up the Council,--I will not say whether legally or illegally.
The Company's law counsel thought he might legally do it; but he
corruptly did it, and left mankind no room to judge but that it was done
for the screening of his own guilt: for a man may use a legal power
corruptly, and for the most shameful and detestable purposes. And thus
matters continued, till he commenced a criminal prosecution against this
man,--this man whom he dared not meet as a defendant.

Mr. Hastings, instead of answering the charge, attacks the accuser.
Instead of meeting the man in front, he endeavored to go round, to come
upon his flanks and rear, but never to meet him in the face, upon the
ground of his accusation, as he was bound by the express authority of
law and the express injunctions of the Directors to do. If the bribery
is not admitted on the evidence of Nundcomar, yet his suppressing it is
a crime, a violation of the orders of the Court of Directors. He
disobeyed those instructions; and if it be only for disobedience, for
rebellion against his masters, (putting the corrupt motive out of the
question,) I charge him for this disobedience, and especially on account
of the principles upon which he proceeded in it.

Then he took another step: he accused Nundcomar of a conspiracy,--which
was a way he then and ever since has used, whenever means were taken to
detect any of his own iniquities.

And here it becomes necessary to mention another circumstance of
history: that the legislature, not trusting entirely to the
Governor-General and Council, had sent out a court of justice to be a
counter security against these corruptions, and to detect and punish any
such misdemeanors as might appear. And this court I take for granted has
done great services.

Mr. Hastings flew to this court, which was meant to protect in their
situations informers against bribery and corruption, rather than to
protect the accused from any of the preliminary methods which must
indispensably be used for the purpose of detecting their guilt,--he flew
to this court, charging this Nundcomar and others with being
conspirators.

A man might be convicted as a conspirator, and yet afterwards live; he
might put the matter into other hands, and go on with his information;
nothing less than _stone-dead_ would do the business. And here happened
an odd concurrence of circumstances. Long before Nundcomar preferred his
charge, he knew that Mr. Hastings was plotting his ruin, and that for
this purpose he had used a man whom he, Nundcomar, had turned out of
doors, called Mohun Persaud. Mr. Hastings had seen papers put upon the
board, charging him with this previous plot for the destruction of
Nundcomar; and this identical person, Mohun Persaud, whom Nundcomar had
charged as Mr. Hastings's associate in plotting his ruin, was now again
brought forward as the principal evidence against him. I will not enter
(God forbid I should!) into the particulars of the subsequent trial of
Nundcomar; but you will find the marks and characters of it to be these.
You will find a close connection between Mr. Hastings and the
chief-justice, which we shall prove. We shall prove that one of the
witnesses who appeared there was a person who had been before, or has
since been, concerned with Mr. Hastings in his most iniquitous
transactions. You will find, what is very odd, that in this trial for
forgery with which this man stood charged, forgery in a private
transaction, all the persons who were witnesses or parties to it had
been, before or since, the particular friends of Mr. Hastings,--in
short, persons from that rabble with whom Mr. Hastings was concerned,
both before and since, in various transactions and negotiations of the
most criminal kind. But the law took its course. I have nothing more to
say than that the man is gone,--hanged justly, if you please; and that
it did so happen,--luckily for Mr. Hastings,--it so happened, that the
relief of Mr. Hastings, and the justice of the court, and the resolution
never to relax its rigor, did all concur just at a happy nick of time
and moment; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, had the full benefit of them
all.

His accuser was supposed to be what men may be, and yet very competent
for accusers, namely, one of his accomplices in guilty actions,--one of
those persons who may have a great deal to say of bribes. All that I
contend for is, that he was in the closest intimacy with Mr. Hastings,
was in a situation for giving bribes,--and that Mr. Hastings was proved
afterwards to have received a sum of money from him, which may be well
referred to bribes.

This example had its use in the way in which it was intended to operate,
and in which alone it could operate. It did not discourage forgeries:
they went on at their usual rate, neither more nor less: but it put an
end to all accusations against all persons in power for any corrupt
practice. Mr. Hastings observes, that no man in India complains of him.
It is generally true. The voice of all India is stopped. All complaint
was strangled with the same cord that strangled Nundcomar. This murdered
not only that accuser, but all future accusation; and not only defeated,
but totally vitiated and reversed all the ends for which this country,
to its eternal and indelible dishonor, had sent out a pompous embassy of
justice to the remotest parts of the globe.

But though Nundcomar was put out of the way by the means by which _he_
was removed, a part of the charge was not strangled with him. Whilst the
process against Nundcomar was carrying on before Sir Elijah Impey, the
process was continuing against Mr. Hastings in other modes; the receipt
of a part of those bribes from Munny Begum, to the amount of 15,000_l._,
was proved against him, and that a sum to the same amount was to be paid
to his associate, Mr. Middleton. As it was proved at Calcutta, so it
will be proved at your Lordships' bar to your entire satisfaction by
records and living testimony now in England. It was, indeed, obliquely
admitted by Mr. Hastings himself.

The excuse for this bribe, fabricated by Mr. Hastings, and taught to
Munny Begum, when he found that she was obliged to prove it against him,
was, that it was given to him for his entertainment, according to some
pretended custom, at the rate of 200_l._ sterling a day, whilst he
remained at Moorshedabad. My Lords, this leads me to a few reflections
on the apology or defence of this bribe. We shall certainly, I hope,
render it clear to your Lordships that it was not paid in this manner as
a daily allowance, but given in a gross sum. But take it in his own way,
it was no less illegal, and no less contrary to his covenant; but if
true under the circumstances, it was an horrible aggravation of his
crime. The first thing that strikes is, that visits from Mr. Hastings
are pretty severe things, and hospitality at Moorshedabad is an
expensive virtue, though for provision it is one of the cheapest
countries in the universe. No wonder that Mr. Hastings lengthened his
visit, and made it extend near three months. Such hosts and such guests
cannot be soon parted. Two hundred pounds a day for a visit! It is at
the rate of 78,000_l._ a year for himself; and as I find his companion
was put on the same allowance, it will be 146,000_l._ a year for
hospitality to two English gentlemen. I believe that there is not a
prince in Europe who goes to such expensive hospitality of splendor.

But that you may judge of the true nature of this hospitality of
corruption, I must bring before you the business of the visitor and the
condition of the host, as stated by Mr. Hastings himself, who best knows
what he was doing. He was, then, at the old capital of Bengal at the
time of this expensive entertainment, on a business of retrenchment, and
for the establishment of a most harsh, rigorous, and oppressive economy.
He wishes the task were assigned to spirits of a less gentle kind. By
Mr. Hastings's account, he was giving daily and hourly wounds to his
humanity in depriving of their sustenance hundreds of persons of the
ancient nobility of a great fallen kingdom. Yet it was in the midst of
this galling duty, it was at that very moment of his tender sensibility,
that, from the collected morsels plucked from the famished mouths of
hundreds of decayed, indigent, and starving nobility, he gorged his
ravenous maw with 200_l._ a day for his entertainment. In the course of
all this proceeding your Lordships will not fail to observe he is never
corrupt, but he is cruel; he never dines with comfort, but where he is
sure to create a famine. He never robs from the loose superfluity of
standing greatness; he devours the fallen, the indigent, the
necessitous. His extortion is not like the generous rapacity of the
princely eagle, who snatches away the living, struggling prey; he is a
vulture, who feeds upon the prostrate, the dying, and the dead. As his
cruelty is more shocking than his corruption, so his hypocrisy has
something more frightful than his cruelty; for whilst his bloody and
rapacious hand signs proscriptions, and now sweeps away the food of the
widow and the orphan, his eyes overflow with tears, and he converts the
healing balm that bleeds from wounded humanity into a rancorous and
deadly poison to the race of man.

Well, there was an end to this tragic entertainment, this feast of
Tantalus. The few left on the pension-list, the poor remnants that had
escaped, were they paid by his administratrix and deputy, Munny Begum?
Not a shilling. No fewer than forty-nine petitions, mostly from the
widows of the greatest and most splendid houses of Bengal, came before
the Council, praying in the most deplorable manner for some sort of
relief out of the pittance assigned them. His colleagues, General
Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, men who, when England is
reproached for the government of India, will, I repeat it, as a shield
be held up between this nation and infamy, did, in conformity to the
strict orders of the Directors, appoint Mahomed Reza Khân to his old
offices, that is, to the general superintendency of the household and
the administration of justice, a person who by his authority might keep
some order in the ruling family and in the state. The Court of Directors
authorized them to assure those offices to him, with a salary reduced
indeed to 30,000_l._ a year, during his good behavior. But Mr. Hastings,
as soon as he obtained a majority by the death of the two best men ever
sent to India, notwithstanding the orders of the Court of Directors, in
spite of the public faith solemnly pledged to Mahomed Reza Khân, without
a shadow of complaint, had the audacity to dispossess him of all his
offices, and appoint his bribing patroness, the old dancing-girl, Munny
Begum, once more to the viceroyalty and all its attendant honors and
functions.

The pretence was more insolent and shameless than the act. Modesty does
not long survive innocence. He brings forward the miserable pageant of
the Nabob, as he called him, to be the instrument of his own disgrace,
and the scandal of his family and government. He makes him to pass by
his mother, and to petition us to appoint Munny Begum once more to the
administration of the viceroyalty. He distributed Mahomed Reza Khân's
salary as a spoil.

When the orders of the Court to restore Mahomed Reza Khân, with their
opinion on the corrupt cause of his removal, and a second time to pledge
to him the public faith for his continuance, were received, Mr.
Hastings, who had been just before a pattern of obedience, when the
despoiling, oppressing, imprisoning, and persecuting this man was the
object, yet, when the order was of a beneficial nature, and pleasant to
a well-formed mind, he at once loses all his old principles, he grows
stubborn and refractory, and refuses obedience. And in this sullen,
uncomplying mood he continues, until, to gratify Mr. Francis, in an
agreement on some of their differences, he consented to his proposition
of obedience to the appointment of the Court of Directors. He grants to
his arrangement of convenience what he had refused to his duty, and
replaces that magistrate. But mark the double character of the man,
never true to anything but fraud and duplicity. At the same time that he
publicly replaces this magistrate, pretending compliance with his
colleague and obedience to his masters, he did, in defiance of his own
and the public faith, privately send an assurance to the Nabob, that is,
to Munny Begum,--informs her that he was compelled by necessity to the
present arrangement in favor of Mahomed Reza Khân, but that on the first
opportunity he would certainly displace him again. And he kept faith
with his corruption; and to show how vainly any one sought protection in
the lawful authority of this kingdom, he displaced Mahomed Reza Khân
from the lieutenancy and controllership, leaving him only the judicial
department miserably curtailed.

But does he adhere to his old pretence of freedom to the Nabob? No such
thing. He appoints an absolute master to him under the name of Resident,
a creature of his personal favor, Sir John D'Oyly, from whom there is
not one syllable of correspondence and not one item of account. How
grievous this yoke was to that miserable captive appears by a paper of
Mr. Hastings, in which he acknowledges that the Nabob had offered, out
of the 160,000_l._ payable to him yearly, to give up to the Company no
less than 40,000_l._ a year, in order to have the free disposal of the
rest. On this all comment is superfluous. Your Lordships are furnished
with a standard by which you may estimate his real receipt from the
revenue assigned to him, the nature of the pretended Residency, and its
predatory effects. It will give full credit to what was generally
rumored and believed, that substantially and beneficially the Nabob
never received fifty out of the one hundred and sixty thousand pounds;
which will account for his known poverty and wretchedness, and that of
all about him.

Thus by his corrupt traffic of bribes with one scandalous woman he
disgraced and enfeebled the native Mahomedan government, captived the
person of the sovereign, and ruined and subverted the justice of the
country. What is worse, the steps taken for the murder of Nundcomar, his
accuser, have confirmed and given sanction not only to the corruptions
then practised by the Governor-General, but to all of which he has since
been guilty. This will furnish your Lordships with some general idea
which will enable you to judge of the bribe for which he sold the
country government.

Under this head you will have produced to you full proof of his sale of
a judicial office to a person called Khân Jehan Khân, and the modes he
took to frustrate all inquiry on that subject, upon a wicked and false
pretence, that, according to his religious scruples, he could not be
sworn.

The great end and object I have in view is to show the criminal
tendency, the mischievous nature of these crimes, and the means taken to
elude their discovery. I am now giving your Lordships that general view
which may serve to characterize Mr. Hastings's administration in all the
other parts of it.

It was not true in fact, as Mr. Hastings gives out, that there was
nothing now against him, and that, when he had got rid of Nundcomar and
his charge, he got rid of the whole. No such thing. An immense load of
charges of bribery remained. They were coming afterwards from every part
of the province; and there was no office in the execution of justice
which he was not accused of having sold in the most flagitious manner.

After all this thundering the sky grew calm and clear, and Mr. Hastings
sat with recorded peculation, with peculation proved upon oath on the
minutes of that very Council,--he sat at the head of that Council and
that board where his peculations were proved against him. These were
afterwards transmitted and recorded in the registers of his masters, as
an eternal monument of his corruption, and of his high disobedience, and
flagitious attempts to prevent a discovery of the various peculations of
which he had been guilty, to the disgrace and ruin of the country
committed to his care.

Mr. Hastings, after the execution of Nundcomar, if he had intended to
make even a decent and commonly sensible use of it, would naturally have
said, "This man is justly taken away who has accused me of these crimes;
but as there are other witnesses, as there are other means of a further
inquiry, as the man is gone of whose perjuries I might have reason to be
afraid, let us now go into the inquiry." I think he did very ill not to
go into the inquiry when the man was alive; but be it so, that he was
afraid of him, and waited till he was removed, why not afterwards go
into such an inquiry? Why not go into an inquiry of all the other
peculations and charges upon him, which were innumerable, one of which I
have just mentioned in particular, the charge of Munny Begum, of having
received from her, or her adopted son, a bribe of 40,000_l._?

Is it fit for a governor to say, will Mr. Hastings say before this
august assembly, "I may be accused in a court of justice,--I am upon my
defence,--let all charges remain against me,--I will not give you an
account"? Is it fit that a governor should sit with recorded bribery
upon him at the head of a public board and the government of a great
kingdom, when it is in his power by inquiry to do it away? No: the
chastity of character of a man in that situation ought to be as dear to
him as his innocence. Nay, more depended upon it. His innocence regarded
himself; his character regarded the public justice, regarded his
authority, and the respect due to the English in that country. I charge
it upon him, that not only did he suppress the inquiry to the best of
his power, (and it shall be proved,) but he did not in any one instance
endeavor to clear off that imputation and reproach from the English
government. He went further; he never denied hardly any of those charges
at the time. They are so numerous that I cannot be positive; some of
them he might meet with some sort of denial, but the most part he did
not.

The first thing a man under such an accusation owes to the world is to
deny the charge; next, to put it to the proof; and lastly, to let
inquiry freely go on. He did not permit this, but stopped it all in his
power. I am to mention some exceptions, perhaps, hereafter, which will
tend to fortify the principle tenfold.

He promised, indeed, the Court of Directors (to whom he never denied the
facts) a full and liberal explanation of these transactions; which full
and liberal explanation he never gave. Many years passed; even
Parliament took notice of it; and he never gave them a liberal
explanation, or any explanation at all of them. A man may say, "I am
threatened with a suit in a court, and it may be very disadvantageous to
me, if I disclose my defence." That is a proper answer for a man in
common life, who has no particular character to sustain; but is that a
proper answer for a governor accused of bribery, that accusation
transmitted to his masters, and his masters giving credit to it? Good
God! is that a state in which a man is to say, "I am upon the
defensive--I am on my guard,--I will give you no satisfaction,--I have
promised it, but I have already deferred it for seven or eight years"?
Is not this tantamount to a denial?

Mr. Hastings, with this great body of bribery against him, was
providentially freed from Nundcomar, one of his accusers, and, as good
events do not come alone, (I think there is some such proverb,) it did
so happen that all the rest, or a great many of them, ran away. But,
however, the recorded evidence of the former charges continued; no new
evidence came in; and Mr. Hastings enjoyed that happy repose which
branded peculation, fixed and eternized upon the records of the Company,
must leave upon a mind conscious of its own integrity.

My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to
his character. It is the grace, undoubtedly, of a virtuous, firm mind
often to despise common, vulgar calumny; but if ever there is an
occasion in which it does become such a mind to disprove it, it is the
case of being charged in high office with pecuniary malversation,
pecuniary corruption. There is no case in which it becomes an honest
man, much less a great man, to leave upon record specific charges
against him of corruption in his government, without taking any one step
whatever to refute them.

Though Mr. Hastings took no step to refute the charges, he took many
steps to punish the authors of them; and those miserable people who had
the folly to make complaints against Mr. Hastings, to make them under
the authority of an act of Parliament, under every sanction of public
faith, yet, in consequence of those charges, every person concerned in
them has been, as your Lordships will see, since his restoration to
power, absolutely undone, brought from the highest situation to the
lowest misery, so that they may have good reason to repent they ever
trusted an English Council, that they ever trusted a Court of Directors,
that they ever trusted an English act of Parliament, that they ever
dared to make their complaints.

And here I charge upon Mr. Hastings, that, by never taking a single step
to defeat or detect the falsehood of any of those charges against him,
and by punishing the authors of them, he has been guilty of such a
subversion of all the principles of British government as will deserve,
and will I dare say meet, your Lordships' most severe animadversion.

In the course of this inquiry we find a sort of pause in his
peculations, a sort of gap in the history, as if pages were torn out.
No longer we meet with the same activity in taking money that was before
found; not even a trace of complimentary presents is to be found in the
records during the time whilst General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and
Mr. Francis formed the majority of the Council. There seems to have been
a kind of truce with that sort of conduct for a while, and Mr. Hastings
rested upon his arms. However, the very moment Mr. Hastings returned to
power, peculation began again just at the same instant; the moment we
find him free from the compulsion and terror of a majority of persons
otherwise disposed than himself, we find him at his peculation again.

My Lords, at this time very serious inquiries had begun in the House of
Commons concerning peculation. They did not go directly to Bengal, but
they began upon the coast of Coromandel, and with the principal
governors there. There was, however, an universal opinion (and justly
founded) that these inquiries would go to far greater lengths. Mr.
Hastings was resolved, then, to change the whole course and order of his
proceeding. Nothing could persuade him, upon any account, to lay aside
his system of bribery: that he was resolved to persevere in. The point
was now to reconcile it with his safety. The first thing he did was to
attempt to conceal it; and accordingly we find him depositing very great
sums of money in the public treasury through the means of the two
persons I have already mentioned, namely, the deputy-treasurer and the
accountant,--paying them in and taking bonds for them as money of his
own, and bearing legal interest. This was his method of endeavoring to
conceal some at least of his bribes: for I would not suggest, nor have
your Lordships to think, that I believe that these were his only
bribes,--for there is reason to think there was an infinite number
besides; but it did so happen that they were those bribes which he
thought might be discovered, some of which he knew were discovered, and
all of which he knew might become the subject of a Parliamentary
inquiry.

Mr. Hastings said he might have concealed them forever. Every one knows
the facility of concealing corrupt transactions everywhere, in India
particularly. But this is by himself proved not to be universally true,
at least not to be true in his own opinion; for he tells you, in his
letter from Cheltenham, that he _would_ have concealed the Nabob's
100,000_l._, but that the magnitude rendered it easy of discovery. He,
therefore, avows an intention of concealment.

But it happens here, very singularly, that this sum, which his fears of
discovery by _others_ obliged him to discover _himself_, happens to be
one of those of which no trace whatsoever appears, except merely from
the operation of his own apprehensions. There is no collateral
testimony: Middleton knew nothing of it; Anderson knew nothing of it; it
was not directly communicated to the faithful Larkins or the trusty
Croftes;--which proves, indeed, the facility of concealment. The fact
is, you find the application always upon the discovery. But concealment
or discovery is a thing of accident.

The bribes which I have hitherto brought before your Lordships belong to
the first period of his bribery, before he thought of the doctrine on
which he has since defended it. There are many other bribes which we
charge him with having received during this first period, before an
improving conversation and close virtuous connection with great lawyers
had taught him how to practise bribes in such a manner as to defy
detection, and instead of punishment to plead merit. I am not bound to
find order and consistency in guilt: it is the reign of disorder. The
order of the proceeding, as far as I am able to trace such a scene of
prevarication, direct fraud, falsehood, and falsification of the public
accounts, was this. From bribes he knew he could never abstain; and his
then precarious situation made him the more rapacious. He knew that a
few of his former bribes had been discovered, declared, recorded,--that
for the moment, indeed, he was secure, because all informers had been
punished and all concealers rewarded. He expected hourly a total change
in the Council, and that men like Clavering and Monson might be again
joined to Francis, that some great avenger should arise from their
ashes,--"_Exoriare, aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor_,"--and that a more
severe investigation and an infinitely more full display would be made
of his robbery than hitherto had been done. He therefore began, in the
agony of his guilt, to cast about for some device by which he might
continue his offence, if possible, with impunity,--and possibly make a
merit of it. He therefore first carefully perused the act of Parliament
forbidding bribery, and his old covenant engaging him not to receive
presents. And here he was more successful than upon former occasions. If
ever an act was studiously and carefully framed to prevent bribery, it
is that law of the 13th of the King, which he well observes admits no
latitudes of construction, no subterfuge, no escape, no evasion. Yet has
he found a defence of his crimes even in the very provisions which were
made for their prevention and their punishment. Besides the penalty
which belongs to every informer, the East India Company was invested
with a fiction of property in all such bribes, in order to drag them
with more facility out of the corrupt hands which held them. The
covenant, with an exception of one hundred pounds, and the act of
Parliament, without any exception, declared that the Governor-General
and Council should receive no presents _for their own use_. He therefore
concluded that the system of bribery and extortion might be
clandestinely and safely carried on, provided the party taking the
bribes had an inward intention and mental reservation that they should
be privately applied to the Company's service in any way the briber
should think fit, and that on many occasions this would prove the best
method of supply for the exigencies of their service.

He accordingly formed, or pretended to form, a private bribe exchequer,
collateral with and independent of the Company's public exchequer,
though in some cases administered by those whom for his purposes he had
placed in the regular official department. It is no wonder that he has
taken to himself an extraordinary degree of merit. For surely such an
invention of finance, I believe, never was heard of,--an exchequer
wherein extortion was the assessor, fraud the cashier, confusion the
accountant, concealment the reporter, and oblivion the remembrancer: in
short, such as I believe no man, but one driven by guilt into frenzy,
could ever have dreamed of.

He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a
parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers. He is an eccentric book-keeper,
a Pindaric accountant. I have heard of "the poet's eye in a fine frenzy
rolling." Here was a revenue exacted from whom he pleased, at what times
he pleased, in what proportions he pleased, through what persons he
pleased, by what means he pleased, to be accounted for or not, at his
discretion, and to be applied to what service he thought proper. I do
believe your Lordships stand astonished at this scheme; and indeed I
should be very loath to venture to state such a scheme at all, however I
might have credited it myself, to any sober ears, if, in his defence
before the House of Commons, and before the Lords, he had not directly
admitted the fact of taking the bribes or forbidden presents, and had
not in those defences, and much more fully in his correspondence with
the Directors, admitted the fact, and justified it upon these very
principles.

As this is a thing so unheard-of and unexampled in the world, I shall
first endeavor to account as well as I can for his motives to it, which
your Lordships will receive or reject, just as you shall find them tally
with the evidence before you: I say, his motives to it; because I
contend that public valid reasons for it he could have none; and the
idea of making the corruption of the Governor-General a resource to the
Company never did or could for a moment enter into his thoughts. I shall
then take notice of the juridical constructions upon which he justifies
his acting in this extraordinary manner; and lastly, show you the
concealments, prevarications, and falsehoods with which he endeavors to
cover it. Because wherever you find a concealment you make a discovery.
Accounts of money received and paid ought to be regular and official.

He wrote over to the Court of Directors, that there were certain sums
of money he had received and which were not his own, but that he had
received them for their use. By this time his intercourse with gentlemen
of the law became more considerable than it had been before. When first
attacked for presents, he never denied the receipt of them, or pretended
to say they were for public purposes; but upon looking more into the
covenants, and probably with better legal advice, he found that no money
could be legally received for his own use; but as these bribes were
directly given and received as for his own use, yet (says he) "there was
an inward destination of them in my own mind to your benefit, and to
your benefit have I applied them."

Now here is a new system of bribery, contrary to law, very ingenious in
the contrivance, but, I believe, as unlikely to produce its intended
effect upon the mind of man as any pretence that was ever used. Here Mr.
Hastings changes his ground. Before, he was accused as a peculator; he
did not deny the fact; he did not refund the money; he fought it off; he
stood upon the defensive, and used all the means in his power to prevent
the inquiry. That was the first era of his corruption,--a bold,
ferocious, plain, downright use of power. In the second, he is grown a
little more careful and guarded,--the effect of subtilty. He appears no
longer as a defendant; he holds himself up with a firm, dignified, and
erect countenance, and says, "I am not here any longer as a delinquent,
a receiver of bribes, to be punished for what I have done wrong, or at
least to suffer in my character for it. No: I am a great inventive
genius, who have gone out of all the ordinary roads of finance, have
made great discoveries in the unknown regions of that science, and have
for the first time established the corruption of the supreme magistrate
as a principle of resource for government."

There are crimes, undoubtedly, of great magnitude, naturally fitted to
create horror, and that loudly call for punishment, that have yet no
idea of _turpitude_ annexed to them; but unclean hands, bribery,
venality, and peculation are offences of turpitude, such as, in a
governor, at once debase the person and degrade the government itself,
making it not only _horrible_, but vile and contemptible in the eyes of
all mankind. In this humiliation and abjectness of guilt, he comes here
not as a criminal on his defence, but as a vast fertile genius who has
made astonishing discoveries in the art of government,--"_Dicam insigne,
recens, alio indictum ore_"--who, by his flaming zeal and the prolific
ardor and energy of his mind, has boldly dashed out of the common path,
and served his country by new and untrodden ways; and now he generously
communicates, for the benefit of all future governors and all future
governments, the grand arcanum of his long and toilsome researches. He
is the first, but, if we do not take good care, he will not be the last,
that has established the corruption of the supreme magistrate among the
settled resources of the state; and he leaves this principle as a
bountiful donation, as the richest deposit that ever was made in the
treasury of Bengal. He claims glory and renown from that by which every
other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and
disgraced. It has been said of an ambassador, that he is a person
employed to tell lies for the advantage of the court that sends him. His
is patriotic bribery, and public-spirited corruption. He is a peculator
for the good of his country. It has been said that private vices are
public benefits. He goes the full length of that position, and turns his
private peculation into a public good. This is what you are to thank him
for. You are to consider him as a great inventor upon this occasion. Mr.
Hastings improves on this principle. He is a robber in gross, and a
thief in detail,--he steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he
extorts,--all for the good of the dear East India Company,--all for the
advantage of his honored masters, the Proprietors,--all in gratitude to
the dear perfidious Court of Directors, who have been in a practice to
heap "insults on his person, slanders on his character, and indignities
on his station,--who never had the confidence in him that they had in
the meanest of his predecessors."

If you sanction this practice, if, after all you have exacted from the
people by your taxes and public imposts, you are to let loose your
servants upon them, to extort by bribery and peculation what they can
from them, for the purpose of applying it to the public service only
whenever they please, this shocking consequence will follow from it. If
your Governor is discovered in taking a bribe, he will say, "What is
that to you? mind your business; I intend it for the public service."
The man who dares to accuse him loses the favor of the Governor-General
and the India Company. They will say, "The Governor has been doing a
meritorious action, extorting bribes for our benefit, and you have the
impudence to think of prosecuting him." So that the moment the bribe is
detected, it is instantly turned into a merit: and we shall prove that
this is the case with Mr. Hastings, whenever a bribe has been
discovered.

I am now to inform your Lordships, that, when he made these great
discoveries to the Court of Directors, he never tells them who gave him
the money, upon what occasion he received it, by what hands, or to what
purposes he applied it.

When he can himself give no account of his motives, and even declares
that he cannot assign any cause, I am authorized and required to find
motives for him,--corrupt motives for a corrupt act. There is no one
capital act of his administration that did not strongly imply
corruption. When a man is known to be free from all imputation of taking
money, and it becomes an established part of his character, the errors
or even crimes of his administration ought to be, and are in general,
traced to other sources. You know it is a maxim. But once convict a man
of bribery in any instance, and once by direct evidence, and you are
furnished with a rule of irresistible presumption that every other
irregular act by which unlawful gain may arise is done upon the same
corrupt motive. _Semel malus præsumitur semper malus._ As for good acts
candor, charity, justice oblige me not to assign evil motives, unless
they serve some scandalous purpose or terminate in some manifest evil
end, so justice, reason, and common sense compel me to suppose that
wicked acts have been done upon motives correspondent to their nature:
otherwise I reverse all the principles of judgment which can guide the
human mind, and accept even the symptoms, the marks and criteria of
guilt, as presumptions of innocence. One that confounds good and evil is
an enemy to the good.

His conduct upon these occasions may be thought irrational. But, thank
God, guilt was never a rational thing: it distorts all the faculties of
the mind; it perverts them; it leaves a man no longer in the free use of
his reason; it puts him into confusion. He has recourse to such
miserable and absurd expedients for covering his guilt as all those who
are used to sit in the seat of judgment know have been the cause of
detection of half the villanies in the world. To argue that these could
not be his reasons, because they were not wise, sound, and substantial,
would be to suppose, what is not true, that bad men were always discreet
and able. But I can very well from the circumstances discover motives
which may affect a giddy, superficial, shattered, guilty, anxious,
restless mind, full of the weak resources of fraud, craft, and intrigue,
that might induce him to make these discoveries, and to make them in the
manner he has done. Not rational, and well-fitted for their purposes, I
am very ready to admit. For God forbid that guilt should ever leave a
man the free, undisturbed use of his faculties! For as guilt never rose
from a true use of our rational faculties, so it is very frequently
subversive of them. God forbid that prudence, the first of all the
virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be
employed in the service of any of the vices! No: it takes the lead, and
is never found where justice does not accompany it; and if ever it is
attempted to bring it into the service of the vices, it immediately
subverts their cause. It tends to their discovery, and, I hope and
trust, finally to their utter ruin and destruction.

In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts
he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and
contradictory. Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one
want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the
accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts
utterly irreconcilable with each other. He is asked, "How came you to
take bonds for this money, if it was not your own? How came you to
vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company's records, and to state
yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their
debtor?" His answer was, "I really cannot tell; I have forgot my
reasons; the distance of time is so great," (namely, a time of about two
years, or not so long,) "I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps
I had this motive, perhaps I had another," (but what is the most
curious,) "perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect." You
shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own
fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions. "For my
motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the
Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of
these sums and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own
account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the
Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,--namely, that I either chose
to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds
for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my
memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not think
it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. It will not be
expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my
intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time
that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I
attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied
in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a
strong probability, follow them."

My Lords, you see, as to any direct explanation, that he fairly gives it
up: he has used artifice and stratagem, which he knows will not do; and
at last attempts to cover the treachery of his conduct by the treachery
of his memory. Frequent applications were made to Mr. Hastings upon this
article from the Company,--gentle hints, _gemitus columbæ_,--rather,
little amorous complaints that he was not more open and communicative;
but all these gentle insinuations were never able to draw from him any
further account till he came to England. When he came here, he left not
only his memory, but all his notes and references, behind in India. When
in India the Company could get no account of them, because he himself
was not in England; and when he was in England, they could get no
account, because his papers were in India. He then sends over to Mr.
Larkins to give that account of his affairs which he was not able to
give himself. Observe, here is a man taking money privately, corruptly,
and which was to be sanctified by the future application of it, taking
false securities to cover it, and who, when called upon to tell whom he
got the money from, for what ends, and on what occasion, neither will
tell in India nor can tell in England, but sends for such an account as
he has thought proper to furnish.

I am now to bring before you an account of what I think much the most
serious part of the effects of his system of bribery, corruption, and
peculation. My Lords, I am to state to you the astonishing and almost
incredible means he made use of to lay all the country under
contribution, to bring the whole into such dejection as should put his
bribes out of the way of discovery. Such another example of boldness and
contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.

I have already shown, amongst the mass of his corruptions, that he let
the whole of the lands to farm to the banians; next, that he sold the
whole Mahomedan government of that country to a woman. This was bold
enough, one should think; but without entering into the circumstances of
the revenue change in 1772, I am to tell your Lordships that he had
appointed six Provincial Councils, each consisting of many members, who
had the ordinary administration of civil justice in that country, and
the whole business of the collection of the revenues.

These Provincial Councils accounted to the Governor-General and Council,
who in the revenue department had the whole management, control, and
regulation of the revenue. Mr. Hastings did in several papers to the
Court of Directors declare, that the establishment of these Provincial
Councils, which at first he stated only as experimental, had proved
useful in the experiment,--and on that use, and upon that experiment, he
had sent even the plan of an act of Parliament, to have it confirmed
with the last and most sacred authority of this country. The Court of
Directors desired, that, if he thought any other method more proper, he
would send it to them for their approbation.

Thus the whole face of the British government, the whole of its order
and constitution, remained from 1772 to 1781. He had got rid, some time
before this period, by death, of General Clavering, by death, of Colonel
Monson, and by vexation and persecution, and his consequent dereliction
of authority, he had shaken off Mr. Francis. The whole Council
consisting only of himself and Mr. Wheler, he, having the casting vote,
was in effect the whole Council; and if ever there was a time when
principle, decency, and decorum rendered it improper for him to do any
extraordinary acts without the sanction of the Court of Directors, that
was the time. Mr. Wheler was taken off,--despair perhaps rendering the
man, who had been in opposition futilely before, compliable. The man is
dead. He certainly did not oppose him; if he had, it would have been in
vain. But those very circumstances which rendered it atrocious in Mr.
Hastings to make any change induced him to make this. He thought that a
moment's time was not to be lost,--that other colleagues might come,
where he might be overpowered by a majority again, and not able to
pursue his corrupt plans. Therefore he was resolved,--your Lordships
will remark the whole of this most daring and systematic plan of bribery
and peculation,--he resolved to put it out of the power of his Council
in future to check or control him in any of his evil practices.

The first thing he did was to form an ostensible council at Calcutta for
the management of the revenues, which was not effectually bound, except
it thought fit, to make any reference to the Supreme Council. He
delegated to them--that is, to four covenanted servants--those functions
which by act of Parliament and the Company's orders were to be exercised
by the Council-General; he delegated to four gentlemen, creatures of his
own, his own powers, but he laid them out to good interest. It appears
odd that one of the first acts to a Governor-General, so jealous of his
power as he is known to be, as soon as he had all the power in his own
hands, should be to put all the revenues out of his own control. This
upon the first view is an extraordinary proceeding. His next step was,
without apprising the Court of Directors of his intention, or without
having given an idea of any such intention to his colleagues while
alive, either those who died in India, or those who afterwards returned
to Europe, in one day, in a moment, to annihilate the whole authority of
the Provincial Councils, and delegate the whole power to these four
gentlemen.

These four gentlemen had for their secretary an agent given them by Mr.
Hastings: a name that you will often hear of; a name at the sound of
which all India turns pale; the most wicked, the most atrocious, the
boldest, the most dexterous villain that ever the rank servitude of that
country has produced. My Lords, I am speaking with the most assured
freedom, because there never was a friend of Mr. Hastings, there never
was a foe of Mr. Hastings, there never was any human person, that ever
differed on this occasion, or expressed any other idea of Gunga Govind
Sing, the friend of Mr. Hastings, whom he intrusted with this important
post. But you shall hear, from the account given by themselves, what the
Council thought of their functions, of their efficiency for the charge,
and in whose hands that efficiency really was. I beg, hope, and trust,
that your Lordships will learn from the persons themselves who were
appointed to execute the office their opinion of the real execution of
it, in order that you may judge of the plan for which he destroyed the
whole English administration in India.

"The Committee must have a dewan, or executive officer, call him by what
name you please. This man, in fact, has all the revenue paid at the
Presidency at his disposal, and can, if he has any abilities, bring all
the renters under contribution. It is little advantage to restrain the
Committee themselves from bribery or corruption, when their executive
officer has the power of practising both undetected. To display the arts
employed by a native on such occasions would fill a volume. He discovers
the secret resources of the zemindars and renters, their enemies and
competitors; and by the engines of hope and fear, raised upon these
foundations, he can work them to his purpose. The Committee, with the
best intentions, best abilities, and steadiest application, must after
all be a tool in the hands of their dewan."

Your Lordships see what the opinion of the Council was of their own
constitution. You see for what it was made. You see for what purposes
the great revenue trust was taken from the Council-General, from the
supreme government. You see for what purposes the executive power was
destroyed. You have it from one of the gentlemen of this commission, at
first four in number, and afterwards five, who was the most active,
efficient member of it. You see it was made for the purpose of being a
tool in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; that integrity, ability, and
vigilance could avail nothing; that the whole country might be laid
under contribution by this man, and that he could thus practise bribery
with impunity. Thus your Lordships see the delegation of all the
authority of the country, above and below, is given by Mr. Hastings to
this Gunga Govind Sing. The screen, the veil, spread before this
transaction, is torn open by the very people themselves who are the
tools in it. They confess they can do nothing; they know they are
instruments in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; and Mr. Hastings uses his
name and authority to make them such in the hands of the basest, the
wickedest, the corruptest, the most audacious and atrocious villain ever
heard of. It is to him all the English authority is sacrificed, and four
gentlemen are appointed to be his tools and instruments. Tools and
instruments for what? They themselves state, that, if he has the
inclination, he has the power and ability to lay the whole country under
contribution, that he enters into the most minute secrets of every
individual in it, gets into the bottom of their family affairs, and has
a power totally to subvert and destroy them; and we shall show upon that
head, that he well fulfilled the purposes for which he was appointed.
Did Mr. Hastings pretend to say that he destroyed the Provincial
Councils for their corruptness or insufficiency, when he dissolved them?
No: he says he has no objection to their competency, no charge to make
against their conduct, but that he has destroyed them for his new
arrangement. And what is his new arrangement? Gunga Govind Sing. Forty
English gentlemen were removed from their offices by that change. Mr.
Hastings did it, however, very economically; for all these gentlemen
were instantly put upon pensions, and consequently burdened the
establishment with a new charge. Well, but the new Council was formed
and constituted upon a very economical principle also. These five
gentlemen, you will have it in proof, with the necessary expenses of
their office, were a charge of 62,000_l._ a year upon the establishment.
But for great, eminent, capital services, 62,000_l._, though a much
larger sum than what was thought fit to be allowed for the members of
the Supreme Council itself, may be admitted. I will pass it. It shall be
granted to Mr. Hastings, that these pensions, though they created a new
burden on the establishment, were all well disposed, provided the
Council did their duty. But you have heard what they say themselves:
they are not there put to do any duty; they can do no duty; their
abilities, their integrity, avail them nothing; they are tools in the
hands of Gunga Govind Sing. Mr. Hastings, then, has loaded the revenue
with 62,000_l._ a year to make Gunga Govind Sing master of the kingdoms
of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. What must the thing to be moved be, when
the machinery, when the necessary tools, for Gunga Govind Sing have cost
62,000_l._ a year to the Company? There it is; it is not my
representation, not the representation of observant strangers, of good
and decent people, that understand the nature of that service, but the
opinion of the tools themselves.

Now did Mr. Hastings employ Gunga Govind Sing without a knowledge of his
character? His character was known to Mr. Hastings: it was recorded long
before, when he was turned out of another office. "During my long
residence," says he, "in this country, this is the first time I heard of
the character of Gunga Govind Sing being infamous. No information I have
received, though I have heard _many_ people speak ill of him, ever
pointed to any particular _act_ of infamy committed by Gunga Govind
Sing. I have no intimate knowledge of Gunga Govind Sing. What I
understand of his character has been from Europeans as well as natives."
After,--"He had many enemies at the time he was proposed to be employed
in the Company's service, and not _one advocate_ among the natives who
had immediate access to myself. I think, therefore, if his character had
been such as has been described, the knowledge of it could hardly have
failed to have been ascertained to me by the _specific_ facts. I have
heard him loaded, as I have many others, with general reproaches, but
have never heard any one express a doubt of _his abilities_." Now, if
anything in the world should induce you to put the whole trust of the
revenues of Bengal, both above and below, into the hands of a single
man, and to delegate to him the whole jurisdiction of the country, it
must be that he either was, or at least was reputed to be, a man of
integrity. Mr. Hastings does not pretend that he is reputed to be a man
of integrity. He knew that he was not able to contradict the charge
brought against him, and that he had been turned out of office by his
colleagues, for reasons assigned upon record, and approved by the
Directors, for malversation in office. He had, indeed, crept again into
the Calcutta Committee; and they were upon the point of turning him out
for malversation, when Mr. Hastings saved them the trouble by turning
out the whole Committee, consisting of a president and five members. So
that in all times, in all characters, in all places, he stood as a man
of a bad character and evil repute, though supposed to be a man of great
abilities.

My Lords, permit me for one moment to drop my representative character
here, and to speak to your Lordships only as a man of some experience in
the world, and conversant with the affairs of men and with the
characters of men.

I do, then, declare my conviction, and wish it may stand recorded to
posterity, that there never was a _bad man_ that had ability for _good
service_. It is not in the nature of such men; their minds are so
distorted to selfish purposes, to knavish, artificial, and crafty means
of accomplishing those selfish ends, that, if put to any good service,
they are poor, dull, helpless. Their natural faculties never have that
direction; they are paralytic on that side; the muscles, if I may use
the expression, that ought to move it, are all dead. They know nothing,
but how to pursue selfish ends by wicked and indirect means. No man ever
knowingly employed a bad man on account of his abilities, but for evil
ends. Mr. Hastings knew this man to be bad; all the world knew him to be
bad; and how did he employ him? In such a manner as that he might be
controlled by others? A great deal might be said for him, if this had
been the case. There might be circumstances in which such a man might be
used in a subordinate capacity. But who ever thought of putting such a
man virtually in possession of the whole authority both of the Committee
and the Council-General, and of the revenues of the whole country?

As soon as we find Gunga Govind Sing here, we find him employed in the
way in which he was meant to be employed: that is to say, we find him
employed in taking corrupt bribes and corrupt presents for Mr. Hastings.
Though the Committee were tools in his hands, he was a tool in the hands
of Mr. Hastings; for he had, as we shall prove, constant, uniform, and
close communications with Mr. Hastings. And, indeed, we may be saved a
good deal of the trouble of proof; for Mr. Hastings himself, by
acknowledging him to be his bribe-broker, has pretty well authenticated
a secret correspondence between them. For the next great bribe as yet
discovered to be taken by Mr. Hastings, about the time of his great
operation of 1781, was the bribe of 40,000_l._, which we charge to have
been privately taken from one of two persons, but from which is not yet
ascertained, but paid to him through this flagitious black agent of his
iniquities, Gunga Govind Sing. The discovery is made by another agent of
his, called Mr. Larkins, one of his white bribe-confidants, and by him
made Accountant-General to the Supreme Presidency. For this sum, so
clandestinely and corruptly taken, he received a bond to himself, on his
own account, as for money lent to the Company. For, upon the frequent,
pressing, tender solicitations of the Court of Directors, always
insinuated to him in a very delicate manner, Mr. Hastings had written to
Mr. Larkins to find out, if he could, some of his own bribes; and
accordingly Mr. Larkins sent over an account of various bribes,--an
account which, even before it comes directly in evidence before you, it
will be pleasant to your Lordships to read. In this account, under the
head, "_Dinagepore, No. 1_," I find "_Duplicate copy of the particulars
of debts, in which the component parts of sundry sums received on the
account of the Honorable Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies
were received by Mr. Hastings and paid to the Sub-Treasurer_." We find
here, "_Dinagepore peshcush, four lacs of rupees, cabooleat_": that is,
an agreement to pay four lacs of rupees, of which three were received
and one remained in balance at the time this account was made out. All
that we can learn from this account, after all our researches, after all
the Court of Directors could do to squeeze it out of him, is, that he
received from Dinagepore, at twelve monthly payments, a sum of about
three lacs of rupees, upon an engagement to pay him four; that is, he
received about 30,000_l._ out of 40,000_l._ which was to be paid him:
and we are told that he received this sum through the hands of Gunga
Govind Sing; and that he was exceedingly angry with Gunga Govind Sing
for having kept back or defrauded him of the sum of 10,000_l._ out of
the 40,000_l._ To keep back from him the fourth part of the whole bribe
was very reprehensible behavior in Gunga Govind Sing, certainly very
unworthy of the great and high trust which Mr. Hastings reposed in his
integrity. My Lords, this letter tells us Mr. Hastings was much
irritated at Gunga Govind Sing. You will hereafter see how Mr. Hastings
behaves to persons against whom he is irritated for their frauds upon
him in their joint concerns. In the mean time Gunga Govind Sing rests
with you as a person with whom Mr. Hastings is displeased on account of
infidelity in the honorable trust of bribe undertaker and manager.

My Lords, you are not very much enlightened, I believe, by seeing these
words, _Dinagepore peshcush_. We find a province, we find a sum of
money, we find an agent, and we find a receiver. The _province_ is
_Dinagepore_, the _agent_ is _Gunga Govind Sing_, the _sum_ agreed on is
40,000_l._, and the _receiver_ of a part of that is _Mr. Hastings_. This
is all that can be seen. Who it was that gave this sum of money to Mr.
Hastings in this manner does no way appear; it is _murder by persons
unknown_: and this is the way in which Mr. Hastings, after all the
reiterated solicitations of Parliament, of the Company, and the public,
has left the account of this bribe.

Let us, however, now see what was the state of transactions at
Dinagepore at that period. For, if Mr. Hastings in the transactions at
that period did anything for that country, it must be presumed this
money was given for those acts; for Mr. Hastings confesses it was a sum
of money corruptly received, but honestly applied. It does not signify
much, at first view, from whom he received it; it is enough to fix upon
him that he did receive it. But because the consequences of his bribes
make the main part of what I intend to bring before your Lordships, I
shall beg to state to you, with your indulgence, what I have been able
to discover by a very close investigation of the records respecting this
business of Dinagepore.

Dinagepore, Rungpore, and Edrackpore make a country, I believe, pretty
nearly as large as all the northern counties of England, Yorkshire
included. It is no mean country, and it has a prince of great, ancient,
illustrious descent at the head of it, called the Rajah of Dinagepore.

I find, that, about the month of July, 1780, the Rajah of Dinagepore,
after a long and lingering illness, died, leaving an half-brother and an
adopted son. A litigation respecting the succession instantly arose in
the family; and this litigation was of course referred to, and was
finally to be decided by, the Governor-General in Council,--being the
ultimate authority to which the decision of all these questions was to
be referred. This cause came before Mr. Hastings, and I find that he
decided the question in favor of the adopted son of the Rajah against
his half-brother. I find that upon that decision a rent was settled, and
a peshcush, or fine, paid. So that all that is in this transaction is
fair and above-board: there is a dispute settled; there is a fine paid;
there is a rent reserved to the Company; and the whole is a fair
settlement. But I find along with it very extraordinary acts; for I find
Mr. Hastings taking part in favor of the minor, agreeably to the
principles of others, and contrary to his own. I find that he gave the
guardianship of this adopted son to the brother of the Ranny, as she is
called, or the widow of the deceased Rajah; and though the hearing and
settling of this business was actually a part of the duty of his office,
yet I find, that, when the steward of the province of Dinagepore was
coming down to represent this case to Mr. Hastings, Mr. Hastings, on
pretence that it would only tend to increase the family dissensions, so
far from hearing fully all the parties in this business, not only sent
him back, but ordered him to be actually turned out of his office. If,
then, the 40,000_l._ be the same with the money taken from the Rajah in
1780, to which account it seems to refer, (for it was taken in regular
payments, beginning July, 1780, and ending at the same period in 1781,)
it was a sum of money corruptly taken by him as a judge in a litigation
of inheritance between two great parties. So that he received the sum of
40,000_l._ for a judgment; which, whether that judgment was right or
wrong, true or false, he corruptly received.

This sum was received, as your Lordships will observe, through Gunga
Govind Sing. He was the broker of the agreement: he was the person who
was to receive it by monthly instalments, and he was to pay it to Mr.
Hastings. His son was in the office of Register-General of the whole
country, who had in his custody all the papers, documents, and
everything which could tend to settle a litigation among the parties. If
Mr. Hastings took this bribe from the Rajah of Dinagepore, he took a
bribe from an infant of five years old through the hands of the
Register. That is, the judge receives a bribe through the hands of the
keeper of the genealogies of the family, the records and other
documents, which must have had the principal share in settling the
question.

This history of this Dinagepore peshcush is the public one received by
the Company, and which is entered upon the record,--but not the private,
and probably the true history of this corrupt transaction.

Very soon after this decision, very soon after this peshcush was given,
we find all the officers of the young Rajah, who was supposed to have
given it, turned out of their employment by Gunga Govind Sing,--by the
very man who received the peshcush for Mr. Hastings. We find them all
turned out of their employments; we find them all accused, without any
appearance or trace in the records of any proof of embezzlement, of
neglect in the education of the minor Rajah, of the mismanagement of his
affairs, or the allotment of an unsuitable allowance. And accordingly,
to prevent the relations of his adopted mother, to prevent those who
might be supposed to have an immediate interest in the family, from
abusing the trust of his education and the trust of the management of
his fortune, Gunga Govind Sing, (for I trust your Lordships would not
suffer me, if I had a mind, to quote that tool of a thing, the Committee
of Revenue, bought at 62,000_l._ a year,--you would not suffer me to
name it, especially when you know all the secret agency of bribes in the
hand of Gunga Govind Sing,)--this Gunga Govind Sing produces soon after
another character, to whom he consigns the custody of the whole family
and the whole province.

I will do Mr. Hastings the justice to say, that, if he had known there
was another man more accomplished in all iniquity than Gunga Govind
Sing, he would not have given him the first place in his confidence. But
there is another next to him in the country, whom you are to hear of
by-and-by, called Debi Sing. This person, in the universal opinion of
all Bengal, is ranked next to Gunga Govind Sing; and, what is very
curious, they have been recorded by Mr. Hastings as rivals in the same
virtues.

                Arcades ambo,
    Et cantare pares, et respondere parati.

But Mr. Hastings has the happiest modes in the world: these rivals were
reconciled on this occasion, and Gunga Govind Sing appoints Debi Sing,
superseding all the other officers for no reason whatever upon record.
And because, like champions, they ought to go in pairs, there is an
English gentleman, one Mr. Goodlad, whom you will hear of presently,
appointed along with him. Absolute strangers to the Rajah's family, the
first act they do is to cut off a thousand out of sixteen hundred a
month from his allowance. They state (though there was a great number of
dependants to maintain) that six hundred would be enough to maintain
him. There appears in the account of these proceedings to be such a
flutter about the care of the Rajah, and the management of his
household: in short, that there never was such a tender guardianship as,
always with the knowledge of Mr. Hastings, is exercised over this poor
Rajah, who had just given (if he did give) 40,000_l._ for _his own_
inheritance, if it was his due,--for the inheritance of _others_, if it
was not his due. One would think he was entitled to some mercy; but,
probably because the money could not otherwise be supplied, his
establishment was cut down by Debi Sing and Mr. Goodlad a thousand a
month, which is just twelve thousand a year.

When Mr. Hastings had appointed those persons to the guardianship who
had an interest in the management of the Rajah's education and fortune,
one should have thought, before they were turned out, he would at least
have examined whether such a step was proper or not. No: they were
turned out without any such examination; and when I come to inquire into
the proceedings of Gunga Govind Sing's Committee, I do not find that the
new guardians have brought to account one single shilling they received,
appointed as they were by that council newly made to superintend all the
affairs of the Rajah. There is not one word to be found of an account:
Debi Sing's honor, fidelity, and disinterestedness, and that of Mr.
Goodlad, is sufficient; and that is the way in which the management and
superintendence of one of the greatest houses in that country is given
to the guardianship of strangers. And how is it managed? We find Debi
Sing in possession of the Rajah's family, in possession of his affairs,
in the management of his whole zemindary; and in the course of the next
year he is to give him in farm the whole of the revenues of these three
provinces. Now whether the peshcush was received for the nomination of
the Rajah as a bribe in judgment, or whether Mr. Hastings got it from
Debi Sing as a bribe in office, for appointing him to the guardianship
of a family that did not belong to him, and for the dominion of three
great and once wealthy provinces,--(which is best or worst I shall not
pretend to determine,)--you find the Rajah in his possession; you find
his education, his household, in his possession; the public revenues are
in his possession; they are given over to him.

If we look at the records, the letting of these provinces appears to
have been carried on by the new Committee of Revenue, as the course and
order of business required it should. But by the investigation into Mr.
Hastings's money transactions, the insufficiency and fallacy of these
records is manifest beyond a doubt. From this investigation it is
discovered that it was in reality a bargain secretly struck between the
Governor-General and Debi Sing, and that the Committee were only
employed in the mere official forms. From the time that Mr. Hastings
new-modelled the revenue system, nothing is seen in its true shape. We
now know, in spite of the fallacy of these records, who the true grantor
was: it will not be amiss to go a little further in supplying their
defects, and to inquire a little concerning the grantee. This makes it
necessary for me to inform your Lordships who Debi Sing is.

     [_Mr. Burke read the Committee's recommendation of Debi Sing to the
     Governor-General and Council; but the copy of the paper alluded to
     is wanting._]

       *       *       *       *       *

Here is a choice; here is Debi Sing presented for his knowledge in
business, his trust and fidelity, and that he is a person against whom
no objection can be made. This is presented to Mr. Hastings, by him
recorded in the Council Books, and by him transmitted to the Court of
Directors. Mr. Hastings has since recorded, that he knew this Debi Sing,
(though he here publicly authorizes the nomination of him to all that
great body of trusts,)--that he knew him to be a man completely capable
of the most atrocious iniquities that were ever charged upon man. Debi
Sing is appointed to all those great trusts, through the means of Gunga
Govind Sing, from whom he (Mr. Hastings) had received 30,000_l._ as a
part of a bribe.

Now, though it is a large field, though it is a thing that I must
confess I feel a reluctance almost in venturing to undertake, exhausted
as I am, yet such is the magnitude of the affair, such the evil
consequences that followed from a system of bribery, such the horrible
consequences of superseding all the persons in office in the country to
give it into the hands of Debi Sing, that, though it is the public
opinion, and though no man that has ever heard the name of Debi Sing
does not know that he was only second to Gunga Govind Sing, yet it is
not to my purpose, unless I prove that Mr. Hastings knew his character
at the very time he accepts him as a person against whom no exception
could be made.

It is necessary to inform your Lordships who this Debi Sing was, to whom
these great trusts were committed, and those great provinces given.

It may be thought, and not unnaturally, that, in this sort of corrupt
and venal appointment to high trust and office, Mr. Hastings has no
other consideration than the money he received. But whoever thinks so
will be deceived. Mr. Hastings was very far from indifferent to the
character of the persons he dealt with. On the contrary, he made a most
careful selection; he had a very scrupulous regard to the aptitude of
the men for the purposes for which he employed them, and was much guided
by his experience of their conduct in those offices which had been sold
to them upon former occasions.

Except Gunga Govind Sing, (whom, as justice required, Mr. Hastings
distinguished by the highest marks of his confidence,) there was not a
man in Bengal, perhaps not upon earth, a match for this Debi Sing. He
was not an unknown subject, not one rashly taken up as an experiment. He
was a tried man; and if there had been one more desperately and
abandonedly corrupt, more wildly and flagitiously oppressive, to be
found unemployed in India, large as his offers were, Mr. Hastings would
not have taken this money from Debi Sing.

Debi Sing was one of those who in the early stages of the English power
in Bengal attached himself to those natives who then stood high in
office. He courted Mahomed Reza Khân, a Mussulman of the highest rank,
of the tribe of Koreish, whom I have already mentioned, then at the head
of the revenue, and now at the head of the criminal justice of Bengal,
with all the supple assiduity of which those who possess no valuable art
or useful talent are commonly complete masters. Possessing large funds,
acquired by his apprenticeship and novitiate in the lowest frauds, he
was enabled to lend to this then powerful man, in the several
emergencies of his variable fortune, very large sums of money. This
great man had been brought down by Mr. Hastings, under the orders of the
Court of Directors, upon a cruel charge, to Calcutta. He was accused of
many crimes, and acquitted, 220,000_l._ in debt: that is to say, as soon
as he was a great debtor, he ceased to be a great criminal.

Debi Sing obtained by his services no slight influence over Mahomed Reza
Khân, a person of a character very different from his.

From that connection he was appointed to the farm of the revenue, and
inclusively of the government of Purneah, a province of very great
extent, and then in a state of no inconsiderable opulence. In this
office he exerted his talents with so much vigor and industry that in a
very short time the province was half depopulated and totally ruined.

The farm, on the expiration of his lease, was taken by a set of
adventurers in this kind of traffic from Calcutta. But when the new
undertakers came to survey the object of their future operations and
future profits, they were so shocked at the hideous and squalid scenes
of misery and desolation that glared upon them in every quarter, that
they instantly fled out of the country, and thought themselves but too
happy to be permitted, on the payment of a penalty of twelve thousand
pounds, to be released from their engagements.

To give in a few words as clear an idea as I am able to give of the
immense volume which might be composed of the vexations, violence, and
rapine of that tyrannical administration, the territorial revenue of
Purneah, which had been let to Debi Sing at the rate of 160,000_l._
sterling a year, was with difficulty leased for a yearly sum under
90,000_l._, and with all rigor of exaction produced in effect little
more than 60,000_l._, falling greatly below one half of its original
estimate: so entirely did the administration of Debi Sing exhaust all
the resources of the province; so totally did his baleful influence
blast the very hope and spring of all future revenue.

The administration of Debi Sing was too notoriously destructive not to
cause a general clamor. It was impossible that it should be passed over
without animadversion. Accordingly, in the month of September, 1772, Mr.
Hastings, then at the head of the Committee of Circuit, removed him for
maladministration; and he has since publicly declared on record that he
knew him to be capable of all the most horrid and atrocious crimes that
can be imputed to man.

This brand, however, was only a mark for Mr. Hastings to find him out
hereafter in the crowd, to identify him for his own, and to call him
forth into action, when his virtues should be sufficiently matured for
the services in which he afterwards employed him, through his
instruments, Mr. Anderson and Gunga Govind Sing. In the mean time he
left Debi Sing to the direction of his own good genius.

Debi Sing was stigmatized in the Company's records, his reputation was
gone, but his funds were safe. In the arrangement made by Mr. Hastings,
in the year 1773, by which Provincial Councils were formed, Debi Sing
became deputy-steward, or secretary, (soon in effect and influence
principal steward,) to the Provincial Council of Moorshedabad, the seat
of the old government, and the first province of the kingdom; and to his
charge were committed various extensive and populous provinces, yielding
an annual revenue of one hundred and twenty lacs of rupees, or
1,500,000_l._ This division of Provincial Council included Rungpore,
Edrackpore, and others, where he obtained such a knowledge of their
resources as subsequently to get possession of them.

Debi Sing found this administration composed mostly of young men,
dissipated and fond of pleasure, as is usual at that time of life, but
desirous of reconciling those pleasures, which usually consume wealth,
with the means of making a great and speedy fortune,--at once eager
candidates for opulence, and perfect novices in all the roads that lead
to it. Debi Sing commiserated their youth and inexperience, and took
upon him to be their guide.

There is a revenue in that country, raised by a tax more productive than
laudable. It is an imposition on public prostitutes, a duty upon the
societies of dancing-girls,--those seminaries from which Mr. Hastings
has selected an administrator of justice and governor of kingdoms. Debi
Sing thought it expedient to farm this tax,--not only because he
neglected no sort of gain, but because he regarded it as no contemptible
means of power and influence. Accordingly, in plain terms, he opened a
legal brothel, out of which he carefully reserved (you may be sure) the
very flower of his collection for the entertainment of his young
superiors: ladies recommended not only by personal merit, but, according
to the Eastern custom, by sweet and enticing names which he had given
them. For, if they were to be translated, they would sound,--Riches of
my Life, Wealth of my Soul, Treasure of Perfection, Diamond of Splendor,
Pearl of Price, Ruby of Pure Blood, and other metaphorical descriptions,
that, calling up dissonant passions to enhance the value of the general
harmony, heightened the attractions of love with the allurements of
avarice. A moving seraglio of these ladies always attended his progress,
and were always brought to the splendid and multiplied entertainments
with which he regaled his Council. In these festivities, whilst his
guests were engaged with the seductions of beauty, the intoxications of
the most delicious wines of France, and the voluptuous vapor of perfumed
India smoke, uniting the vivid satisfactions of Europe with the torpid
blandishments of Asia, the great magician himself, chaste in the midst
of dissoluteness, sober in the centre of debauch, vigilant in the lap of
negligence and oblivion, attended with an eagle's eye the moment for
thrusting in business, and at such times was able to carry without
difficulty points of shameful enormity, which at other hours he would
not so much as have dared to mention to his employers, young men rather
careless and inexperienced than intentionally corrupt. Not satisfied
with being pander to their pleasures, he anticipated and was purveyor to
their wants, and supplied them with a constant command of money; and by
these means he reigned with an uncontrolled dominion over the province
and over its governors.

For you are to understand that in many things we are very much
misinformed with regard to the true seat of power in India. Whilst we
were proudly calling India a British government, it was in substance a
government of the lowest, basest, and most flagitious of the native
rabble, to whom the far greater part of the English who figured in
employment and station had from their earliest youth been slaves and
instruments. Banians had anticipated the period of their power in
premature advances of money, and have ever after obtained the entire
dominion over their nominal masters.

By these various ways and means Debi Sing contrived to add job to job,
employment to employment, and to hold, besides the farms of two very
considerable districts, various trusts in the revenue,--sometimes
openly appearing, sometimes hid two or three deep in false names,
emerging into light or shrouding himself in darkness, as successful or
defeated crimes rendered him bold or cautious. Every one of these trusts
was marked with its own fraud; and for one of those frauds, committed by
him in another name, by which he became deeply in balance to the
revenue, he was publicly whipped _by proxy_.

All this while Mr. Hastings kept his eye upon him, and attended to his
progress. But as he rose in Mr. Hastings's opinion, he fell in that of
his immediate employers. By degrees, as reason prevailed, and the fumes
of pleasure evaporated, the Provincial Council emerged from their first
dependence, and, finding nothing but infamy attending the councils and
services of such a man, resolved to dismiss him. In this strait and
crisis of his power the artist turned himself into all shapes. He
offered great sums individually, he offered them collectively, and at
last put a _carte blanche_ on the table,--all to no purpose. "What are
you?--stones? Have I not men to deal with? Will flesh and blood refuse
me?"

When Debi Sing found that the Council had entirely escaped, and were
proof against his offers, he left them with a sullen and menacing
silence. He applied where he had good intelligence that these offers
would be well received, and that he should at once be revenged of the
Council, and obtain all the ends which through them he had sought in
vain.

Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a set of innocent
officers,--sold his fellow-servants of the Company, entitled by every
duty to his protection,--sold English subjects, recommended by every tie
of national sympathy,--sold the honor of the British government
itself,--without charge, without complaint, without allegation of crime
in conduct, or of insufficiency in talents: he sold them to the most
known and abandoned character which the rank servitude of that clime
produces. For _him_ he entirely broke and quashed the Council of
Moorshedabad, which had been the settled government for twelve years, (a
long period in the changeful history of India,)--at a time, too, when it
had acquired a great degree of consistency, an official experience, a
knowledge and habit of business, and was making full amends for early
errors.

For now Mr. Hastings, having buried Colonel Monson and General
Clavering, and having shaken off Mr. Francis, who retired half dead from
office, began at length to respire; he found elbow-room once more to
display his genuine nature and disposition, and to make amends in a riot
and debauch of peculation for the forced abstinence to which he was
reduced during the usurped dominion of honor and integrity.

It was not enough that the English were thus sacrificed to the revenge
of Debi Sing. It was necessary to deliver over the natives to his
avarice. By the intervention of bribe-brokerage he united the two great
rivals in iniquity, who before, from an emulation of crimes, were
enemies to each other,--Gunga Govind Sing and Debi Sing. He negotiated
the bribe and the farm of the latter through the former; and Debi Sing
was invested in farm for two years with the three provinces of
Dinagepore, Edrackpore, and Rungpore,--territories making together a
tract of land superior in dimensions to the northern counties of
England, Yorkshire included.

To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle on the full swing of
his genius, he removed all the restraints which had been framed to give
an ostensible credit, to give some show of official order, to the plans
of revenue administration framed from time to time in Bengal. An
officer, called a _dewan_, had been established in the provinces,
expressly as a check on the person who should act as farmer-general.
This office he conferred along with that of farmer-general on Debi Sing,
in order that Debi might become an effectual check upon Sing; and thus
these provinces, without inspection, without control, without law, and
without magistrates, were delivered over by Mr. Hastings, bound hand and
foot, to the discretion of the man whom he had before recorded as the
destroyer of Purneah, and capable of every the most atrocious wickedness
that could be imputed to man.

Fatally for the natives of India, every wild project and every corrupt
sale of Mr. Hastings, and those whose example he followed, is covered
with a pretended increase of revenue to the Company. Mr. Hastings would
not pocket his bribe of 40,000_l._ for himself without letting the
Company in as a sharer and accomplice. For the province of Rungpore, the
object to which I mean in this instance to confine your attention,
7,000_l._ a year was added. But lest this avowed increase of rent should
seem to lead to oppression, great and religious care was taken in the
covenant so stipulated with Debi Sing, that _this_ increase should not
arise from any additional assessment whatsoever on the country, but
solely from improvements in the cultivation, and the encouragement to be
given to the landholder and husbandman. But as Mr. Hastings's bribe, of
a far greater sum, was not guarded by any such provision, it was left to
the discretion of the donor in what manner he was to indemnify himself
for it.

Debi Sing fixed the seat of his authority at Dinagepore, where, as soon
as he arrived, he did not lose a moment in doing his duty. If Mr.
Hastings can forget his covenant, you may easily believe that Debi Sing
had not a more correct memory; and accordingly, as soon as he came into
the province, he instantly broke every covenant which he had entered
into as a restraint on his avarice, rapacity, and tyranny, which, from
the highest of the nobility and gentry to the lowest husbandmen, were
afterwards exercised, with a stern and unrelenting impartiality, upon
the whole people. For, notwithstanding the province before Debi Sing's
lease was, from various causes, in a state of declension, and in balance
for the revenue of the preceding year, at his very first entrance into
office he forced from the zemindars or landed gentry an enormous
increase of their tribute. They refused compliance. On this refusal he
threw the whole body of zemindars into prison, and thus in bonds and
fetters compelled them to sign their own ruin by an increase of rent
which they knew they could never realize. Having thus gotten them under,
he added exaction to exaction, so that every day announced some new and
varied demand, until, exhausted by these oppressions, they were brought
to the extremity to which he meant to drive them, the sale of their
lands.

The lands held by the zemindars of that country are of many
descriptions. The first and most general are those that pay revenue; the
others are of the nature of demesne lands, which are free, and pay no
rent to government. The latter are for the immediate support of the
zemindars and their families,--as from the former they derive their
influence, authority, and the means of upholding their dignity. The
lands of the former description were immediately attached, sequestered,
and sold for the most trifling consideration. The rent-free lands, the
best and richest lands of the whole province, were sold,--sold for--what
do your Lordships think? They were sold for less than one year's
purchase,--at less than one year's purchase, at the most underrated
value; so that the fee-simple of an English acre of rent-free land sold
at the rate of seven or eight shillings. Such a sale, on such terms,
strongly indicated the purchaser. And how did it turn out in fact? The
purchaser was the very agent and instrument of Mr. Hastings, Debi Sing
himself. He made the exaction; he forced the sale; he reduced the rate;
and he became the purchaser at less than one year's purchase, and paid
with the very money which he had extorted from the miserable vendors.

When he had thus sold and separated these lands, he united the whole
body of them, amounting to about 7,000_l._ sterling a year (but,
according to the rate of money and living in that country, equivalent to
a rental in England of 30,000_l._ a year); and then having raised in the
new letting, as on the sale he had fraudulently reduced those lands, he
reserved them as an estate for himself, or to whomsoever resembling
himself Mr. Hastings should order them to be disposed.

The lands, thus sold for next to nothing, left of course the late
landholder still in debt. The failure of fund, the rigorous exaction of
debt, and the multiplication of new arbitrary taxes next carried off the
goods.

There is a circumstance attending this business which will call for
your Lordships' pity. Most of the landholders or zemindars in that
country happened at that time to be women. The sex there is in a state
certainly resembling imprisonment, but guarded as a sacred treasure with
all possible attention and respect. None of the coarse male hands of the
law can reach them; but they have a custom, very cautiously used in all
good governments there, of employing female bailiffs or sergeants in the
execution of the law, where that sex is concerned. Guards, therefore,
surrounded the houses; and then female sergeants and bailiffs entered
into the habitations of these female zemindars, and held their goods and
persons in execution,--nothing being left but what was daily threatened,
their life and honor. The landholders, even women of eminent rank and
condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled
from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable
followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous,
without protection and without bread. The monthly instalment of Mr.
Hastings's bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the
vitals of the people.

The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all
the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and
pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support
infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the
blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the
enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of
violence and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had
been before made away with. Even the lands and funds set aside for
their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their
miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial
sufferings of their lives,--even the very feeble consolations of death,
were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,--a tyranny more consuming than
the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than
death itself,--seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and
the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.

Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people. Were
the lower, the more industrious, spared? Alas! as their situation was
far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and
grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more
vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary. To afford your Lordships
some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr.
Hastings's hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the
very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing. Debi
Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of
gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country,
had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the
improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.

"It is notorious," says he, "that poverty generally prevails amongst the
husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the
country. They are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time
they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence.
And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the
famine. Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses
only a handful of straw, the sale of a _thousand_ of which would not
perhaps produce twenty shillings."

These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was
to obtain a gift of 40,000_l._, over and above a large increase of rent,
over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself
for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit
of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.

Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences. All
this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven
like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by
imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more
than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.

Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive
imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was
not put in practice. On its own day your Lordships will hear, with
astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous
inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded
demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent
on which they were piled.

The country being in many parts left wholly waste and in all parts
considerably depopulated by the first rigors, the full rate of the
district was exacted from the miserable survivors. Their burdens were
increased, as their fellow-laborers, to whose joint efforts they were to
owe the means of payment, diminished. Driven to make payments beyond all
possible calculation, previous to receipts and above their means, in a
very short time they fell into the hands of usurers.

The usurers, who under such a government held their own funds by a
precarious tenure, and were to lend to those whose substance was still
more precarious, to the natural hardness and austerity of that race of
men had additional motives to extortion, and made their terms
accordingly. And what were the terms these poor people were obliged to
consent to, to answer the bribes and peshcush paid to Mr.
Hastings?--five, ten, twenty, forty per cent? No! at an interest of six
hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day! A tiller of land to pay
six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government! What
exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of
wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder
between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the
country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted,
overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part
of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. An
universal treasury extent and process of execution followed on the
cattle and stock, and was enforced with more or less rigor in every
quarter. We have it in evidence, that in those sales five cows were sold
for not more than seven or eight shillings. All other things were
depreciated in the same proportion. The sale of the instruments of
husbandry succeeded to that of the corn and stock. Instances there are,
where, all other things failing, the farmers were dragged from the court
to their houses, in order to see them first plundered, and then burnt
down before their faces. It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it
was a savage war made upon the country.

The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies.
The families were disposed of. It is a known observation, that those who
have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly
attached to their children and wives. The most tender of parents sold
their children at market. The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their
wives. The tyranny of Mr. Hastings extinguished every sentiment of
father, son, brother, and husband!

I come now to the last stage of their miseries. Everything visible and
vendible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.

It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from
the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors,
all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature,
attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient
rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which
producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow
irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury,
and malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing
their avarice, their vices are no longer human. From cruel men they are
transformed into savage beasts, with no other vestiges of reason left
but what serves to furnish the inventions and refinements of ferocious
subtlety, for purposes of which beasts are incapable and at which fiends
would blush.

Debi Sing and his instruments suspected, and in a few cases they
suspected justly, that the country people had purloined from their own
estates, and had hidden in secret places in the circumjacent deserts,
some small reserve of their own grain to maintain themselves during the
unproductive months of the year, and to leave some hope for a future
season. But the under-tyrants knew that the demands of Mr. Hastings
would admit no plea for delay, much less for subtraction of his bribe,
and that he would not abate a shilling of it to the wants of the whole
human race. These hoards, real or supposed, not being discovered by
menaces and imprisonment, they fell upon the last resource, the naked
bodies of the people. And here, my Lords, began such a scene of
cruelties and tortures as I believe no history has ever presented to the
indignation of the world,--such as I am sure, in the most barbarous
ages, no politic tyranny, no fanatic persecution, has ever yet exceeded.
Mr. Paterson, the commissioner appointed to inquire into the state of
the country, makes his own apology and mine for opening this scene of
horrors to you in the following words: "That the punishments inflicted
upon the ryots, both of Rungpore and Dinagepore, for non-payment, were
in many instances of such a nature that I would rather wish to draw a
veil over them than shock your feelings by the detail, but that, however
disagreeable the task may be to myself, it is absolutely necessary, for
the sake of justice, humanity, and the honor of government, that they
should be exposed, to be prevented in future."

My Lords, they began by winding cords round the fingers of the unhappy
freeholders of those provinces, until they clung to and were almost
incorporated with one another; and then they hammered wedges of iron
between them, until, regardless of the cries of the sufferers, they had
bruised to pieces and forever crippled those poor, honest, innocent,
laborious hands, which had never been raised to their mouths but with a
penurious and scanty proportion of the fruits of their own soil; but
those fruits (denied to the wants of their own children) have for more
than fifteen years past furnished the investment for our trade with
China, and been sent annually out, and without recompense, to purchase
for us that delicate meal with which your Lordships, and all this
auditory, and all this country, have begun every day for these fifteen
years at their expense. To those beneficent hands that labor for our
benefit the return of the British government has been cords and hammers
and wedges. But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands
will act with resistless power. What is it that they will not pull down,
when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors? Then what can
withstand such hands? Can the power that crushed and destroyed them?
Powerful in prayer, let us at least deprecate and thus endeavor to
secure ourselves from the vengeance which these mashed and disabled
hands may pull down upon us. My Lords, it is an awful consideration: let
us think of it.

But to pursue this melancholy, but necessary detail. I am next to open
to your Lordships, what I am hereafter to prove, that the most
substantial and leading yeomen, the responsible farmers, the parochial
magistrates and chiefs of villages, were tied two and two by the legs
together; and their tormentors, throwing them with their heads
downwards, over a bar, beat them on the soles of the feet with rattans,
until the nails fell from the toes; and then attacking them at their
heads, as they hung downward, as before at their feet, they beat them
with sticks and other instruments of blind fury, until the blood gushed
out at their eyes, mouths, and noses. Not thinking that the ordinary
whips and cudgels, even so administered, were sufficient, to others (and
often also to the same who had suffered as I have stated) they applied,
instead of rattan and bamboo, whips made of the branches of the bale
tree,--a tree full of sharp and strong thorns, which tear the skin and
lacerate the flesh far worse than ordinary scourges. For others,
exploring with a searching and inquisitive malice, stimulated by an
insatiate rapacity, all the devious paths of Nature for whatever is most
unfriendly to man, they made rods of a plant highly caustic and
poisonous, called _Bechettea_, every wound of which festers and
gangrenes, adds double and treble to the present torture, leaves a crust
of leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of
life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of
avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season
when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and
cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to
reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment.
They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at
certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe
and almost intolerable,--they were led out before break of day, and,
stiff and sore as they were with the bruises and wounds of the night,
were plunged into water; and whilst their jaws clung together with the
cold, and their bodies were rendered infinitely more sensible, the blows
and stripes were renewed upon their backs; and then, delivering them
over to soldiers, they were sent into their farms and villages to
discover where a few handfuls of grain might be found concealed, or to
extract some loan from the remnants of compassion and courage not
subdued in those who had reason to fear that their own turn of torment
would be next, that they should succeed them in the same punishment, and
that their very humanity, being taken as a proof of their wealth, would
subject them (as it did in many cases subject them) to the same inhuman
tortures. After this circuit of the day through their plundered and
ruined villages, they were remanded at night to the same prison,
whipped, as before, at their return to the dungeon, and at morning
whipped at their leaving it, and then sent, as before, to purchase, by
begging in the day, the reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of
menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and
flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long
time made up all the vicissitude of life to these miserable people.

But there are persons whose fortitude could bear their own suffering;
there are men who are hardened by their very pains, and the mind,
strengthened even by the torments of the body, rises with a strong
defiance against its oppressor. They were assaulted on the side of their
sympathy. Children were scourged almost to death in the presence of
their parents. This was not enough. The son and father were bound close
together, face to face and body to body, and in that situation cruelly
lashed together, so that the blow which escaped the father fell upon the
son, and the blow which missed the son wound over the back of the
parent. The circumstances were combined by so subtle a cruelty that
every stroke which did not excruciate the sense should wound and
lacerate the sentiments and affections of nature.

On the same principle, and for the same ends, virgins, who had never
seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses,
and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was
to be sought against all wrong and all violence, (but where no judge or
lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and
hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench,) these virgins, vainly
invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst
their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all
the people, publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the
human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and
suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the
bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were
buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this
consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then
cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the
circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the
nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of
cleft bamboos. Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would
think it incredible. But it did not end there. Growing from crime to
crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging
sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire--(I cannot
proceed for shame and horror!)--these infernal furies planted death in
the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason,
distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks
from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural,
monstrous, and nefarious cruelty,--there, where the reverence of nature
and the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe
their practices.

These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India
and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature. But there
were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things
done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than
all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of
opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in
mere sensitive nature can do.

The women thus treated lost their caste. My Lords, we are not here to
commend or blame the institutions and prejudices of a whole race of
people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no
reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of
men, or foreign conquest, have been able to make the smallest
impression. The aboriginal Gentoo inhabitants are all dispersed into
tribes or castes,--each caste born to an invariable rank, rights, and
descriptions of employment, so that one caste cannot by any means pass
into another. With the Gentoos, certain impurities or disgraces, though
without any guilt of the party, infer loss of caste; and when the
highest caste, that of Brahmin, which is not only noble, but sacred, is
lost, the person who loses it does not slide down into one lower, but
reputable,--he is wholly driven from all honest society. All the
relations of life are at once dissolved. His parents are no longer his
parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his,
are no longer to regard him as their father. It is something far worse
than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal
excommunication. It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches
any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death.
Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned. No honest
occupation can be followed. He becomes an _halicore_, if (which is rare)
he survives that miserable degradation.

Upon those whom all the shocking catalogue of tortures I have mentioned
could not make to flinch one of the modes of losing caste for Brahmins
and other principal tribes was practised. It was to harness a bullock at
the court-door, and to put the Brahmin on his back, and to lead him
through the towns, with drums beating before him. To intimidate others,
this bullock, with drums, (the instrument, according to their ideas, of
outrage, disgrace, and utter loss of caste,) was led through the
country; and as it advanced, the country fled before it. When any
Brahmin was seized, he was threatened with this pillory, and for the
most part he submitted in a moment to whatever was ordered. What it was
may be thence judged. But when no possibility existed of complying with
the demand, the people by their cries sometimes prevailed on the tyrants
to have it commuted for cruel scourging, which was accepted as mercy. To
some Brahmins this mercy was denied, and the act of indelible infamy
executed. Of these men one came to the Company's commissioner with the
tale, and ended with these melancholy words: "I have suffered this
indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me: I call for
justice." He called in vain.

Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive
demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into
despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a
body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers
invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of
circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a
relief, into the prison of their native soil. Not suffered to quit the
district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had
scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of
tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to
exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair
drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most
quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an
universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults,
the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes
the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were
massacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire
to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person
with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been
the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all
these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops,
who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the
impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired
with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel
and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or
even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief
in that province.

In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to
exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into
content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every
moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces
in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers
all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was
feared it would go to England. The English Chief in the province, Mr.
Goodlad, represented it to Mr. Hastings's Revenue Committee to be (what
it was) the greatest and most serious disturbance that ever happened in
Bengal. But, good easy man, he was utterly unable to guess to what cause
it was to be attributed. He thought there was some irregularity in the
collection, but on the whole judged that it had little other cause than
a general conspiracy of the husbandmen and landholders, who, as Debi
Sing's lease was near expiring, had determined not to pay any more
revenue.

Mr. Hastings's Committee of Revenue, whilst these wounds were yet
bleeding, and whilst a total failure was threatened in the rents of
these provinces, thought themselves obliged to make an inquiry with some
sort of appearance of seriousness into the causes of it. They looked,
therefore, about them carefully, and chose what they judged would be
most plausible and least effective. They thought that it was necessary
to send a special commissioner into the province, and one, too, whose
character would not instantly blast the credit of his mission. They cast
their eyes on a Mr. Paterson, a servant of the Company, a man of fair
character, and long standing in the service. Mr. Paterson was a person
known to be of a very cool temper, placid manners, moderate and middle
opinions, unconnected with parties; and from such a character they
looked for (what sometimes is to be expected from it) a compromising,
balanced, neutralized, equivocal, colorless, confused report, in which
the blame was to be impartially divided between the sufferer and the
oppressor, and in which, according to the standing manners of Bengal, he
would recommend oblivion as the best remedy, and would end by remarking,
that retrospect could have no advantage, and could serve only to
irritate and keep alive animosities; and by this kind of equitable,
candid, and judge-like proceeding, they hoped the whole complaint would
calmly fade away, the sufferers remain in the possession of their
patience, and the tyrant of his plunder. In confidence of this event
from this presumed character, Mr. Hastings's Committee, in appointing
Mr. Paterson their commissioner, were not deficient in arming him with
powers equal to the object of his commission. He was enabled to call
before him all accountants, to compel the production of all accounts, to
examine all persons,--not only to inquire and to report, but to decide
and to redress.

Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally
failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their
man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a
firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling
heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and
excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of
chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is
now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son,
as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded
the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from
the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts.
He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was
the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This
letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He
laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of
integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather
than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper
frame of mind for doing his duty.

He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust
that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full
support in the execution of it,--as he, with every other white man in
Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact,
that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent,
had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold
them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known
this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other
man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi
Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.

But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to
perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the
universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people,
concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie,
with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and
saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the
exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished
wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no
sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first
letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable
words. "In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the
oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not
enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the
facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not
collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and
every insult of disgrace,--and this not confined to a few, but extended
over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to
servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to
resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot,
when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an
exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half
of that demand,--when he finds himself so far from being released, that
he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his
feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail,
adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the
reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their
attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these
prejudices under such circumstances."

He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every
discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft,
fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion
of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his
employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions
for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements
and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested
reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe,
never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of
Bengal,--of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so
absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in
those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before
Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports,
carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before
you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of
Governor Hastings's general system of bribery.

But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr.
Hastings's system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between
him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is
left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore,
Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is
received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled
their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been
usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing
made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his
Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.

Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that
all officers representing government, and making in that character an
authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their
proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence
of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for
truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is
their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would
impeach or shake the report.

Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other
maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings's devising.
In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the
protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant
shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.

This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and
of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned
their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty,
into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril;
the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but
appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a
culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be
juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive
board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to
proceed by strict rules of law.

By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the
credit due to the proceedings of government. They changed the natural
situation of proofs. They rejected the depositions of Paterson's
witnesses, as not on oath, though they had never ordered or authorized
them so to be taken.

They went further, and disabled, in a body, all the deponents
themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole
province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own
rebellion. They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead
of the culprit. They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves
ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on
him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) and made him a
complainant and a witness against him in the stupidest and most
improbable of all accusations,--namely, that Paterson had menaced him
with punishment, if he did not, in so many words, slander and calumniate
Debi Sing; and then the Committee, seating this wretch as an assessor at
their own board, who a few days before would have trembled like a
whipped slave at the look of an European, encouraged him to interrogate
their own commissioner.

[_Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit down. After some time
Mr. Burke again addressed the House._]

My Lords, I am sorry to break the attention of your Lordships in such a
way. It is a subject that agitates me. It is long, difficult, and
arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you any further
trouble, I will go through it this day.

I am to tell your Lordships, that the next step they took was, after
putting Mr. Paterson as an accuser to make good a charge which he made
out but too much to their satisfaction, they changed their battery.

[_Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House, on the motion of
His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, adjourned._]




SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788.


My Lords,--In any great undertaking, a failure in the midst of it, even
from infirmity, though to be regarded principally as a misfortune, is
attended with some slight shadow of disgrace; but your Lordships'
humanity, and your love of justice, have remedied everything, and I
therefore proceed with confidence this day.

My Lords, I think (to the best of my remembrance) the House adjourned at
the period of time in which I was endeavoring to illustrate the
mischiefs that happened from Mr. Hastings's throwing off his
responsibility, by delegating his power to a nominal Council, and in
reality to a black bad man, a native of the country, of the worst
character that could be found in it,--and the consequence of it, in
preventing the detection and the punishment of the grossest abuses that
ever were known to be committed in India, or any other part of the
world.

My Lords, I stated to you that Mr. Commissioner Paterson was sent into
that country. I stated that he was sent into it with all the authority
of government, with power to hear, and not only to hear and to report,
but to redress, the grievances which he should find in the country. In
short, there was nothing wanting to his power but an honest support.
Your Lordships will be convinced that the road to fortune was easy to
him. Debi Sing for a favorable report would have given a large sum of
money. Your Lordships will be convinced that the Committee would not
have received such a report as a proof of bribery. They would rather
consider him as a man whose conduct tended to conciliate, and to soften
troublesome and difficult matters, and to settle the order of government
as soon as possible.

Some of the things contained in his reports I have taken the liberty of
laying before your Lordships, but very faintly, very imperfectly, and
far short of my materials. I have stated, that the criminal, against
whom the commissioner had made his report, instead of being punished by
that strong hand of power which Mr. Hastings has thought proper to use
upon other occasions, when he has endeavored to make princes, or persons
in the rank and with the attributes of sovereign princes, feel whenever
they have incurred his private resentments,--that this man was put into
every situation of offence or defence which the most litigious and
prevaricating laws that ever were invented in the very bosom of
arbitrary power could afford him, or by which peculation and power were
to be screened from the cries of an oppressed people.

Mr. Paterson, I stated, from being a commissioner directed to report,
under the authority of government, to that government, was considered as
a voluntary accuser, obliged to make good the articles of his charge.
But I believe I stated that he did not long remain in that condition.

I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that this Debi Sing,
fortified by this protection, which was extended even to the lowest of
his instruments, thought it high time to assume the superiority that
belonged to a personage who had the Governor-General for his
_pensioner_. No longer the sneaking tone of apology; no longer the
modest allegations that the commissioner was misinformed;--he boldly
accuses the representative of English government of forgery in order to
destroy him; he criminates and recriminates, and lays about him without
mercy.

Things were now in a proper train; the Committee find the cause growing
and ripening to their wishes;--answers, replies, objections, and
interrogatories,--accounts opposed to accounts,--balances now on the one
side, now on the other,--now debtor becomes creditor, and creditor
debtor,--until the proceedings were grown to the size of volumes, and
the whole well fitted to perplex the most simple facts, and to darken
the meridian sunshine of public notoriety. They prepared a report for
the Governor-General and Council suitable to the whole tenor of their
proceedings. Here the man whom they had employed and betrayed appeared
in a new character. Observe their course with him. First he was made a
commissioner. Then he was changed from a commissioner to be a voluntary
accuser. He now undergoes another metamorphosis: he appears as a culprit
before Mr. Hastings, on the accusation of the donor of Mr. Hastings's
bribes. He is to answer to the accusations of Debi Sing. He is permitted
to find materials for his own defence; and he, an old Company's servant,
is to acknowledge it as a favor to be again suffered to go into the
province, without authority, without station, without public character,
under the discountenance and frowns, and in a manner under prosecution,
of the government. As a favor, he is suffered to go again into Rungpore,
in hopes of finding among the dejected, harassed, and enslaved race of
Hindoos, and in that undone province, men bold enough to stand forward,
against all temptations of emolument, and at the risk of their lives,
with a firm adherence to their original charge,--and at a time when they
saw _him_ an abandoned and persecuted private individual, whom they had
just before looked upon as a protecting angel, carrying with him the
whole power of a beneficent government, and whom they had applied to, as
a magistrate of high and sacred authority, to hear the complaints and to
redress the grievances of a whole people.

A new commission of junior servants was at the same time sent out to
review and reëxamine the cause, to inquire into the inquiry, to examine
into the examination, to control the report, to be commissioners upon
the commission of Mr. Paterson. Before these commissioners he was made
to appear as an accused person, and was put upon his defence, but
without the authority and without the favor which ought to go with an
accused person for the purpose of enabling him to make out such defence.

These persons went down into that country, and, after spending a long
time in mere matters of form, found they could not do without a
representative of Debi Sing, and accordingly they ordered Debi Sing to
send up his _vakeel_.

I forgot to state to your Lordships what the condition of Debi Sing was
during this proceeding. This man had been ordered to Calcutta on two
grounds: one, on the matter of his flagitious misconduct at Rungpore;
and the other, for a great failure in the payment of his stipulated
revenue. Under this double accusation, he was to be considered,
according to the usual mode of proceeding in such cases, as a prisoner;
and he was kept, not in the common gaol of Calcutta, not in the prison
of the fort, not in that gaol in which Rajah Nundcomar, who had been
prime-minister of the empire, was confined, but, according to the mild
ways of that country, where they choose to be mild, and the persons are
protected by the official influence of power, under a free custody. He
was put under a guard of sepoys, but not confined to his house; he was
permitted to go abroad, where he was daily in conference with those who
were to judge him; and having an address which seldom fails, and a
dexterity never wanting to a man possessed of 700,000_l._, he converted
this guard into a retinue of honor: their bayonets were lowered, their
muskets laid aside; they attended him with their side-arms, and many
with silver verges in their hands, to mark him out rather as a great
magistrate attended by a retinue than a prisoner under guard.

When he was ordered to send a vakeel to defend his conduct, he refused
to send him. Upon which the commissioners, instead of saying, "If you
will not send your agent, we will proceed in our inquiry without him,"
(and, indeed, it was not made necessary by the commission that he should
be there either by vakeel or otherwise,) condescendingly admitted his
refusal, and suffered him to come up in person. He accordingly enters
the province, attended with his guard, in the manner I have before
mentioned, more as a person returning in triumph from a great victory
than as a man under the load of all those enormous charges which I have
stated. He enters the province in this manner; and Mr. Paterson, who saw
himself lately the representative of the India Company, (an old servant
of the Company is a great man in that country,) was now left naked,
destitute, without any mark of official situation or dignity. He was
present, and saw all the marks of imprisonment turned into marks of
respect and dignity to this consummate villain whom I have the
misfortune of being obliged to introduce to your Lordships' notice. Mr.
Paterson, seeing the effect of the proceeding everywhere, seeing the
minds of the people broken, subdued, and prostrate under it, and that,
so far from having the means of detecting the villanies of this insolent
criminal, appearing as a magistrate, he had not the means of defending
even his own innocence, because every kind of information fled and was
annihilated before him, represented to these young commissioners that
this appearance of authority tended to strike terror into the hearts of
the natives, and to prevent his receiving justice. The Council of
Calcutta took this representation into their deliberate consideration;
they found that it was true, that, if he had such an attendance any
longer in this situation, (and a large attendance it was, such as the
Chancellor of this kingdom or the Speaker of the House of Commons does
not appear with,) it would have an evil appearance. On the other hand,
say they, "_If he should be left under a guard, the people would
consider him as under disgrace._" They therefore took a middle way, and
ordered the guard not to attend him with fixed bayonets, which had the
appearance of the custody of a prisoner, but to lower their muskets and
unfix their bayonets.

The next step of these commissioners is to exclude Mr. Paterson from all
their deliberations; and in order that both parties might be put on an
equality, one would naturally conclude that the culprit, Debi Sing, was
likewise excluded. Far from it: he sat upon the bench. Need I say any
more upon this subject? The protection followed.

In this situation Mr. Paterson wrote one of the most pathetic memorials
that ever was penned to the Council of Calcutta, submitting to his hard
fate, but standing inflexibly to his virtue that brought it upon him. To
do the man justice, he bore the whole of this persecution like an hero.
He never tottered in his principles, nor swerved to the right or to the
left from the noble cause of justice and humanity in which he had been
engaged; and when your Lordships come to see his memorials, you will
have reason to observe that his abilities are answerable to the dignity
of his cause, and make him worthy of everything that he had the honor to
suffer for it.

To cut short the thread of this shocking series of corruption,
oppression, fraud, and chicanery, which lasted for upwards of four
years: Paterson remains without employment; the inhabitants of great
provinces, whose substance and whose blood was sold by Mr. Hastings,
remain without redress; and the purchaser, Debi Sing, that corrupt,
iniquitous, and bloody tyrant, instead of being proceeded against by the
Committee in a civil suit for retribution to the sufferers, is handed
over to the false semblance of a trial, on a criminal charge, before a
Mahometan judge,--an equal judge, however. The judge was Mahomed Reza
Khân, his original patron, and the author of all his fortunes,--a judge
who depends on him, as a debtor depends upon his creditor. To that
judge is he sent, without a distinct charge, without a prosecutor, and
without evidence. The next ships will bring you an account of his
honorable acquittal.

I have stated before that I considered Mr. Hastings as responsible for
the characters of the people he employed,--doubly responsible, if he
_knew_ them to be bad. I therefore charge him with putting in situations
in which any evil may be committed persons of known evil characters.

My Lords, I charge him, as chief governor, with destroying the
institutions of the country, which were designed to be, and ought to
have been, controls upon such a person as Debi Sing.

An officer, called dewan, or steward of the country, had always been
placed as a control on the farmer; but that no such control should in
fact exist, that he, Debi Sing, should be let loose to rapine,
slaughter, and plunder in the country, both offices were conferred on
him. Did Mr. Hastings vest these offices in him? No: but if Mr. Hastings
had kept firm to the duties which the act of Parliament appointed him to
execute, all the revenue appointments must have been made by him; but,
instead of making them himself, he appointed Gunga Govind Sing to make
them; and for that appointment, and for the whole train of subordinate
villany which followed the placing iniquity in the chief seat of
government, Mr. Hastings is answerable. He is answerable, I say, first,
for destroying his own legal capacity, and, next, for destroying the
legal capacity of the Council, not one of whom ever had, or could have,
any true knowledge of the state of the country, from the moment he
buried it in the gulf of mystery and of darkness, under that collected
heap of villany, Gunga Govind Sing. From that moment he destroyed the
power of government, and put everything into his hands: for this he is
answerable.

The Provincial Councils consisted of many members, who, though they
might unite in some small iniquities perhaps, could not possibly have
concealed from the public eye the commission of such acts as these.
Their very numbers, their natural competitions, the contentions that
must have arisen among them, must have put a check, at least, to such a
business. And therefore, Mr. Hastings having destroyed every check and
control above and below, having delivered the whole into the hands of
Gunga Govind Sing, for all the iniquities of Gunga Govind Sing he is
responsible.

But he did not know Debi Sing, whom he employed. I read, yesterday, and
trust it is fresh in your Lordships' remembrance, that Debi Sing was
presented to him by that set of tools, as they call themselves, who
acted, as they themselves tell us they must act, entirely and implicitly
under Gunga Govind Sing,--that is to say, by Gunga Govind Sing himself,
the confidential agent of Mr. Hastings.

Mr. Hastings is further responsible, because he took a bribe of
40,000_l._ from some person in power in Dinagepore and Rungpore, the
countries which were ravaged in this manner, through the hands of Gunga
Govind Sing,--through the medium of that very person whom he had
appointed to exercise all the authorities of the Supreme Council above
and of all subordinate Councils below. Having, therefore, thus appointed
a Council of tools in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, at the expense of
62,000_l._ a year, to supersede all the English provincial
authorities,--having appointed them for the purpose of establishing a
bribe-factor general, a general receiver and agent of bribes through all
that country, Mr. Hastings is responsible for all the consequences of
it.

I have thought it necessary, and absolutely necessary it is, to state
what the consequence of this clandestine mode of supplying the Company's
exigencies was. Your Lordships will see that their exigencies are to be
supplied by the ruin of the landed interest of a province, the
destruction of the husbandmen, and the ruin of all the people in it.
This is the consequence of a general bribe-broker, an agent like Gunga
Govind Sing, superseding all the powers and controls of government.

But Mr. Hastings has not only reduced bribery to a system of government
practically, but theoretically. For when he despaired any longer of
concealing his bribes from the penetrating eye of Parliament, then he
took another mode, and declared, as your Lordships will see, that it was
the best way of supplying the necessities of the East India Company in
the pressing exigencies of their affairs; that thus a relief to the
Company's affairs might be yielded, which, in the common, ostensible
mode, and under the ordinary forms of government, and publicly, never
would be yielded to them. So that bribery with him became a supplement
to exaction.

The best way of showing that a theoretical system is bad is to show the
practical mischiefs that it produces: because a thing may look specious
in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in
theory, and yet be in its practice excellent. Here a thing in theory,
stated by Mr. Hastings to be productive of much good, is in reality
productive of all those horrible mischiefs I have stated. That Mr.
Hastings well knew this appears from an extract of the Bengal Revenue
Consultations, 21st January, 1785, a little before he came away.

Mr. Hastings says,--"I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges:
he has disproved them. It was the duty of the accuser to prove them.
Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not
follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the
character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily conceive
that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which are laid to
his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr. Goodlad, who had
no authority but that of receiving the accounts and rents of the
district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the channel of
communication between him and the Committee."

We shall now see what things Mr. Hastings did, what course he was in, a
little before his departure,--with what propriety and consistency of
character he has behaved from the year of the commencement of his
corrupt system, in 1773, to the end of it, when he closed it in 1785,
when the bribes not only mounted the chariot, but boarded the barge,
and, as I shall show, followed him down the Ganges, and even to the sea,
and that he never quitted his system of iniquity, but that it survived
his political life itself.

One of his last political acts was this.

Your Lordships will remember that Mr. Goodlad was sent up into the
country, whose conduct was terrible indeed: for that he could not be in
place and authority in that country, and be innocent, while such things
were doing, I shall prove. But that is not now my consideration.

The Governor-General's minute, just read, is this. "I entirely acquit
Mr. Goodlad of all the charges: he has disproved them. It was the duty
of the accuser to prove them" (the accuser, namely, the commissioner).
"Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not
follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the
character," &c., &c., &c.

Now your Lordships perceive he has acquitted Mr. Goodlad. He is clear.
Be it that he is fairly and conscientiously acquitted. But what is Mr.
Hastings's account of Rajah Debi Sing? He is presented to him in 1781,
by Gunga Govind Sing, as a person against whose character there could be
no exception, and by him accepted in that light. Upon the occasion I
have mentioned, Mr. Hastings's opinion of him is this: "I so well know
the character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily
conceive that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which
are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr.
Goodlad, who had no authority but that of receiving the accounts and
rents of the district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the
channel of communication between him and the Committee."

Thus your Lordships see what Mr. Hastings's opinion of Debi Sing was. We
shall prove it at another time, by abundance of clear and demonstrative
evidence, that, whether he was bad or no, (but we shall prove that bad
he was indeed,) _even he_ could hardly be so bad as he was in the
opinion which Mr. Hastings entertained of him; who, notwithstanding, now
disowns this mock Committee, instituted by himself, but, in reality,
entirely managed by Gunga Govind Sing. This Debi Sing was accepted as an
unexceptionable man; and yet Mr. Hastings knows both his power of doing
mischief and his artifice in concealing it. If, then, Mr. Goodlad is to
be acquitted, does it not show the evil of Mr. Hastings's conduct in
destroying those Provincial Councils which, as I have already stated,
were obliged to book everything, to minute all the circumstances which
came before them, together with all the consultations respecting them?
He strikes at the whole system at once, and, instead of it, he leaves an
Englishman, under pretence of controlling Gunga Govind Sing's agent,
appointed for the very purpose of giving him bribes, in a province where
Mr. Hastings says that agent had the power of committing such
enormities, and which nobody doubts his disposition to commit,--he
leaves him, I say, in such a state of inefficiency, that these
iniquities could be concealed (though every one true) from the person
appointed there to inspect his conduct! What, then, could be his
business there? Was it only to receive such sums of money as Debi Sing
might put into his hands, and which might have been easily sent to
Calcutta? Was he to be of use as a communication between Debi Sing and
the Committee, and in no other way? Here, then, we have that English
authority which Mr. Hastings left in the country,--here the native
authority which he settled, and the establishment of native iniquity in
a regular system under Gunga Govind Sing,--here the destruction of all
English inspection. I hope I need say no more to prove to your Lordships
that this system, taken nakedly as it thus stands, founded in mystery
and obscurity, founded for the very express purpose of conveying
bribes, as the best mode of collecting the revenue and supplying the
Company's exigencies through Gunga Govind Sing, would be iniquitous upon
the face and the statement of it. But when your Lordships consider what
horrid effects it produced, you will easily see what the mischief and
abomination of Mr. Hastings's destroying these Provincial Councils and
protecting these persons must necessarily be. If you had not known in
theory, you must have seen it in practice.

But when both practice and theory concur, there can be no doubt that a
system of private bribery for a revenue, and of private agency for a
constitutional government, must ruin the country where it prevails, must
disgrace the country that uses it, and finally end in the destruction of
the revenue. For what says Mr. Hastings? "I was to have received
40,000_l._ in bribes, and 30,000_l._ was actually applied to the use of
the Company." Now I hope I shall demonstrate, if not, it will be by some
one abler than me demonstrated, in the course of this business, that
there never was a bribe received by Mr. Hastings that was not instantly
followed with a deficiency in the revenue,--this is clear, and what we
undertake to prove,--and that Debi Sing himself was, at the time Mr.
Hastings came away, between twenty and thirty thousand pounds debtor to
the Company. So that, in truth, you always find a deficiency of revenue
nearly equal, and in some instances I shall show double, to all the
bribes Mr. Hastings received: from whence it will be evident that he
never could nor did receive them under that absurd and strange idea of a
resource to government.

I must re-state to your Lordships, because I wish you never to forget,
that this Committee of Revenue was, in their own opinion, and from their
own certain knowledge and mere motion, if motion can be attributed
originally to instruments, mere tools; that they knew that they were
tools in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing. There were two persons
principal in it,--Mr. Shore, who was the acting President, and Mr.
Anderson, who was President in rank, and President in emolument, but
absent for a great part of the time upon a foreign embassy. It is the
recorded opinion of the former, (for I must beg leave to read again a
part of the paper which has already been read to your Lordships,) that
"the Committee, with the best intentions, best abilities, and steadiest
application, must, after all, be a tool in the hands of their dewan."

Now do you believe, in the first place, that men will long have
abilities, will long have good intentions, and will long, above all,
have steady application, when they know they are but tools in the hands
of another,--when they know they are tools for his own corrupt purposes?

In the next place, I must beg leave to state to you, that, on the
constitution of this Committee, Mr. Hastings made them all take a solemn
oath that they would never receive any present whatever. It was not
enough to trust to a general covenant; it was not enough to trust to the
penal act of 1773: he bound the Committee by a new oath, and forced them
to declare that they would not receive any bribes. As soon as he had so
secured them against receiving bribes, he was resolved to make them
inefficient,--a good way to secure them against bribes, by taking from
them the power of bribe-worthy service. This was a good counter-security
to their oath. But Mr. Hastings put a dewan there, against whom there
was no security; he let loose this dewan to frustrate their intentions,
their application, their abilities, and oath: that is, there was a
person at that board who was more than the board itself, who might riot
in peculation and plunder from one end of the country to the other. He
was there to receive bribes for Mr. Hastings; the Committee were to be
pure with impotent hands; and then came a person with ample power for
Mr. Hastings himself. And lest this person should not have power enough
in this Committee, he is made the general bribe-broker to Mr. Hastings.
This secret under-current, as your Lordships will see, is to counteract
everything, and, as fast as one part is rendered pure, totally to
corrupt all the rest.

But, my Lords, this was not the private opinion of Mr. Shore only, a man
of great abilities, and intimately acquainted with the revenue, who must
know when he was in a situation to do good and when not. The other
gentleman whom I have mentioned, Mr. Hastings's confidant in everything
but his bribes, and supposed to be in his closest secrets, is Mr.
Anderson. I should remark to your Lordships, that Mr. Anderson is a man
apparently of weak nerves, of modest and very guarded demeanor, as we
have seen him in the House of Commons; it is in that way only I have the
honor of knowing him. Mr. Anderson being asked whether he agreed in the
opinion and admitted the truth of his friend Mr. Shore's statement
relative to the dewan of the Committee, his answer was this: "I do not
think that I should have written it quite so strong, but I do in a great
measure agree to it: that is, I think there is a great deal of truth in
the observation; I think, in particular, that it would require great
exertion in the Committee, and great abilities on the part of the
President, to restrain effectually the conduct of the dewan; I think it
would be difficult for the Committee to interpose a sufficient control
to guard against all the abuses of the dewan."

There is the real President of the Committee,--there the most active,
efficient member of it. They are both of one opinion concerning their
situation: and I think this opinion of Mr. Anderson is still more
strong; for, as he thinks he should have written it with a little more
guard, but should have agreed in substance, you must naturally think the
strongest expression the truest representation of the circumstance.

There is another circumstance that must strike your Lordships relative
to this institution. It is where the President says that the use of the
President would be to exert his best abilities, his greatest
application, his constant guard,--for what?--to prevent his dewan from
being guilty of bribery and being guilty of oppressions. So here is an
executive constitution in which the chief executive minister is to be in
such a situation and of such a disposition that the chief employment of
the presiding person in the Committee is to guard against him and to
prevent his doing mischief. Here is a man appointed, of the greatest
possible power, of the greatest possible wickedness, in a situation to
exert that power and wickedness for the destruction of the country, and
without doubt it would require the greatest ability and diligence in the
person at the head of that Council to prevent it. Such a constitution,
allowed and alleged by the persons themselves who composed it, was, I
believe, never heard of in the world.

Now that I have done with this part of the system of bribery, your
Lordships will permit me to follow Mr. Hastings to his last parting
scene. He parted with his power, he parted with his situation, he parted
with everything, but he never could part with Gunga Govind Sing. He was
on his voyage, he had embarked, he was upon the Ganges, he had quitted
his government; and his last dying sigh, his last parting voice, was
"Gunga Govind Sing!" It ran upon the banks of the Ganges, as another
plaintive voice ran upon the banks of another river (I forget whose);
his last accents were, "Gunga, Gunga Govind Sing!" It demonstrates the
power of friendship.

It is said by some idle, absurd moralists, that friendship is a thing
that cannot subsist between bad men; but I will show your Lordships the
direct contrary; and, after having shown you what Gunga Govind Sing was,
I shall bring before you Mr. Hastings's last act of friendship for him.
Not that I have quite shown you everything, but pretty well, I think,
respecting this man. There is a great deal concerning his character and
conduct that is laid by, and I do believe, that, whatever time I should
take up in expatiating upon these things, there would be "in the lowest
deep still a lower deep"; for there is not a day of the inquiry that
does not bring to light more and more of this evil against Mr. Hastings.

But before I open the papers relative to this act of Mr. Hastings's
friendship for Gunga Govind Sing, I must re-state some circumstances,
that your Lordships may understand thoroughly the nature of it. Your
Lordships may recollect, that, about the time of the succession of the
minor Rajah of Dinagepore, who was then but five or six years of age,
and when Mr. Hastings left Bengal eight or nine, Mr. Hastings had
received from that country a bribe of about 40,000_l._ There is a
fidelity even in bribery; there is a truth and observance even in
corruption; there is a justice, that, if money is to be paid for
protection, protection should be given. My Lords, Mr. Hastings received
this bribe through Gunga Govind Sing; then, at least, through Gunga
Govind Sing he ought to take care that that Rajah should not be
robbed,--that he should not be robbed, if Gunga Govind Sing could help
it,--that, above all, he should not be robbed by Gunga Govind Sing
himself. But your Lordships will find that the last act of Mr.
Hastings's life was to be an accomplice in the most cruel and perfidious
breach of faith, in the most iniquitous transaction, that I do believe
ever was held out to the indignation of the world with regard to private
persons. When he departed, on the 16th of February, 1785, when he was on
board, in the mouth of the Ganges, and preparing to visit his native
country, let us see what the last act of his life then was. Hear the
last tender accents of the dying swan upon the Ganges.

"The regret which I cannot but feel in relinquishing the service of my
honorable employers would be much embittered, were it accompanied by the
reflection that I have neglected the merits of a man who deserves no
less of them than of myself, Gunga Govind Sing, who from his earliest
youth had been employed in the collection of the revenues, and was about
eleven years ago selected for his superior talents to fill the office of
dewan to the Calcutta Committee. He has from that time, with a short
intermission, been the principal native agent in the collection of the
Company's revenues; and I can take upon myself to say that he has
performed the duties of his office with fidelity, diligence, and
ability. To myself he has given proofs of a constancy and attachment
which neither the fears nor expectations excited by the prevalence of a
different influence could shake,--and at a time, too, when these
qualities were so dangerous, that, far from finding them amongst the
generality of his countrymen, I did not invariably meet with them
amongst my own. With such a sense of his merits, it is natural that I
should feel a desire of rewarding him,--for justice, gratitude,
generosity, and even policy, demand it; and I resort to the board for
the means of performing so necessary a duty, in full confidence, that,
as those which I shall point out are neither incompatible with the
Company's interest nor prejudicial to the rights of others, they will
not be withheld from me. At the request, therefore, of Gunga Govind
Sing, I deliver the accompanyin

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