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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund
+Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12)
+
+Author: Edmund Burke
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2006 [EBook #18192]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF THE RIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Susan Skinner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
+http://gallica.bnf.fr)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 accompanying _durkhausts_, or petitions, for grants
+of lands lying in different districts, the total _jumma_, or rent, of
+which amount to Rupees 2,38,061. 12. 1."
+
+Your Lordships recollect that Mr. Larkins was one of the bribe-agents of
+Mr. Hastings,--one, I mean, of a corporation, but not corporate in their
+acts. My Lords, Mr. Larkins has told you, he has told us, and he has
+told the Court of Directors, that Mr. Hastings parted in a quarrel with
+Gunga Govind Sing, because he had not faithfully kept his engagement
+with regard to his bribe, and that, instead of 40,000_l._ from
+Dinagepore, he had only paid him 30,000_l._ My Lords, that iniquitous
+men will defraud one another I can conceive; but you will perceive by
+Mr. Hastings's behavior at parting, that he either had in fact received
+this money from Gunga Govind Sing, or in some way or other had abundant
+reason to be satisfied,--that he totally forgot his anger upon this
+occasion, and that at parting his last act was to ratify _grants of
+lands_ (so described by Mr. Hastings) to Gunga Govind Sing. Your
+Lordships will recollect the tender and forgiving temper of Mr.
+Hastings. Whatever little bickerings there might have been between them
+about their small money concerns, the purifying waters of the Ganges had
+washed away all sins, enmities, and discontent. By some of those arts
+which Gunga Govind Sing knows how to practise, (I mean conciliatory,
+honest arts,) he had fairly wiped away all resentment out of Mr.
+Hastings's mind; and he, who so long remembered the affront offered him
+by Cheyt Sing, totally forgets Gunga Govind Sing's fraud of 10,000_l._,
+and attempts to make others the instruments of giving him what he calls
+his reward.
+
+Mr. Hastings states, among Gunga Govind's merits, that he had, from the
+time of its institution, and with a very short intermission, served the
+office of dewan to the Calcutta Committee. That short intermission was
+when he was turned out of office upon proof of peculation and
+embezzlement of public money; but of this cause of the intermission in
+the political life and political merits of Gunga Govind Sing Mr.
+Hastings does not tell you.
+
+Your Lordships shall now hear what opinion a member of the Provincial
+Council at Calcutta, in which he had also served, had of him.
+
+"Who is Gunga Govind Sing?" The answer is, "He was, when I left Bengal,
+dewan to the Committee of Revenue.--What was his office and power during
+Mr. Hastings's administration since 1780?--He was formerly dewan to the
+Provincial Council stationed at Calcutta, of which I was a member. His
+conduct then was licentious and unwarrantable, oppressive and
+extortionary. He was stationed under us to be an humble and submissive
+servant, and to be of use to us in the discharge of our duty. His
+conduct was everything the reverse. We endeavored to correct the
+mischiefs he was guilty of as much as possible. In one attempt to
+release fifteen persons illegally confined by him, we were dismissed our
+offices: a different pretence was held out for our dismission, but it
+was only a pretence. Since his appointment as dewan to the present
+Committee of Revenue, his line of conduct has only been a continuance of
+what I have described, but upon a larger scale.--What was the general
+opinion of the natives of the use he made of his power? He was looked up
+to by the natives as the second person in the government, if not the
+first. He was considered as the only channel for obtaining favor and
+employment from the Governor. There is hardly a native family of rank or
+credit within the three provinces whom he has not some time or other
+distressed and afflicted; scarce a zemindary that he has not dismembered
+and plundered.--Were you in a situation to know this to be true?--I
+certainly was.--What was the general opinion, and your own, concerning
+his wealth?--It is almost impossible to form a competent judgment, his
+means of acquiring it have been so extensive. I had an account shown to
+me, about July, 1785, stating his acquisitions at three hundred and
+twenty lacs of rupees,--that is, 3,200,000_l._"
+
+My Lords, I have only to add, that, from the best inquiries I have been
+able to make, those who speak highest of his wealth are those who obtain
+the greatest credit. The estimate of any man's wealth is uncertain; but
+the enormity of his wealth is universally believed. Yet Mr. Hastings
+seemed to act as if he needed a reward; and it is therefore necessary to
+inquire what recommended him particularly to Mr. Hastings. Your
+Lordships have seen that he was on the point of being dismissed for
+misbehavior and oppression by that Calcutta Committee his services to
+which Mr. Hastings gives as one proof of his constant and uniform good
+behavior. "He had executed," he says, "the duties of his office with
+fidelity, diligence, and ability." These are his public merits; but he
+has private merits. "To myself," says he, "he has given proofs of
+constancy and attachment."
+
+Now we, who have been used to look very diligently over the Company's
+records, and to compare one part with another, ask what those services
+were, which have so strongly recommended him to Mr. Hastings, and
+induced him to speak so favorably of his public services. What those
+services are does not appear; we have searched the records for them,
+(and those records are very busy and loquacious,) about that period of
+time during which Mr. Hastings was laboring under an eclipse, and near
+the dragon's mouth, and all the drums of Bengal beating to free him from
+this dangerous eclipse. During this time there is nothing publicly done,
+there is nothing publicly said, by Gunga Govind Sing. There were, then,
+some services of Gunga Govind Sing that lie undiscovered, which he takes
+as proofs of attachment. What could they be? They were not public;
+nobody knows anything of them; they must, by reference to the time, as
+far as we can judge of them, be services of concealment: otherwise, in
+the course of this business, it will be necessary, and Mr. Hastings will
+find occasion, to show what those personal services of Gunga Govind
+Sing to him were. _His_ services to Gunga Govind Sing were pretty
+conspicuous: for, after he was turned out for peculation, Mr. Hastings
+restored him to his office; and when he had imprisoned fifteen persons
+illegally and oppressively, and when the Council were about to set them
+at liberty, they were set at liberty themselves, they were dismissed
+their offices. Your Lordships see, then, what his public services were.
+His private services are unknown: they must be, as we conceive from
+their being unknown, of a suspicious nature; and I do not go further
+than suspicion, because I never heard, and I have not been without
+attempts to make the discovery, what those services were that
+recommended him to Mr. Hastings.
+
+Having looked at his public services, which are well-known scenes of
+wickedness, barbarity, and corruption, we next come to see what his
+reward is. Your Lordships hear what reward he thought proper to secure
+for himself; and I believe a man who has power like Gunga Govind Sing,
+and a disposition like Gunga Govind Sing, can hardly want the means of
+rewarding himself; and if every virtue rewards itself, and virtue is
+said to be its own reward, the virtue of Gunga Govind Sing was in a good
+way of seeking its own reward. Mr. Hastings, however, thought it was not
+right that such a man should reward himself, but that it was necessary
+for the honor and justice of government to find him a reward. Then the
+next thing is, what that reward shall be. It is a grant of lands. Your
+Lordships will observe, that Mr. Hastings declares some of these lands
+to be unoccupied, others occupied, but not by the just owners. Now these
+were the very lands of the Rajah of Dinagepore from whence he had taken
+the bribe of 40,000_l._ My Lords, this was a monstrous thing. Mr.
+Hastings had the audacity, as his parting act, when he was coming to
+England, and ought to have expected (whatever he did expect) the
+responsibility of this day,--he was, I say, shameless enough not only to
+give this recommendation, but to perpetuate the mischiefs of his reign,
+as he has done, to his successors: for he has really done so, by making
+it impossible, almost, to know anything of the true state of that
+country; and he has thereby made them much less responsible and criminal
+than before in any ill acts they may have done since his time. But Mr.
+Hastings not only recommends and backs the petition of Gunga Govind Sing
+with his parting authority, which authority he made the people there
+believe would be greater in England than it was in India, but he is an
+evidence; he declares, that, "to his own knowledge, these lands are
+vacant, and confessedly, therefore, by the laws of this as well as of
+most other countries, in the absolute gift of government."
+
+My Lords, as I said, Mr. Hastings becomes a witness, and I believe in
+the course of the proceedings you will find a false witness, for Gunga
+Govind Sing. "To my own knowledge," says he, "they are vacant." Why, I
+cannot find that Mr. Hastings had ever been in Dinagepore; or if he had,
+it must have been only as a passenger. He had not the supervision of the
+district, in any other sense than with that kind of eagle eye which he
+must have had over all Bengal, and which he had for no other purposes
+than those for which eagles' eyes are commonly used. He becomes, you
+see, a witness for Gunga Govind Sing, and orders to be given him, as a
+recompense for all the iniquitous acts this man committed, the lands of
+that very Rajah who through the hands of Gunga Govind Sing had given an
+enormous bribe to Mr. Hastings. These lands were not without an
+ownership, but were lands in the hands of the Rajah, and were to be
+severed from the zemindary, and given to Gunga Govind Sing. The manner
+of obtaining them is something so shocking, and contains such a number
+of enormities completed in one act, that one can scarce imagine how such
+a compound could exist.
+
+This man, besides his office of dewan to the Calcutta Committee, which
+gave him the whole management and power of the revenue, was, as I have
+stated, at the head of all the registers in the kingdom, whose duty it
+was to be a control upon him as dewan. As Mr. Hastings destroyed every
+other constitutional settlement of the country, so the office which was
+to be a check upon Gunga Govind Sing, namely, the register of the
+country, had been superseded, and revived in another shape, and given to
+the own son of this very man. God forbid that a son should not be under
+a certain and reasonable subordination! But though in this country we
+know a son may possibly be free from the control of his father, yet the
+meanest slave is not in a more abject condition of slavery than a son is
+in that country to his father; for it extends to the power of a Roman
+parent. The office of register is to take care that a full and fair rent
+is secured to government; and above all, it is his business to take care
+of the body of laws, the _Rawaj-ul-Mulk_, or custom of the country, of
+which he is the guardian as the head of the law. It was his business to
+secure that fundamental law of the government, and fundamental law of
+the country, that a zemindary cannot be split, or any portion of it
+separated, without the consent of the government. This man betrayed his
+trust, and did privately, contrary to the duty of his office, get this
+minor Rajah, who was but an infant, who was but nine years old at the
+time, to make over to him a part of his zemindary, to a large amount,
+under color of a fraudulent and fictitious sale. By the laws of that
+country, by the common laws of Nature, the act of this child was void.
+The act was void as against the government, by giving a zemindary
+without the consent of the government to the very man who ought to have
+prevented such an act. He has the same sacred guardianship of minors
+that the Chancellor of England has. This man got to himself those lands
+by a fraudulent, and probably forged deed,--for that is charged too; but
+whether it was forged or not, this miserable minor was obliged to give
+the lands to him: he did not dare to quarrel with him upon such an
+article; because he who would purchase could take. The next step was to
+get one of his nearest relations to seem to give a consent; because
+taking it of the minor was too gross. The relation, who could no more
+consent by the law of that country than the law of this, gave apparently
+his consent. And these were the very lands that Mr. Hastings speaks of
+as "lands entirely at the disposal of government."
+
+All this came before the Council. The moment Mr. Hastings was gone,
+India seemed a little to respire; there was a vast, oppressive weight
+taken off it, there was a mountain removed from its breast; and persons
+did dare then, for the first time, to breathe their complaints. And
+accordingly, this minor Rajah got some person kind enough to tell him
+that he was a minor, that he could not part with his estate; and this,
+with the other shocking and illegal parts of the process, was stated by
+him to the Council, who had Mr. Hastings's recommendation of Gunga
+Govind Sing before them. The Council, shocked to see a minor attempted
+to be dispossessed in such a manner by him who was the natural guardian
+of all minors, shocked at such an enormous, daring piece of iniquity,
+began to inquire further, and to ask, "How came this his near relation
+to consent?" He was apparently partner in the fraud. Partner in the
+fraud he was, but not partner in the profit; for he was to do it without
+getting anything for it: the wickedness was in him, and the profit in
+Gunga Govind Sing. In consequence of this inquiry, the man comes down to
+account for his conduct, and declares another atrocious iniquity, that
+shows you the powers which Gunga Govind Sing possessed. "Gunga Govind
+Sing," says he, "is master of the country; he had made a great festival
+for the burial of his mother; all those of that caste ought to be
+invited to the funeral festival; he would have disgraced me forever, if
+I had not been invited to that funeral festival." These funeral
+festivals, you should know, are great things in that country, and
+celebrated in this manner, and, you may depend upon it, in a royal
+manner by him, upon burying his mother: any person left out was marked,
+despised, and disgraced. "But he had it in his power, and I was
+threatened to be deprived of my caste by his register, who had the caste
+in his absolute disposition." Says he, "I was under terror, I was under
+duress, and I did it."
+
+Gunga Govind Sing was fortified by the opinion, that the Governor,
+though departed, virtually resided in that country. God grant that his
+power may be extirpated out of it now! I doubt it; but, most assuredly,
+it was residing in its plenitude when he departed from thence; and there
+was not a man in India who was not of opinion, either that he was
+actually to return to govern India again, or that his power is such in
+England as that he might govern it here. And such were the hopes of
+those who had intentions against the estates of others. Gunga Govind
+Sing, therefore, being pressed to the wall by this declaration of the
+Rajah's relation, when he could say nothing against it, when it was
+clear and manifest, and there were only impudent barefaced denials, and
+asseverations against facts which carried truth with themselves, did not
+in his answer pretend to say that a zemindary might be parted without
+the consent of the government, that a minor might be deprived of it,
+that the next relation had a power of disposing of it. He did indeed
+say, but nobody believed him, that he had used no force upon this
+relation; but as every one knew the act would be void, he was driven to
+Mr. Hastings's great refuge,--he was driven to say, "The government in
+this country has arbitrary power; the power of government is everything,
+the right of the subject nothing; they have at all times separated
+zemindaries from their lawful proprietors. Give me what Mr. Hastings has
+constantly given to other people without any right, or shadow or
+semblance of right at all." God knows, it is well that I walk with my
+authority in my hand; for there are such crimes, such portentous,
+incredible crimes, to be brought before your Lordships, that it would
+hardly be believed, were it not that I am constantly, as I hope I shall
+constantly be, guarded with evidence, and that the strongest that can
+be, even the evidence of the parties themselves.
+
+"From your inquiry," Gunga Govind Sing says to the Council, "every
+circumstance will appear in its true colors. With respect to the
+alienation of parts of zemindaries, the extent and consequence of the
+great zemindars depend in a great measure on the favor and countenance
+of the ruling powers. By what means did this zemindar of Dinagepore get
+possession of Purgunnah Buttassim after the death of Rycobad Chowdry in
+1158, of Purgunnah Coolygong after the death of Sahebrance Chowderanne
+in the same year, notwithstanding his heirs existed, and of Purgunnah
+Suntoe, &c., during the lifetime of Sumboonant, the zemindar, in 1167,
+all without right, title, or pecuniary consideration? This has been the
+case with many purgunnahs in his zemindary, and indeed exists in many
+other zemindaries besides since the Company's accession. Ramkissen, in
+1172, got possession of Nurrulloor, the zemindary of Mahomed Ali. The
+purgunnah of Ichanguipore, &c., was in three divisions in 1173. The
+petition of Govind Deo Sheopersaud was made over to the son of Bousser
+Chowdry, possessor of the third share. Purgunnah Baharbund belonged to
+the zemindary of Ranny Bhowanny, and in 1180 was made over to Lucknaut
+Nundy. All these changes took place in the lifetime of the rightful
+possessors, without right, title, or purchase."
+
+Your Lordships have not heard before of Lucknaut Nundy. He was the son
+of a person of whom your Lordships have heard before, called Cantoo
+Baboo, the banian of Mr. Hastings. Mr. Hastings has proved in abundance
+of other cases that a grant to father and son is the same thing. The
+fathers generally take out grants in the names of their sons: and the
+Ranny Bhowanny, possessing the zemindary of Radshi, an old lady of the
+first rank and family in India, was stripped of part of her zemindary,
+and it was given to Lucknaut Nundy, the son of Mr. Hastings's banian;
+and then (you see the consequence of good examples) comes Gunga Govind
+Sing, and says, "I am as good a man as he; there is a zemindary given;
+then do as much for Gunga Govind Sing as you have done for Cantoo
+Baboo." Here is an argument drawn from the practice of Mr. Hastings. And
+this shows your Lordships the necessity of suppressing such iniquities
+by punishing the author of them. You will punish Mr. Hastings, and no
+man will hereafter dare to rob minors, no man will hereafter dare to rob
+widows, to give to the vilest of mankind, their own base instruments for
+their own nefarious purposes, the lands of others, without right, title,
+or purchase.
+
+My Lords, I will not after this state to you the false representation of
+the value of these lands which this man gave in to government. He
+represented it to be much less than it was, when he desired the grant of
+them,--as shall be stated, when it comes before your Lordships, at the
+proper time. But at present I am only touching upon principles, and
+bringing examples so far as they illustrate principles, and to show how
+precedents spread.
+
+I believe your Lordships will conceive better of the spirit of these
+transactions by my intermixing with them, as I shall endeavor to do, as
+much as possible of the grounds of them. I will venture to say, that no
+description that I can give, no painting, if I was either able or
+willing to paint, could make these transactions appear to your Lordships
+with the strength which they have in themselves; and your Lordships
+will be convinced of this, when you see, what nobody could hardly
+believe, that a man can say, "It was given to others without right,
+title, or purchase,--give it to me without right, title, or purchase;
+give me the estates of minors without right, title, or purchase, because
+Mr. Hastings gave the estates of widows without right, title, or
+purchase."
+
+Of this exemplary grant, of this pattern for future proceedings, I will
+show your Lordships the consequence. I will read to your Lordships part
+of the examination of a witness, taken from a report of a committee of
+the House of Commons.
+
+"Are you acquainted with the situation of the zemindary of
+Baharbund?--It lies to the eastward of Dinagepore and Rungpore. I was
+stationed in that neighborhood.--To whom did it originally belong?--I
+believe, to the zemindary of Radshi, belonging to Ranny Bhowanny.--For
+what reason was it taken from the Ranny of Radshi and given to Cantoo
+Baboo?--I do not exactly recollect: I believe, on some plea of
+incapacity or insufficiency in her to manage it, or some pretended
+decline in the revenue, owing to mismanagement.--On what terms was it
+granted to Cantoo Baboo or his son?--I believe it was a grant in
+perpetuity, at the revenue of Rupees 82,000 or 83,000 per annum.--What
+amount did he collect from the country?--I cannot tell. The year I was
+in that neighborhood, the settlement with his under-tenants was
+something above 3,53,000 rupees. The inhabitants of the country objected
+to it. They assembled in a body of about five thousand, and were
+proceeding to Calcutta to make known their grievances to the Committee
+of Revenue. They were stopped at Cossimbazar by Noor Sing Baboo, the
+brother of Cantoo Baboo, and there the matter was compromised,--in what
+manner I cannot say."
+
+Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings's banian got this zemindary belonging
+to this venerable lady; unable to protect herself; that it was granted
+to him without right, title, or purchase. To show you that Mr. Hastings
+had been in a constant course of such proceeding, here is a petition
+from a person called ---- for some favor from government which it is not
+necessary now to state. In order to make good his claim, he states what
+nobody denied, but which is universally known in fact. Says he, "I have
+never entertained any such intention or idea," that is, of seizing upon
+other people's zemindaries; "neither am I at all desirous of acquiring
+any other person's zemindary in this country," &c....
+
+    [_The document read here is wanting, ending_] "as several Calcutta
+    banians have done," &c.
+
+He states it as a kind of constant practice, by which the country had
+been robbed under Mr. Hastings, known and acknowledged to be so, to
+seize upon the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless. In this
+manner did Gunga Govind Sing govern himself, upon the direct precedent
+of Cantoo Baboo, the banian of Mr. Hastings; and this other instrument
+of his in like manner calls upon government for favor of some kind or
+other, upon the same principle and the same precedent.
+
+Your Lordships now see how necessary it was to say something about
+arbitrary power. For, first, the wicked people of that country (Mr.
+Hastings's instruments, I mean) pretend right, title, purchase, grant;
+and when their frauds in all these legal means are discovered, then they
+fly off, and have recourse to arbitrary power, and say, "It is true I
+can make out no right, title, grant, or purchase; the parties are
+minors; I am bound to take care of their right: but you have arbitrary
+power; you have exercised it upon other occasions; exercise it upon
+this; give me the rights of other people." This was the last act, and I
+hope will be the last act, of Mr. Hastings's wicked power, done by the
+wickedest man in favor of the wickedest man, and by the wickedest means,
+which failed upon his own testimony.
+
+To bring your Lordships to the end of this business, which I hope will
+lead me very near to the end of what I have to trouble your Lordships
+with, I will now state the conduct of the Council, and the resolution
+about Gunga Govind Sing. I am to inform your Lordships that there was a
+reference made by the Council to the Committee of Revenue, namely, to
+Gunga Govind Sing himself,--a reference with regard to the right, title,
+mode, and proceeding, and many other circumstances; upon which the
+Committee, being such as I have described, very naturally were silent.
+Gunga Govind Sing _loquitur solus_,--in the manner you have just heard;
+the Committee were the chorus,--they sometimes talk, fill up a vacant
+part,--but Gunga Govind Sing was the great actor, the sole one. The
+report of this Committee being laid before the Council, Mr. Stables, one
+of the board, entered the following minute on the 15th of May, 1785.
+
+"I have perused the several papers upon this subject, and am sorry to
+observe that the Committee of Revenue are totally silent on the most
+material points therein, and sending the petition to them has only been
+so much time thrown away: I mean, on the actual value of the lands in
+question, what the amount derived from them has been in the last year,
+and what advantages or disadvantages to government by the sale, and
+whether, in their opinion, the supposed sale was compulsive or not. But
+it is not necessary for the discussion of the question respecting the
+regularity or irregularity of the pretended sale of Salbarry to Gunga
+Govind Sing, the dewan, to enter into the particular assertions of each
+party.
+
+"The representations of the Rajah's agent, confirmed by the petitions of
+his principal, positively assert the sale to have been compulsive and
+violent; and the dewan as positively denies it, though the fears he
+expresses, 'that their common enemies would set aside the act before it
+was complete,' show clearly that they were sensible the act was
+unjustifiable, if they do not tend to falsify his denial.
+
+"But it is clearly established and admitted by the language and writings
+of both parties, that there has been a most unwarrantable collusion in
+endeavoring to alienate the rights of government, contrary to the most
+positive original laws of the constitution of these provinces, 'that no
+zemindar and other landholder, paying revenue to government, shall be
+permitted to alienate his lands without the express authority of that
+government.'
+
+"The defence set up by Gunga Govind Sing does not go to disavow the
+transaction; for, if it did, the deed of sale, &c., produced by himself,
+and the petition to the board for its confirmation, would detect him: on
+the contrary, he openly admits its existence, and only strives to show
+that it was a voluntary one on the part of the Ranny and the servants of
+the Rajah. Whether voluntary or not, it was equally criminal in Gunga
+Govind Sing, as the public officer of government: because diametrically
+opposite to the positive and repeated standing orders of that government
+for the rule of his conduct, as dewan, and native guardian of the public
+rights intrusted especially to his care; because it was his duty, not
+only not to be guilty of a breach of those rules himself, but, as dewan,
+and exercising the efficient office of _kanungo_, to prevent, detect,
+expose, and apprise his employers of every instance attempted to the
+contrary; because it was his duty to prevent the government being
+defrauded, and the Rajah, a child of nine years old, robbed of his
+hereditary possessions, as he would have been, if this transaction had
+not been detected: whereas, on the contrary, the dewan is himself the
+principal mover and sole instrument in that fraud and robbery, if I am
+rightly informed, to the amount of 42,474 rupees[1] in perpetuity, by
+which he alone was to benefit; and because he has even dared to stand
+forward in an attempt to obtain our sanction, and thereby make us
+parties to (in my opinion) a false deed and fraudulent transaction, as
+his own defence now shows the bill of sale and all its collateral papers
+to be.
+
+"If offences of this dark tendency and magnitude were not to be punished
+in a public manner, the high example here set the natives employed
+under the government by their first native officer would very soon
+render our authority contemptible, and operate to the destruction of the
+public revenues. I will not dwell further on the contradictions in these
+papers before us on this subject.
+
+"But I beg leave to point out how tenacious the government have been of
+insuring implicit obedience to their rules on this subject in
+particular, and in prohibiting conduct like that here exhibited against
+their public officer, and how sacredly they have viewed the public
+institutes on this subject, which have been violated and trampled on;
+and it will suffice to show their public orders on a similar instance
+which happened some time ago, and which the dewan, from his official
+situation, must have been a party in detecting.
+
+"I desire the board's letter to the Committee on this subject, dated the
+31st May, 1782, may be read, and a copy be annexed to this minute.
+
+"I therefore move the board that Gunga Govind Sing may be forthwith
+required to surrender the original deeds produced by him as a title to
+the grant of Salbarry, in order that they may be returned to the Rajah's
+agents, to be made null and void.
+
+"I further move the board, that the dewan, Gunga Govind Sing, together
+with his naib, Prawn Kishin Sing, his son, and all his dependants, be
+removed from their offices, and that the Roy Royan, Rajah Rajebullub,
+whose duty only Gunga Govind Sing virtually is to perform, be reinstated
+in the exercise of the duties of his department; and that Gunga Govind
+Sing be ordered to deliver up all official papers of the circar to the
+Committee of Revenue and the Roy Royan, and that they be ordered
+accordingly to take charge of them, and finally settle all accounts."
+
+This motion was overruled, and no final proceeding appears.
+
+My Lords, you have heard the proceedings of the court before which Gunga
+Govind Sing thought proper to appeal, in consequence of the power and
+protection of Mr. Hastings being understood to exist after he left
+India, and authenticated by his last parting deed. Your Lordships will
+judge by that last act of Mr. Hastings what the rest of his whole life
+was.
+
+My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than just to remind your
+Lordships of this, that Mr. Hastings's government was one whole system
+of oppression, of robbery of individuals, of destruction of the public,
+and of suppression of the whole system of the English government, in
+order to vest in the worst of the natives all the powers that could
+possibly exist in any government,--in order to defeat the ends which all
+governments ought in common to have in view. Thus, my Lords, I show you
+at one point of view what you are to expect from him in all the rest. I
+have, I think, made out as clear as can be to your Lordships, so far as
+it was necessary to go, that his bribery and peculation was not
+occasional, but habitual,--that it was not urged upon him at the moment,
+but was regular and systematic. I have shown to your Lordships the
+operation of such a system on the revenues.
+
+My Lords, Mr. Hastings pleads one constant merit to justify those
+acts,--namely, that they produce an increase of the public revenue; and
+accordingly he never sells to any of those wicked agents any trusts
+whatever in the country, that you do not hear that it will considerably
+tend to the increase of the revenue. Your Lordships will see, when he
+sold to wicked men the province of Bahar in the same way in which Debi
+Sing had this province of Dinagepore, that consequences of a horrid and
+atrocious nature, though not to so great an extent, followed from it. I
+will just beg leave to state to your Lordships, that the kingdom of
+Bahar is annexed to the kingdom of Bengal; that this kingdom was
+governed by another Provincial Council; that he turned out that
+Provincial Council, and sold that government to two wicked men: one of
+no fortune at all, and the other of a very suspicious fortune; one a
+total bankrupt, the other justly excommunicated for his wickedness in
+his country, and then in prison for misdemeanors in a subordinate
+situation of government. Mr. Hastings destroyed the Council that
+imprisoned him; and, instead of putting one of the best and most
+reputable of the natives to govern it, he takes out of prison this
+excommunicated wretch, hated by God and man,--this bankrupt, this man of
+evil and desperate character, this mismanager of the public revenue in
+an inferior station; and, as he had given Bengal to Gunga Govind Sing,
+he gave this province to Rajahs Kelleram and Cullian Sing. It was done
+upon this principle, that they would increase and very much better the
+revenue. These men seemed to be as strange instruments for improving a
+revenue as ever were chosen, I suppose, since the world began. Perhaps
+their merit was giving a bribe of 40,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings. How he
+disposed of it I don't know. He says, "I disposed of it to the public,
+and it was in a case of emergency." You will see in the course of this
+business the falsehood of that pretence; for you will see, though the
+obligation is given for it as a round sum of money, that the payment
+was not accomplished till a year after; that therefore it could not
+answer any immediate exigence of the Company. Did it answer in an
+increase of the revenue? The very reverse. Those persons who had given
+this bribe of 40,000_l._ at the end of that year were found 80,000_l._
+in debt to the Company. The Company always loses, when Mr. Hastings
+takes a bribe; and when he proposes an increase of the revenue, the
+Company loses often double. But I hope and trust your Lordships will
+consider this idea of a monstrous rise of rent, given by men of
+desperate fortunes and characters, to be one of the grievances instead
+of one of the advantages of this system.
+
+It has been necessary to lay these facts before you, (and I have stated
+them to your Lordships far short of their reality, partly through my
+infirmity, and partly on account of the odiousness of the task of going
+through things that disgrace human nature,) that you may be enabled
+fully to enter into the dreadful consequences which attend a system of
+bribery and corruption in a Governor-General. On a transient view,
+bribery is rather a subject of disgust than horror,--the sordid practice
+of a venal, mean, and abject mind; and the effect of the crime seems to
+end with the act. It looks to be no more than the corrupt transfer of
+property from one person to another,--at worst a theft. But it will
+appear in a very different light, when you regard the consideration for
+which the bribe is given,--namely, that a Governor-General, claiming an
+arbitrary power in himself, for that consideration delivers up the
+properties, the liberties, and the lives of an whole people to the
+arbitrary discretion of any wicked and rapacious person, who will be
+sure to make good from their blood the purchase he has paid for his
+power over them. It is possible that a man may pay a bribe merely to
+redeem himself from some evil. It is bad, however, to live under a power
+whose violence has no restraint except in its avarice. But no man ever
+paid a bribe for a power to charge and tax others, but with a view to
+oppress them. No man ever paid a bribe for the handling of the public
+money, but to peculate from it. When once such offices become thus
+privately and corruptly venal, the very worst men will be chosen (as Mr.
+Hastings has in fact constantly chosen the very worst); because none but
+those who do not scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently
+with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands of a severe public
+revenue and the private bribes of a rapacious chief magistrate. Not only
+the worst men will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no
+dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions. Their
+protection is sure. The authority that is to restrain, to control, to
+punish them is previously engaged; he has his retaining fee for the
+support of their crimes. Mr. Hastings never dared, because he could not,
+arrest oppression in its course, without drying up the source of his own
+corrupt emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the fact, to punish
+extortion in others, because he could not, without risking the discovery
+of bribery in himself. The same corruption, the same oppression, and the
+same impunity will reign through all the subordinate gradations.
+
+A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of wicked, violent, and
+unjust instruments. But when once the line of just and legal demand is
+transgressed, such instruments are of absolute necessity; and they
+comport themselves accordingly. When we know that men must be well paid
+(and they ought to be well paid) for the performance of honorable duty,
+can we think that men will be found to commit wicked, rapacious, and
+oppressive acts with fidelity and disinterestedness for the sole
+emolument of dishonest employers? No: they must have their full share of
+the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer and more
+necessary instruments of the general extortion. We must not, therefore,
+flatter ourselves, when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000_l._ in bribes for
+Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the people nothing more
+than 40,000_l._ is extorted. I speak within compass, four times forty
+must be levied on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent
+purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable tortures,
+imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general despair, general
+insurrection, the massacre of the officers of revenue by the people, the
+massacre of the people by the soldiery, and the total waste and
+destruction of the finest provinces in India, are things of course,--and
+all a necessary consequence involved in the very substance of Mr.
+Hastings's bribery.
+
+I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed, for private
+purposes, the whole system of government by the six Provincial Councils,
+which he had no right to destroy.
+
+I charge him with having delegated to others that power which the act of
+Parliament had directed him to preserve unalienably in himself.
+
+I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere instruments and
+tools, at the enormous expense of 62,000_l._ per annum.
+
+I charge him with having appointed a person their dewan to whom these
+Englishmen were to be subservient tools,--whose name, to his own
+knowledge, was, by the general voice of India, by the general recorded
+voice of the Company, by recorded official transactions, by everything
+that can make a man known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy;
+and with giving him the whole power which he had thus separated from the
+Council-General, and from the Provincial Councils.
+
+I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.
+
+I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which fidelity even
+in iniquity requires at the hands of the worst of men.
+
+I charge him with having robbed those people of whom he took the bribes.
+
+I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.
+
+I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, taken the
+lands of orphans, and given them to wicked persons under him.
+
+I charge him with having removed the natural guardians of a minor Rajah,
+and with having given that trust to a stranger, Debi Sing, whose
+wickedness was known to himself and all the world, and by whom the
+Rajah, his family, and dependants were cruelly oppressed.
+
+I charge him with having committed to the management of Debi Sing three
+great provinces; and thereby with having wasted the country, ruined the
+landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses,
+seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed
+the honor of the whole female race of that country.
+
+In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villany upon
+Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.
+
+My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national
+justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords? You have the cause of oppressed
+princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and
+of wasted kingdoms.
+
+Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever
+laid to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish
+any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left
+substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.
+
+My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons
+of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, that the sun,
+in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more
+glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the
+material bounds and barriers of Nature, united by the bond of a social
+and moral community,--all the Commons of England resenting, as their
+own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of
+India.
+
+Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the
+modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us
+with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the
+mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the crown, under whose authority you
+sit, and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority,
+what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent powers and
+protecting justice of his Majesty. We have here the heir-apparent to the
+crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England wish an
+heir-apparent of the crown to be. We have here all the branches of the
+royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the
+sovereign and the subject,--offering a pledge in that situation for the
+support of the rights of the crown and the liberties of the people, both
+which extremities they touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary
+peerage here,--those who have their own honor, the honor of their
+ancestors and of their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they
+have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which
+justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new
+nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves by various merits,--by
+great military services which have extended the fame of this country
+from the rising to the setting sun. We have those who, by various civil
+merits and various civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which
+they well deserve, and in which they will justify the favor of their
+sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and make them
+rejoice to see those virtuous characters that were the other day upon a
+level with them now exalted above them in rank, but feeling with them in
+sympathy what they felt in common with them before. We have persons
+exalted from the practice of the law, from the place in which they
+administered high, though subordinate, justice, to a seat here, to
+enlighten with their knowledge and to strengthen with their votes those
+principles which have distinguished the courts in which they have
+presided.
+
+My Lords, you have here also the lights of our religion, you have the
+bishops of England. My Lords, you have that true image of the primitive
+Church, in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from
+the superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will
+bring upon the best institutions. You have the representatives of that
+religion which says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit
+of their institution is charity,--a religion which so much hates
+oppression, that, when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, He
+did not appear in a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with
+the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling
+principle that their welfare was the object of all government, since the
+Person who was the Master of Nature chose to appear Himself in a
+subordinate situation. These are the considerations which influence
+them, which animate them, and will animate them, against all
+oppression,--knowing that He who is called first among them, and first
+among us all, both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it,
+made Himself "the servant of all."
+
+My Lords, these are the securities which we have in all the constituent
+parts of the body of this House. We know them, we reckon, we rest upon
+them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your
+hands. Therefore it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons,
+
+I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.
+
+I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament
+assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
+
+I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose
+national character he has dishonored.
+
+I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights,
+and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose
+country he has laid waste and desolate.
+
+I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice
+which he has violated.
+
+I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly
+outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank,
+situation, and condition of life.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Vakeel states Mofussil Jumma, of Salbarry, for 1,191
+
+    S* R*            96,229
+Purchase money       53,755
+                     ------
+Per annum, loss      42,474
+
+
+
+
+SPEECHES
+
+IN
+
+THE IMPEACHMENT
+
+OF
+
+WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,
+
+LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+April and May, 1789.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+     After Mr. Burke had concluded the opening speeches, the first
+     article of the impeachment was brought forward, on the 22d of
+     February, 1788, by Mr. Fox, and supported by Mr. Grey on the 25th.
+     After the evidence upon this article had been adduced, it was
+     summed up and enforced by Mr. Anstruther, on the 11th day of April
+     following.
+
+     The next article with which the Commons proceeded was brought
+     forward on the 15th of April, 1788, by Mr. Adam, and supported by
+     Mr. Pelham; and the evidence, in part upon the second article of
+     charge, was summed up and enforced, on the 3d of June, by Mr.
+     Sheridan.
+
+     On the 21st of April, 1789, Mr. Burke opened the sixth charge,
+     bribery and corruption, in the following speech, which was
+     continued on the 25th of April, and on the 6th and 7th May, in the
+     same session.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--An event which had spread for a considerable time an
+universal grief and consternation through this kingdom, and which in its
+issue diffused as universal and transcendent a joy, has in the
+circumstances both of our depression and of our exaltation produced a
+considerable delay, if not a total suspension, of the most important
+functions of government.
+
+My Lords, we now resume our office,--and we resume it with new and
+redoubled alacrity, and, we trust, under not less propitious omens than
+when we left it, in this House, at the end of the preceding session. We
+come to this duty with a greater degree of earnestness and zeal, because
+we are urged to it by many and very peculiar circumstances. This day we
+come from an House where the last steps were taken (and I suppose
+something has happened similar in this) to prepare our way to attend
+with the utmost solemnity, in another place, a great national
+thanksgiving for having restored the sovereign to his Parliament and the
+Parliament to its sovereign.
+
+But, my Lords, it is not only in the house of prayer that we offer to
+the First Cause the acceptable homage of our rational nature,--my Lords,
+in this House, at this bar, in this place, in every place where His
+commands are obeyed, His worship is performed. And, my Lords, I must
+boldly say, (and I think I shall hardly be contradicted by your
+Lordships, or by any persons versed in the law which guides us all,)
+that the highest act of religion, and the highest homage which we can
+and ought to pay, is an imitation of the Divine perfections, as far as
+such a nature can imitate such perfections, and that by this means alone
+we can make our homage acceptable to Him.
+
+My Lords, in His temple we shall not forget that His most distinguished
+attribute is justice, and that the first link in the chain by which we
+are held to the Supreme Judge of All is justice; and that it is in this
+solemn temple of representative justice we may best give Him praise,
+because we can here best imitate His divine attributes. If ever there
+was a cause in which justice and mercy are not only combined and
+reconciled, but incorporated, it is in this cause of suffering nations,
+which we now bring before your Lordships this second session of
+Parliament, unwearied and unfatigued in our persevering pursuit; and we
+feel it to be a necessary preliminary, a necessary fact, a necessary
+attendant and concomitant of every public thanksgiving, that we should
+express our gratitude by our virtues, and not merely with our mouths,
+and that, when we are giving thanks for acts of mercy, we should render
+ourselves worthy of them by doing acts of mercy ourselves. My Lords,
+these considerations, independent of those which were our first movers
+in this business, strongly urge us at present to pursue with all zeal
+and perseverance the great cause we have now in hand. And we feel this
+to be the more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that light,
+unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious minds soon tire
+in any pursuit that requires strength, steadiness, and perseverance.
+Such persons, who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not
+resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say, How long is this
+business to continue? Our answer is, It is to continue till its ends are
+obtained.
+
+We know, that, by a mysterious dispensation of Providence, injury is
+quick and rapid, and justice slow; and we may say that those who have
+not patience and vigor of mind to attend the tardy pace of justice
+counteract the order of Providence, and are resolved not to be just at
+all. We, therefore, instead of bending the order of Nature to the laxity
+of our characters and tempers, must rather confirm ourselves by a manly
+fortitude and virtuous perseverance to continue within those forms, and
+to wrestle with injustice, until we have shown that those virtues which
+sometimes wickedness debauches into its cause, such as vigor, energy,
+activity, fortitude of spirit, are called back and brought to their true
+and natural service,--and that in the pursuit of wickedness, in the
+following it through all the winding recesses and mazes of its
+artifices, we shall show as much vigor, as much constancy, as much
+diligence, energy, and perseverance, as any others can do in endeavoring
+to elude the laws and triumph over the justice of their country. My
+Lords, we have thought it the more necessary to say this, because it has
+been given out that we might faint in this business. No: we follow, and
+trust we shall always follow, that great emblem of antiquity, in which
+the person who held out to the end of a long line of labors found the
+reward of all the eleven in the twelfth. Our labor, therefore, will be
+our reward; and we will go on, we will pursue with vigor and diligence,
+in a manner suitable to the Commons of Great Britain, every mode of
+corruption, till we have thoroughly eradicated it.
+
+I think it necessary to say a word, too, upon another circumstance, of
+which there is some complaint, as if some injustice had arisen from
+voluntary delay on our part.
+
+I have already alluded to, first, the melancholy, then the joyful
+occasion of this delay; and I shall now make one remark on another part
+of the complaint, which I understand was formally made to your Lordships
+soon after we had announced our resolution to proceed in this great
+cause of suffering nations before you. It has been alleged, that the
+length of the pursuit had already very much distressed the person who is
+the object of it,--that it leaned upon a fortune unequal to support
+it,--and that 30,000_l._ had been already spent in the preliminary
+preparations for the defence.
+
+My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and unadulterated justice
+considers with a certain degree of tenderness the person whom it is
+called to punish, and never oppresses those by the process who ought not
+to be oppressed but by the sentence of the court before which they are
+brought. The Commons have heard, indeed, with some degree of
+astonishment, that 30,000_l._ hath been laid out by Mr. Hastings in this
+business. We, who have some experience in the conduct of affairs of this
+nature, we, who profess to proceed with regard not to the economy so
+much as to the rigor of this prosecution, (and we are justified by our
+country in so doing,) upon a collation and comparison of the public
+expenses with those which the defendant is supposed to have incurred,
+are much surprised to hear it. We suppose that his solicitors can give a
+good account to him of those expenses,--that the thing is true,--and
+that he has actually, through them, incurred this expense. We have
+nothing to do with this: but we shall remove any degree of uneasiness
+from your Lordships' minds, and from our own, when we show you in the
+charge which we shall bring before you this day, that one bribe only
+received by Mr. Hastings, the smallest of his bribes, or nearly the
+smallest, the bribe received from Rajah Nobkissin, is alone more than
+equal to have paid all the charges Mr. Hastings is stated to have
+incurred; and if this be the case, your Lordships will not be made very
+uneasy in a case of bribery by finding that you press upon the sources
+of peculation.
+
+It has also been said that we weary out the public patience in this
+cause. The House of Commons do not call upon your Lordships to do
+anything of which they do not set the example. They have very lately sat
+in the Colchester Committee as many, within one or two, days
+successively as have been spent in this trial interruptedly in the
+course of two years. Every cause deserves that it should be tried
+according to its nature and circumstances; and in the case of the
+Colchester Committee, in the trial of paltry briberies of odd pounds,
+shillings, and pence, in the corruption of a returning officer, who is
+but a miller, they spent nearly the same number of days that we have
+been inquiring into the ruin of kingdoms by the peculation and bribery
+of the chief governor of the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa.
+Therefore God forbid that we should faint at thrice thirty days, if the
+proceedings should be drawn into such a length, when for a small crime
+as much time has been spent as has yet been spent in this great cause!
+
+Having now cleared the way with regard to the local and temporary
+circumstances of this case,--having shown your Lordships that too much
+time has not been spent in it,--having no reason to think, from the time
+which has hitherto been spent, that time will be unnecessarily spent in
+future,--I trust your Lordships will think that time ought neither to be
+spared nor squandered in this business: we will therefore proceed,
+article by article, as far as the discretion of the House of Commons
+shall think fit, for the justice of the case, to limit the inquiry, or
+to extend it.
+
+We are now going to bring before your Lordships the sixth article. It is
+an article of charge of bribery and corruption against Mr. Hastings; but
+yet we must confess that we feel some little difficulty _in limine_. We
+here appear in the name and character not only of representatives of the
+Commons of Great Britain, but representatives of the inhabitants of
+Bengal: and yet we have had lately come into our hands such ample
+certificates, such full testimonials, from every person in whose cause
+we complain, that we shall appear to be in the strangest situation in
+the world,--the situation of persons complaining, who are disavowed by
+the persons in whose name and character they complain. This would have
+been a very great difficulty in the beginning, especially as it is come
+before us in a flood-tide of panegyric. No encomium can be more exalted
+or more beautifully expressed. No language can more strongly paint the
+perfect satisfaction, the entire acquiescence, of all the nations of
+Bengal, and their wonderful admiration of the character of the person
+whom we have brought as a criminal to your bar upon their part. I do
+admit that it is a very awkward circumstance; but yet, at the same time,
+the same candor which has induced the House of Commons to bring before
+you the bosom friends and confidants of Mr. Hastings as their evidence
+will not suffer them to suppress or withhold for a moment from your
+Lordships this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation in Mr.
+Hastings's favor, and we shall produce it as a part of our evidence. Oh,
+my Lords, consider the situation of a people who are forced to mix their
+praises with their groans, who are forced to sign, with hands which have
+been in torture, and with the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an
+attestation in favor of the person from whom all their sufferings have
+been derived! When we prove to you the things that we shall prove, this
+will, I hope, give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory
+proof of the misery to which these people have been reduced. You will
+see before you, what is so well expressed by one of our poets as the
+homage of tyrants, "that homage with the mouth which the heart would
+fain deny, but dares not." Mr. Hastings has received that homage, and
+that homage we mean to present to your Lordships: we mean to present it,
+because it will show your Lordships clearly, that, after Mr. Hastings
+has ransacked Bengal from one end to the other, and has used all the
+power which he derives from having every friend and every dependant of
+his in every office from one end of that government to the other, he has
+not, in all those panegyrics, those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums,
+got one word of refutation or one word of evidence against any charge
+whatever which we produce against him. Every one knows, that, in the
+course of criminal trials, when no evidence of _alibi_ can be brought,
+when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted, the last thing
+produced is evidence to character. His cause, therefore, is gone, when,
+having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at
+length appeals to his character. In those little papers which are given
+us of our proceedings in our criminal courts, it is always an omen of
+what is to follow: after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or
+robbery, it ends in his character: "He has an admirable character; I
+have known him from a boy; he is wonderfully good; he is the best of
+men; I would trust him with untold gold": and immediately follows,
+"Guilty,--Death." This is the way in which, in our courts, character is
+generally followed by sentence. The practice is not modern. Undoubtedly
+Mr. Hastings has the example of criminals of high antiquity; for Caius
+Verres, Antonius, and every other man who has been famous for the
+pillage and destruction of provinces, never failed to bring before their
+judges the attestations of the injured to their character. Voltaire
+says, "_Les bons mots sont toujours redits_." A similar occasion has
+here produced a similar conduct. He has got just the same character as
+Caius Verres got in another cause; and the _laudationes_, which your
+Lordships know always followed, to save trouble, we mean ourselves to
+give your Lordships; we mean to give them with this strong presumption
+of guilt, that in all this panegyric there is not one word of defence to
+a single article of charge; they are mere lip-honors: but we think we
+derive from those panegyrics, which Mr. Hastings has had sent over as
+evidence to supply the total want of it, an indication of the
+impossibility of attaining it. Mr. Hastings has brought them here, and I
+must say we are under some difficulty about them, and the difficulty is
+this. We think we can produce before your Lordships proofs of barbarity
+and peculation by Mr. Hastings; we have the proofs of them in specific
+provinces, where those proofs may be met by contrary proofs, or may lose
+their weight from a variety of circumstances. We thought we had got the
+matter sure, that everything was settled, that he could not escape us,
+after he had himself confessed the bribes he had taken from the specific
+provinces. But in what condition are we now? We have from those specific
+provinces the strongest attestations that there is not any credit to be
+paid to his own acknowledgments. In short, we have the complaints,
+concerning these crimes of Mr. Hastings, of the injured persons
+themselves; we have his own confessions; we shall produce both to your
+Lordships. But these persons now declare, that not only their own
+complaints are totally unfounded, but that Mr. Hastings's confessions
+are not true, and not to be credited. These are circumstances which your
+Lordships will consider in the view you take of this wonderful body of
+attestation.
+
+It is a pleasant thing to see in these addresses the different character
+and modes of eloquence of different countries. In those that will be
+brought before your Lordships you will see the beauty of chaste European
+panegyric improved by degrees into high, Oriental, exaggerated, and
+inflated metaphor. You will see how the language is first written in
+English, then translated into Persian, and then retranslated into
+English. There may be something amusing to your Lordships in this, and
+the beauty of these styles may, in this heavy investigation, tend to
+give a little gayety and pleasure. We shall bring before you the
+European and Asiatic incense. You will have the perfume-shops of the two
+countries.
+
+One of the accusations which we mean to bring against Mr. Hastings is
+upon the part of the Zemindar Radanaut, of the country of Dinagepore.
+Now hear what the Zemindar says himself. "As it has been learned by me,
+the mutsuddies, and the respectable officers of my zemindary, that the
+ministers of England are displeased with the late Governor, Warren
+Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that he oppressed us, took money
+from us by deceit and force, and ruined the country, therefore we, upon
+the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent on and
+necessary for us to abide by, following the rules laid down in giving
+evidence, declare the particulars of the acts and deeds of Warren
+Hastings, Esquire, full of circumspection and caution, civility and
+justice, superior to the conduct of the most learned, and, by
+representing what is fact, wipe away the doubts that have possessed the
+minds of the ministers of England; that Mr. Hastings is possessed of
+fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to us; that he is clear
+of the contamination of mistrust and wrong, and his mind is free of
+covetousness or avarice. During the time of his administration no one
+saw other conduct than that of protection to the husbandman, and
+justice. No inhabitant ever experienced afflictions, no one ever felt
+oppression from him; our reputations have always been guarded from
+attacks by his prudence, and our families have always been protected by
+his justice. He never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards
+us, but healed the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation by
+means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never permitting one of us to
+sink in the pit of despondence. He supported every one by his goodness,
+overset the designs of evil-minded men by his authority, tied the hand
+of oppression with the strong bandage of justice, and by these means
+expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness and joy over us. He
+reëstablished justice and impartiality. We were during his government in
+the enjoyment of perfect happiness and ease, and many of us are thankful
+and satisfied. As Mr. Hastings was well acquainted with our manners and
+customs, he was always desirous, in every respect, of doing whatever
+would preserve our religious rites, and guard them against every kind of
+accident and injury, and at all times protected us. Whatever we have
+experienced from him, and whatever happened from him, we have written
+without deceit or exaggeration."
+
+My Lords, here is a panegyric; and, directly contrary to the usual mode
+of other accusers, we begin by producing the panegyrics made upon the
+person whom we accuse. We shall produce along with the charge, and give
+as evidence, the panegyric and certificate of the persons whom we
+suppose to have suffered these wrongs. We suffer ourselves even to
+abandon, what might be our last resource, his own confession, by showing
+that one of the princes from whom he confesses that he took bribes has
+given a certificate of the direct contrary.
+
+All these things will have their weight upon your Lordships' minds; and
+when we have put ourselves under this disadvantage, (what disadvantage
+it is your Lordships will judge,) at least we shall stand acquitted of
+unfairness in charging him with crimes directly contrary to the
+panegyrics in this paper contained. Indeed, I will say this for him,
+that general charge and loose accusation may be answered by loose and
+general panegyric, and that, if ours were of that nature, this panegyric
+would be sufficient to overset our accusation. But we come before your
+Lordships in a different manner and upon different grounds. I am ordered
+by the Commons of Great Britain to support the charge that they have
+made, and persevere in making, against Warren Hastings, Esquire, late
+Governor-General of Bengal, and now a culprit at your bar: First, for
+having taken corruptly several bribes, and extorted by force, or under
+the power and color of his office, several sums of money from the
+unhappy natives of Bengal. The next article which we shall bring before
+you is, that he is not only personally corrupted, but that he has
+personally corrupted all the other servants of the Company,--those under
+him, whose corruptions he ought to have controlled, and those above him,
+whose business it was to control his corruptions.
+
+We purpose to make good to your Lordships the first of these, by
+submitting to you, that part of those sums which are specified in the
+charge were taken by him with his own hand and in his own person, but
+that much the greater part have been taken from the natives by the
+instrumentality of his black agents, banians, and other
+dependants,--whose confidential connection with him, and whose agency on
+his part in corrupt transactions, if his counsel should be bold enough
+to challenge us to the proof, we shall fully prove before you. The next
+part, and the second branch of his corruption, namely, what is commonly
+called his active corruption, distinguishing the personal under the name
+of passive, will appear from his having given, under color of contracts,
+a number of corrupt and lucrative advantages from a number of
+unauthorized and unreasonable grants, pensions, and allowances, by which
+he corrupted actively the whole service of the Company. And, lastly, we
+shall show, that, by establishing a universal connivance from one end of
+the service to the other, he has not only corrupted and contaminated it
+in all its parts, but bound it in a common league of iniquity to support
+mutually each other against the inquiry that should detect and the
+justice that should punish their offences. These two charges, namely, of
+his active and passive corruption, we shall bring one after the other,
+as strongly and clearly illustrating and as powerfully confirming each
+other.
+
+The first which we shall bring before you is his own passive
+corruption,--so we commonly call it. Bribes are so little known in this
+country that we can hardly get clear and specific technical names to
+distinguish them; but in future, I am afraid, the conduct of Mr.
+Hastings will improve our law vocabulary. The first, then, of these
+offences with which Mr. Hastings stands charged here is receiving bribes
+himself, or through his banians. Every one of these are overt acts of
+the general charge of bribery, and they are every one of them,
+separately taken, substantive crimes. But whatever the criminal nature
+of these acts was, (and the nature was very criminal, and the
+consequences to the country very dreadful,) yet we mean to prove to your
+Lordships that they were not single acts, that they were not acts
+committed as opportunity offered, or as necessity tempted or urged upon
+the occasion, but that they are parts of a general systematic plan of
+corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense of his integrity;
+that he has, for that purpose, not only taken the opportunity of his own
+power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and
+created complete revolutions in the country's government, for the
+purpose of making the power which ought to be subservient to legal
+government subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer
+cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice, he endeavored to justify
+them by principle. These artifices we mean to detect; these principles
+we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy,
+and subvert forever.
+
+My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of
+collusion, concealment, and deceit, your Lordships will, perhaps, not
+feel the same degree of interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had
+before you crimes of dignity: you have had before you the ruin and
+expulsion of great and illustrious families, the breach of solemn public
+treaties, the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses
+in Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination
+are not always the most pernicious in their effects: in these high,
+eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort
+of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on which they can be
+exercised are rare; the persons upon whom they can be exercised few; the
+persons who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many.
+These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged
+crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the
+distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in
+eminent station.
+
+But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect
+that high situation,--when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with
+fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery--when
+all these follow in one train,--when these vices, which gender and spawn
+in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime
+that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is
+much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable,
+but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the
+highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt
+government. They are reptile vices. There are situations in which the
+acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of
+little importance. In the other, the mischief of the example is
+infinite.
+
+My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives bribes, he gives a
+signal to universal pillage to all the inferior parts of the service.
+The bridles upon hard-mouthed passion are removed; they are taken away;
+they are broken. Fear and shame, the great guards to virtue next to
+conscience, are gone. Shame! how can it exist?--it will soon blush away
+its awkward sensibility. Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long, when it is
+seen that crimes which naturally bring disgrace are attended with all
+the outward symbols, characteristics, and rewards of honor and of
+virtue,--when it is seen that high station, great rank, general
+applause, vast wealth follow the commission of peculation and bribery.
+Is it to be believed that men can long be ashamed of that which they see
+to be the road to honor? As to fear, let a Governor-General once take
+bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service. What have they to
+fear? Is it the man whose example they follow that is to bring them
+before a tribunal for their punishment? Can he open any inquiry? He
+cannot: he that opens a channel of inquiry under these circumstances
+opens a high-road to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent
+it? None: for he can make no laws to restrain that practice without the
+breach of his own laws immediately in his own conduct. If we once can
+admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however
+defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence
+of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no
+hope left in the supreme justice of the country. We are sensible of all
+these difficulties; we have felt them; and perhaps it has required no
+small degree of exertion for us to get the better of these difficulties
+which are thrown in our way by a Governor-General accepting bribes, and
+thereby screening and protecting the whole service in such iniquitous
+proceedings.
+
+With regard to this matter, we are to state to your Lordships, in order
+to bring it fully and distinctly before you, what the nature of this
+distemper of bribery is in the Indian government. We are to state what
+the laws and rules are which have been opposed to prevent it, and the
+utter insufficiency of all that have been proposed: to state the
+grievance, the instructions of the Company and government, the acts of
+Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of Parliament. We are to
+state to your Lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are
+to state the trust the Company had in him for the prevention of all
+those evils; and then we are to prove that every evil, that all those
+grievances which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants
+to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to
+smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a
+special, direct, and immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your
+Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person collectively, has
+done more mischief than all those persons whose evil practices have
+produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own
+appointment.
+
+The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove
+in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical,
+endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company's affairs in India, from
+the time of their first establishment there. Very often there are no
+words nor any description which can adequately convey the state of a
+thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself: because the former
+might be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that which was
+really fact to be nothing but the coloring of the person that explained
+it; and therefore I think that it will be much better to give to your
+Lordships here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when the
+Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings entered into, and
+when they took those measures to prevent the very evils from persons
+placed in those very stations and in those very circumstances in which
+we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the offences we now bring
+before you.
+
+I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to read a consultation
+of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming
+the state of the Company, in order to show the magnitude of the
+pecuniary corruptions that prevailed in it.
+
+    "It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and profess to your
+    interests and to our own honor, that we think it indispensably
+    necessary to lay open to your view a series of transactions too
+    notoriously known to be suppressed, and too affecting to your
+    interest, to the national character, and to the existence of the
+    Company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured,--transactions
+    which seem to demonstrate that every spring of this government was
+    smeared with corruption, that principles of rapacity and oppression
+    universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment and public
+    spirit was lost and extinguished in the unbounded lust of unmerited
+    wealth.
+
+    "To illustrate these positions, we must exhibit to your view a most
+    unpleasing variety of complaints, inquiries, accusations, and
+    vindications, the particulars of which are entered in our
+    Proceedings and the Appendix,--assuring you that we undertake this
+    task with peculiar reluctance, from the personal regard we entertain
+    for some of the gentlemen whose characters will appear to be deeply
+    affected.
+
+    "At Fort St. George we received the first advices of the demise of
+    Mir Jaffier and of Sujah Dowlah's defeat. It was there firmly
+    imagined that no definite measures would be taken, either in respect
+    to a peace or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our
+    arrival,--as the 'Lapwing' arrived in the month of January with your
+    general letter, and the appointment of a committee with express
+    powers to that purpose, for the successful exertion of which the
+    happiest occasion now offered. However, a contrary resolution
+    prevailed in the Council. The opportunity of acquiring immense
+    fortunes was too inviting to be neglected, and the temptation too
+    powerful to be resisted. A treaty was hastily drawn up by the board,
+    or rather transcribed, with few unimportant additions, from that
+    concluded with Mir Jaffier,--and a deputation, consisting of Messrs.
+    Johnstone, senior, Middleton, and Leycester, appointed to raise the
+    natural son of the deceased Nabob to the subahdarry, in prejudice of
+    the claim of the grandson; and for this measure such reasons are
+    assigned as ought to have dictated a diametrically opposite
+    resolution. Meeran's son was a minor, which circumstance alone would
+    have naturally brought the whole administration into our hands, at a
+    juncture when it became indispensably necessary we should realize
+    that shadow of power and influence which, having no solid
+    foundation, was exposed to the danger of being annihilated by the
+    first stroke of adverse fortune. But this inconsistence was not
+    regarded; nor was it material to the views for precipitating the
+    treaty, which was pressed on the young Nabob at the first interview,
+    in so earnest and indelicate a manner as highly disgusted him and
+    chagrined his ministers; while not a single rupee was stipulated for
+    the Company, whose interests were sacrificed, that their servants
+    might revel in the spoils of a treasury before impoverished, but now
+    totally exhausted.
+
+    "This scene of corruption was first disclosed, at a visit the Nabob
+    was paid, to Lord Clive and the gentlemen of the Committee, a few
+    days after our arrival. He there delivered to his Lordship a letter
+    filled with bitter complaints of the insults and indignities he had
+    been exposed to, and the embezzlement of near twenty lacs of rupees,
+    issued from his treasury for purposes unknown, during the late
+    negotiations. So public a complaint could not be disregarded, and it
+    soon produced an inquiry. We referred the letter to the board, in
+    expectation of obtaining a satisfactory account of the application
+    of this money, and were answered only by a warm remonstrance entered
+    by Mr. Leycester against that very Nabob in whose elevation he
+    boasts of having been a principal agent.
+
+    "Mahomed Reza Khân, the Naib Subah, was then called upon to account
+    for this large disbursement from the treasury; and he soon delivered
+    to the Committee the very extraordinary narrative entered in our
+    Proceedings the 6th of June, wherein he specifies the several names
+    and sums, by whom paid, and to whom, whether in cash, bills, or
+    obligations. So precise, so accurate an account as this of money for
+    secret and venal services was never, we believe, before this period,
+    exhibited to the Honorable Court of Directors,--at least, never
+    vouched by such undeniable testimony and authentic documents: by
+    Juggut Seet, who himself was obliged to contribute largely to the
+    sums demanded; by Muley Ram, who was employed by Mr. Johnstone in
+    all those pecuniary transactions; by the Nabob and Mahomed Reza
+    Khân, who were the heaviest sufferers; and, lastly, by the
+    confession of the gentlemen themselves whose names are specified in
+    the distribution list.
+
+    "Juggut Seet expressly declared in his narrative, that the sum which
+    he agreed to pay the deputation, amounting to 125,000 rupees, was
+    extorted by menaces; and since the close of our inquiry, and the
+    opinions we delivered in the Proceedings of the 21st June, it fully
+    appears that the presents from the Nabob and Mahomed Reza Khân,
+    exceeding the immense sum of seventeen lacs, were not the voluntary
+    offerings of gratitude, but contributions levied on the weakness of
+    the government, and violently exacted from the dependent state and
+    timid disposition of the minister. The charge, indeed, is denied on
+    the one hand, as well as affirmed on the other. Your honorable board
+    must therefore determine how far the circumstance of extortion may
+    aggravate the crime of disobedience to your positive orders, the
+    exposing the government in a manner to sale, and receiving the
+    infamous wages of corruption from opposite parties and contending
+    interests. We speak with boldness, because we speak from conviction
+    founded upon indubitable facts, that, besides the above sums
+    specified in the distribution account to the amount of 228,125
+    pounds sterling, there was likewise to the value of several lacs of
+    rupees procured from Nundcomar and Roydullub, each of whom aspired
+    at and obtained a promise of that very employment it was
+    predetermined to bestow on Mahomed Reza Khân.
+
+    (Signed at the end)
+
+            "CLIVE.
+            W^M B. SUMNER.
+            JOHN CARNAC.
+            H. VERELST.
+            FRA^S SYKES."
+
+This paper cannot be denied to be a paper of weight and authenticity,
+because it is signed by a gentleman now in this House, who sits on one
+side of the gentleman at your bar, as his bail. This grievance,
+therefore, so authenticated, so great, and described in so many
+circumstances, I think it might be sufficient for me, in this part of
+the business, to show was, when Mr. Hastings was sent to India, a
+prevalent evil.
+
+But, my Lords, it is necessary that I should show to you something more,
+because, _prima fronte_, this is some exculpation of Mr. Hastings: for,
+if he was only a partaker in a general misconduct, it was rather _vitium
+loci et vitium temporis_ than _vitium hominis_. This might be said in
+his exculpation. But I am next to show your Lordships the means which
+the Company took for removing this grievance; and that Mr. Hastings's
+peculiar trust, the great specific ground of his appointment, was a
+confidence that he would eradicate this very evil, of which we are going
+to prove that he has been one of the principal promoters. I wish your
+Lordships to advert to one particular circumstance,--namely, that the
+two persons who were bidders at this time, and at this auction of
+government, for the favor and countenance of the Presidency at Calcutta,
+were Mahomed Reza Khân and Rajah Nundcomar. I wish your Lordships to
+recollect this by-and-by, when we shall bring before you the very same
+two persons, who, in the same sort of transaction, and in circumstances
+exactly similar, or very nearly so, were candidates for the favor of Mr.
+Hastings.
+
+My Lords, our next step will be to show you that the Company in 1768 had
+made a covenant expressly forbidding the taking of presents of above
+400_l._ value in each present by the Governor-General. I take it for
+granted, this will not be much litigated. They renewed and enforced that
+with other covenants and other instructions; and at last came an act of
+Parliament, in the clearest, the most definite, the most specific words
+that all the wisdom of the legislature, intent upon the eradication of
+this evil, could use, to prevent the receiving of presents.
+
+My Lords, I think it is necessary to state, that there has been some
+little difficulty concerning this word, _presents_. Bribery and
+extortion have been covered by the name of presents, and the authority
+and practice of the East has been adduced as a palliation of the crime.
+My Lords, no authority of the East will be a palliation of the breach of
+laws enacted in the West: and to those laws of the West, and not the
+vicious customs of the East, we insist upon making Mr. Hastings liable.
+But do not your Lordships see that this is an entire mistake? that there
+never was any custom of the East for it? I do not mean vicious practices
+and customs, which it is the business of good laws and good customs to
+eradicate. There are three species of presents known in the East,--two
+of them payments of money known to be legal, and the other perfectly
+illegal, and which has a name exactly expressing it in the manner our
+language does. It is necessary that your Lordships should see that Mr.
+Hastings has made use of a perversion of the names of authorized gifts
+to cover the most abominable and prostituted bribery. The first of those
+presents is known in the country by the name of _peshcush_: this
+_peshcush_ is a fine paid, upon the grant of lands, to the sovereign, or
+whoever grants them. The second is the _nuzzer_, or _nuzzerana_, which
+is a tribute of acknowledgment from an inferior to a superior. The last
+is called _reshwat_, in the Persian language,--that is to say, a bribe,
+or sum of money clandestinely and corruptly taken,--and is as much
+distinguished from the others as, in the English language, a fine or
+acknowledgment is distinguished from a bribe. To show your Lordships
+this, we shall give in evidence, that, whenever a peshcush or fine is
+paid, it is a sum of money publicly paid, and paid in proportion to the
+grant,--and that the sum is entered upon the very grant itself. We shall
+prove the nuzzer is in the same manner entered, and that all legal fees
+are indorsed upon the body of the grant for which they are taken: and
+that they are no more in the East than in the West any kind of color or
+pretence for corrupt acts, which are known by the circumstance of their
+being clandestinely taken, and which are acknowledged and confessed to
+be illegal and corrupt. Having stated that Mr. Hastings, in some of the
+evidence that we shall produce, endeavors to confound these three
+things, I am only to remark that the nuzzer is generally a very small
+sum of money, that it sometimes amounts to one gold mohur, that
+sometimes it is less, and that, in all the records of the Company, I
+have never known it exceed one gold mohur, or about thirty-five
+shillings,--passing by the fifty gold mohurs which were given to Mr.
+Hastings by Cheyt Sing, and a hundred gold mohurs which were given to
+the Mogul, as a nuzzer, by Mahomed Ali, Nabob of Arcot.
+
+The Company, seeing that this nuzzer, though small in each sum, might
+amount at last to a large tax upon the country, (and it did so in fact,)
+thought proper to prohibit any sum of money to be taken upon any pretext
+whatever; and the Company in the year 1775 did expressly explode the
+whole doctrine of peshcush, nuzzer, and every other private lucrative
+emolument, under whatever name, to be taken by the Governor-General, and
+did expressly send out an order that that was the construction of the
+act, and that he was not even to take a nuzzer. Thus we shall show that
+that act had totally cut up the whole system of bribery and corruption,
+and that Mr. Hastings had no sort of color whatever for taking the money
+which we shall prove he has taken.
+
+I know that positive prohibitions, that acts of Parliament, that
+covenants, are things of very little validity indeed, as long as all the
+means of corruption are left in power, and all the temptations to
+corrupt profit are left in poverty. I should really think that the
+Company deserved to be ill served, if they had not annexed such
+appointments to great trusts as might secure the persons intrusted from
+the temptations of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases is the
+greatest security, given a lawful gratification to the natural passions
+of men. Matrimony is to be used, as a true remedy against a vicious
+course of profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and the just
+profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful means which might be made
+use of to supply them. For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any
+man to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in blessings, to
+expect labor without a prospect of reward, and fatigue without any means
+of securing rest, is an unreasonable demand in any human creature from
+another. Those who trust that they shall find in men uncommon and heroic
+virtues are themselves endeavoring to have nothing paid them but the
+common returns of the worst parts of human infirmity. And therefore I
+shall show your Lordships that the Company did provide large, ample,
+abundant means for supporting the Governor-General,--that Lord Clive, in
+the year 1765, and the Council with him, of which Mr. Sumner, I am glad
+and proud to say, was one, did fix such an allowance as they thought a
+sufficient security to the Governor-General against the temptations
+attendant upon his situation; and therefore, after they had fixed this
+sum, they say, "that, although by this means the Governor will not be
+able to amass a million or half a million in the space of two or three
+years, yet he will acquire a very handsome independency, and be in that
+very situation which a man of honor and true zeal for the service would
+wish to possess. Thus situated, he may defy all opposition in Council;
+he will have nothing to ask, nothing to propose, but what he wishes for
+the advantage of his employers; he may defy the law, because there can
+be no foundation for a bill of discovery; and he may defy the obloquy of
+the world, because there can be nothing censurable in his conduct. In
+short, if stability can be insured to such a government as this, where
+riches have been acquired in abundance in a small space of time, by all
+ways and means, and by men with or without capacities, it must be
+effected by a Governor thus restricted,"--that is, a Governor restricted
+from every emolument but that of his salary. I must remark, that this
+salary and these emoluments were not settled upon the vague speculations
+of men taking the measure of their necessities for India from the
+manners of England; but it was fixed by the Council themselves,--fixed
+in India,--fixed by those who knew and were in the situation of the
+Governor-General, and who knew what was necessary to support his dignity
+and to preserve him from the temptation of corruption: and they have
+laid open to you such a body of advantages arising from it as would lead
+any man, who had a regard to his honor or conscience, to think himself
+happy in having such a provision made for him, and at the same time
+every temptation to act corruptly removed far from him.
+
+The emoluments of the office, though reduced from the original plan
+which Lord Clive had proposed, may be computed at near 30,000_l._ a
+year, when Mr. Hastings was President: 22,000_l._ in certain money, and
+the rest in other advantages. Whatever it was, I have shown that it was
+thought sufficient by those who were the best judges, and who, in
+carving for others, were carving for themselves their own allowance at
+the time. But, my Lords, I am to give a better opinion of the
+sufficiency of that provision to guard against the temptation, out of
+Mr. Hastings's own mouth. He says, in his letter to the Court of
+Directors, "Although I disclaim the consideration of my own interest in
+these speculations, and flatter myself that I proceed upon more liberal
+grounds, yet I am proud to avow the feelings of an honest ambition that
+stimulates me to aspire at the possession of my present station for
+years to come. Those who know my natural turn of mind will not ascribe
+this to sordid views. A very few years' possession of the government
+would undoubtedly enable me to retire with a fortune amply fitted to the
+measure of my desires, were I to consult only my ease: but in my present
+situation I feel my mind expand to something greater; I have catched the
+desire of applause in public life."
+
+Here Mr. Hastings confesses that the emoluments affixed to office were
+not only sufficient for the purposes and ends which the nature of his
+office demanded, and the support of present dignity, but that they were
+sufficient to secure him, in a very few years, a comfortable retreat;
+but his object in wishing to hold his office long was _to catch applause
+in public life_. What an unfortunate man is he, who has so often told
+us, in so many places, and through so many mouths, that, after fourteen
+years' possession of an office which was to make him a comfortable
+fortune in a few years, he is at length bankrupt in fortune, and for his
+applause in public life is now at your Lordships' bar, and his accuser
+is his country! This, my Lords, is to be unfortunate: but there are some
+misfortunes that never do or ever can arrive but through crimes. He was
+a deserter from the path of honor. At the turning of the two ways he
+made a glorious choice,--he caught at the applause of ambition: which
+though I am ready to consent is not virtue, yet surely a generous
+ambition for applause for public services in life is one of the best
+counterfeits of virtue, and supplies its place in some degree; and it
+adds a lustre to real virtue, where it exists as the substratum of it.
+Human nature, while it is made as it is, never can wholly repudiate it
+for its imperfection, because there is something yet more perfect. But
+what shall we say to the deserter of that cause, who, having glory and
+honor before him, has chosen to plunge himself into the downward road to
+sordid riches?
+
+My Lords, I have shown the grievances that existed. I have shown the
+means that existed to put Mr. Hastings beyond a temptation to those
+practices of which we accuse him, even in his own opinion,--if he will
+not follow his example in the House of Commons, and disavow this letter,
+as he has done his defence before them, and say he never wrote it. That
+situation which was to afford him a comfortable fortune in a few years
+he has held for many years, and therefore he has not one excuse to make
+for himself; but I shall show your Lordships much greater and stronger
+proofs, that will lean heavy upon him in the day of your sentence. The
+first, the peculiar, trust that was put in him, was to redress all those
+grievances.
+
+My Lords, I have stated to you the condition of India in 1765. You may
+suppose that the means that were taken, the regulations that were made
+by the Company at that period of time, had operated their effect, and
+that by the beginning of the year 1772, when Mr. Hastings came first to
+his government, these evils did not then require, perhaps, so vigorous
+an example, or so much diligence in putting an end to them; but, my
+Lords, I have to show you a very melancholy truth, that, notwithstanding
+all these means, the Company was of opinion that all these disorders had
+increased, and accordingly they say, without entering into all the
+grievous circumstances of this letter, which was wrote on the 10th of
+April, 1773, "We wish we could refute the observation, that almost every
+attempt made by us and our administration at your Presidency for
+reforming abuses has rather increased them, and added to the misery of a
+country we are so anxious to protect and cherish." They say, that, "when
+oppression pervades the whole country, when youths have been suffered
+with impunity to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over the natives, and
+to acquire rapid fortunes by monopolizing of commerce, it cannot be a
+wonder to us or yourselves that Dadney merchants do not come forward to
+contract with the Company, that the manufactures find their way through
+foreign channels, or that our investments are at once enormously dear
+and of a debased quality. It is evident, then, that the evils which have
+been so destructive to us lie too deep for any partial plans to reach or
+correct; it is therefore our resolution to aim at the root of those
+evils, and we are happy in having reason to believe that in every just
+and necessary regulation we shall meet with the approbation and support
+of the legislature, who consider the public as materially interested in
+the Company's prosperity."
+
+This is to show your Lordships that Mr. Hastings was armed with great
+powers to correct great abuses, and that there was reposed in him a
+special trust for that purpose. And now I shall show, by the
+twenty-fifth paragraph of the same letter, that they intrusted Mr.
+Hastings with this very great power from some particular hope they had,
+not only of his abstaining himself, which is a thing taken for granted,
+but of his restraining abuses through every part of the service; and
+therefore they say, "that, in order to effectuate this great end, the
+first step must be to restore perfect obedience and due subordination to
+your administration. Our Governor and Council must reassume and exercise
+their delegated powers upon every just occasion,--punish delinquents,
+cherish the meritorious, discountenance that luxury and dissipation
+which, to the reproach of government, prevailed in Bengal. Our
+President, Mr. Hastings, we trust, will set the example of temperance,
+economy, and application; and upon this, we are sensible, much will
+depend. And here we take occasion to indulge the pleasure we have in
+acknowledging Mr. Hastings's services upon the coast of Coromandel, in
+constructing with equal labor and ability the plan which has so much
+improved our investments there; and as we are persuaded he will
+persevere in the same laudable pursuit through every branch of our
+affairs in Bengal, he, in return, may depend on the steady support and
+favor of his employers." Here are not only laws to restrain abuse, here
+are not only salaries to prevent the temptation to it, but here are
+praises to animate and encourage him, here is what very few men, even
+bad in other respects, have resisted,--here is a great trust put in him,
+to call upon him with particular vigor and exertion to prevent all
+abuses through the settlement, and particularly these abuses of
+corruption. Much trust is put in his frugality, his order, his
+management of his private affairs; and from thence they hope that he
+would not ruin his own fortune, but improve it by honorable means, and
+teach the Company's servants the same order and management, in order to
+free them from temptation to rapacity in their own particular
+situations. There have been known to be men, otherwise corrupt and
+vicious, who, when great trust was put in them, have called forth
+principles of honor latent in their minds; and men who were nursed, in a
+manner, in corruption have been not only great reformers by institution,
+but greater reformers by the example of their own conduct. Then I am to
+show, that, soon after his coming to that government, there were means
+given him instantly of realizing those hopes and expectations, by
+putting into his hands several arduous and several difficult
+commissions.
+
+My Lords, in the year 1772 the Company had received alarming advices of
+many disorders throughout the country: there were likewise, at the same
+time, circumstances in the state of the government upon which they
+thought it necessary to make new regulations. The famine which prevailed
+in and devastated Bengal, and the ill use that was made of that calamity
+to aggravate the distress for the advantage of individuals, produced a
+great many complaints, some true, some exaggerated, but universally
+spread, as I believe is in the memory of those who are not very young
+among us. This obliged the Company to a very serious consideration of an
+affair which dishonored and disgraced their government, not only at
+home, but through all the countries in Europe, much more than perhaps
+even more grievous and real oppressions that were exercised under them.
+It had alarmed their feelings, it had been marked, and had called the
+attention of the public upon them in an eminent manner.
+
+Your Lordships remember the death of Jaffier Ali Khân, the first of
+those subahs who introduced the English power into Bengal. He died about
+four or five years before this period. He was succeeded by two of his
+sons, who succeeded to one another in a very rapid succession. The first
+was the person of whom we have read an account to you. He was the
+natural son of the Nabob by a person called Munny Begum, who, for the
+corrupt gifts the circumstances of which we have recited, had, in
+prejudice of the lawful issue of the Nabob, been raised to the _musnud_;
+but as bastard slips, it is said in King Richard, (an abuse of a
+Scripture phrase,) do not take deep root, this bastard slip, Nujim ul
+Dowlah, shortly died, and the legitimate son, Syef ul Dowlah, succeeded
+him. After him another legitimate son, Mobarek ul Dowlah, succeeded in a
+minority. When I say _succeeded_, I wish your Lordships to understand
+that there is no regular succession in the office of subah or viceroy
+of the kingdom; but, in general, succession has been considered, and
+persons have been put in that place upon some principles resembling a
+regular succession. That regular succession had been broken in favor of
+a natural son, and the mother of that natural son did obtain the
+superiority in the female part of the family for a time.
+
+In consequence of these two circumstances, namely, the famine, and the
+abuses that were supposed to arise from it, and from the circumstance of
+the minority of Mobarek ul Dowlah, who now reigns or appears to
+reign,--in consequence of these two circumstances, the Company gave two
+sets of orders.
+
+The first order related to Mahomed Reza Khân, who was (as your Lordships
+remember I took, in the beginning of this affair, means of explaining)
+lord-deputy of the province under the native government, the English
+holding the dewanny,--and deputy dewan, or high-steward, under the name
+of the English, and had the command of the whole revenue; and who was
+accused before the Company (the channel of which accusation we now
+learn) of having aggravated that famine by a monopoly for his own
+benefit. The Company, upon these loose and general charges, ordered that
+he should be divested of his office, that he should be brought down to
+Calcutta, and there be obliged to render an account of his conduct.
+
+The next regulation they made was concerning the effective government of
+the country, which was become vacant by the removal of Mahomed Reza
+Khân. The offices which he held were in effect these: he was guardian to
+the Nabob by the appointment of the Company; he had the care and
+management of his family; he had the care of the public justice; and he
+represented that shadow of government to foreign nations which it was
+the policy of the Company, at that time, to keep up. This was the person
+whom Mr. Hastings was ordered to remove; in consequence of which removal
+all these offices were to be supplied,--of guardian of the Nabob's
+person and manager of his family, of chief magistrate, and of
+representative of the fallen dignity of the native government to the
+foreign nations which traded to Bengal.
+
+To these orders was added an instruction of a very remarkable nature,
+which was a third trust that was given to Mr. Hastings: that during the
+Nabob's minority he should reduce the annual allowance, which was
+thirty-two lacs, to sixteen; and that to prevent the abuse of this
+restricted sum, and to prevent its being directed by the minister's
+authority to other purposes than that for which the Company allowed it,
+(that is to say, allowed him out of what was his own,) of these sixteen
+lacs an account was to be regularly kept, as a check upon the person so
+appointed, which account was ordered to be transmitted to Calcutta, and
+to be sent to England.
+
+Now we are to show your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's conduct was upon
+all these occasions; and for this we mean to produce testimony recorded
+in the Company's books, and authentic documents taken from the public
+offices of that country. At the same time I do admit that there never
+was a positive testimony that did not stand something in need of the
+support of presumption: for, as we know that witnesses may be perjured,
+and as we know that documents can be forged, we have recourse to a known
+principle in the laws of all countries, that circumstances cannot lie;
+and therefore, if the testimony that is given was ever so clear and
+positive, yet, if it is contrary to the circumstances of the country, if
+it is contrary to the circumstances of the facts to which it alludes, if
+the deposition is totally adverse and alien to the characters of the
+persons, then I will say, that, though the testimonies should be many,
+though they should be consistent, and though they should be clear, yet
+they will still leave some degree of hesitation and doubt upon every
+mind timorous in the execution of justice, as every mind ought to be.
+If, for instance, ten witnesses were to swear that the Chief-Justice of
+England, that the Lord High-Chancellor, or the Archbishop of Canterbury,
+was seen, in the robes of his function, at noonday, robbing upon the
+highway, it is not the clearness, the weight, the authority of
+testimonies, that could make me believe it; I should attribute it to any
+cause, either corruption, mistake, error, or madness, rather than
+believe that fact. Why? Because it is totally alien to the character of
+the persons, the situation, the circumstances, and to all the rules of
+probability. But if, on the contrary, the crime charged has a perfect
+relation with the person, with his known conduct, with his known habits,
+with the situation and circumstances of the place that he is in, and
+with the very corrupt inherent nature of the act that he does, then much
+less proof than we are able to produce will serve; and according to the
+nature and strength of the presumptions arising from the inherent nature
+of a vicious principle and vicious motives in the act, will be
+strengthened the weakest evidence, or, if it comes to a sufficient
+height, the whole burden of proof will be turned upon the party
+accused. And thus we shall think ourselves bound to show your Lordships,
+in every step of this proceeding, that there is an inherent presumption
+of corruption in every act. We shall show the presumptions which
+preceded, we shall show the presumptions which accompanied the proof;
+and these, with the subsequent presumptions, will make it impossible to
+disbelieve them. Such a body of proof was never given upon any such
+occasion: and it is such proof as will prevail against the whole voice
+of corruption, that amazing, active, diligent, spreading voice, which
+has been made, by buzzing in every part of this country, sometimes to
+sound like the public voice; it will put it to silence, by showing that
+your Lordships have proceeded upon the strongest evidence, active and
+passive.
+
+First, Mr. Hastings received a positive order to seize upon Mahomed Reza
+Khân. That order he executed with a military promptitude of obedience,
+which will show your Lordships what are the services which are congenial
+to his own mind, and which find in him always a ready acquiescence, a
+faithful agent, and a spirited instrument in the execution. The very day
+after he received the order, he sent up, privately, without
+communicating with the Council, from whom he was not ordered to keep
+this proceeding a secret,--he sent up, and found that great and
+respectable man and respectable magistrate, who was in all those high
+offices which I have stated: and if I was to compare them to
+circumstances and situations in this country, I should say he had united
+in himself the character of First Lord of the Treasury, the character of
+Chief-Justice, the character of Lord High-Chancellor, and the character
+of Archbishop of Canterbury: a man of great gravity, dignity, and
+authority, and advanced in years; had once 100,000_l._ a year for the
+support of his dignity, and had at that time 50,000_l._ This man,
+sitting in his garden, reposing himself after the toils of his
+situation, (for he was one of the most laborious men in the world,) was
+suddenly arrested, and, without a moment's respite, dragged down to
+Calcutta, and there by Mr. Hastings (exceeding the orders of the
+Company) confined near two years under a guard of soldiers. Mr. Hastings
+kept this great man for several months without even attempting the trial
+upon him. How he tried him afterwards your Lordships may probably in the
+course of this business inquire; and you will then judge, from the
+circumstances of that trial, that, as he was not tried for his crime, so
+neither was he acquitted for his innocence;--but at present I leave him
+in that situation. Mr. Hastings, unknown to the Council, having executed
+the orders of the Company in the last degree of rigor to this unhappy
+man, keeps him in that situation, without a trial, under a guard,
+separated from his country, disgraced and dishonored, and by Mr.
+Hastings's express order not suffered either to make a visit or receive
+a visitor.
+
+There was another commission for Mr. Hastings contained in these orders.
+The Company, because they were of opinion that justice could not be
+easily obtained while the first situations of the country were filled
+with this man's adherents, desired Mr. Hastings to displace them:
+leaving him a very large power, and confiding in his justice, prudence,
+and impartiality not to abuse a trust of such delicacy. But we shall
+prove to your Lordships that Mr. Hastings thought it necessary to turn
+out, from the highest to the lowest, several hundreds of people, for no
+other reason than that they had been put in their employments by that
+very man whom the English government had formerly placed there. If _we_
+were to insist that we could not possibly try Mr. Hastings, or come at
+his wickedness, until we had eradicated his influence in Bengal, and
+left not one man in it who was during his government in any place or
+office whatever, yet, though we should readily admit that we could not
+do the whole without it, at the same time, rather than make a general
+massacre of every person presumed to be under his influence, we would
+leave some of his crimes unproved. He did avow and declare, that, unless
+he turned all these persons out of their offices, he could never hope to
+come at the truth of any charges against Mahomed Reza Khân, against whom
+no specific charge had been made. Yet, upon loose and general charges,
+did he seize upon this man, confine him in this manner, and every person
+who derived any place or authority from him, high or low, was turned
+out. Mr. Hastings had in the Company's orders something to justify him
+in rigor, but he had likewise a prudential power over that rigor; and he
+not only treated this man in the manner described, but every human
+creature connected with him, as if they had been all guilty, without any
+charge whatever against them. These are his reasons for taking this
+extraordinary step.
+
+"I pretend not to enter into the views of others. My own were these.
+Mahomed Reza Khân's influence still prevailed generally throughout the
+country. In the Nabob's household, and at the capital, it was scarce
+affected by his present disgrace. His favor was still courted, and his
+anger dreaded. Who, under such discouragements, would give information
+or evidence against him? His agents and creatures filled every office of
+the nizamut and dewanny. How was the truth of his conduct to be
+investigated by these? It would be superfluous to add other arguments to
+show the necessity of prefacing the inquiry by breaking his influence,
+removing his dependants, and putting the direction of all the affairs
+which had been committed to his care into the hands of the most powerful
+or active of his enemies."
+
+My Lords, if _we_ of the House of Commons were to desire and to compel
+the East India Company, or to address the crown, to remove, according to
+their several situations and several capacities, every creature that had
+been put into office by Mr. Hastings, because we could otherwise make no
+inquiry into his conduct, should we not be justified by his own example
+in insisting upon the removal of every creature of the reigning power
+before we could inquire into his conduct? We have not done that, though
+we feel, as he felt, great disadvantages in proceeding in the inquiry
+while every situation in Bengal is notoriously held by his
+creatures,--always excepting the first of all, but which we could show
+is nothing under such circumstances. Then what do I infer from
+this,--from his obedience to the orders of the Company, carried so much
+beyond necessity, and prosecuted with so much rigor,--from the inquiry
+being suspended for so long a time,--from every person in office being
+removed from his situation,--from all these precautions being used as
+prefatory to the inquiry, when he himself says, that, after he had used
+all these means, he found not the least benefit and advantage from them?
+The use I mean to make of this is, to let your Lordships see the great
+probability and presumption that Mr. Hastings, finding himself in the
+very selfsame situation that had occurred the year before, when
+Nundcomar was sold to Mahomed Reza Khân, of selling Mahomed Reza Khân to
+Nundcomar, made a corrupt use of it, and that, as Mahomed Reza Khân was
+not treated with severity for his crimes, so neither was he acquitted
+for his innocence. The Company had given Mr. Hastings severe orders, and
+very severely had he executed them. The Company gave him no orders not
+to institute a present inquiry; but he, under pretence of business,
+neglected that inquiry, and suffered this man to languish in prison to
+the utter ruin of his fortune.
+
+We have in part shown your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's own manner of
+proceeding with regard to a public delinquent is; but at present we
+leave Mahomed Reza Khân where he was. Do your Lordships think that there
+is no presumption of Mr. Hastings having a corrupt view in this
+business, and of his having put this great man, who was supposed to be
+of immense wealth, under contributions? Mr. Hastings never trusted his
+colleagues in this proceeding; and what reason does he give? Why, he
+supposed that they must be bribed by Mahomed Reza Khân. "For," says he,
+"as I did not know their characters at that time, I did not know whether
+Mahomed Reza Khân had not secured them to his interest by the known ways
+in which great men in the East secure men to their interest." He never
+trusted his colleagues with the secret; and the person that he employed
+to prosecute Mahomed Reza Khân was his bitter enemy, Nundcomar. I will
+not go the length of saying that the circumstance of enmity disables a
+person from being a prosecutor; under some circumstances it renders a
+man incompetent to be a witness; but this I know, that the circumstance
+of having no other person to rely upon in a charge against any man but
+his enemy, and of having no other principle to go upon than what is
+supposed to be derived out of that enmity, must form some considerable
+suspicion against the proceeding. But in this he was justified by the
+Company; for Nundcomar, the great rival of Mahomed Reza Khân, was in the
+worst situation with the Company as to his credit. This Nundcomar's
+politics in the country had been by Mr. Hastings himself, and by several
+persons joined with him, cruelly represented to the Company; and
+accordingly he stood so ill with them, by reason of Mr. Hastings's
+representations and those of his predecessors, that the Company ordered
+and directed, that, if he could be of any use in the inquiry into
+Mahomed Reza Khân's conduct, some reward should be given him suitable to
+his services; but they caution Mr. Hastings at the same time against
+giving him any trust which he might employ to the disadvantage of the
+Company. Now Mr. Hastings began, before he could experience any service
+from him, by giving him his reward, and not the base reward of a base
+service, _money_, but every trust and power which he was prohibited from
+giving him. Having turned out every one of Mahomed Reza Khân's
+dependants, he filled every office, as he avows, with the creatures of
+Nundcomar. Now when he uses a cruel and rigorous obedience in the case
+of Mahomed Reza Khân, when he breaks through the principles of his
+former conduct with regard to Nundcomar, when he gives _him_, Nundcomar,
+trust, whom he was cautioned not to trust, and when he gives him that
+reward before any service could be done,--I say, when he does this, in
+violation of the Company's orders and his own principles, it is the
+strongest evidence that he now found them in the situation in which they
+were in 1765, when bribes were notoriously taken, and that each party
+was mutually sold to the other, and faith kept with neither. The
+situation in which Mr. Hastings thus placed himself should have been
+dreaded by him of all things, because he knew it was a situation in
+which the most outrageous corruption had taken place before.
+
+There is another circumstance which serves to show that in the
+persecution of these great men, and the persons employed by them, he
+could have no other view than to extort money from them. There was a
+person of the name of Shitab Roy, who had a great share in the conduct
+of the revenues of Bahar. Mr. Hastings, in the letter to the Company,
+complaining of the state of their affairs, and saying that there were
+great and suspicious balances in the kingdom of Bahar, does not even
+name the name of Shitab Roy. There was an English counsellor, a
+particular friend of Mr. Hastings's, there, under whose control Shitab
+Roy acted. Without any charges, without any orders from the Company, Mr.
+Hastings dragged down that same Shitab Roy, and in the same ignominious
+prison he kept him the same length of time, that is, one year and three
+months, without trial; and when the trial came on, there was as much
+appearance of collusion in the trial as there was of rigor in the
+previous process. This is the manner in which Mr. Hastings executed the
+command of the Company for removing Mahomed Reza Khân.
+
+When a successor to Mahomed Reza Khân was to be appointed, your
+Lordships naturally expect, from the character I have given of him, and
+from the nature of his functions, that Mr. Hastings would be
+particularly precise, would use the utmost possible care in nominating a
+person to succeed him, who might fulfil the ends and objects of his
+employment, and be at the same time beyond all doubt and suspicion of
+corruption in any way whatever. Let us now see how he fills up that
+office thus vacant. When the Company ordered Mahomed Reza Khân to be
+dispossessed of his office, they ordered at the same time that the
+salary of his successor should be reduced: that 30,000_l._ was a
+sufficient recompense for that office. Your Lordships will see by the
+allowance for the office, even reduced as it was, that they expected
+some man of great eminence, of great consequence, and fit for those
+great and various trusts. They cut off the dewanny from it, that is, the
+collection of the revenues; and having lessened his labors, they
+lessened his reward.--They ordered that this person, who was to be
+guardian of the Nabob in his minority, and who was to represent the
+government, should have but 30,000_l._ The order they give is this.
+
+"And that as Mahomed Reza Khân can no longer be considered by us as one
+to whom such a power can safely be committed, we trust to your local
+knowledge the selection of some person well qualified for the affairs of
+government, and of whose attachment to the Company you shall be well
+assured. Such person you will recommend to the Nabob, to succeed Mahomed
+Reza, as minister of the government, and guardian of the Nabob's
+minority; and we persuade ourselves that the Nabob will pay such regard
+to your recommendation as to invest him with the necessary power and
+authority.
+
+"As the advantages which the Company may receive from the appointment of
+such minister will depend on his readiness to promote our views and
+advance our interest, we are willing to allow him so liberal a
+gratification as may excite his zeal and insure his attachment to the
+Company; we therefore empower you to grant to the person whom you shall
+think worthy of this trust an annual allowance not exceeding three lacs
+of rupees, which we consider not only as a munificent reward for any
+services he shall render the Company, but sufficient to enable him to
+support his station with suitable rank and dignity. And here we must
+add, that, in the choice you shall make of a person to be the active
+minister of the Nabob's government, we hope and trust that you will show
+yourselves worthy of the confidence we have placed in you by being
+actuated therein by no other motives than those of the public good and
+the safety and interest of the Company."
+
+My Lords, here they have given a reward, and they have described a
+person fit to succeed in all capacities the man whom they had thought
+fit to depose. Now, as we have seen how Mr. Hastings obeyed the
+Company's orders in the manner of removing Mahomed Reza Khân from his
+office, let us see how he obeyed their order for filling it up. Your
+Lordships will naturally suppose that he made all the orders of
+Mahometan and Hindoo princes to pass in strict review before him; that
+he had considered their age, authority, dignity, the goodness of their
+manners; and upon the collation of all these circumstances had chosen a
+person fit to be a regent to guard the Nabob's minority from all
+rapacity whatever, and fit to instruct him in everything. I will give
+your Lordships Mr. Hastings's own idea of the person necessary to fill
+such offices.
+
+"That his rank ought to be such as at least ought not to wound the
+Nabob's honor, or lessen his credit in the estimation of the people, by
+the magisterial command which the new guardian must exercise over
+him,--with abilities and vigor of mind equal to the support of that
+authority; and the world will expect that the guardian be especially
+qualified by his own acquired endowments to discharge the duties of that
+relation in the education of his young pupil, to inspire him with
+sentiments suitable to his birth, and to instruct him in the principles
+of his religion."
+
+This, upon another occasion, is Mr. Hastings's sense of the man who
+ought to be placed in that situation of trust in which the Company
+ordered him to place him. Did Mr. Hastings obey that order? No, my
+Lords, he appointed no man to fill that office. What, no man at all? No,
+he appointed no person at all in the sense which is mentioned there,
+which constantly describes a person at least of the male sex: he
+appointed a woman to fill that office; he appointed a woman, in a
+country where no woman can be seen, where no woman can be spoken to by
+any one without a curtain between them; for all these various duties,
+requiring all these qualifications described by himself, he appointed a
+woman. Do you want more proof than this violent transgression of the
+Company's orders upon that occasion that some corrupt motive must have
+influenced him?
+
+My Lords, it is necessary for me to state the situation of the family,
+that you may judge from thence of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings's
+proceedings. The Nabob Jaffier Ali Khân had among the women of his
+seraglio a person called Munny Begum. She was a dancing-girl, whom he
+had seen at some entertainment; and as he was of a licentious turn, this
+dancing-girl, in the course of her profession as a prostitute, so far
+inveigled the Nabob, that, having a child or pretending to have had a
+child by him, he brought her into the seraglio; and the Company's
+servants sold to that son the succession of that father. This woman had
+been sold as a slave,--her profession a dancer, her occupation a
+prostitute. And, my Lords, this woman having put her natural son, as we
+state, and shall prove, in the place of the legitimate offspring of the
+Nabob, having got him placed by the Company's servants on the musnud,
+she came to be at the head of that part of the household which relates
+to the women: which is a large and considerable trust in a country where
+polygamy is admitted, and where women of great rank may possibly be
+attended by two thousand of the same sex in inferior situations. As soon
+as the legitimate son of the Nabob came to the musnud, there was no
+ground for keeping this woman any longer in that situation; and upon an
+application of the Company to Mahomed Reza Khân to know who ought to
+have the right of superiority, he answered, as he ought to have done,
+that, though all the women of the seraglio ought to have honor, yet the
+mother of the Nabob ought to have the superiority of it. Therefore this
+woman was removed, and the mother of the Nabob was placed in her
+situation. In that situation Mr. Hastings found the seraglio. If his
+duties had gone no further than the regulation of an Eastern household,
+he ought to have kept the Nabob's mother there by the rules of that
+country.
+
+What did he do? Not satisfied with giving to this prostitute every favor
+that she could desire, (and money must be the natural object of such a
+person,) Mr. Hastings deposes the Nabob's own mother, turns her out of
+the employment, and puts at the head of the seraglio this prostitute,
+who at the best, in relation to him, could only be a step-mother. If you
+heard no more, do your Lordships want anything further to convince you
+that this must be a violent, atrocious, and corrupt act,--suppose it had
+gone no further than the seraglio? But when I call this woman a
+dancing-girl, I state something lower than Europeans have an idea of
+respecting that situation. She was born a slave, bred a dancing-girl.
+Her dancing was not any of those noble and majestic movements which make
+part of the entertainment of the most wise, of the education of the most
+virtuous, which improve the manners without corrupting the morals of all
+civilized people, and of which, among uncivilized people, the professors
+have their due share of admiration; but these dances were not decent to
+be seen nor fit to be related. I shall pass them by. Your Lordships are
+to suppose the lowest degree of infamy in occupation and situation, when
+I tell you that Munny Begum was a slave and a dancing-girl.
+
+The history of the Munny Begum is this. "At a village called Balkonda,
+near Sekundra, there lived a widow, who, from her great poverty, not
+being able to bring up her daughter Munny, gave her to a slave-girl
+belonging to Summin Ali Khân, whose name was Bissoo. During the space of
+five years she lived at Shahjehanabad, and was educated by Bissoo after
+the manner of a dancing-girl. Afterwards the Nabob Shamut Jung, upon
+the marriage of Ikram ul Dowlah, brother to the Nabob Surajah ul Dowlah,
+sent for Bissoo Beg's set of dancing-girls from Shahjehanabad, of which
+Munny Begum was one, and allowed them ten thousand rupees for their
+expenses, to dance at the wedding. While the ceremony was celebrating,
+they were kept by the Nabob; but some months afterwards he dismissed
+them, and they took up their residence in this city. Mir Mahomed Jaffier
+Khân then took them into keeping, and allowed Munny and her set five
+hundred rupees per month, till at length, finding that Munny was
+pregnant, he took her into his own house. She gave birth to the Nabob
+Nujim ul Dowlah, and in this manner has she remained in the Nabob's
+family ever since."
+
+Now it required a very peculiar mode of selection to take such a woman,
+so circumstanced, (resembling whom there was not just such another,) to
+depose the Nabob's own mother from the superiority of the household, and
+to substitute this woman. It would have been an abominable abuse, and
+would have implied corruption in the grossest degree, if Mr. Hastings
+had stopped there. He not only did this, but he put _her_, this woman,
+in the very place of Mahomed Reza Khân: he made her guardian, he made
+her regent, he made her viceroy, he made her the representative of the
+native government of the country in the eyes of strangers. There was not
+a trust, not a dignity in the country, which he did not put, during the
+minority of this unhappy person, her step-son, into the hands of this
+woman.
+
+Reject, if you please, the strong presumption of corruption in
+disobeying the order of the Company directing him to select a _man_ fit
+to supply the place of Mahomed Reza Khân, to exercise all the great and
+arduous functions of government and of justice, as well as the
+regulation of the Nabob's household; and then I will venture to say,
+that neither your Lordships, nor any man living, when he hears of this
+appointment, does or can hesitate a moment in concluding that it is the
+result of corruption, and that you only want to be informed what the
+corruption was. Here is such an arrangement as I believe never was
+before heard of: a secluded woman in the place of a man of the world; a
+fantastic dancing-girl in the place of a grave magistrate; a slave in
+the place of a woman of quality; a common prostitute made to superintend
+the education of a young prince; and a step-mother, a name of horror in
+all countries, made to supersede the natural mother from whose body the
+Nabob had sprung.
+
+These are circumstances that leave no doubt of the grossest and most
+flagrant corruption. But was there no application made to Mr. Hastings
+upon that occasion? The Nabob's uncle, whom Mr. Hastings declares to be
+a man of no dangerous ambition, no alarming parts, no one quality that
+could possibly exclude him from that situation, makes an application to
+Mr. Hastings for that place, and was by Mr. Hastings rejected. The
+reason he gives for his rejection is, because he cannot put any man in
+it without danger to the Company, who had ordered him to put a man into
+it. One would imagine the trust to be placed in him was such as enabled
+him to overturn the Company in a moment. Now the situation in which the
+Nabob's uncle, Yeteram ul Dowlah, would have been placed was this: he
+would have had no troops, he would have had no treasury, he would have
+had no collections of revenue, nothing, in short, that could have made
+him dangerous, but he would have been an absolute pensioner and
+dependant upon the Company, though in high office; and the least attempt
+to disturb the Company, instead of increasing, would have been
+subversive of his own power. If Mr. Hastings should still insist that
+there might be danger from the appointment of a man, we shall prove that
+he was of opinion that there could be no danger from any one,--that the
+Nabob himself was a mere shadow, a cipher, and was kept there only to
+soften the English government in the eyes and opinion of the natives.
+
+My Lords, I will detail these circumstances no further, but will bring
+some collateral proofs to show that Mr. Hastings was at that very time
+conscious of the wicked and corrupt act he was doing. For, besides this
+foolish principle of policy, which he gives as a reason for defying the
+orders of the Company, and for insulting the country, that had never
+before seen a woman in that situation, and _his_ declaration to the
+Company, that their government cannot be supported by private justice,
+(a favorite maxim, which he holds upon all occasions,) besides these
+reasons which he gave for his politic injustice, he gives the following.
+The Company had ordered that 30,000_l._ should be given to the person
+appointed. He knew that the Company could never dream of giving this
+woman 30,000_l._ a year, and he makes use of that circumstance to
+justify him in putting her in that place: for he says, the Company, in
+the distressed state of its affairs, could never mean to give 30,000_l._
+a year for the office which they order to be filled; and accordingly,
+upon principles of economy, as well as upon principles of prudence, he
+sees there could be no occasion for giving this salary, and that it will
+be saved to the Company. But no sooner had he given her the appointment
+than that appointment became a ground for giving her that money. The
+moment he had appointed her, he overturns the very principle upon which
+he had appointed her, and gives the 30,000_l._ to her, and the officers
+under her, saving not one shilling to the Company by this infamous
+measure, which he justified only upon the principle of economy. The
+30,000_l._ was given, the principle of economy vanished, a shocking
+arrangement was made, and Bengal saw a dancing-girl administering its
+justice, presiding over all its remaining power, wealth, and influence,
+exhibiting to the natives of the country their miserable state of
+degradation, and the miserable dishonor of the English Company in Mr.
+Hastings's abandonment of all his own pretences.
+
+But there is a still stronger presumption. The Company ordered that this
+person, who was to have the management of the Nabob's revenue, and who
+was to be his guardian, should keep a strict account, which account
+should be annually transmitted to the Presidency, and by the Presidency
+to Europe; and the purpose of it was, to keep a control upon the reduced
+expenses of the sixteen lac which were ordered in the manner I
+mentioned. Your Lordships will naturally imagine that that control was
+kept safe. No, here is the order of the Directors, and you will see how
+Mr. Hastings obeyed it.
+
+"As the disbursement of the sums allotted to the Nabob for the
+maintenance of his household and family and the support of his dignity
+will pass through the hands of the minister who shall be selected by
+you, conformable to our preceding orders, we expect that you will
+require such minister to deliver annually to your board a regular and
+exact account of the application of the several sums paid by the Company
+to the Nabob. This you will strictly examine; and we trust that you will
+not suffer any part of the Nabob's stipend to be appropriated to the
+minister's own use, or wasted among the unnecessary dependants of the
+court, but that the whole amount be applied to the purposes for which it
+was assigned by us."
+
+One would have imagined, that, after Mr. Hastings had made so suspicious
+an arrangement, (I will not call it by any worse name,) he would have
+removed all suspicion with regard to money,--that he would have obeyed
+the Company by constituting the control which they had ordered to be
+placed over a man, even a fit man, and a man worthy of the trust
+committed to him. But what is his answer, when three years after he is
+desired to produce this account? His answer is,--"I can save the board
+the trouble of this reference by acquainting them that no such accounts
+have ever been transmitted, nor, as I can affirm with most certain
+knowledge, any orders given for that purpose, either to Gourdas, to
+whose office it did not properly belong, nor to the Begum, who had the
+actual charge and responsibility of those disbursements."
+
+He has given to this woman the charge of all the disbursements of the
+Company; the officer whom you would imagine would be responsible was not
+responsible, but to this prostitute and dancing-girl the whole of the
+revenue was given; when he was ordered to transmit that account, he not
+only did not produce that account, but had given no order that it
+should be kept: so that no doubt can be left upon your Lordships' minds,
+that the sixteen lac, which were reserved for the support of the dignity
+of the government of that country, were employed for the purpose of Mr.
+Hastings's having a constant bank, from which he should draw every
+corrupt emolument he should think fit for himself and his associates.
+Thus your Lordships see that he appointed an improper person to the
+trust without any control, and that the very accounts which were to be
+the guardians of his purity, and which were to remove suspicion from
+him, he never so much as directed or ordered. If any one can doubt that
+that transaction was in itself corrupt, I can only say that his mind
+must be constituted in a manner totally different from that which
+prevails in any of the higher or lower branches of judicature in any
+country in the world. The suppression of an account is a proof of
+corruption.
+
+When Mr. Hastings committed these acts of violence against Mahomed Reza
+Khân, when he proceeded to make arrangements in the Company's affairs of
+the same kind with those in which corruption had been before exercised,
+he was bound by a particular responsibility that there should be nothing
+mysterious in his own conduct, and that at least all the accounts should
+be well kept. He appointed a person nominally for that
+situation,--namely, the Rajah Gourdas. Who was he? A person acting, he
+says, under the influence of Rajah Nundcomar, whom he had declared was
+not fit to be employed or trusted: all the offices were filled by him.
+But had Rajah Gourdas, whose character is that of an excellent man,
+against whom there could lie no reasonable objection on account of his
+personal character, and whose want of talents was to be supplied by
+those of Nundcomar, (and of _his_ parts Mr. Hastings spoke as highly as
+possible,)--had he, I say, the management? No: but Munny Begum. Did she
+keep any accounts? No.
+
+Mr. Hastings was ordered, and a very disagreeable and harsh order it
+was, to take away one half of the Nabob's allowance which he had by
+treaty. I do not charge Mr. Hastings with this reduction: he had nothing
+to do with that. Sixteen lac were cut off, and sixteen left; these two
+sums had been distributed, one for the support of the seraglio and the
+dignity of the state, the other for the court establishment and the
+household. The sixteen lac which was left, therefore, required to be
+well economized, and well administered. There was a rigor in the
+Company's order relative to it, which was, that it should take place
+from an antedated time, that is, a whole year prior to the communication
+of their order to the Nabob. The order was, that the Nabob's stipend
+should be reduced to sixteen lac a year from the month of January. Mr.
+Hastings makes this reflection upon it, in order to leave no doubt upon
+your mind of his integrity in administering that great trust: he says,--
+
+"Your order for the reduction of the Nabob's stipend was communicated to
+him in the month of December, 1771. He remonstrated against it, and
+desired it might be again referred to the Company. The board entirely
+acquiesced in his remonstrance, and the subsequent payments of his
+stipend were paid as before. I might easily have availed myself of this
+plea. I might have treated it as an act of the past government, with
+which I had no cause to interfere, and joined in asserting the
+impossibility of his defraying the vast expense of his court and
+household without it, which I could have proved by plausible arguments,
+drawn from the actual amount of the nizamut and bhela establishments;
+and both the Nabob and Begum would have liberally purchased my
+forbearance. Instead of pursuing this plan, I carried your orders
+rigidly and literally into execution. I undertook myself the laborious
+and reproachful task of limiting his charges, from an excess of his
+former stipend, to the sum of his reduced allowance."
+
+He says in another place,--"The stoppage of the king's tribute was an
+act of mine, and I have been often reproached with it. It was certainly
+in my power to have continued the payment of it, and to have made my
+terms with the king for any part of it which I might have chosen to
+reserve for my own use. He would have thanked me for the remainder."
+
+My Lords, I believe it is a singular thing, and what your Lordships have
+been very little used to, to see a man in the situation of Mr. Hastings,
+or in any situation like it, so ready in knowing all the resources by
+which sinister emolument may be made and concealed, and which, under
+pretences of public good, may be transferred into the pocket of him who
+uses those pretences. He is resolved, if he is innocent, that his
+innocence shall not proceed from ignorance. He well knows the ways of
+falsifying the Company's accounts; he well knows the necessities of the
+natives, and he knows that by paying a part of their dues they will be
+ready to give an acquittance of the whole. These are parts of Mr.
+Hastings's knowledge of which your Lordships will see he also well
+knows how to avail himself.
+
+But you would expect, when he reduced the allowance to sixteen lac, and
+took credit to himself as if he had done the thing which he professed,
+and had argued from his rigor and cruelty his strict and literal
+obedience to the Company, that he had in reality done it. The very
+reverse: for it will be in proof, that, after he had pretended to reduce
+the Company's allowance, he continued it a twelvemonth from the day in
+which he said he had entirely executed it, to the amount of 90,000_l._,
+and entered a false account of the suppression in the Company's
+accounts; and when he has taken a credit as under pretence of reducing
+that allowance, he paid 90,000_l._ more than he ought. Can you, then,
+have a doubt, after all these false pretences, after all this fraud,
+fabrication, and suppression which he made use of, that that 90,000_l._,
+of which he kept no account and transmitted no account, was money given
+to himself for his own private use and advantage?
+
+This is all that I think necessary to state to your Lordships upon this
+monstrous part of the arrangement; and therefore, from his rigorous
+obedience in cases of cruelty, and, where control was directed, from his
+total disobedience, and from his choice of persons, from his suppression
+of the accounts that ought to have been produced, and falsifying the
+accounts that were kept, there arises a strong inference of corruption.
+When your Lordships see all this in proof, your Lordships will justify
+me in saying that there never was (taking every part of the arrangement)
+such a direct, open violation of any trust.--I shall say no more with
+regard to the appointment of Munny Begum.
+
+My Lords, here ended the first scene, and here ends that body of
+presumption arising from the transaction and inherent in it. My Lords,
+the next scene that I am to bring before you is the positive proof of
+corruption in this transaction, in which I am sure you already see that
+corruption must exist. The charge was brought by a person in the highest
+trust and confidence with Mr. Hastings, a person employed in the
+management of the whole transaction, a person to whom the management,
+subordinate to Munny Begum, of all the pecuniary transactions, and all
+the arrangements made upon that occasion, was intrusted.
+
+On the 11th day of March, 1775, Nundcomar gives to Mr. Francis, a member
+of the Council, a charge against Mr. Hastings, consisting of two parts.
+The first of these charges was a vast number of corrupt dealings, with
+respect to which he was the informer, not the witness, but to which he
+indicated the modes of inquiry; and they are corrupt dealings, as Mr.
+Hastings himself states them, amounting to millions of rupees, and in
+transactions every one of which implies in it the strongest degree of
+corruption. The next part was of those to which he was not only an
+informer, but a witness, in having been the person who himself
+transmitted the money to Mr. Hastings and the agents of Mr. Hastings;
+and accordingly, upon this part, which is the only part we charge, his
+evidence is clear and full, that he gave the money to Mr. Hastings,--he
+and the Begum (for I put them together). He states, that Mr. Hastings
+received for the appointment of Munny Begum to the rajahship two lacs of
+rupees, or about 22,000_l._, and that he received in another gross sum
+one lac and a half of rupees: in all making three lac and a half, or
+about 36,000_l._ This charge was signed by the man, and accompanied with
+the account.
+
+Mr. Hastings, on that day, made no reflection or observation whatever
+upon this charge, except that he attempted to excite some suspicion that
+Mr. Francis, who had produced it, was concerned in the charge, and was
+the principal mover in it. He asks Mr. Francis that day this question:--
+
+"The Governor-General observes, as Mr. Francis has been pleased to
+inform the board that he was unacquainted with the contents of the
+letter sent in to the board by Nundcomar, that he thinks himself
+justified in carrying his curiosity further than he should have
+permitted himself without such a previous intimation, and therefore begs
+leave to ask Mr. Francis whether he was before this acquainted with
+Nundcomar's intention of bringing such charges against him before the
+board.
+
+"_Mr. Francis._--As a member of this Council, I do not deem myself
+obliged to answer any question of mere curiosity. I am willing, however,
+to inform the Governor-General, that, though I was totally unacquainted
+with the contents of the paper I have now delivered in to the board till
+I heard it read, I did apprehend in general that it contained some
+charge against him. It was this apprehension that made me so
+particularly cautious in the manner of receiving the Rajah's letter. I
+was not acquainted with Rajah Nundcomar's intention of bringing in such
+charges as are mentioned in the letter.
+
+    "Warren Hastings.
+    J. Clavering.
+    Geo. Monson.
+    P. Francis."
+
+Now what the duty of Mr. Hastings and the Council was, upon receiving
+such information, I shall beg leave to state to your Lordships from the
+Company's orders; but, before I read them, I must observe, that, in
+pursuance of an act of Parliament, which was supposed to be made upon
+account of the neglect of the Company, as well as the neglects of their
+servants, and for which general neglects responsibility was fixed upon
+the Company for the future, while for the present their authority was
+suspended, and a Parliamentary commission sent out to regulate their
+affairs, the Company did, upon that occasion, send out a general code
+and body of instructions to be observed by their servants, in the 35th
+paragraph of which it is said,--
+
+"We direct that you immediately cause the strictest inquiry to be made
+into all oppressions which may have been committed either against the
+natives or Europeans, and into all abuses that may have prevailed in the
+collection of the revenues, or any part of the civil government of the
+Presidency: and that you communicate to us all information which you may
+be able to learn relative thereto, or to any dissipation or embezzlement
+of the Company's money."
+
+Your Lordships see here that there is a direct duty fixed upon them to
+forward, to promote, to set on foot, without exception of any persons
+whatever, an inquiry into all manner of corruption, peculation, and
+oppression. Therefore this charge of Nundcomar's was a case exactly
+within the Company's orders; such a charge was not sought out, but was
+actually laid before them; but if it had not been actually laid before
+them, if they had any reason to suspect that such corruptions existed,
+they were bound by this order to make an active inquiry into them.
+
+Upon that day (11th March, 1775) nothing further passed; and, on the
+part of Mr. Hastings, that charge, as far as we can find, might have
+stood upon the records forever, without his making the smallest
+observation upon it, or taking any one step to clear his own character.
+But Nundcomar was not so inattentive to his duties as an accuser as Mr.
+Hastings was to his duties as an inquirer; for, without a moment's
+delay, upon the first board-day, two days after, Nundcomar came and
+delivered the following letter.
+
+"I had the honor to lay before you, in a letter of the 11th instant, an
+abstracted, but true account of the Honorable Governor in the course of
+his administration. What is there written I mean not the least to alter:
+far from it. I have the strongest written vouchers to produce in support
+of what I have advanced; and I wish and entreat, for my honor's sake,
+that you will suffer me to appear before you, to establish the fact by
+an additional, incontestable evidence."
+
+My Lords, I will venture to say, if ever there was an accuser that
+appeared well and with weight before any court, it was this man. He does
+not shrink from his charge; he offered to meet the person he charged
+face to face, and to make good his charge by his own evidence, and
+further evidence that he should produce. Your Lordships have also seen
+the conduct of Mr. Hastings on the first day; you have seen his
+acquiescence under it; you have seen the suspicion he endeavored to
+raise. Now, before I proceed to what Mr. Hastings thought of it, I must
+remark upon this accusation, that it is a specific accusation, coming
+from a person knowing the very transaction, and known to be concerned in
+it,--that it was an accusation in writing, that it was an accusation
+with a signature, that it was an accusation with a person to make it
+good, that it was made before a competent authority, and made before an
+authority bound to inquire into such accusation. When he comes to
+produce his evidence, he tells you, first, the sums of money given, the
+species in which they were given, the very bags in which they were put,
+the exchange that was made by reducing them to the standard money of the
+country; he names all the persons through whose hands the whole
+transaction went, eight in number, besides himself, Munny Begum, and
+Gourdas, being eleven, all referred to in this transaction. I do believe
+that since the beginning of the world there never was an accusation
+which was more deserving of inquiry, because there never was an
+accusation which put a false accuser in a worse situation, and that put
+an honest defendant in a better; for there was every means of collation,
+every means of comparison, every means of cross-examining, every means
+of control. There was every way of sifting evidence, in which evidence
+could be sifted. Eleven witnesses to the transaction are referred to;
+all the particulars of the payment, every circumstance that could give
+the person accused the advantage of showing the falsehood of the
+accusation, were specified. General accusations may be treated as
+calumnies; but particular accusations, like these, afford the defendant,
+if innocent, every possible means for making his defence: therefore the
+very making no defence at all would prove, beyond all doubt, a
+consciousness of guilt.
+
+The next thing for your Lordships' consideration is the conduct of Mr.
+Hastings upon this occasion. You would imagine that he would have
+treated the accusation with a cold and manly disdain; that he would
+have challenged and defied inquiry, and desired to see his accuser face
+to face. This is what any man would do in such a situation. I can
+conceive very well that a man composed, firm, and collected in himself,
+conscious of not only integrity, but known integrity, conscious of a
+whole life beyond the reach of suspicion,--that a man placed in such a
+situation might oppose general character to general accusation, and
+stand collected in himself, poised on his own base, and defying all the
+calumnies in the world. But as it shows a great and is a proof of a
+virtuous mind to despise calumny, it is the proof of a guilty mind to
+despise a specific accusation, when made before a competent authority,
+and with competent means to prove it. As Mr. Hastings's conduct was what
+no man living expected, I will venture to say that no expression can do
+it justice but his own. Upon reading the letter, and a motion being made
+that Rajah Nundcomar be brought before the board to prove the charge
+against the Governor-General, the Governor-General enters the following
+minute.
+
+"Before the question is put, I declare that I will not suffer Nundcomar
+to appear before the board as my accuser. I know what belongs to the
+dignity and character of the first member of this administration. I will
+not sit at this board in the character of a criminal, nor do I
+acknowledge the members of this board to be my judges. I am reduced on
+this occasion to make the declaration, that I look upon General
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis as my accusers. I cannot
+prove this in the direct letter of the law, but in my conscience I
+regard them as such, and I will give my reasons for it. On their arrival
+at this place, and on the first formation of the Council, they thought
+proper to take immediate and decisive measures in contradiction and for
+the repeal of those which were formed by me in conjunction with the last
+administration. I appealed to the Court of Directors from their acts.
+Many subsequent letters have been transmitted both by them and by me to
+the Court of Directors: by me, in protestation against their conduct; by
+them, in justification of it. Quitting this ground, they since appear to
+me to have chosen other modes of attack, apparently calculated to divert
+my attention and to withdraw that of the public from the subject of our
+first differences, which regarded only the measures that were necessary
+for the good of the service, to attacks directly and personally levelled
+at me for matters which tend to draw a personal and popular odium upon
+me: and fit instruments they have found for their purpose,--Mr. Joseph
+Fowke, Mahrajah Nundcomar, Roopnarain Chowdry, and the Ranny of Burdwan.
+
+"It appears incontestably upon the records that the charges preferred by
+the Ranny against me proceeded from the office of Mr. Fowke. All the
+papers transmitted by her came in their original form written in the
+English language,--some with Persian papers, of which they were supposed
+to be translations, but all strongly marked with the character and idiom
+of the English language. I applied on Saturday last for Persian
+originals of some of the papers sent by her, and I was refused: I am
+justified in declaring my firm belief that no such originals exist.
+
+"With respect to Nundcomar's accusations, they were delivered by the
+hands of Mr. Francis, who has declared that he was called upon by Rajah
+Nundcomar, as a duty belonging to his office as a councillor of this
+state, to lay the packet which contained them before the board,--that he
+conceived that he could not, consistent with his duty, refuse such a
+letter at the instance of a person of the Rajah's rank, and did
+accordingly receive it, and laid it before the board,--declaring at the
+same time that he was unacquainted with the contents of it. I believe
+that the Court of Directors, and those to whom those proceedings shall
+be made known, will think differently of this action of Mr. Francis:
+that Nundcomar was guilty of great insolence and disrespect in the
+demand which he made of Mr. Francis; and that it was not a duty
+belonging to the office of a councillor of this state to make himself
+the carrier of a letter, which would have been much more properly
+committed to the hands of a peon or hircarra, or delivered by the writer
+of it to the secretary himself.
+
+"Mr. Francis has acknowledged that he apprehended in general that it
+contained some charge against me. If the charge was false, it was a
+libel. It might have been false for anything that Mr. Francis could know
+to the contrary, since he was unacquainted with the contents of it. In
+this instance, therefore, he incurred the hazard of presenting a libel
+to the board: this was not a duty belonging to his office as a
+councillor of this state. I must further inform the board that I have
+been long since acquainted with Nundcomar's intentions of making this
+attack upon me. Happily, Nundcomar, among whose talents for intrigue
+that of secrecy is not the first, has been ever too ready to make the
+first publication of his own intentions. I was shown a paper containing
+many accusations against me, which I was told was carried by Nundcomar
+to Colonel Monson, and that he himself was employed for some hours in
+private with Colonel Monson, explaining the nature of those charges.
+
+"I mention only what I was told; but as the rest of the report which was
+made to me corresponds exactly with what has happened since, I hope I
+shall stand acquitted to my superiors and to the world in having given
+so much credit to it as to bring the circumstance upon record. I cannot
+recollect the precise time in which this is said to have happened, but I
+believe it was either before or at the time of the dispatch of the
+'Bute' and 'Pacific.' The charge has since undergone some alteration;
+but of the copy of the paper which was delivered to me, containing the
+original charge, I caused a translation to be made; when, suspecting the
+renewal of the subject in this day's consultation, I brought it with me,
+and I desire it may be recorded, that, when our superiors, or the world,
+if the world is to be made the judge of my conduct, shall be possessed
+of these materials, they may, by comparing the supposed original and
+amended list of accusations preferred against me by Nundcomar, judge how
+far I am justified in the credit which I give to the reports above
+mentioned. I do not mean to infer from what I have said that it makes
+any alteration in the nature of the charges, whether they were delivered
+immediately from my ostensible accusers, or whether they came to the
+board through the channel of patronage; but it is sufficient to
+authorize the conviction which I feel in my own mind, that those
+gentlemen are parties in the accusations of which they assert the right
+of being the judges.
+
+"From the first commencement of this administration, every means have
+been tried both to deprive me of the legal authority with which I have
+been trusted, and to proclaim the annihilation of it to the world; but
+no instance has yet appeared of this in so extraordinary a degree as in
+the question now before the board. The chief of the administration, your
+superior, Gentlemen, appointed by the legislature itself, shall I sit at
+this board to be arraigned in the presence of a wretch whom you all know
+to be one of the basest of mankind? I believe I need not mention his
+name; but it is Nundcomar. Shall I sit here to hear men collected from
+the dregs of the people give evidence, at his dictating, against my
+character and conduct? I will not. You may, if you please, form
+yourselves into a committee for the investigation of these matters in
+any manner which you may think proper; but I will repeat, that I will
+not meet Nundcomar at the board, nor suffer Nundcomar to be examined at
+the board; nor have you a right to it, nor can it answer any other
+purpose than that of vilifying and insulting me to insist upon it.
+
+"I am sorry to have found it necessary to deliver my sentiments on a
+subject of so important a nature in an unpremeditated minute, drawn from
+me at the board, which I should have wished to have had leisure and
+retirement to have enabled me to express myself with that degree of
+caution and exactness which the subject requires. I have said nothing
+but what I believe and am morally certain I shall stand justified for in
+the eyes of my superiors and the eyes of the world; but I reserve to
+myself the liberty of adding my further sentiments in such a manner and
+form as I shall hereafter judge necessary."
+
+My Lords, you see here the picture of Nundcomar drawn by Mr. Hastings
+himself; you see the hurry, the passion, the precipitation, the
+confusion, into which Mr. Hastings is thrown by the perplexity of
+detected guilt; you see, my Lords, that, instead of defending himself,
+he rails at his accuser in the most indecent language, calling him a
+wretch whom they all knew to be the basest of mankind,--that he rails at
+the Council, by attributing their conduct to the worst of motives,--that
+he rails at everybody, and declares the accusation to be a libel: in
+short, you see plainly that the man's head is turned. You see there is
+not a word he says upon this occasion which has common sense in it; you
+see one great leading principle in it,--that he does not once attempt to
+deny the charge. He attempts to vilify the witness, he attempts to
+vilify those he supposes to be his accusers, he attempts to vilify the
+Council; he lags upon the accusation, he mixes it with other
+accusations, which had nothing to do with it, and out of the whole he
+collects a resolution--to do what? To meet his adversary and defy him?
+No,--that he will not suffer him to appear before him: he says, "I will
+not sit at this board in the character of a criminal, nor do I
+acknowledge the board to be my judges."
+
+He was not called upon to acknowledge them to be his judges. Both he and
+they were called upon to inquire into all corruptions without exception.
+It was his duty not merely [not?] to traverse and oppose them while
+inquiring into acts of corruption, but he was bound to take an active
+part in it,--that if they had a mind to let such a thing sleep upon
+their records, it was his duty to have brought forward the inquiry. They
+were not his judges, they were not his accusers; they were his
+fellow-laborers in the inquiry ordered by the Court of Directors, their
+masters, and by which inquiry he might be purged of that corruption with
+which he stood charged.
+
+He says, "Nundcomar is a wretch whom you all know to be the basest of
+mankind." I believe they did not know the man to be a wretch, or the
+basest of mankind; but if he was a wretch, and if he was the basest of
+mankind, if he was guilty of all the crimes with which we charge Mr.
+Hastings, (not one of which was ever proved against him,)--if any of
+your Lordships were to have the misfortune to be before this tribunal,
+before any inquest of the House of Commons, or any other inquest of this
+nation, would you not say that it was the greatest possible advantage to
+you that the man who accused you was a miscreant, the vilest and basest
+of mankind, by the confession of all the world? Do mankind really, then,
+think that to be accused by men of honor, of weight, of character, upon
+probable charges, is an advantage to them, and that to be accused by the
+basest of mankind is a disadvantage? No: give me, if ever I am to have
+accusers, miscreants, as he calls him,--wretches, the basest and vilest
+of mankind. "The board," says he, "are my accusers." If they were, it
+was their duty; but they were not his accusers, but were inquiring into
+matters which it was equally his duty to inquire into. He would not
+suffer Nundcomar to be produced; he would not suffer Nundcomar to be
+examined; he rather suffered such an accusation to stand against his
+name and character than permit it to be inquired into. Do I want any
+other presumption of his guilt, upon such an occasion, than such conduct
+as this?
+
+This man, whom he calls a wretch, the basest and vilest of mankind, was
+undoubtedly, by himself, in the records of the Company, declared to be
+one of the first men of that country, everything that a subject could
+be, a person illustrious for his birth, sacred with regard to his caste,
+opulent in fortune, eminent in situation, who had filled the very first
+offices in that country; and that he was, added to all this, a man of
+most acknowledged talents, and of such a superiority as made the whole
+people of Bengal appear to be an inferior race of beings compared to
+him,--a man whose outward appearance and demeanor used to cause
+reverence and awe, and who at that time was near seventy years of age,
+which, without any other title, generally demands respect from mankind.
+And yet this man he calls the basest of mankind, a name which no man is
+entitled to call another till he has proved something to justify him in
+so doing; and notwithstanding his opulence, his high rank, station, and
+birth, he despises him, and will not suffer him to be heard as an
+accuser before him. I will venture to say that Mr. Hastings, in so
+doing, whether elevated by philosophy or inflated by pride, is not like
+the rest of mankind. We do know, that, in all accusations, a great part
+of their weight and authority comes from the character, the situation,
+the name, the description, the office, the dignity of the persons who
+bring them; mankind are so made, we cannot resist this prejudice; and it
+has weight, and ever will have _primâ facie_ weight, in all the
+tribunals in the world. If, therefore, Rajah Nundcomar was a man who (it
+is not degrading to your Lordships to say) was equal in rank, according
+to the idea of his country, to any peer in this House, as sacred as a
+bishop, of as much gravity and authority as a judge, and who was
+prime-minister in the country in which he lived, with what face can Mr.
+Hastings call this man a wretch, and say that he will not suffer him to
+be brought before him? If, indeed, joined with such circumstances, the
+accuser be a person of bad morals, then, I admit, those bad morals take
+away from their weight; but for a proof of that you must have some other
+grounds than the charges and the railing of the culprit against him.
+
+I might say that his passion is a proof of his guilt; and there is an
+action which is more odious than the crimes he attempts to cover,--_for
+he has murdered this man by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey_; and if his
+counsel should be unwise enough to endeavor to detract from the credit
+of this man by the pretended punishment to which he was brought, we will
+open that dreadful scene to your Lordships, and you will see that it
+does not detract from his credit, but brings an eternal stain and
+dishonor upon the justice of Great Britain: I say nothing further of it.
+As he stood there, as he gave that evidence that day, the evidence was
+to be received; it stands good, and is a record against Mr.
+Hastings,--with this addition, that he would not suffer it to be
+examined. He railed at his colleagues. He says, if the charge was false,
+they were guilty of a libel. No: it might have been the effect of
+conspiracy, it might be punished in another way; but if it was false, it
+was no libel. And all this is done to discountenance inquiry, to bring
+odium upon his colleagues for doing their duty, and to prevent that
+inquiry which could alone clear his character.
+
+Mr. Hastings had himself forgotten the character which he had given of
+Nundcomar; but he says that his colleagues were perfectly well
+acquainted with him, and knew that he was a wretch, the basest of
+mankind. But before I read to you the character which Mr. Hastings gave
+of him, when he recommended him to the Presidency, (to succeed Mahomed
+Reza Khân,) I am to let your Lordships understand fully the purpose for
+which Mr. Hastings gave it. Upon that occasion, all the Council, whom he
+stated to lie under suspicion of being bought by Mahomed Reza Khân, all
+those persons with one voice cried out against Nundcomar; and as Mr.
+Hastings was known to be of the faction the most opposite to Nundcomar,
+they charged him with direct inconsistency in raising Nundcomar to that
+exalted trust,--a charge which Mr. Hastings could not repel any other
+way than by defending Nundcomar. The weight of their objections chiefly
+lay to Nundcomar's political character; his moral character was not
+discussed in that proceeding. Mr. Hastings says,--
+
+"The President does not take upon him to vindicate the moral character
+of Nundcomar; his sentiments of this man's former political conduct are
+not unknown to the Court of Directors, who, he is persuaded, will be
+more inclined to attribute his present countenance of him to motives of
+zeal and fidelity to the service, in repugnance perhaps to his own
+inclinations, than to any predilection in his favor. He is very well
+acquainted with most of the facts alluded to in the minute of the
+majority, having been a principal instrument in detecting them:
+nevertheless he thinks it but justice to make a distinction between the
+violation of a trust and an offence committed against our government by
+a man who owed it no allegiance, nor was indebted to it for protection,
+but, on the contrary, was the minister and actual servant of a master
+whose interest naturally suggested that kind of policy which sought, by
+foreign aids, and the diminution of the power of the Company, to raise
+his own consequence, and to reëstablish his authority. He has never been
+charged with any instance of infidelity to the Nabob Mir Jaffier, the
+constant tenor of whose politics, from his first accession to the
+nizamut till his death, corresponded in all points so exactly with the
+artifices which were detected in his minister that they may be as fairly
+ascribed to the one as to the other: their immediate object was beyond
+question the aggrandizement of the former, though the latter had
+ultimately an equal interest in their success. The opinion which the
+Nabob himself entertained of the services and of the fidelity of
+Nundcomar evidently appeared in the distinguished marks which he
+continued to show him of his favor and confidence to the latest hour of
+his life.
+
+"His conduct in the succeeding administration appears not only to have
+been dictated by the same principles, but, if we may be allowed to speak
+favorably of any measures which opposed the views of our own government
+and aimed at the support of an adverse interest, surely it was not only
+not culpable, but even praiseworthy. He endeavored, as appears by the
+abstracts before us, to give consequence to his master, and to pave the
+way to his independence, by obtaining a firman from the king for his
+appointment to the subahship; and he opposed the promotion of Mahomed
+Reza Khân, because he looked upon it as a supersession of the rights and
+authority of the Nabob. He is now an absolute dependant and subject of
+the Company, on whose favor he must rest all his hopes of future
+advancement."
+
+The character here given of him is that of an excellent patriot, a
+character which all your Lordships, in the several situations which you
+enjoy or to which you may be called, will envy,--the character of a
+servant who stuck to his master against all foreign encroachments, who
+stuck to him to the last hour of his life, and had the dying testimony
+of his master to his services.
+
+Could Sir John Clavering, could Colonel Monson, could Mr. Francis know
+that this man, of whom Mr. Hastings had given that exalted character
+upon the records of the Company, was the basest and vilest of mankind?
+No, they ought to have esteemed him the contrary: they knew him to be a
+man of rank, they knew him to be a man perhaps of the first capacity in
+the world, and they knew that Mr. Hastings had given this honorable
+testimony of him on the records of the Company but a very little time
+before; and there was no reason why they should think or know, as he
+expresses it, that he was the basest and vilest of mankind. From the
+account, therefore, of Mr. Hastings himself, he was a person competent
+to accuse, a witness fit to be heard; and that is all I contend for. Mr.
+Hastings would not hear him, he would not suffer the charge he had
+produced to be examined into.
+
+It has been shown to your Lordships that Mr. Hastings employed Nundcomar
+to inquire into the conduct and to be the principal manager of a
+prosecution against Mahomed Reza Khân. Will you suffer this man to
+qualify and disqualify witnesses and prosecutors agreeably to the
+purposes which his own vengeance and corruption may dictate in one case,
+and which the defence of those corruptions may dictate in another? Was
+Nundcomar a person fit to be employed in the greatest and most sacred
+trusts in the country, and yet not fit to be a witness to the sums of
+money which he paid Mr. Hastings for those trusts? Was Nundcomar a fit
+witness to be employed and a fit person to be used in the prosecution of
+Mahomed Reza Khân, and yet not fit to be employed against Mr. Hastings,
+who himself had employed him in the very prosecution of Mahomed Reza
+Khân?
+
+If Nundcomar was an enemy to Mr. Hastings, he was an enemy to Mahomed
+Reza Khân; and Mr. Hastings employed him, avowedly and professedly on
+the records of the Company, on account of the very qualification of that
+enmity. Was he a wretch, the basest of mankind, when opposed to Mr.
+Hastings? Was he not as much a wretch, and as much the basest of
+mankind, when Mr. Hastings employed him in the prosecution of the first
+magistrate and Mahometan of the first descent in Asia? Mr. Hastings
+shall not qualify and disqualify men at his pleasure; he must accept
+them such as they are; and it is a presumption of his guilt accompanying
+the charge, (which I never will separate from it,) that he would not
+suffer the man to be produced who made the accusation. And I therefore
+contend, that, as the accusation was so made, so witnessed, so detailed,
+so specific, so entered upon record, and so entered upon record in
+consequence of the inquiries ordered by the Company, his refusal and
+rejection of inquiry into it is a presumption of his guilt.
+
+He is full of his idea of dignity. It is right for every man to preserve
+his dignity. There is a dignity of station, which a man has in trust to
+preserve; there is a dignity of personal character, which every man by
+being made man is bound to preserve. But you see Mr. Hastings's idea of
+dignity has no connection with integrity; it has no connection with
+honest fame; it has no connection with the reputation which he is bound
+to preserve. What, my Lords, did he owe nothing to the Company that had
+appointed him? Did he owe nothing to the legislature,--did he owe
+nothing to your Lordships, and to the House of Commons, who had
+appointed him? Did he owe nothing to himself? to the country that bore
+him? Did he owe nothing to the world, as to its opinion, to which every
+public man owes a reputation? What an example was here held out to the
+Company's servants!
+
+Mr. Hastings says, "This may come into a court of justice; it will come
+into a court of justice: I reserve my defence on the occasion till it
+comes into a court of justice, and here I make no opposition to it." To
+this I answer, that the Company did not order him so to reserve himself,
+but ordered him to be an inquirer into those things. Is it a lesson to
+be taught to the inferior servants of the Company, that, provided they
+can escape out of a court of justice by the back-doors and sally-ports
+of the law, by artifice of pleading, by those strict and rigorous rules
+of evidence which have been established for the protection of innocence,
+but which by them might be turned to the protection and support of
+guilt, that such an escape is enough for them? that an Old Bailey
+acquittal is enough to establish a fitness for trust? and if a man shall
+go acquitted out of such a court, because the judges are bound to acquit
+him against the conviction of their own opinion, when every man in the
+market-place knows that he is guilty, that he is fit for a trust? Is it
+a lesson to be held out to the servants of the Company, that, upon the
+first inquiry which is made into corruption, and that in the highest
+trust, by the persons authorized to inquire into it, he uses all the
+powers of that trust to quash it,--vilifying his colleagues, vilifying
+his accuser, abusing everybody, but never denying the charge? His
+associates and colleagues, astonished at this conduct, so wholly unlike
+everything that had ever appeared of innocence, request him to consider
+a little better. They declare they are not his accusers; they tell him
+they are not his judges; that they, under the orders of the Company, are
+making an inquiry which he ought to make. He declares he will not make
+it. Being thus driven to the wall, he says, "Why do you not form
+yourselves into a committee? I won't suffer these proceedings to go on
+as long as I am present." Mr. Hastings plainly had in view, that, if the
+proceedings had been before a committee, there would have been a doubt
+of their authenticity, as not being before a regular board; and he
+contended that there could be no regular board without his own presence
+in it: a poor, miserable scheme for eluding this inquiry; partly by
+saying that it was carried on when he was not present, and partly by
+denying the authority of this board.
+
+I will have nothing to do with the great question that arose upon the
+Governor-General's resolution to dissolve a board, whether the board
+have a right to sit afterwards; it is enough that Mr. Hastings would not
+suffer them, as a Council, to examine into what, as a Council, they were
+bound to examine into. He absolutely declared the Council dissolved,
+when they did not accept his committee, for which they had many good
+reasons, as I shall show in reply, if necessary, and which he could have
+no one good reason for proposing;--he then declares the Council
+dissolved. The Council, who did not think Mr. Hastings had a power to
+dissolve them while proceeding in the discharge of their duty, went on
+as a Council. They called in Nundcomar to support his charge: Mr.
+Hastings withdrew. Nundcomar was asked what he had to say further in
+support of his own evidence. Upon which he produces a letter from Munny
+Begum, the dancing-girl that I have spoken of, in which she gives him
+directions and instructions relative to his conduct in every part of
+those bribes; by which it appears that the corrupt agreement for her
+office was made with Mr. Hastings through Nundcomar, before he had
+quitted Calcutta. It points out the execution of it, and the manner in
+which every part of the sum was paid: one lac by herself in Calcutta;
+one lac, which she ordered Nundcomar to borrow, and which he did borrow;
+and a lac and a half which were given to him, Mr. Hastings, besides this
+purchase money, under color of an entertainment. This letter was
+produced, translated, examined, criticized, proved to be sealed with the
+seal of the Begum, acknowledged to have no marks but those of
+authenticity upon it, and as such was entered upon the Company's
+records, confirming and supporting the evidence of Nundcomar, part by
+part, and circumstance by circumstance. And I am to remark, that, since
+this document, so delivered in, has never been litigated or controverted
+in the truth of it, from that day to this, by Mr. Hastings, so, if there
+was no more testimony, here is enough, upon this business. Your
+Lordships will remark that this charge consisted of two parts: two lacs
+that were given explicitly for the corrupt purchase of the office; and
+one lac and a half given in reality for the same purpose, but under the
+color of what is called an entertainment.
+
+Now in the course of these proceedings it was thought necessary that Mr.
+Hastings's banian, Cantoo Baboo, (a name your Lordships will be well
+acquainted with, and who was the minister in this and all the other
+transactions of Mr. Hastings,) should be called before the board to
+explain some circumstances in the proceedings. Mr. Hastings ordered his
+banian, a native, not to attend the sovereign board appointed by
+Parliament for the government of that country, and directed to inquire
+into transactions of this nature. He thus taught the natives not only to
+disobey the orders of the Court of Directors, enforced by an act of
+Parliament, but he taught his own servant to disobey, and ordered him
+not to appear before the board. Quarrels, duels, and other mischiefs
+arose. In short, Mr. Hastings raised every power of heaven and of hell
+upon this subject: but in vain: the inquiry went on.
+
+Mr. Hastings does not meet Nundcomar: he was afraid of him. But he was
+not negligent of his own defence; for he flies to the Supreme Court of
+Justice. He there prosecuted an inquiry against Nundcomar for a
+conspiracy. Failing in that, he made other attempts, and disabled
+Nundcomar from appearing before the board by having him imprisoned, and
+thus utterly crippled that part of the prosecution against him. But as
+guilt is never able thoroughly to escape, it did so happen, that the
+Council, finding monstrous deficiencies in the Begum's affairs, finding
+the Nabob's allowance totally squandered, that the most sacred pensions
+were left unpaid, that nothing but disorder and confusion reigned in all
+his affairs, that the Nabob's education was neglected, that he could
+scarcely read or write, that there was scarcely any mark of a man left
+in him except those which Nature had at first imprinted,--I say, all
+these abuses being produced in a body before them, they thought it
+necessary to send up to inquire into them; and a considerable deficiency
+or embezzlement appearing in the Munny Begum's account of the young
+Nabob's stipend, she voluntarily declared, by a writing under her seal,
+that she had given 15,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings for an entertainment.
+
+Mr. Hastings, finding that the charge must come fully against him,
+contrived a plan which your Lordships will see the effects of presently,
+and this was, to confound this lac and an half, or 15,000_l._, with the
+two lacs given directly and specifically as a bribe,--intending to avail
+himself of this finesse whenever any payment was to be proved of the two
+lacs, which he knew would be proved against him, and which he never did
+deny; and accordingly your Lordships will find some confusion in the
+proofs of the payment of those sums. The receipt of two lacs is proved
+by Nundcomar, proved with all the means of detection which I have
+stated; the receipt of the lac and a half is proved by Munny Begum's
+letter, the authenticity of which was established, and never denied by
+Mr. Hastings. In addition to these proofs, Rajah Gourdas, who had the
+management of the Nabob's treasury, verbally gave an account perfectly
+corresponding with that of Nundcomar and the Munny Begum's letter; and
+he afterwards gave in writing an attestation, which in every point
+agrees correctly with the others. So that there are three witnesses upon
+this business. And he shall not disqualify Rajah Gourdas, because,
+whatever character he thought fit to give Nundcomar, he has given the
+best of characters to Rajah Gourdas, who was employed by Mr. Hastings in
+occupations of trust, and therefore any objections to his competency
+cannot exist. Having got thus far, the only thing that remained was to
+examine the records of the public offices, and see whether any trace of
+these transactions was to be found there. These offices had been thrown
+into confusion in the manner you will hear; but, upon strict inquiry,
+there was a _shomaster_, or office paper, produced, from which it
+appears that the officer of the treasury, having brought to the Nabob an
+account of one lac and a half which he said had been given to Mr.
+Hastings, desired to know from him under what head of expense it should
+be entered, and that he, the Nabob, desired him to put it under the head
+of expenses for entertaining Mr. Hastings. If there had been a head of
+entertainment established as a regular affair, the officer would never
+have gone to the Nabob and asked under what name to enter it; but he
+found an irregular affair, and he did not know what head to put it
+under. And from the whole of the proceedings it appears that three lacs
+and a half were paid: two lac by way of bribe, one lac and a half under
+the color of an entertainment. Mr. Hastings endeavors to invalidate the
+first obliquely, not directly, for he never directly denied it; and he
+partly admits the second, in hopes that all the proof of payment of the
+first charge should be merged and confounded in the second. And
+therefore your Lordships will see from the beginning of that business
+till it came into the hands of Mr. Smith, his agent, then appearing in
+the name and character of agent and solicitor to the Company, that this
+was done to give some appearance and color to it by a false
+representation, as your Lordships will see, of every part of the
+transaction.
+
+The proof, then, of the two lacs rests upon the evidence of Nundcomar,
+the letter of Munny Begum, and the evidence of Rajah Gourdas. The
+evidence of the lac and a half, by way of entertainment, was at first
+the same; and afterwards begins a series of proofs to which Mr. Hastings
+has himself helped us. For, in the first place, he produces this office
+paper in support of his attempt to establish the confusion between the
+payment of the two lacs and of the lac and a half. He did not himself
+deny that he received a lac and a half, because with respect to that lac
+and a half he had founded some principle of justification. Accordingly
+this office paper asserts and proves this lac and a half to have been
+given, in addition to the other proofs. Then Munny Begum herself is
+inquired of. There is a commission appointed to go up to her residence;
+and the fact is proved to the satisfaction of Mr. Goring, the
+commissioner. The Begum had put a paper of accounts, through her son,
+into his hands, which shall be given at your Lordships' bar, in which
+she expressly said that she gave Mr. Hastings a lac and a half for
+entertainment. But Mr. Hastings objects to Mr. Goring's evidence upon
+this occasion. He wanted to supersede Mr. Goring in the inquiry; and he
+accordingly appoints, with the consent of the Council, two creatures of
+his own to go and assist in that inquiry. The question which he directs
+these commissioners to put to Munny Begum is this:--"Was the sum of
+money charged by you to be given to Mr. Hastings given under an idea of
+entertainment customary, or upon what other ground, or for what other
+reason?" He also desires the following questions may be proposed to the
+Begum:--"Was any application made to you for the account which you have
+delivered of three lacs and a half of rupees said to have been paid to
+the Governor and Mr. Middleton? or did you deliver the account of your
+own free will, and unsolicited?" My Lords, you see that with regard to
+the whole three lacs and a half of rupees the Begum had given an account
+which tended to confirm the payment of them; but Mr. Hastings wanted to
+invalidate that account by supposing she gave it under restraint. The
+second question is,--"In what manner was the application made to you,
+and by whom?" But the principal question is this:--"On what account was
+the one lac and a half given to the Governor-General which you have laid
+to his account? Was it in consequence of any requisition from him, or of
+any previous agreement, or of any established usage?" When a man asks
+concerning a sum of money, charged to be given to him by another person,
+on what account it was given, he does indirectly admit that that money
+actually was paid, and wants to derive a justification from the mode of
+the payment of it; and accordingly that inference was drawn from the
+question so sent up, and it served as an instruction to Munny Begum; and
+her answer was, that it was given to him, as an ancient usage and
+custom, for an entertainment. So that the fact of the gift of the money
+is ascertained by the question put by Mr. Hastings to her, and her
+answer. And thus at last comes his accomplice in this business, and
+gives the fullest testimony to the lac and a half.
+
+I must beg leave, before I go further, to state the circumstances of
+the several witnesses examined upon this business. They were of two
+kinds: voluntary witnesses, and accomplices forced by inquiry and
+examination to discover their own guilt. Of the first kind were
+Nundcomar and Rajah Gourdas: these were the only two that can be said to
+be voluntary in the business, and who gave their information without
+much fear, though the last unwillingly, and with a full sense of the
+danger of doing it. The other was the evidence of his accomplice, Munny
+Begum, wrung from her by the force of truth, in which she confessed that
+she gave the lac and a half, and justifies it upon the ground of its
+being a customary entertainment. Besides this, there is the evidence of
+Chittendur, who was one of Mr. Hastings's instruments, and one of the
+Begum's servants. He, being prepared to confound the two lacs with the
+one lac and a half, says, upon his examination, that a lac and a half
+was given; but upon examining into the particulars of it, he proves that
+the sum he gave was two lacs, and not a lac and a half: for he says that
+there was a dispute about the other half lac; Nundcomar demanded
+interest, which the Begum was unwilling to allow, and consequently that
+half lac remained unpaid. Now this half lac can be no part of the lac
+and a half, which is admitted on all hands, and proved by the whole body
+of concurrent testimony, to have been given to Mr. Hastings in one
+lumping sum. When Chittendur endeavors to confound it with the lac and a
+half, he clearly establishes the fact that it was a parcel of the two
+lacs, and thus bears evidence, in attempting to prevaricate in favor of
+Mr. Hastings, that one lac and a half was paid, which Mr. Hastings is
+willing to allow; but when he enters into the particulars of it, he
+proves by the subdivision of the payment, and by the non-payment of part
+of it, that it accords with the two lacs, and not with the lac and a
+half.
+
+There are other circumstances in these accounts highly auxiliary to this
+evidence. The lac and a half was not only attested by Rajah Gourdas, by
+the Begum, by Chittendur, by the Begum again upon Mr. Hastings's own
+question, indirectly admitted by Mr. Hastings, proved by the orders for
+it to be written off to expense, (such a body of proof as perhaps never
+existed,) but there is one proof still remaining, namely, a paper, which
+was produced before the Committee, and which we shall produce to your
+Lordships. It is an authentic paper, delivered in favor of Mr. Hastings
+by Major Scott, who acted at that time as Mr. Hastings's agent, to a
+committee of the House of Commons, and authenticated to come from Munny
+Begum herself. All this body of evidence we mean to produce; and we
+shall prove, first, that he received the two lacs,--and, secondly, that
+he received one lac and a half under the name of entertainment. With
+regard to the lac and a half, Mr. Hastings is so far from controverting
+it, even indirectly, that he is obliged to establish it by testimonies
+produced by himself, in order to sink in that, if he can, the two lacs,
+which he thinks he is not able to justify, but which he fears will be
+proved against him. The lac and a half, I do believe, he will not be
+advised to contest; but whether he is or no, we shall load him with it,
+we shall prove it beyond all doubt. But there are other circumstances
+further auxiliary in this business, which, from the very attempts to
+conceal it, prove beyond doubt the fraudulent and wicked nature of the
+transaction. In the account given by the Begum, a lac, which is for Mr.
+Hastings's entertainment, is entered in a suspicious neighborhood; for
+there is there entered a lac of rupees paid for the subahdarry sunnuds
+to the Mogul through the Rajah Shitab Roy. Upon looking into the
+account, and comparing it with another paper produced, the first thing
+we find is, that this woman charges the sum paid to be a sum due; and
+then she charges this one lac to have been paid when the Mogul was in
+the hands of the Mahrattas, when all communication with him was stopped,
+and when Rajah Shitab Roy, who is supposed to have paid it, was under
+confinement in the hands of Mr. Hastings. Thus she endeavors to conceal
+the lac of rupees paid to Mr. Hastings.
+
+In order to make this transaction, which, though not in itself
+intricate, is in some degree made so by Mr. Hastings, clear to your
+Lordships, we pledge ourselves to give to your Lordships, what must be a
+great advantage to the culprit himself, a syllabus, the heads of all
+this charge, and of the proofs themselves, with their references, to
+show how far the proof goes to the two lacs, and then to the one lac and
+a half singly. This we shall put in writing, that you may not depend
+upon the fugitive memory of a thing not so well, perhaps, or powerfully
+expressed as it ought to be, and in order to give every advantage to the
+defendant, and to give every facility to your Lordships' judgment: and
+this will, I believe, be thought a clear and fair way of proceeding.
+Your Lordships will then judge whether Mr. Hastings's conduct at the
+time, his resisting an inquiry, preventing his servant appearing as an
+evidence, discountenancing and discouraging his colleagues, raising
+every obstruction to the prosecution, dissolving the Council,
+preventing evidence and destroying it as far as lay in his power by
+collateral means, be not also such presumptive proofs as give double
+force to all the positive proof we produce against him.
+
+The lac and a half, I know, he means to support upon the custom of
+entertainment; and your Lordships will judge whether or not a man who
+was ordered and had covenanted never to take more than 400_l._ could
+take 16,000_l._ under color of an entertainment. That which he intends
+to produce as a justification we charge, and your Lordships and the
+world will think, to be the heaviest aggravation of his crime. And after
+explaining to your Lordships the circumstances under which this
+justification is made, and leaving a just impression of them upon your
+minds, I shall beg your Lordships' indulgence to finish this member of
+the business to-morrow.
+
+It is stated and entered in the account, that an entertainment was
+provided for Mr. Hastings at the rate of 200_l._ a day. He stayed at
+Moorshedabad for near three months; and thus you see that visits from
+Mr. Hastings are pretty expensive things: it is at the rate of
+73,000_l._ a year for his entertainment. We find that Mr. Middleton, an
+English gentleman who was with him, received likewise (whether under the
+same pretence I know not, and it does not signify) another sum equal to
+it; and if these two gentlemen had stayed in that country a year, their
+several allowances would have been 146,000_l._ out of the Nabob's
+allowance of 160,000_l._ a year: they would have eat up nearly the whole
+of it. And do you wonder, my Lords, that such guests and such hosts are
+difficult to be divided? Do you wonder that such visits, when so well
+paid for and well provided for, were naturally long? There is hardly a
+prince in Europe who would give to another prince of Europe from his
+royal hospitality what was given upon this occasion to Mr. Hastings.
+
+Let us now see what was Mr. Hastings's business during this long
+protracted visit. First, he tells you that he came there to reduce all
+the state and dignity of the Nabob. He tells you that he felt no
+compunction in reducing that state; that the elephants, the menagerie,
+the stables, all went without mercy, and consequently all the persons
+concerned in them were dismissed also. When he came to the abolition of
+the pensions, he says,--"I proceeded with great pain, from the
+reflection that I was the instrument in depriving whole families, all at
+once, of their bread, and reducing them to a state of penury: convinced
+of the necessity of the measure, I endeavored to execute it with great
+impartiality." Here he states the work he was employed in, when he took
+this two hundred pounds a day for his own pay. "It was necessary to
+begin with reforming the useless servants of the court, and retrenching
+the idle parade of elephants, menageries, &c., which loaded the civil
+list. This cost little regret in performing; but the Resident, who took
+upon himself the chief share in this business, acknowledges that he
+suffered considerably in his feelings, when he came to touch on the
+pension list. Some hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of the
+country, excluded, under our government, from almost all employments,
+civil or military, had, ever since the revolution, depended on the
+bounty of the Nabob; and near ten lacs were bestowed that way. It is not
+that the distribution was always made with judgment or impartial, and
+much room was left for a reform; but when the question was to cut off
+entirely the greatest part, it could not fail to be accompanied with
+circumstances of real distress. The Resident declares, that, even with
+some of the highest rank, he could not avoid discovering, under all the
+pride of Eastern manners, the manifest marks of penury and want. There
+was, however, no room left for hesitation: to confine the Nabob's
+expenses within the limited sum, it was necessary that pensions should
+be set aside."
+
+Here, my Lords, is a man sent to execute one of the most dreadful
+offices that was ever executed by man,--to cut off, as he says himself,
+with a bleeding heart, the only remaining allowance made for hundreds of
+the decayed nobility and gentry of a great kingdom, driven by our
+government from the offices upon which they existed. In this moment of
+anxiety and affliction, when he says he felt pain and was cut to the
+heart to do it,--at this very moment, when he was turning over fourteen
+hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry of this country to downright
+want of bread,--just at that moment, while he was doing this act, and
+feeling this act in this manner, from the collected morsels forced from
+the mouths of that indigent and famished nobility he gorged his own
+ravenous maw with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for his
+entertainment. As we see him in this business, this man is unlike any
+other: he is also never corrupt but he is cruel; he never dines without
+creating a famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity of
+standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent, the oppressed, and
+ruined; he takes to himself double what would maintain them. His is
+unlike the generous rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a
+living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like that of the
+ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed, the sickly, the dying, and
+the dead, and only anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.
+His cruelty is beyond his corruption: but there is something in his
+hypocrisy which is more terrible than his cruelty; for, at the very time
+when with double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription, and
+sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility and gentry of a great
+country, his eyes overflow with tears, and he turns the precious balm
+that bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine, into fatal,
+rancorous, mortal poison to the human race.
+
+You have seen, that, when he takes two hundred pounds a day for his
+entertainment, he tells you that in this very act he is starving
+fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry. My Lords, you have
+the blood of nobles,--if not, you have the blood of men in your veins:
+you feel as nobles, you feel as men. What would you say to a cruel Mogul
+exactor, by whom after having been driven from your estates, driven from
+the noble offices, civil and military, which you hold, driven from your
+bishoprics, driven from your places at court, driven from your offices
+as judges, and, after having been reduced to a miserable flock of
+pensioners, your very pensions were at last wrested from your mouths,
+and who, though at the very time when those pensions were wrested from
+you he declares them to have been the only bread of a miserable decayed
+nobility, takes himself two hundred pounds a day for his entertainment,
+and continues it till it amounts to sixteen thousand pounds? I do
+think, that, of all the corruptions which he has not owned, but has not
+denied, or of those which he does in effect own, and of which he brings
+forward the evidence himself, the taking and claiming under color of an
+entertainment is ten times the most nefarious.
+
+I shall this day only further trouble your Lordships to observe that he
+has never directly denied this transaction. I have tumbled over the
+records, I have looked at every part, to see whether he denies it. He
+did not deny it at the time, he did not deny it to the Court of
+Directors: on the contrary, he did in effect acknowledge it, when,
+without directly acknowledging it, he promised them a full and liberal
+explanation of the whole transaction. He never did give that
+explanation. Parliament took up the business; this matter was reported
+at the end of the Eleventh Report; but though the House of Commons had
+thus reported it, and made that public which before was upon the
+Company's records, he took no notice of it. Then another occasion
+arises: he comes before the House of Commons; he knows he is about to be
+prosecuted for those very corruptions; he well knows these charges exist
+against him; he makes his defence (if he will allow it to be his
+defence); but, though thus driven, he did not there deny it, because he
+knew, that, if he had denied it, it could be proved against him. I
+desire your Lordships will look at that paper which we have given in
+evidence, and see if you find a word of denial of it: there is much
+discourse, much folly, much insolence, but not one word of denial. Then,
+at last, it came before this tribunal against him. I desire to refer
+your Lordships to that part of his defence to the article in which this
+bribe is specifically charged: he does not deny it there; the only
+thing which looks like a denial is one sweeping clause inserted, (in
+order to put us upon the proof,) that all the charges are to be
+conceived as denied; but a specific denial to this specific charge in no
+stage of the business, from beginning to end, has he once made.
+
+And therefore here I close that part of the charge which relates to the
+business of Nundcomar. Your Lordships will see such a body of
+presumptive proof and positive proof as never was given yet of any
+secret corrupt act of bribery; and there I leave it with your Lordships'
+justice. I beg pardon for having detained you so long; but your
+Lordships will be so good as to observe that no business ever was
+covered with more folds of iniquitous artifice than this which is now
+brought before you.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+
+SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--When I last had the honor of addressing your Lordships, I
+endeavored to state with as much perspicuity as the nature of an
+intricate affair would admit, and as largely as in so intricate an
+affair was consistent with the brevity which I endeavored to preserve,
+the proofs which had been adduced against Warren Hastings upon an
+inquiry instituted by an order of the Court of Directors into the
+corruption and peculation of persons in authority in India. My Lords, I
+have endeavored to show you by anterior presumptive proofs, drawn from
+the nature and circumstances of the acts themselves inferring guilt,
+that such actions and such conduct could be referable only to one cause,
+namely, _corruption_; I endeavored to show you afterwards, my Lords,
+what the specific nature and extent of the corruption was, as far as it
+could be fully proved; and lastly, the great satisfactory presumption
+which attended the inquiry with regard to Mr. Hastings,--namely, that,
+contrary to law, contrary to his duty, contrary to what is owed by
+innocence to itself, Mr. Hastings resisted that inquiry, and employed
+all the power of his office to prevent the exercise of it, either in
+himself or in others. These presumptions and these proofs will be
+brought before your Lordships, distinctly and in order, at the end of
+this opening.
+
+The next point on which I thought it necessary to proceed was relative
+to the presumptions which his subsequent conduct gave with regard to his
+guilt: because, my Lords, his uniform tenor of conduct, such as must
+attend guilt, both in the act, at the time of the inquiry, and
+subsequent to it, will form such a body of satisfactory evidence as I
+believe the human mind is not made to resist.
+
+My Lords, there is another reason why I choose to enter into the
+presumptions drawn from his conduct and the fact, taking his conduct in
+two parts, if it may be so expressed, _omission_ and _commission_, in
+order that your Lordships should more fully enter into the consequences
+of this system of bribery. But before I say anything upon that, I wish
+your Lordships to be apprised, that the Commons, in bringing this bribe
+of three lac and a half before your Lordships, do not wish by any means
+to have it understood that this is the whole of the bribe that was
+received by Mr. Hastings in consequence of delivering up the whole
+management of the government of the country to that improper person whom
+he nominated for it. My Lords, from the proofs that will be adduced
+before you, there is great probability that he received very nearly a
+hundred thousand pounds; there is positive proof of his receiving fifty;
+and we have chosen only to charge him with that of which there is such
+an accumulated body of proof as to leave no doubt upon the minds of your
+Lordships. All this I say, because we are perfectly apprised of the
+sentiments of the public upon this point: when they hear of the enormity
+of Indian peculation, when they see the acts done, and compare them
+with the bribes received, the acts seem so enormous and the bribes
+comparatively so small, that they can hardly be got to attribute them to
+that motive. What I mean to state is this: that, from a collective view
+of the subject, your Lordships will be able to judge that enormous
+offences have been committed, and that the bribe which we have given in
+proof is a specimen of the nature and extent of those enormous bribes
+which extend to much greater sums than we are able to prove before you
+in the manner your Lordships would like and expect.
+
+I have already remarked to your Lordships, that, after this charge was
+brought and recorded before the Council in spite of the resistance made
+by Mr. Hastings, in which he employed all the power and authority of his
+station, and the whole body of his partisans and associates in iniquity,
+dispersed through every part of these provinces,--after he had taken all
+these steps, finding himself pressed by the proof and pressed by the
+presumption of his resistance to the inquiry, he did think it necessary
+to make something like a defence. Accordingly he has made what he calls
+a justification, which did not consist in the denial of that fact, or
+any explanation of it. The mode he took for his defence was abuse of his
+colleagues, abuse of the witnesses, and of every person who in the
+execution of his duty was inquiring into the fact, and charging them
+with things which, if true, were by no means sufficient to support him,
+either in defending the acts themselves, or in the criminal means he
+used to prevent inquiry into them. His design was to mislead their
+minds, and to carry them from the accusation and the proof of it. With
+respect to the passion, violence, and intemperate heat with which he
+charged them, they were proceeding in an orderly, regular manner; and if
+on any occasion they seem to break out into warmth, it was in
+consequence of that resistance which he made to them, in what your
+Lordships, I believe, will agree with them in thinking was one of the
+most important parts of their functions. If they had been intemperate in
+their conduct, if they had been violent, passionate, prejudiced against
+him, it afforded him only a better means of making his defence; because,
+though in a rational and judicious mind the intemperate conduct of the
+accuser certainly proves nothing with regard to the truth or falsehood
+of his accusation, yet we do know that the minds of men are so
+constituted that an improper mode of conducting a right thing does form
+some degree of prejudice against it. Mr. Hastings, therefore, unable to
+defend himself upon principle, has resorted as much as he possibly could
+to prejudice. And at the same time that there is not one word of denial,
+or the least attempt at a refutation of the charge, he has loaded the
+records with all manner of minutes, proceedings, and letters relative to
+everything but the fact itself. The great aim of his policy, both then,
+before, and ever since, has been to divert the mind of the auditory, or
+the persons to whom he addressed himself, from the nature of his cause,
+to some collateral circumstance relative to it,--a policy to which he
+has always had recourse; but that trick, the last resource of despairing
+guilt, I trust will now completely fail him.
+
+Mr. Hastings, however, began to be pretty sensible that this way of
+proceeding had a very unpromising and untoward look; for which reason he
+next declared that he reserved his defence for fear of a legal
+prosecution, and that some time or other he would give a large and
+liberal explanation to the Court of Directors, to whom he was answerable
+for his conduct, of his refusing to suffer the inquiry to proceed, of
+his omitting to give them satisfaction at the time, of his omitting to
+take any one natural step that an innocent man would have taken upon
+such an occasion. Under this promise he has remained from that time to
+the time you see him at your bar, and he has neither denied, exculpated,
+explained, or apologized for his conduct in any one single instance.
+
+While he accuses the intemperance of his adversaries, he shows a degree
+of temperance in himself which always attends guilt in despair: for
+struggling guilt may be warm, but guilt that is desperate has nothing to
+do but to submit to the consequences of it, to bear the infamy annexed
+to its situation, and to try to find some consolation in the effects of
+guilt with regard to private fortune for the scandal it brings them into
+in public reputation. After the business had ended in India, the causes
+why he should have given the explanation grew stronger and stronger: for
+not only the charges exhibited against him were weighty, but the manner
+in which he was called upon to inquire into them was such as would
+undoubtedly tend to stir the mind of a man of character, to rouse him to
+some consideration of himself, and to a sense of the necessity of his
+defence. He was goaded to make this defence by the words I shall read to
+your Lordships from Sir John Clavering.
+
+"In the late proceedings of the Revenue Board it will appear that there
+is no species of peculation from which the Honorable Governor-General
+has thought it reasonable to abstain." He further says, in answer to
+Mr. Hastings, "The malicious view with which this innuendo" (an innuendo
+of Mr. Hastings) "is thrown out is only worthy of a man who, having
+disgraced himself in the eyes of every man of honor both in Asia and in
+Europe, and having no imputation to lay to our charge, has dared to
+attempt in the dark what malice itself could not find grounds to aim at
+openly."
+
+These are the charges which were made upon him,--not loosely, in the
+heat of conversation, but deliberately, in writing, entered upon record,
+and sent to his employers, the Court of Directors, those whom the law
+had set over him, and to whose judgment and opinion he was responsible.
+Do your Lordships believe that it was conscious innocence that made him
+endure such reproaches, so recorded, from his own colleague? Was it
+conscious innocence that made him abandon his defence, renounce his
+explanation, and bear all this calumny, (if it was calumny,) in such a
+manner, without making any one attempt to refute it? Your Lordships will
+see by this, and by other minutes with which the books are filled, that
+Mr. Hastings is charged quite to the brim with corruptions of all sorts,
+and covered with every mode of possible disgrace. For there is something
+so base and contemptible in the crimes of peculation and bribery, that,
+when they come to be urged home and strongly against a man, as here they
+are urged, nothing but a consciousness of guilt can possibly make a
+person so charged support himself under them. Mr. Hastings considered
+himself, as he has stated, to be under the necessity of bearing them.
+What is that necessity? Guilt. Could he say that Sir John Clavering (for
+I say nothing now of Colonel Monson and Mr. Francis, who were joined
+with him) was a man weak and contemptible? I believe there are those
+among your Lordships who remember that Sir John Clavering was known
+before he went abroad, and better known by his conduct after, to be a
+man of the most distinguished honor that ever served his Majesty; he
+served his Majesty in a military situation for many years, and
+afterwards in that high civil situation in India. It is known that
+through every step and gradation of a high military service, until he
+arrived at the highest of all, there never was the least blot upon him,
+or doubt or suspicion of his character; that his temper for the most
+part, and his manners, were fully answerable to his virtues, and a noble
+ornament to them; that he was one of the best natured, best bred men, as
+well as one of the highest principled men to be found in his Majesty's
+service; that he had passed the middle time of life, and come to an age
+which makes men wise in general; so that he could be warmed by nothing
+but that noble indignation at guilt which is the last thing that ever
+was or will be extinguished in a virtuous mind. He was a man whose voice
+was not to be despised; but if his character had been personally as
+contemptible as it was meritorious and honorable in every respect, yet
+his situation as a commissioner named by an act of Parliament for the
+express purpose of reforming India gave him a weight and consequence
+that could not suffer Mr. Hastings, without a general and strong
+presumption of his guilt, to acquiesce in such recorded minutes from
+him. But if he had been a weak, if he had been an intemperate man, (in
+reality he was as cool, steady, temperate, judicious a man as ever was
+born,) the Court of Directors, to whom Mr. Hastings was responsible by
+every tie and every principle, and was made responsible at last by a
+positive act of Parliament obliging him to yield obedience to their
+commands as the general rule of his duty,--the Court of Directors, I
+say, perfectly approved of every part of General Clavering's, Colonel
+Monson's, and Mr. Francis's conduct; they approved of this inquiry which
+Mr. Hastings rejected; and they have declared, "that the powers and
+instructions vested in and given to General Clavering and the other
+gentlemen were such as fully authorized them in every inquiry that seems
+to have been their object ... Europeans."[2]
+
+Now after the supreme authority, to which they were to appeal in all
+their disputes, had passed this judgment upon this very inquiry, the
+matter no longer depended upon Mr. Hastings's opinion; nor could he be
+longer justified in attributing that to evil motives either of malice or
+passion in his colleagues. When the judges who were finally to determine
+who was malicious, who was passionate, who was or was not justified
+either in setting on foot the inquiry or resisting it, had passed that
+judgment, then Mr. Hastings was called upon by all the feelings of a
+man, and by his duty in Council, to give satisfaction to his masters,
+the Directors, who approved of the zeal and diligence shown in that very
+inquiry, the passion of which he only reprobated, and upon which he
+grounded his justification.
+
+If anything but conscious guilt could have possibly influenced him to
+such more than patience under this accusation, let us see what was his
+conduct when the scene was changed. General Clavering, fatigued and
+broken down by the miseries of his situation, soon afterwards lost a
+very able and affectionate colleague, Colonel Monson, (whom Mr. Hastings
+states to be one of the bitterest of his accusers,) a man one of the
+most loved and honored of his time, a person of your Lordships' noble
+blood, and a person who did honor to it, and if he had been of the
+family of a commoner, well deserved to be raised to your distinction.
+When that man died,--died of a broken heart, to say nothing else,--and
+General Clavering felt himself in a manner without help, except what he
+derived from the firmness, assiduity, and patience of Mr. Francis,
+sinking like himself under the exertion of his own virtues, he was
+resolved to resign his employment. The Court of Directors were so
+alarmed at this attempt of his to resign his employment, that they wrote
+thus: "When you conceived the design of quitting our service, we imagine
+you could not have heard of the resignation of Mr. Hastings ... your
+zeal and ability."[3]
+
+My Lords, in this struggle, and before he could resign finally, another
+kind of resignation, the resignation of Nature, took place, and Sir John
+Clavering died. The character that was given Sir John Clavering at that
+time is a seal to the whole of his proceedings, and the use that I shall
+make of it your Lordships will see presently. "The abilities of General
+Clavering, the comprehensive knowledge he had attained of our affairs
+... to the East India Company."[4]
+
+And never had it a greater loss. There is the concluding funeral
+oration made by his masters, upon a strict, though by no means partial,
+view of his conduct. My Lords, here is the man who is the great accuser
+of Mr. Hastings, as he says. What is he? a slight man, a man of mean
+situation, a man of mean talents, a man of mean character? No: of the
+highest character. Was he a person whose conduct was disapproved by
+their common superiors? No: it was approved when living, and ratified
+when dead. This was the man, a man equal to him in every respect, upon
+the supposed evil motives of whom alone was founded the sole
+justification of Mr. Hastings.
+
+But be it, then, that Sir John Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr.
+Francis were all of them the evil-minded persons that he describes them
+to be, and that from dislike to them, from a kind of manly resentment,
+if you please, against such persons, an hatred against malicious
+proceedings, and a defiance of them, he did not think proper, as he
+states, to make his defence during that period of time, and while
+oppressed by that combination,--yet, when he got rid of the two former
+persons, and when Mr. Francis was nothing, when the whole majority was
+in his hand, and he was in full power, there was a large, open, full
+field for inquiry; and he was bound to re-institute that inquiry, and to
+clear his character before his judges and before his masters. Mr.
+Hastings says, "No: they have threatened me with a prosecution, and I
+reserve myself for a court of justice."
+
+Mr. Hastings has now at length taken a ground, as you will see from all
+his writings, which makes all explanation of his conduct in this
+business absolutely impossible. For, in the first place, he says, "As a
+prosecution is meditated against me, I will say nothing in explanation
+of my conduct, because I might disclose my defence, and by that means do
+myself a prejudice." On the other hand, when the prosecution is dropped,
+as we all know it was dropped in this case, then he has a direct
+contrary reason, but it serves him just as well: "Why, as no prosecution
+is intended, no defence need be made." So that, whether a prosecution is
+intended or a prosecution dropped, there is always cause why Mr.
+Hastings should not give the Court of Directors the least satisfaction
+concerning his conduct, notwithstanding, as we shall prove, he has
+reiteratedly promised, and promised it in the most ample and liberal
+manner. But let us see if there be any presumption in his favor to rebut
+the presumption which he knew was irresistible, and which, by making no
+defence for his conduct, and stopping the inquiry, must necessarily lie
+upon him. He reserves his defence, but he promises both defence and
+explanation.
+
+Your Lordships will remark that there is nowhere a clear and positive
+denial of the fact. Promising a defence, I will admit, does not directly
+and _ex vi termini_ suppose that a man may not deny the fact, because it
+is just compatible with the defence; but it does by no means exclude the
+admission of the fact, because the admission of the fact may be attended
+with a justification: but when a man says that he will explain his
+conduct with regard to a fact, then he admits that fact, because there
+can be no explanation of a fact which has no existence. Therefore Mr.
+Hastings admits the fact by promising an explanation, and he shows he
+has no explanation nor justification to give by never having given it.
+Goaded, provoked, and called upon for it, in the manner I have
+mentioned, he chooses to have a feast of disgrace, (if I may say so,) to
+have a riot of infamy, served up to him day by day for a course of
+years, in every species of reproach that could be given by his
+colleagues, and by the Court of Directors, "from whom," he says, "I
+received nothing but opprobrious and disgraceful epithets," and he says
+"that his predecessors possessed more of their confidence than he had."
+Yet for years he lay down in that sty of disgrace, fattening in it,
+feeding upon that offal of disgrace and excrement, upon everything that
+could be disgustful to the human mind, rather than deny the fact and put
+himself upon a civil justification. Infamy was never incurred for
+nothing. We know very well what was said formerly:--
+
+        "Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo
+    Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca."
+
+And never did a man submit to infamy for anything but its true reward,
+_money_. Money he received; the infamy he received along with it: he was
+glad to take his wife with all her goods; he took her with her full
+portion, with every species of infamy that belonged to her; and your
+Lordships cannot resist the opinion that he would not have suffered
+himself to be disgraced with the Court of Directors, disgraced with his
+colleagues, disgraced with the world, disgraced upon an eternal record,
+unless he was absolutely guilty of the fact that was charged upon him.
+
+He frequently expresses that he reserves himself for a court of justice.
+Does he, my Lords? I am sorry that Mr. Hastings should show that he
+always mistakes his situation; he has totally mistaken it: he was a
+servant, bound to give a satisfactory account of his conduct to his
+masters, and, instead of that, he considers himself and the Court of
+Directors as litigant parties,--them as the accusers, and himself as the
+culprit. What would your Lordships, in private life, conceive of a
+steward who was accused of embezzling the rents, robbing and oppressing
+the tenants, and committing a thousand misdeeds in his stewardship, and
+who, upon your wishing to make inquiry into his conduct, and asking an
+explanation of it, should answer, "I will give no reply: you may intend
+to prosecute me and convict me as a cheat, and therefore I will not give
+you any satisfaction": what would you think of that steward? You could
+have no doubt that such a steward was a person not fit to be a steward,
+nor fit to live.
+
+Mr. Hastings reserves himself for a court of justice: that single
+circumstance, my Lords, proves that he was guilty. It may appear very
+odd that his guilt should be inferred from his desire of trial in a
+court in which he could be acquitted or condemned. But I shall prove to
+you from that circumstance that Mr. Hastings, in desiring to be tried in
+a court of justice, convicts himself of presumptive guilt.
+
+When Mr. Hastings went to Bengal in the year 1772, he had a direction
+exactly similar to this which he has resisted in his own case: it was to
+inquire into grievances and abuses. In consequence of this direction, he
+proposes a plan for the regulation of the Company's service, and one
+part of that plan was just what you would expect from him,--that is, the
+power of destroying every Company's servant without the least
+possibility of his being heard in his own defence or taking any one
+step to justify himself, and of dismissing him at his own discretion:
+and the reason he gives for it is this. "I shall forbear to comment upon
+the above propositions: if just and proper, their utility will be
+self-apparent. One clause only in the last article may require some
+explanation, namely, the power proposed for the Governor of recalling
+any person from his station without assigning a reason for it. In the
+charge of oppression," (now here you will find the reason why Mr.
+Hastings wishes to appeal to a court of justice, rather than to give
+satisfaction to his employers,) "though supported by the cries of the
+people and the most authentic representations, it is yet impossible in
+most cases to obtain legal proofs of it; and unless the discretionary
+power which I have recommended be somewhere lodged, the assurance of
+impunity from any formal inquiry will baffle every order of the board,
+as, on the other hand, the fear of the consequence will restrain every
+man within the bounds of his duty, if he knows himself liable to suffer
+by the effects of a single control." You see Mr. Hastings himself is of
+opinion that the cries of oppression, though extorted from a whole
+people by the iron hand of severity,--that these cries of a whole
+people, attended even with authentic documents sufficient to satisfy the
+mind of any man, may be totally insufficient to convict the oppressor in
+a court; and yet to that court, whose competence he denies, to that very
+court, he appeals, in that he puts his trust, and upon that ground he
+refuses to perform the just promise he had given of any explanation to
+those who had employed him.
+
+Now I put this to your Lordships: if a man is of opinion that no public
+court can truly and properly bring him to any account for his conduct,
+that the forms observable in courts are totally adverse to it, that
+there is a general incompetency with regard to such a court, and yet
+shuns a tribunal capable and competent, and applies to that which he
+thinks is incapable and incompetent, does not that man plainly show that
+he has rejected what he thinks will prove his guilt, and that he has
+chosen what he thinks will be utterly insufficient to prove it? And if
+this be the case, as he asserts it to be, with an under servant, think
+what must be the case of the upper servant of all: for, if an inferior
+servant is not to be brought to justice, what must be the situation of a
+Governor-General? It is impossible not to see, that, as he had conceived
+that a court of justice had not sufficient means to bring his crimes to
+light and detection, nor sufficient to bring him to proper and adequate
+punishment, therefore he flew to a court of justice, not as a place to
+decide upon him, but as a sanctuary to secure his guilt. Most of your
+Lordships have travelled abroad, and have seen in the unreformed
+countries of Europe churches filled with persons who take sanctuary in
+them. You do not presume that a man is innocent because he is in a
+sanctuary: you know, that, so far from demonstrating his innocence, it
+demonstrates his guilt. And in this case, Mr. Hastings flies not to a
+court for trial, but as a sanctuary to secure him from it.
+
+Let us just review the whole of his conduct; let us hear how Mr.
+Hastings has proceeded with regard to this whole affair. The court of
+justice dropped; the prosecution in Bengal ended. With Sir Elijah Impey
+as chief-justice, who, as your Lordships have seen, had a most close and
+honorable connection with the Governor-General, (all the circumstances
+of which I need not detail to you, as it must be fresh in your
+Lordships' memory,) he had not much to fear from the impartiality of the
+court. He might be sure the forms of law would not be strained to do him
+mischief; therefore there was no great terror in it. But whatever terror
+there might be in it was overblown, because his colleagues refused to
+carry him into it, and therefore that opportunity of defence is gone. In
+Europe he was afraid of making any defence, but the prosecution here was
+also soon over; and in the House of Commons he takes this ground of
+justification for not giving any explanation, that the Court of
+Directors had received perfect satisfaction of his innocence; and he
+named persons of great and eminent character in the profession, whose
+names certainly cannot be mentioned without highly imposing upon the
+prejudices and weighing down almost the reason of mankind. He quotes
+their opinions in his favor, and argues that the exculpation which they
+give, or are supposed to give him, should excuse him from any further
+explanation.
+
+My Lords, I believe I need not say to great men of the profession, many
+of the first ornaments of which I see before me, that they are very
+little influenced in the seat of judgment by the opinions which they
+have given in the chamber, and they are perfectly in the right: because
+while in the chamber they hear but one part of the cause; it is
+generally brought before them in a very partial manner, and they have
+not the lights which they possess when they sit deliberately down upon
+the tribunal to examine into it; and for this reason they discharge
+their minds from every prejudice that may have arisen from a foregone
+partial opinion, and come uninfluenced by it as to a new cause. This, we
+know, is the glory of the great lawyers who have presided and do preside
+in the tribunals of this country; but we know, at the same time, that
+those opinions (which they in their own mind reject, unless supported
+afterwards by clear and authentic testimony) do weigh upon the rest of
+mankind at least: for it is impossible to separate the opinion of a
+great and learned man from some consideration of the person who has
+delivered that opinion.
+
+Mr. Hastings, being conscious of this, and not fearing the tribunal
+abroad for the reason that I gave you, namely, his belief that it was
+not very adverse to him, and also knowing that the prosecution there was
+dropped, had but one thing left for his consideration, which was, how he
+should conflict with the tribunal at home: and as the prosecution must
+originate from the Court of Directors, and be authorized by some great
+law opinions, the great point with him was, some way or other, by his
+party, I will not say by what means or circumstances, but by some party
+means, to secure a strong interest in the executive part of the India
+House. My Lords, was that interest used properly and fairly? I will not
+say that friendship and partiality imply injustice; they certainly do
+not; but they do not imply justice. The Court of Directors took up this
+affair with great warmth; they committed it to their solicitor, and the
+solicitor would naturally (as most solicitors do) draw up a case a
+little favorably for the persons that employed him; and if there was any
+leaning, which upon my word I do not approve in the management of any
+cause whatever, yet, if there was a leaning, it must be a leaning for
+the client.
+
+Now the counsel did not give a decided opinion against the prosecution,
+but upon the face of the case they expressed great doubts upon it; for,
+with such a strange, disorderly, imperfect, and confused case as was
+laid before them, they could not advise a prosecution; and in my opinion
+they went no further. And, indeed, upon that case that went before them,
+I, who am authorized by the Commons to prosecute, do admit that a great
+doubt might lie upon the most deciding mind, whether, under the
+circumstances there stated, a prosecution could be or ought to be
+pursued. I do not say which way my mind would have turned, upon that
+very imperfect state of the case; but I still allow so much to their
+very great ability, great minds, and sound judgment, that I am not sure,
+if it was _res integra_, I would not have rather hesitated myself (who
+am now here an accuser) what judgment to give.
+
+It does happen that there are very singular circumstances in this
+business, to which your Lordships will advert; and you will consider
+what weight they ought to have upon your Lordships' minds. The person
+who is now the solicitor of the Company is a very respectable man in the
+profession,--Mr. Smith; he was at that time also the Company's
+solicitor, and he has since appeared in this cause as Mr. Hastings's
+solicitor. Now there is something particular in a man's being the
+solicitor to a party who was prosecuting another, and continuing
+afterwards in his office, and becoming the solicitor to the party
+prosecuted. It would be nearly as strange as if our solicitor were to be
+the solicitor of Mr. Hastings in this prosecution and trial before your
+Lordships. It is true, that we cannot make out, nor do we attempt to
+prove, that Mr. Smith was at that time actually Mr. Hastings's
+solicitor: all that we shall attempt to make out is, that the case he
+produced was just such a case as a solicitor anxious for the
+preservation of his client, and not anxious for the prosecution, would
+have made out.
+
+My Lords, I have next to remark, that the opinion which the counsel gave
+in this case, namely, a very doubtful opinion, accompanied with strong
+censure of the manner in which the case was stated, was drawn from them
+by a case in which I charge that there were _misrepresentation_,
+_suppression_, and _falsification_.
+
+Now, my Lords, in making this charge I am in a very awkward and
+unpleasant situation; but it is a situation in which, with all the
+disagreeable circumstances attending it, I must proceed. I am, in this
+business, obliged to name many men: I do not name them wantonly, but
+from the absolute necessity, as your Lordships will see, of the case. I
+do not mean to reflect upon this gentleman: I believe, at the time when
+he made this case, and especially the article which I state as a
+_falsification_, he must have trusted to some of the servants of the
+Company, who were but young in their service at that time. There was a
+very great error committed; but by whom, or how, your Lordships in the
+course of this inquiry will find. What I charge first is, that the case
+was improperly stated; secondly, that it was partially stated; and that
+afterwards a further report was made upon reference to the same officer
+in the committee. Now, my Lords, of the three charges which I have made,
+the two former, namely, the misrepresentation and suppression, were
+applicable to the case; but all the three, misrepresentation,
+suppression, and falsification, were applicable to the report.
+
+This I say in vindication of the opinions given, and for the
+satisfaction of the public, who may be imposed upon by them. I wish the
+word to be understood. When I say _imposed_, I always mean by it the
+weight and authority carried: a meaning which this word, perhaps, has
+not got yet thoroughly in the English language; but in a neighboring
+language _imposing_ means, that it weighs upon men's minds with a
+sovereign authority. To say that the opinions of learned men, though
+even thus obtained, may not have weight with this court, or with any
+court, is a kind of compliment I cannot pay to them at the expense of
+that common nature in which I and all human beings are involved.
+
+He states in the case the covenants and the salary of Mr. Hastings, and
+his emoluments, very fairly. I do not object to any part of that. He
+then proceeds to state very partially the business upon which the
+Committee of Circuit went, and without opening whose conduct we cannot
+fully bring before you this charge of bribery. He then states, "that, an
+inquiry having been made by the present Supreme Council of Bengal
+respecting the conduct of the members of the last administration,
+several charges have been made, stating moneys very improperly received
+by Mr. Hastings during the time of the late administration: amongst
+these is one of his having received 150,000 rupees of Munny Begum, the
+guardian of the Nabob, who is an infant."
+
+In this statement of the case everything is put out of its true place.
+Mr. Hastings was not charged with receiving a lac and a half of rupees
+from Munny Begum, the guardian of the Nabob,--for she was not then his
+guardian; but he was charged with receiving a lac and a half of rupees
+for removing the Nabob's own mother, who was his natural guardian, and
+substituting this step-mother, who was a prostitute, in her place;
+whereas here it supposes he found her a guardian, and that she had made
+him a present, which alters the whole nature of the case. The case, in
+the recital of the charge, sets out with what every one of your
+Lordships knows now not to be the truth of the fact, nor the thing that
+in itself implies the criminality: he ought to have stated that in the
+beginning of the business. The suppressions in the recital are amazing.
+He states an inquiry having been made by the Supreme Council of Bengal
+respecting the conduct of the members of the last administration. That
+inquiry was made in consequence of the charge, and not the charge
+brought forward, as they would have it believed, in consequence of the
+inquiry. There is no mention that that inquiry had been expressly
+ordered by the Court of Directors; but it is stated as though it was a
+voluntary inquiry. Now there is always something doubtful in voluntary
+inquiries with regard to the people concerned. He then supposes, upon
+this inquiry, that to be the charge which is not the charge at all. The
+crime, as I have stated, consisted of two distinct parts, but both
+inferring the same corruption: the first, two lac of rupees taken
+expressly for the nomination of this woman to this place; and the other,
+one lac and a half of rupees, in effect for the same purpose, but under
+the name and color of an entertainment. The drawer of the case, finding
+that in the one case, namely, the two lac of rupees, the evidence was
+more weak, but that no justification could be set up,--finding in the
+other, the lac and a half of rupees, the proof strong and not to be
+resisted, but that some justification was to be found for it, lays aside
+the charge of the two lac totally; and the evidence belonging to it,
+which was considered as rather weak, is applied to the other charge of a
+lac and a half, the proof of which upon its own evidence was
+irresistible.
+
+My speech I hope your Lordships consider as only pointing out to your
+attention these particulars. Your Lordships will see it exemplified
+throughout the whole, that, when there is evidence (for some evidence is
+brought) that does belong to the lac and a half, it is entirely passed
+by, the most material circumstances are weakened, the whole strength and
+force of them taken away. Every one knows how true it is of evidence,
+_juncta juvant_: but here everything is broken and smashed to pieces,
+and nothing but disorder appears through the whole. For your Lordships
+will observe that the proof that belongs to one thing is put as
+belonging to another, and the proof of the other brought in a weak and
+imperfect manner in the rear of the first, and with every kind of
+observation to rebut and weaken it; and when this evidence is produced,
+which appears inapplicable almost in all the parts, in many doubtful,
+confused, and perplexed, and in some even contradictory, (which it will
+be when the evidence to one thing is brought to apply and bear upon
+another,) good hopes were entertained in consequence that that would
+happen which in part did happen, namely, that the counsel, distracted
+and confused, and finding no satisfaction in the case, could not advise
+a prosecution.
+
+But what is still more material and weighty, many particulars are
+suppressed in this case, and still more in the report; and turning from
+the case to the proceedings of the persons who are supposed to have the
+management of the inquiry, they bring forward, as an appendix to this
+case, Mr. Hastings's own invectives and charge against these persons, at
+the very same time that they suppress and do not bring forward, either
+in the charge or upon the report, what the other party have said in
+their own justification. The consequence of this management was, that a
+body of evidence which would have made this case the clearest in the
+world, and which I hope we shall make to appear so to your Lordships,
+was rendered for the most part inapplicable, and the whole puzzled and
+confused: I say, for the most part, for some parts did apply, but
+miserably applied, to the case. From their own state of the case they
+would have it inferred that the fault was not in their way of
+representing it, but in the infirmity, confusion, and disorder of the
+proofs themselves; but this, I trust we shall satisfy you, is by no
+means the case. I rest, however, upon the proof of partiality in this
+business, of the imposition upon the counsel, whether designed or not,
+and of the bias given by adding an appendix with Mr. Hastings's own
+remarks upon the case, without giving the reasons of the other parties
+for their conduct. Now, if there was nothing else than the fallacious
+recital, and afterwards the suppression, I believe any rational and
+sober man would see perfect, good, and sufficient ground for laying
+aside any authority that can be derived from the opinions of persons,
+though of the first character (and I am sure no man living does more
+homage to their learning, impartiality, and understanding than I do):
+first, because the statement of the case has thrown the whole into
+confusion; and secondly, as to the matter added as an appendix, which
+gives the representation of the delinquent and omits the representation
+of his prosecutors, it is observed very properly and very wisely by one
+of the great men before whom this evidence was laid, that "the evidence,
+as it is here stated, is still more defective, if the appendix is
+adopted by the Directors and meant to make a part of the case; for that
+throws discredit upon all the information so collected." Certainly it
+does; for, if the delinquent party, who is to be prosecuted, be heard
+with his own representation of the case, and that of his prosecutors be
+suppressed, he is master both of the lawyers and of the mind of mankind.
+
+My Lords, I have here attempted to point out the extreme inconsistencies
+and defects of this proceeding; and I wish your Lordships to consider,
+with respect to these proceedings of the India House in their
+prosecutions, that it is in the power of some of their officers to make
+statements in the manner that I have described, then to obtain the names
+of great lawyers, and under their sanction to carry the accused through
+the world as acquitted.
+
+These are the material circumstances which will be submitted to your
+Lordships' sober consideration in the course of this inquiry. I have now
+stated them on these two accounts: first, to rebut the reason which Mr.
+Hastings has assigned for not giving any satisfaction to the Court of
+Directors, namely, because they did not want it, having dropped a
+prosecution upon great authorities and opinions; and next, to show your
+Lordships how a business begun in bribery is to be supported only by
+fraud, deceit, and collusion, and how the receiving of bribes by a
+Governor-General of Bengal tends to taint the whole service from
+beginning to end, both at home and abroad.
+
+But though upon the partial case that was presented to them these great
+lawyers did not advise a prosecution, and though even upon a full
+representation of a case a lawyer might think that a man ought not to be
+prosecuted, yet he may consider him to be the vilest man upon earth. We
+know men are acquitted in the great tribunals in which several Lords of
+this country have presided, and who perhaps ought not to have been
+brought there and prosecuted before them, and yet about whose
+delinquency there could be no doubt. But though we have here sufficient
+reason to justify the great lawyers whose names and authorities are
+produced, yet Mr. Hastings has extended that authority beyond the length
+of their opinions. For, being no longer under the terror of the law,
+which, he said, restrained him from making his defence, he was then
+bound to give that satisfaction to his masters and the world which every
+man in honor is bound to do, when a grave accusation is brought against
+him. But this business of the law I wish to sleep from this moment, till
+the time when it shall come before you; though I suspect, and have had
+reason (sitting in committees in the House of Commons) to believe, that
+there was in the India House a bond of iniquity, somewhere or other,
+which was able to impose in the first instance upon the solicitor, the
+guilt of which, being of another nature, I shall state hereafter, that
+your Lordships may be able to discover through whose means and whose
+fraud Mr. Hastings obtained these opinions.
+
+If, however, all the great lawyers had been unanimous upon that
+occasion, still it would have been necessary for Mr. Hastings to say, "I
+cannot, according to my opinion, be brought to give an account in a
+court of justice, and I have got great lawyers to declare, that, upon
+the case laid before them, they cannot advise a prosecution; but now is
+the time for me to come forward, and, being no longer in fear that my
+defence may be turned against me, I will produce my defence for the
+satisfaction of my masters and the vindication of my own character." But
+besides this doubtful opinion (for I believe your Lordships will find it
+no better than a doubtful opinion) given by persons for whom I have the
+highest honor, and given with a strong censure upon the state of the
+case, there were also some great lawyers, men of great authority in the
+kingdom, who gave a full and decided opinion that a prosecution ought to
+be instituted against him; but the Court of Directors decided otherwise,
+they overruled those opinions, and acted upon the opinions in favor of
+Mr. Hastings. When, therefore, he knew that the great men in the law
+were divided upon the propriety of a prosecution, but that the Directors
+had decided in his favor, he was the more strongly bound to enter into a
+justification of his conduct.
+
+But there was another great reason which should have induced him to do
+this. One great lawyer, known to many of your Lordships, Mr. Sayer, a
+very honest, intelligent man, who had long served the Company and well
+knew their affairs, had given an opinion concerning Mr. Hastings's
+conduct in stopping these prosecutions. There was an abstract question
+put to Mr. Sayer, and other great lawyers, separated from many of the
+circumstances of this business, concerning a point which incidentally
+arose; and this was, whether Mr. Hastings, as Governor-General, had a
+power so to dissolve the Council, that, if he declared it dissolved,
+they could not sit and do any legal and regular act. It was a great
+question with the lawyers at the time, and there was a difference of
+opinion on it. Mr. Sayer was one of those who were inclined to be of
+opinion that the Governor-General had a power of dissolving the Council,
+and that the Council could not legally sit after such dissolution. But
+what was his remark upon Mr. Hastings's conduct?--and you must suppose
+his remark of more weight, because, upon the abstract question, he had
+given his opinion in favor of Mr. Hastings's judgment. "The meeting of
+the Council depends on the pleasure of the Governor; and I think the
+duration of it must do so, too. But it was as great a crime to dissolve
+the Council upon base and sinister motives as it would be to assume the
+power of dissolving, if he had it not. I believe he is the first
+Governor that ever dissolved a Council inquiring into his behavior, when
+he was innocent. Before he could summon three Councils and dissolve
+them, he had time fully to consider what would be the result of such
+conduct, _to convince everybody, beyond a doubt, of his conscious
+guilt_."
+
+Mr. Sayer, then, among other learned people, (and if he had not been the
+man that I have described, yet, from his intimate connection with the
+Company, his opinion must be supposed to have great weight,) having used
+expressions as strong as the persons who have ever criminated Mr.
+Hastings most for the worst of his crimes have ever used to qualify and
+describe them, and having ascribed his conduct to base and sinister
+motives, he was bound upon that occasion to justify that strong conduct,
+allowed to be legal, and charged at the same time to be violent. Mr.
+Hastings was obliged then to produce something in his justification. He
+never did. Therefore, for all the reasons assigned by himself, drawn
+from the circumstances of prosecution and non-prosecution, and from
+opinions of lawyers and colleagues, the Court of Directors at the same
+time censuring his conduct, and strongly applauding the conduct of those
+who were adverse to him, Mr. Hastings was, I say, from those accumulated
+circumstances, bound to get rid of the infamy of a conduct which could
+be attributed to nothing but base and sinister motives, and which could
+have no effect but to convince men of his consciousness that he was
+guilty. From all these circumstances I infer that no man could have
+endured this load of infamy, and to this time have given no explanation
+of his conduct, unless for the reason which this learned counsel gives,
+and which your Lordships and the world will give, namely, his conscious
+guilt.
+
+After leaving upon your minds that presumption, not to operate without
+proof, but to operate along with the proof, (though, I take it, there
+are some presumptions that go the full length of proof,) I shall not
+press it to the length to which I think it would go, but use it only as
+auxiliary, assisting, and compurgatory of all the other evidences that
+go along with it.
+
+There is another circumstance which must come before your Lordships in
+this business. If you find that Mr. Hastings has received the two lac of
+rupees, then you will find that he was guilty, without color or pretext
+of any kind whatever, of acting in violation of his covenant, of acting
+in violation of the laws, and all the rules of honor and conscience. If
+you find that he has taken the lac and a half, which he admits, but
+which he justifies under the pretence of an entertainment, I shall beg
+to say something to your Lordships concerning that justification.
+
+The justification set up is, that he went up from Calcutta to
+Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three months, and that there an
+allowance was made to him of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an
+entertainment. Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine, if there
+was such a custom, whether or no his covenant justifies his conformity
+with it. I remember Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland,
+says it is no law, but a lewd custom. A governor is to conform himself
+to the laws of his own country, to the stipulations of those that employ
+him, and not to the lewd customs of any other country: those customs are
+more honored in the breach than in the observance. If Mr. Hastings was
+really feasted and entertained with the magnificence of the country, if
+there was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to amuse him in
+his leisure hours, if he was feasted with the hookah and every other
+luxury, there is something to be said for him, though I should not
+justify a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner. But in fact
+here was no entertainment that could amount to such a sum; and he has
+nowhere proved the existence of such a custom.
+
+But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is more honored in the
+breach than in the observance, that custom is capable of being abused to
+the grossest extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your
+Lordships' minds in such a manner that I hardly need detail the
+circumstances of it. What! two hundred pounds to be given to a man for
+one day's entertainment? If there is an end of it there, it ruins
+nobody, and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt anybody;
+but when that entertainment is renewed day after day for three months,
+it is no longer a compliment to the man, but a great pecuniary
+advantage, and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a grievous,
+an intolerable burden. It then becomes a matter of the most serious and
+dreadful extortion, tending to hinder the people who give it not only
+from giving entertainment, but from having bread to eat themselves.
+Therefore, if any such entertainment was customary, the custom was
+perverted by the abuse of its being continued for three months together.
+It was longer than Ahasuerus's feast. There is a feast of reason and a
+flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings's feast was a feast of avarice and a flow
+of money. No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table: he
+continued to sit at that table for three months.
+
+In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take any allowance above
+400_l._, and forbidden to take any allowance above 100_l._, without the
+knowledge, consent, and approbation of the Council to which he belongs.
+Now he takes 16,000_l._, not only without the consent of the Council,
+but without their knowledge,--without the knowledge of any other human
+being: it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own
+black agents and confidants, and those of Munny Begum. Why is it a
+secret? Hospitality, generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of
+display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them; they want to be shown
+to the world, not concealed. The concealment of acts of charity is what
+makes them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to whom there can
+be no concealment; but acts of corruption are kept secret, not to keep
+them secret from the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the
+secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to keep them secret
+from the eyes of mankind, whose opinions he does fear, in the immediate
+effect of them, and in their future consequences. Therefore he had but
+one reason to keep this so dark and profound a secret, till it was
+dragged into day in spite of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret,
+but his knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the light.
+Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its
+retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread
+abroad in the face of day. Such candles should not be hid under a
+bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to
+express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very
+splendor is a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light up this
+whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake
+them. Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr.
+Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the
+dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their prey
+into the jungles. Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment
+for the flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it
+is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.
+
+But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit?
+No: he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the
+neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob.
+On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly
+called a _visitation_. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a
+pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the
+world,--as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread,
+from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them
+to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering. When you
+consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing
+fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not
+conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not
+upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both
+to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.
+
+It is mentioned and supposed in the observations upon this case, though
+no circumstances relative to the persons or the nature of the visit are
+stated, that this expense was something which he might have charged to
+the Company and did not. It is first supposed by the learned counsel who
+made the observation, that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged
+thing; then, that he had not charged the Company anything for it. I have
+looked into that business. In the first place, I see no such custom; and
+if there was such a custom, there was the most abusive misemployment of
+it. I find that in that year there was paid from the Company's cash
+account to the Governor's travelling charges (and he had no other
+journey at that end of the year) thirty thousand rupees, which is about
+3,000_l._; and when we consider that he was in the receipt of near
+30,000_l._, besides the nuzzers, which amount to several thousand a
+year, and that he is allowed 3,000_l._ by the Company for his travelling
+expenses, is it right to charge upon the miserable people whom he was
+defrauding of their bread 16,000_l._ for his entertainment?
+
+I find that there are also other great sums relative to the expenses of
+the Committee of Circuit, which he was upon. How much of them is
+applicable to him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three
+thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not above a day or
+two's journey to Moorshedabad, and by his taking his road by Kishenagur
+he could not be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he must live
+somewhere; and he was actually paid three thousand pounds for travelling
+charges for three months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand
+pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.
+
+If you once admit that a man for an entertainment shall take sixteen
+thousand pounds, there never will be any bribe, any corruption, that may
+not be justified: the corrupt man has nothing to do but to make a visit,
+and then that very moment he may receive any sum under the name of this
+entertainment; that moment his covenants are annulled, his bonds and
+obligations destroyed, the act of Parliament repealed, and it is no
+longer bribery, it is no longer corruption, it is no longer peculation;
+it is nothing but thanks for obliging inquiries, and a compliment
+according to the mode of the country, by which he makes his fortune.
+
+What hinders him from renewing that visit? If you support this
+distinction, you will teach the Governor-General, instead of attending
+his business at the capital, to make journeys through the country,
+putting every great man of that country under the most ruinous
+contributions; and as this custom is in no manner confined to the
+Governor-General, but extends, as it must upon that principle, to every
+servant of the Company in any station whatever, then, if each of them
+were to receive an entertainment, I will venture to say that the
+greatest ravage of an hostile army could not, indeed, destroy the
+country more entirely than the Company's servants by such visits.
+
+Your Lordships will see that there are grounds for suspicion, not
+supported with the same evidence, but with evidence of great
+probability, that there was another entertainment given at the expense
+of another lac of rupees; and there is also great probability that Mr.
+Hastings received two lac of rupees, and Mr. Middleton another lac. The
+whole of the Nabob's revenues would have been exhausted by these two
+men, if they had stayed there a whole year: and they stayed three
+months. Nothing will be secured from the Company's servants, so long as
+they can find, under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt custom
+of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt practice. The excuse
+is worse than the thing itself. I leave it, then, with your judgment to
+decide whether you will or not, if this justification comes before you,
+establish a principle which would put all Bengal in a worse situation
+than an hostile army could do, and ruin all the Company's servants by
+sending them from their duty to go round robbing the whole country under
+the name of entertainments.
+
+My Lords, I have now done with this first part,--namely, the presumption
+arising from his refusal to make any defence, on pretence that the
+charge brought against him might be referred to a court of justice, and
+from the non-performance of his promise to give satisfaction to his
+employers,--and when that pretence was removed, still refusing to give
+that satisfaction, though suffering as he did under a load of infamy and
+obloquy, and though urged to give it by persons of the greatest
+character. I have stated this to your Lordships as the strongest
+presumption of guilt, and that this presumption is strengthened by the
+very excuse which he fabricated for a part of his bribes, when he knew
+that the proof of them was irresistible, and that this excuse is a high
+aggravation of his guilt,--that this excuse is not supported by law,
+that it is not supported by reason, that it does not stand with his
+covenant, but carries with it a manifest proof of corruption, and that
+it cannot be justified by any principle, custom, or usage whatever. My
+Lords, I say I have done with the presumption arising from his conduct
+as it regarded the fact specifically charged against him, and with
+respect to the relation he stood in to the Court of Directors, and from
+the attempt he made to justify that conduct. I believe your Lordships
+will think both one and the other strong presumptions of his
+criminality, and of his knowledge that the act he was doing was
+criminal.
+
+I have another fact to lay before your Lordships, which affords a
+further presumption of his guilt, and which will show the mischievous
+consequences of it; and I trust your Lordships will not blame me for
+going a little into it. Your Lordships know we charge that the
+appointment of such a woman as Munny Begum to the guardianship of the
+Nabob, to the superintendency of the civil justice of the country, and
+to the representation of the whole government, was made for no other
+purpose than that through this corrupt woman sixteen thousand pounds a
+year, the whole tattered remains of the Nabob's grandeur, might be a
+prey to Mr. Hastings: it could be for no other. Now your Lordships would
+imagine, that, after this, knowing he was already grievously suspected,
+he would have abstained from giving any further ground for suspicion by
+a repetition of the same acts through the same person; as no other
+reason could be furnished for such acts, done directly contrary to the
+order of his superiors, but that he was actuated by the influence of
+bribery. Your Lordships would imagine, that, when this Munny Begum was
+removed upon a charge of corruption, Mr. Hastings would have left her
+quiet in tranquil obscurity, and that he would no longer have attempted
+to elevate her into a situation which furnished against himself so much
+disgrace and obloquy to himself, and concerning which he stood charged
+with a direct and positive act of bribery. Your Lordships well know,
+that, upon the deposition of that great magistrate, Mahomed Reza Khân,
+this woman was appointed to supply his place. The Governor-General and
+Council (the majority of them being then Sir John Clavering, Colonel
+Monson, and Mr. Francis) had made a provisional arrangement for the
+time, until they should be authorized to fill up the place in a proper
+manner. Soon after, there came from Europe a letter expressing the
+satisfaction which the Court of Directors had received in the acquittal
+of Mahomed Reza Khân, expressing a regard for his character, an high
+opinion of his abilities, and a great disposition to make him some
+recompense for his extreme sufferings; and accordingly they ordered
+that he should be again employed. Having no exact ideas of the state of
+employments in that country, they made a mistake in the specific
+employment for which they named him; for, being a Mahometan, and the
+head of the Mahometans in that country, he was named to an office which
+must be held by a Gentoo. But the majority I have just named, who never
+endeavored by any base and delusive means to fly from their duty, or not
+to execute it at all, because they were desired to execute it in a way
+in which they could not execute it, followed the spirit of the order;
+and finding that Mahomed Reza Khân, before his imprisonment and trial,
+had been in possession of another employment, they followed the spirit
+of the instructions of the Directors and replaced him in that
+employment: by which means there was an end put to the government of
+Munny Begum, the country reverted to its natural state, and men of the
+first rank in the country were placed in the first situations in it. The
+seat of judicature was filled with wisdom, gravity, and learning, and
+Munny Begum sunk into that situation into which a woman who had been
+engaged in the practices that she had been engaged in naturally would
+sink at her time of life. Mr. Hastings resisted this appointment. He
+trifled with the Company's orders on account of the letter of them, and
+endeavored to disobey the spirit of them. However, the majority overbore
+him; they put Mahomed Reza Khân into his former situation; and as a
+proof and seal to the honor and virtue of their character, there was not
+a breath of suspicion that they had any corrupt motive for this conduct.
+They were odious to many of the India House here; they were odious to
+that corrupt influence which had begun and was going on to ruin India;
+but in the face of all this odium, they gave the appointment to Mahomed
+Reza Khân, because the act contained in itself its own justification.
+Mr. Hastings made a violent protest against it, and resisted it to the
+best of his power, always in favor of Munny Begum, as your Lordships
+will see. Mr. Hastings sent this protest to the Directors; but the
+Directors, as soon as the case came before them, acknowledged their
+error, and praised the majority of the Council, Sir John Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, for the wise and honorable part they
+had taken upon the occasion, by obeying the spirit and not the
+letter,--commended the act they had done,--confirmed Mahomed Reza Khân
+in his place,--and to prevent that great man from being any longer the
+sport of fortune, any longer the play of avarice between corrupt
+governors and dancing-girls, they gave him the pledged faith of the
+Company that he should remain in that office as long as his conduct
+deserved their protection: it was a good and an honorable tenure. My
+Lords, soon afterwards there happened two lamentable deaths,--first of
+Colonel Monson, afterwards of General Clavering. Thus Mr. Hastings was
+set loose: there was an inspection and a watch upon his conduct, and no
+more. He was then just in the same situation in which he had stood in
+1772. What does he do? Even just what he did in 1772. He deposes Mahomed
+Reza Khân, notwithstanding the Company's orders, notwithstanding their
+pledged faith; he turns him out, and makes a distribution of two lacs
+and a half of rupees, the salary of that great magistrate, in the manner
+I will now show your Lordships. He made an arrangement consisting of
+three main parts: the first was with regard to the women, the next with
+regard to the magistracy, the last with regard to the officers of state
+of the household.
+
+The first person that occurred to Mr. Hastings was Munny Begum; and he
+gave her, not out of that part of the Nabob's allowance which was to
+support the seraglio, but out of the allowance of this very magistrate,
+just as if such a thing had been done here out of the salary of a Lord
+Chancellor or a Lord Chief-Justice,--out of these two lacs and a half of
+rupees, that is, about twenty-four or twenty-five thousand pounds a
+year, he ordered an allowance to be made to Munny Begum of 72,000 rupees
+per annum, or 7,200_l._ a year; for the Nabob's own mother, whom he
+thrust, as usual, into a subordinate situation, he made an allowance of
+3,000_l._; to the Sudder ul Huk Khân, which is, translated into English,
+the Lord Chief-Justice, he allowed the same sum that he did to the
+dancing-girl, (which was very liberal in him, and I am rather astonished
+to find it,) namely, 7,200_l._ a year. And who do you think was the next
+public officer he appointed? It was the Rajah Gourdas, the son of
+Nundcomar, and whose testimony he has attempted both before and since
+this occasion to weaken. To him, however, he gave an employment of
+6,000_l._ a year, as if to make through the son some compensation to the
+manes of the father. And in this manner he distributes, with a wild and
+liberal profusion, between magistrates and dancing-girls, the whole
+spoil of Mahomed Reza Khân, notwithstanding the Company's direct and
+positive assurance given to him. Everything was done, at the same time,
+to put, as it was before, into the hands of this dancing-girl the
+miserable Nabob's whole family; and that the fund for corruption might
+be large enough, he did not take the money for this dancing-girl out of
+the Nabob's separate revenue, of which he and the dancing-girl had the
+private disposal between them.
+
+Now upon what pretence did he do all this? The Nabob had represented to
+Mr. Hastings that he was now of age,--that he was an independent,
+sovereign prince,--that, being independent and sovereign in his
+situation, and being of full age, he had a right to manage his own
+concerns himself; and therefore he desired to be admitted to that
+management. And, indeed, my Lords, ostensibly, and supposing him to have
+been this independent prince, and that the Company had no authority or
+had never exercised any authority over him through Mr. Hastings, there
+might be a good deal said in favor of this request. But what was the
+real state of the case? The Nabob was a puppet in the hands of Mr.
+Hastings and Munny Begum; and you will find, upon producing the
+correspondence, that he confesses that she was the ultimate object and
+end of this request.
+
+I think this correspondence, wherein a son is made to petition, in his
+own name, for the elevation of a dancing-girl, his step-mother, above
+himself and everybody else, will appear to your Lordships such a
+curiosity as, I believe, is not to be found in the state correspondence
+of the whole world. The Nabob begins thus:--"The excellency of that
+policy by which her Highness the Begum" (meaning Munny Begum) "(may her
+shadow be far extended!) formerly, during the time of her
+administration, transacted the affairs of the nizamut in the very best
+and most advantageous manner, was, by means of the delusions of enemies
+disguised under the appearance of friends, hidden from me. Having lately
+seriously reflected on my own affairs, I am convinced that it was the
+effect of maternal affection, was highly proper, and for my
+interest,--and that, except the said Begum is again invested with the
+administration, the regulation and prosperity of this family, which is
+in fact her own, cannot be effected. For this cause, from the time of
+her suspension until now, I have passed my time, and do so still, in
+great trouble and uneasiness. As all affairs, and particularly the
+happiness and prosperity of this family, depend on your pleasure, I now
+trouble you, in hopes that you, likewise concurring in this point, will
+be so kind as to write in fit and proper terms to her Highness the
+Begum, that she will always, as formerly, employ her authority in the
+administration of the nizamut and the affairs of this family."
+
+This letter, my Lords, was received upon the 23d of August; and your
+Lordships may observe two things in it: first, that, some way or other,
+this Nabob had been (as the fact was) made to express his desire of
+being released from his subjection to the Munny Begum, but that now he
+has got new lights, all the mists are gone, and he now finds that Munny
+Begum is not only the fittest person to govern him, but the whole
+country. This young man, whose incapacity is stated, and never denied,
+by Mr. Hastings, and by Lord Cornwallis, and by all the rest of the
+world who know him, begins to be charmed with the excellency of the
+policy of Munny Begum. Such is his violent impatience, such the
+impossibility of his existing an hour but under the government of Munny
+Begum, that he writes again on the 25th of August, (he had really the
+impatience of a lover,) and within five days afterwards writes
+again,--so impatient, so anxious and jealous is this young man to be put
+under the government of an old dancing-woman. He is afraid lest Mr.
+Hastings should imagine that some sinister influence had prevailed upon
+him in so natural and proper a request. He says, "Knowing it for my
+interest and advantage that the administration of the affairs of the
+nizamut should be restored to her Highness the Munny Begum, I have
+already troubled you with my request, that, regarding my situation with
+an eye of favor, you will approve of this measure. I am credibly
+informed that some one of my enemies, from selfish views, has, for the
+purpose of oversetting this measure, written you that the said Begum
+procured from me by artifice the letter I wrote you on this subject.
+This causes me the greatest astonishment. Please to consider, that
+artifice and delusion are confined to cheats and impostors, and can
+never proceed from a person of such exalted rank, who is the head and
+patron of all the family of the deceased Nabob, my father,--and that to
+be deluded, being a proof of weakness and folly, can have no relation to
+me, except the inventor of this report considers me as void of
+understanding, and has represented me to the gentlemen as a blockhead
+and an idiot. God knows how harshly such expressions appear to me; but,
+as the truth or falsehood has not yet been fully ascertained, I have
+therefore suspended my demand of satisfaction. Should it be true, be so
+kind as to inform me of it, that the person may be made to answer for
+it."
+
+My Lords, here is a very proper demand. The Nabob is astonished at the
+suspicion, that such a woman as Munny Begum, whose trade in youth had
+been delusion, should be capable of deluding anybody. Astonishing it
+certainly was, that a woman who had been a deluder in youth should be
+suspected to be the same in old age, and that he, a young man, should be
+subject to her artifices. "They must suspect me to be a great
+blockhead," he says, "if a man of my rank is to be deluded." There he
+forgot that it is the unhappy privilege of great men to be cheated, to
+be deluded, much more than other persons; but he thought it so
+impossible in the case of Munny Begum, that he says, "Produce me the
+traitor that could suppose it possible for me to be deluded, when I call
+for this woman as the governor of the country. I demand satisfaction." I
+rather wonder that Mr. Hastings did not inform him who it was that had
+reported so gross and improbable a tale, and deliver him up to the fury
+of the Nabob.
+
+Mr. Hastings is absolutely besieged by him; for he receives another
+letter upon the 3d of September. Here are four letters following one
+another quick as post expresses with horns sounding before them. "Oh, I
+die, I perish, I sink, if Munny Begum is not put into the government of
+the country!--I therefore desire to have her put into the government of
+the country, and that you will not keep me longer in this painful
+suspense, but will be kindly pleased to write immediately to the Munny
+Begum, that she take on herself the administration of the affairs of the
+nizamut, which is, in fact, her own family, without the interference of
+any other person whatever: by this you will give me complete
+satisfaction." Here is a correspondence more like an amorous than a
+state correspondence. What is this man so eager about, what in such a
+rage about, that he cannot endure the smallest delay of the post with
+common patience? Why, lest this old woman (who is not his mother, and
+with whom he had no other tie of blood) should not be made mistress of
+himself and the whole country! However, in a very few months afterwards
+he himself is appointed by Mr. Hastings to the government; and you may
+easily judge by the preceding letters who was to govern. It would be an
+affront to your Lordships' judgment to attempt to prove who was to
+govern, after he had desired to put the whole government of affairs into
+the hands of Munny Begum.
+
+Now, Munny Begum having obtained this salary, and being invested with
+this authority, and made in effect the total and entire governor of the
+country, as I have proved by the Nabob's letters, let us see the
+consequences of it; and then I desire to know whether your Lordships can
+believe that in all this haste, which, in fact, is Mr. Hastings's haste
+and impatience, (for we shall prove that the Nabob never did or could
+take a step but by his immediate orders and directions,)--whether your
+Lordships can believe that Mr. Hastings would incur all the odium
+attending such transactions, unless he had some corrupt consideration.
+
+My Lords, very soon after these appointments were made, consisting of
+Munny Begum at the head of the affairs, the Lord Chief-Justice under
+her, and under her direction, and Rajah Gourdas as steward of the
+household, the first thing we hear is, just what your Lordships expect
+to hear upon such a case, that this unfortunate chief-justice, who was a
+man undoubtedly of but a poor, low disposition, but, I believe, a
+perfectly honest, perfectly well-intentioned man, found it absolutely
+impossible for him to execute his office under the direction of Munny
+Begum; and accordingly, in the month of September following, he sends a
+complaint to Mr. Hastings, "that certain bad men had gained an
+ascendency over the Nabob's temper, by whose instigation he acts." After
+complaining of the slights he receives from the Nabob, he adds, "Thus
+they cause the Nabob to treat me, sometimes with indignity, at others
+with kindness, just as they think proper to advise him: their view is,
+that, by compelling me to displeasure at such unworthy treatment, they
+may force me either to relinquish my station, or to join with them, and
+act by their advice, and appoint creatures of their recommendation to
+the different offices, from which they might draw profit to themselves."
+This is followed by another letter, in which he shows who those corrupt
+men were that had gained the ascendency over the Nabob's
+temper,--namely, the eunuchs of Munny Begum: one of them her direct
+instrument in bribery with Mr. Hastings. What you would expect from such
+a state of things accordingly happened. Everything in the course of
+justice was confounded; all official responsibility destroyed; and
+nothing but a scene of forgery, peculation, and knavery of every kind
+and description prevailed through the country, and totally disturbed all
+order and justice in it. He says, "The Begum's ministers, before my
+arrival, with the advice of their counsellors, caused the Nabob to sign
+a receipt, in consequence of which they received at two different times
+near fifty thousand rupees, in the name of the officers of the Adawlut,
+Foujdarry, &c., from the Company's circar; and having drawn up an
+account-current in the manner they wished, they got the Nabob to sign
+it, and then sent it to me." In the same letter he asserts "that these
+people have the Nabob entirely in their power."
+
+My Lords, you see here Mr. Hastings enabling the corrupt eunuchs of this
+wicked old woman to draw upon the Company's treasury at their pleasure,
+under forged papers of the Nabob, for just such moneys as they please,
+under the name and pretence of giving it to the officers of justice, but
+which they distribute among themselves as they think fit. This complaint
+was soon followed by another, and they furnish, first, the strongest
+presumptive proof of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings; and, secondly,
+they show the horrible mischievous effects of his conduct upon the
+country.
+
+In consequence of the first complaint, Mr. Hastings directs this
+independent Nabob not to concern himself any longer with the Foujdarry.
+The Nabob, who had before declared that the superintendence of all the
+offices belonged to him, and was to be executed by himself, or under his
+orders, instantly obeys Mr. Hastings, and declares he will not interfere
+in the business of the courts any more. Your Lordships will observe
+further that the complaint is not against the Nabob, but against the
+creatures and the menial servants of Munny Begum: and yet it is the
+Nabob he forbids to interfere in this business; of the others he takes
+no notice; and this is a strong proof of the corrupt dealings of Mr.
+Hastings with this woman. When the whole country was fallen into
+confusion under the administration of this woman, and under her corrupt
+ministers, men base-born and employed in the basest offices, (the men of
+the household train of the women of rank in that country are of that
+description,) he writes to the Nabob again, and himself confesses the
+mischiefs that had arisen from his corrupt arrangements.
+
+"At your Excellency's request, I sent Sudder ul Huk Khân to take on him
+the administration of the affairs of the Adawlut and Foujdarry, and
+hoped by that means not only to have given satisfaction to your
+Excellency, but that through his abilities and experience these affairs
+would have been conducted in such manner as to have secured the peace of
+the country and the happiness of the people; and it is with the greatest
+concern I learn that this measure is so far from being attended with the
+expected advantages, that the affairs both of the Foujdarry and Adawlut
+are in the greatest confusion imaginable, and daily robberies and
+murders are perpetrated throughout the country. This is evidently owing
+to the want of a proper authority in the person appointed to superintend
+them. I therefore addressed your Excellency on the importance and
+delicacy of the affairs in question, and of the necessity of lodging
+full power in the hands of the person chosen to administer them. In
+reply to which your Excellency expressed sentiments coincident with
+mine. Notwithstanding which, your dependants and people, actuated by
+selfish and avaricious views, have by their interference so impeded the
+business as to throw the whole country into a state of confusion, from
+which nothing can retrieve it but an unlimited power lodged in the hands
+of the superintendent. I therefore request that your Excellency will
+give the strictest injunctions to all your dependants not to interfere
+in any manner with any matter relative to the affairs of the Adawlut and
+Foujdarry, and that you will yourself relinquish all interference
+therein, and leave them entirely to the management of Sudder ul Huk
+Khân. This is absolutely necessary to restore the country to a state of
+tranquillity."
+
+My Lords, what evidence do we produce to your Lordships of the
+consequences of Mr. Hastings's corrupt measures? His own. He here gives
+you the state into which the country was thrown by the criminal
+interference of the wicked woman whom he had established in power,
+totally superseding the regular judicial authority of the country, and
+throwing everything into confusion. As usual, there is such irregularity
+in his conduct, and his crimes are so multiplied, that all the
+contrivances of ingenuity are unable to cover them. Now and then he
+comes and betrays himself; and here he confesses you his own weakness,
+and the effects of his own corruption: he had appointed Munny Begum to
+this office of power, he dare not say a word to her upon her abuse of
+it, but he lays the whole upon the Nabob. When the Chief-Justice
+complains that these crimes were the consequence of Munny Begum's
+interference, and were committed by her creatures, why did he not say to
+the Nabob, "The Begum must not interfere; the Begum's eunuchs must not
+interfere"? He dared not: because that woman had concealed all the
+bribes but one from public notice to gratify him; she and Yatibar Ali
+Khân, her minister, who had the principal share in this destruction of
+justice and perversion of all the principal functions of government, had
+it in their power to discover the whole. Mr. Hastings was obliged, in
+consequence of that concealment, to support her and to support him.
+Every evil principle was at work. He bought a mercenary silence to pay
+the same back to them. It was a wicked silence, the concealment of their
+common guilt. There was at once a corrupt gratitude operating mutually
+by a corrupt influence on both, and a corrupt fear influencing the mind
+of Mr. Hastings, which did not permit him to put an end to this scene of
+disorder and confusion, bought at the expense of twenty-four thousand
+pounds a year to the Company. You will hereafter see what use he makes
+of the evidence of Yatibar Ali Khân, and of this woman, for concealing
+their guilt.
+
+Your Lordships will observe that the virtuous majority, whose reign was
+but short, and two of whom died of grief and vexation under the
+impediments which they met with from the corruptions and oppositions of
+Mr. Hastings, (their indirect murderer,--for it is well known to the
+world that their hearts were thus broken,) put their conduct out of all
+suspicion. For they ordered an exact account to be kept by Mahomed Reza
+Khân,--though, certainly, if any person in the country could be trusted,
+he, upon his character, might; but they did not trust him, because they
+knew the Company did not suffer them to trust any man: they ordered an
+exact account to be kept by him of the Nabob's expenses, which finally
+must be the Company's expenses; they ordered the account to be sent down
+yearly, to be controlled, if necessary, whilst the means of control
+existed.--What was Mr. Hastings's conduct? He did not give the persons
+whom he appointed any order to produce any account, though their
+character and circumstances were such as made an account ten thousand
+times more necessary from them than from those from whom it had been in
+former times by the Company strictly exacted. So that his not ordering
+any account to be given of the money that was to be expended leaves no
+doubt that the appointment of Munny Begum was in pursuance of his old
+system of bribery, and that he maintained her in office, to the
+subversion of public justice, for the purpose of robbing, and of
+continuing in the practice of robbing, the country.
+
+But though this continued longer than was for the good of the country,
+yet it did not continue absolutely and relatively long; because the
+Court of Directors, as soon as they heard of this iniquitous
+appointment, which glared upon them in all the light of its infamy,
+immediately wrote the strongest, the most decided, and the most
+peremptory censure upon him, attributing his acts, every one of them, to
+the same causes to which I attribute them. As a proof that the Court of
+Directors saw the thing in the very light in which I represent it to
+your Lordships, and indeed in which every one must see it, you will find
+that they reprobate all his idle excuses,--that they reprobate all the
+actors in the scene,--that they consider everything to have been done,
+not by the Nabob, but by himself,--that the object of the appointment of
+Munny Begum was _money_, and that the consequence of that appointment
+was the robbery of the Nabob's treasury. "We by no means approve your
+late proceedings, on the application of the Nabob Mobarek ul Dowlah for
+the removal of the Naib Subahdar. The requisition of Mobarek ul Dowlah
+was improper and unfriendly; because he must have known that the late
+appointment of Mahomed Reza Khân to the office of Naib Subahdar had been
+marked with the Company's special approbation, and that the Court of
+Directors had assured him of their favor so long as a firm attachment
+to the Company's interest and a proper discharge of the duties of his
+station should render him worthy of their protection. We therefore
+repeat our declaration, that to require the dismission of a
+prime-minister thus circumstanced, without producing the smallest proof
+of his infidelity to the Company, or venturing to charge him with one
+instance of maladministration in the discharge of his public duty, was
+improper and inconsistent with the friendship subsisting between the
+Nabob of Bengal and the Company." And further on they say,--"The Nabob
+having intimated that he had repeatedly stated the trouble and
+uneasiness which he had suffered from the naibship of the nizamut being
+vested in Mahomed Reza Khân, we observe one of the members of your board
+desired the Nabob's repeated letters on the subject might be read, but
+this reasonable request was overruled, on a plea of saving the board's
+time, which we can by no means admit as a sufficient objection. The
+Nabob's letters of the 25th and 30th August, of the 3d September and
+17th November, leave us no doubt of the true design of this
+extraordinary business being to bring forward Munny Begum, and again to
+invest her with improper power and influence, notwithstanding our former
+declaration, that so great a part of the Nabob's allowance had been
+embezzled or misapplied under her superintendence."
+
+At present I do not think it necessary, because it would be doing more
+than enough, it would be slaying the slain, to show your Lordships what
+Mr. Hastings's motives were in acting against the sense of the East
+India Company, appointed by an act of Parliament to control him,--that
+he did it for a corrupt purpose, that all his pretences were false and
+fraudulent, and that he had his own corrupt views in the whole of the
+proceeding. But in the statement which I have given of this matter, I
+beg your Lordships to observe the instruments with which Mr. Hastings
+acts. The great men of that country, and particularly the Subahdar
+himself, the Nabob, are and is in so equivocal a situation, that it
+afforded him two bolting-holes, by which he is enabled to resist the
+authority of the Company, and exercise an arbitrary authority of his
+own: for, though the Nabob has the titles of high sovereignty, he is the
+lowest of all dependants; he appears to be the master of the
+country,--he is a pensioner of the Company's government.
+
+When Mr. Hastings wants him to obey and answer his corrupt purposes, he
+finds him in the character of a pensioner: when he wants his authority
+to support him in opposition to the authority of the Company,
+immediately he invests him with high sovereign powers, and he dare not
+execute the orders of the Company for fear of doing some act that will
+make him odious in the eyes of God and man. We see how he appointed all
+officers for him, and forbade his interference in all affairs. When the
+Company see the impropriety and the guilt of these acts, and order him
+to rescind them, and appoint again Mahomed Reza Khân, he declares he
+will not, that he cannot do it in justice, but that he will consent to
+send him the order of the Company, but without backing it with any order
+of the board: which, supposing even there had been no private
+communication, was, in other words, commanding him to disobey it. So
+this poor man, who a short time before was at the feet of Mr. Hastings,
+whom Mr. Hastings declared to be a pageant, and swore in a court of
+justice that he was but a pageant, and followed that affidavit with
+long declarations in Council that he was a pageant in sovereignty, and
+ought in policy ever to be held out as such,--this man he sets up in
+opposition to the Company, and refuses to appoint Mahomed Reza Khân to
+the office which was guarantied to him by the express faith of the
+Company, pledged to his support. Will any man tell me that this
+resistance, under such base, though plausible pretences, could spring
+from any other cause than a resolution of persisting systematically in
+his course of corruption and bribery through Munny Begum?
+
+But there is another circumstance that puts this in a stronger light. He
+opposes the Nabob's mock authority to the authority of the Company, and
+leaves Mahomed Reza Khân unemployed, because, as he says, he cannot in
+justice execute orders from the Company (though they are his undoubted
+masters) contrary to the rights of the Nabob. You see what the rights of
+the Nabob were: the rights of the Nabob were, to be governed by Munny
+Begum and her scandalous ministers. But, however, we now see him exalted
+to be an independent sovereign; he defies the Company at the head of
+their armies and their treasury; that name that makes all India shake
+was defied by one of its pensioners. My Lords, human greatness is an
+unstable thing. This man, so suddenly exalted, was as soon depressed;
+and the manner of his depression is as curious as that of his exaltation
+by Mr. Hastings, and will tend to show you the man most clearly.
+
+Mr. Francis, whose conduct all along was directed by no other principles
+than those which were in conformity with the plan adopted by himself and
+his virtuous colleagues, namely, an entire obedience to the laws of his
+country, and who constantly had opposed Mr. Hastings, upon principles of
+honor, and principles of obedience to the authority of the Company under
+which he acted, had never contended for any one thing, in any way, or in
+any instance, but obedience to them, and had constantly asserted that
+Mahomed Reza Khân ought to be put into employment. Mr. Hastings as
+constantly opposed him; and the reason he gave for it was, that it was
+against the direct rights of the Nabob, and that they were rights so
+sacred that they could not be infringed even by the sovereign authority
+of the Company ordering him to do it. He had so great an aversion to the
+least subtraction of the Nabob's right, that, though expressly commanded
+by the Court of Directors, he would not suffer Mahomed Reza Khân to be
+invested with his office under the Company's authority. The Nabob was
+too sovereign, too supreme, for him to do it. But such is the fate of
+human grandeur, that a whimsical event reduced the Nabob to his state of
+pageant again, and made him the mere subject of--you will see whom. Mr.
+Hastings found he was so embarrassed by his disobedience to the spirit
+of the orders of the Company, and by the various wild projects he had
+formed, as to make it necessary for him, even though he had a majority
+in the Council, to gain over at any price Mr. Francis. Mr. Francis,
+frightened by the same miserable situation of affairs, (for this
+happened at a most dangerous period,--the height of the Mahratta war,)
+was willing likewise to give up his opposition to Mr. Hastings, to
+suspend the execution of many rightful things, and to concede them to
+the public necessity. Accordingly he agreed to terms with Mr. Hastings.
+But what was the price of that concession? Any base purpose, any
+desertion of public duty? No: all that he desired of Mr. Hastings was,
+that he should obey the orders of the Company; and among other acts of
+the obedience required was this, that Mahomed Reza Khân should be put
+into his office.
+
+You have heard how Mr. Hastings opposed the order of the Company, and on
+what account he opposed it. On the 1st of September he sent an order to
+the Nabob, now become his subject, to give up this office to Mahomed
+Reza Khân: an act which he had before represented as a dethroning of the
+Nabob. The order went on the 1st of September, and on the 3d this great
+and mighty prince, whom all earth could not move from the assertion of
+his rights, gives them all up, and Mahomed Reza Khân is invested with
+them. So there all his pretences were gone. It is plain that what had
+been done before was for Munny Begum, and that what he now gave up was
+from necessity: and it shows that the Nabob was the meanest of his
+servants; for in truth he ate his daily bread out of the hands of Mr.
+Hastings, through Munny Begum.
+
+Mahomed Reza Khân was now invested again with his office; but such was
+the treachery of Mr. Hastings, that, though he wrote to the Nabob that
+this was done in consequence of the orders of the Company, he did
+clandestinely, according to his usual mode, assure the Nabob that
+Mahomed Reza Khân should not hold the place longer than till he heard
+from England. He then wrote him another letter, that he should hold it
+no longer than while he submitted to his present necessity, (thus giving
+up to his colleague what he refused to the Company,) and engaged,
+privately, that he would dismiss Mahomed Reza Khân again. And
+accordingly, the moment he thought Mr. Francis was not in a condition to
+give him trouble any longer, that moment he again turned out Mahomed
+Reza Khân from that general superintendence of affairs which the Company
+gave him, and deposed him as a minister, leaving him only a very
+confined authority as a magistrate.
+
+All these changes, no less than four great revolutions, if I may so call
+them, were made by Mr. Hastings for his own corrupt purposes. This is
+the manner in which Mr. Hastings has played with the most sacred objects
+that man ever had a dealing with: with the government, with the justice,
+with the order, with the dignity, with the nobility of a great country:
+he played with them to satisfy his own wicked and corrupt purposes
+through the basest instrument.
+
+Now, my Lords, I have done with these presumptions of corruption with
+Munny Begum, and have shown that it is not a slight crime, but that it
+is attended with a breach of public faith, with a breach of his orders,
+with a breach of the whole English government, and the destruction of
+the native government, of the police, the order, the safety, the
+security, and the justice of the country,--and that all these are much
+concerned in this cause. Therefore the Commons stand before the face of
+the world, and say, We have brought a cause, a great cause, a cause
+worthy the Commons of England to prosecute, and worthy the Lords to
+judge and determine upon.
+
+I have now nothing further to state than what the consequences are of
+Mr. Hastings taking bribes,--that Mr. Hastings's taking of bribes is not
+only his own corruption, but the incurable corruption of the whole
+service. I will show, first, that he was named in 1773 to put an end to
+that corruption. I will show that he did not,--that he knowingly and
+willingly connived at it,--and that that connivance was the principal
+cause of all the disorders that have hitherto prevailed in that country.
+I will show you that he positively refused to obey the Company's order
+to inquire into and to correct the corruptions that prevailed in that
+country; next, that he established an avowed system of connivance, in
+order to gain over everything that was corrupt in the country; and that,
+lastly, to secure it, he gave up all the prosecutions, and enervated and
+took away the sole arm left to the Company for the assertion of
+authority and the preservation of good morals and purity in their
+service.
+
+My Lords, here is a letter, in the year 1773, in which the Court of
+Directors had, upon his own representation, approved some part of his
+conduct. He is charmed with their approbation; he promises the greatest
+things; but I believe your Lordships will see, from the manner in which
+he proceeds at that very instant, that a more deliberate system, for not
+only being corrupt himself, but supporting corruption in others, never
+was exhibited in any public paper.
+
+"While I indulge the pleasure which I receive from the past successes of
+my endeavors, I own I cannot refrain from looking back with a mixture of
+anxiety on the omissions by which I am sensible I may since have
+hazarded the diminution of your esteem. All my letters addressed to your
+Honorable Court, and to the Secret Committee, repeat the strongest
+promises of prosecuting the inquiries into the conduct of your servants
+which you had been pleased to commit particularly to my charge. You will
+readily perceive that I must have been sincere in those declarations;
+since it would have argued great indiscretion to have made them, had I
+foreseen my inability to perform them. I find myself now under the
+disagreeable necessity of avowing that inability; at the same time I
+will boldly take upon me to affirm, that, on whomsoever you might have
+delegated that charge, and by whatever powers it might have been
+accompanied, it would have been sufficient to occupy the entire
+attention of those who were intrusted with it, and, even with all the
+aids of leisure and authority, would have proved ineffectual. I dare
+appeal to the public records, to the testimony of those who have
+opportunities of knowing me, and even to the detail which the public
+voice can report of the past acts of this government, that my time has
+been neither idly nor uselessly employed: yet such are the cares and
+embarrassments of this various state, that, although much may be done,
+much more, even in matters of moment, must necessarily remain neglected.
+To select from the miscellaneous heap which each day's exigencies
+present to our choice those points on which the general welfare of your
+affairs most essentially depends, to provide expedients for future
+advantages and guard against probable evils, are all that your
+administration can faithfully promise to perform for your service with
+their united labors most diligently exerted. They cannot look back
+without sacrificing the objects of their immediate duty, which are those
+of your interests, to endless researches, which can produce no real
+good, and may expose your affairs to all the ruinous consequences of
+personal malevolence, both here and at home."
+
+My Lords, this is the first man, I believe, that ever took credit for
+his sincerity from his breach of his promises. "I could not," he says,
+"have made these promises, if I had not thought that I could perform
+them. Now I find I cannot perform them, and you have in that
+non-performance and in that profession a security for my sincerity when
+I promised them." Upon this principle, any man who makes a promise has
+nothing to do afterwards, but to say that he finds himself (without
+assigning any particular cause for it) unable to perform it,--not only
+to justify himself for his non-performance, but to justify himself and
+claim credit for sincerity in his original profession. The charge was
+given him specially, and he promised obedience, over and over, upon the
+spot, and in the country, in which he was no novice, for he had been
+bred in it: it was his native country in one sense, it was the place of
+his renewed nativity and regeneration. Yet this very man, as if he was a
+novice in it, now says, "I promised you what I now find I cannot
+perform." Nay, what is worse, he declares no man could perform it, if he
+gave up his whole time to it. And lastly, he says, that the inquiry into
+these corruptions, even if you succeeded in it, would do more harm than
+good. Now was there ever an instance of a man so basely deserting a
+duty, and giving so base a reason for it? His duty was to put an end to
+corruption in every channel of government. It cannot be done. Why?
+Because it would expose our affairs to malignity and enmity, and end,
+perhaps, to our disadvantage. Not only will he connive himself, but he
+advises the Company to do it. For fear of what? For fear that their
+service was so abandoned and corrupt, that the display of the evil would
+tend more to their disreputation than all their attempts to reform it
+would tend to their service.
+
+Mr. Hastings should naturally have imagined that the law was a resource
+in this desperate case of bribery. He tells you, that in "that charge of
+oppression, though they were supported by the cries of the people and
+the most authentic representations, it is yet impossible in most cases
+to obtain legal proofs." Here is a system of total despair upon the
+business, which I hope and believe is not a desperate one, and has not
+proved a desperate one, whenever a rational attempt has been made to
+pursue it. Here you find him corrupt, and you find, in consequence of
+that corruption, that he screens the whole body of corruption in India,
+and states an absolute despair of any possibility, by any art or
+address, of putting an end to it. Nay, he tells you, that, if corruption
+did not exist, if it was not connived at, that the India Company could
+not exist. Whether that be a truth or not I cannot tell; but this I
+know, that it is the most horrible picture that ever was made of any
+country. It might be said that these were excuses for omissions,--sins
+of omission he calls them. I will show that they were systematic, that
+Mr. Hastings did uniformly profess that he would connive at abuses, and
+contend that abuses ought to be connived at. When the whole mystery of
+the iniquity, in which he himself was deeply concerned, came to
+light,--when it appeared that all the Company's orders were
+contravened,--that contracts were given directly contrary to their
+orders, and upon principles subversive of their government, leading to
+all manner of oppression and ruin to the country,--what was Mr.
+Hastings's answer? "I must here remark, that the majority ... I had not
+the power of establishing it."[5] Then he goes on and states other cases
+of corruption, at every one of which he winks. Here he states another
+reason for his connivance. "Suppose again," (for he puts another
+supposition, and these suppositions are not hypotheses laid down for
+argument, but real facts then existing before the Council examining into
+grievances,)--"suppose again, that any person had benefited himself ...
+unprofitable discussion."[6]
+
+Here is a direct avowal of his refusing to examine into the conduct of
+persons in the Council, even in the highest departments of government,
+and the best paid, for fear he should dissatisfy them, and should lose
+their votes, by discovering those peculations and corruptions, though he
+perfectly knew them. Was there ever, since the world began, any man who
+would dare to avow such sentiments, until driven to the wall? If he
+could show that he himself abhorred bribes, and kept at a distance from
+them, then he might say, "I connive at the bribes of others"; but when
+he acknowledges that he takes bribes, how can you doubt that he buys a
+corrupt confederacy, and puts an end to any hope through him of
+reformation of the abuses at Bengal? But your Lordships will see that he
+not only connived at abuse, but patronized it and supported it for his
+own political purposes; since he here confesses, that, if inquiry into
+it created him ill-humor, and produced him an opposition in Council, he
+sacrificed it to the power of the Company, and the constitution of their
+government. Did he so? The Company ordered him to prosecute those
+people, and their constitution required that they should be prosecuted.
+"No," says Mr. Hastings, "the conniving at it procures a majority of
+votes." The very thing that he bought was not worth half the price he
+paid for it. He was sent to reform corruptions, and, in order that he
+might reform corruptions, he winked at, countenanced, and patronized
+them, to get a majority of votes; and what was, in fact, a sacrifice to
+his own interest, ambition, and corruption, he calls a sacrifice to the
+Company. He puts, then, this alternative: "Either give everything into
+my hand, suffer me to go on, and have no control, or else I wink at
+every species of corruption." It is a remarkable and stupendous thing,
+that, when all the world was alarmed at the disorders of the Company,
+when that alarm occasioned his being sent out, and when, in consequence
+of that alarm, Parliament suspended the constitution of the Company, and
+appointed another government, Mr. Hastings should tell that Company that
+Parliament had done wrong, and that the person put at the head of that
+government was to wink at those abuses. Nay, what is more, not only does
+Mr. Hastings declare, upon general principles, that it was impossible to
+pursue all the delinquencies of India, and that, if possible to pursue
+them, mischief would happen from it, but your Lordships will observe
+that Mr. Hastings, in this business, during the whole period of the
+administration of that body which was sent out to inquire into and
+reform the corruptions of India, did not call one person to an account;
+nor, except Mr. Hastings, this day, has any one been called to an
+account, or punished for delinquency. Whether he will be punished or no,
+time will show. I have no doubt of your Lordships' justice, and of the
+goodness of our cause.
+
+The table of the House of Commons groaned under complaints of the evils
+growing in India under this systematic connivance of Mr. Hastings. The
+Directors had set on foot prosecutions, to be conducted God knows how;
+but, such as they were, they were their only remedy; and they began to
+consider at last that these prosecutions had taken a long oblivious nap
+of many years; and at last, knowing that they were likely, in the year
+1782, to be called to a strict account about their own conduct, the
+Court of Directors began to rouse themselves, and they write thus:
+"Having in several of our letters to you very attentively perused all
+the proceedings referred to in these paragraphs, relative to the various
+forgeries on the Company's treasuries, we lament exceedingly that the
+parties should have been so long in confinement without being brought to
+trial."
+
+Here, my Lords, after justice had been asleep awhile, it revived. They
+directed two things: first, that those suits should be pursued; but
+whether pursued or not, that an account of the state of them should be
+given, that they might give orders concerning them.
+
+Your Lordships see the orders of the Company. Did they not want to
+pursue and to revive those dormant prosecutions? They want to have a
+state of them, that they may know how to direct the future conduct of
+them with more effect and vigor than they had yet been pursued with. You
+will naturally imagine that Mr. Hastings did not obey their orders, or
+obeyed them languidly. No, he took another part. He says, "Having
+attentively read and weighed the arguments ... for withdrawing them."[7]
+
+Thus he begins with the general principle of connivance; he directly
+avows he does it for a political purpose; and when the Company directs
+he shall proceed in the suits, instead of deferring to their judgment,
+he takes the judgment on himself, and says theirs is untenable; he
+directly discharges the prosecutions of the Company, supersedes the
+authority of his masters, and gives a general release to all the persons
+who were still suffering by the feeble footsteps of justice in that
+country. He gave them an act of indemnity, and that was the last of his
+acts.
+
+Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery, the presumptions that
+arise from his own bribes, his attention to secure others from the
+punishment of theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his
+discharging it,--when we see all this, can we avoid judging and forming
+our opinions upon two grand points: first, that no man would proceed in
+that universal patronage of guilt, unless he was guilty himself; next,
+that, by a universal connivance for fourteen years, he is himself the
+cause and mainspring of all the evils, calamities, extortion, and
+bribery, that have prevailed and ravaged that country for so long a
+time? There is, indeed, no doubt either of his guilt, or of the
+consequences of it, by which he has extinguished the last expiring hope
+and glimpse that remained of procuring a remedy for India of the evils
+that exist in it.
+
+I would mention, that, as a sort of postscript, when he could no longer
+put the government into the hands of that infamous woman, Munny Begum,
+he sent an amorous, sentimental letter to the Company, describing her
+miserable situation, and advising the Company to give her a pension of
+seventy-two thousand rupees a year, to maintain her. He describes her
+situation in such a moving way as must melt every heart. He supposes her
+to be reduced to want by the cruel orders of the Company, who retain
+from her money which they were never obliged to give her. This
+representation, which he makes with as much fairness as he represents
+himself to be in a state of the most miserable poverty and distress, he
+alone made to the Company, because his colleagues would not countenance
+him in it; and we find, upon looking over Lord Cornwallis's last
+examination into the whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman
+was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty thousand pounds. Mr.
+Hastings, however, could not avoid making this representation; because
+he knew, that, if he quitted the country without securing that woman, by
+giving her a hope that she could procure by his credit here that money
+which by his authority he had before procured for her, she might then
+make a discovery of all the corruption that had been carried on between
+them; and therefore he squanders away the treasures of the Company, in
+order to secure himself from any such detection, and to procure for
+himself _razinamas_ and all those fine things. He knew that Munny Begum,
+that the whole seraglio, that all the country, whom he had put under the
+dominion of Sir John D'Oyly, that all those people might have made a
+discovery of all his corrupt proceedings; he therefore gets the Nabob to
+appoint Sir John D'Oyly his agent here, with a view of stopping his
+mouth, and by the hope of another 160,000_l._ a year to prevent his
+giving an account of the dilapidation and robbery that was made of the
+160,000_l._ which had been left him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have now finished what I proposed to say relative to his great fund of
+bribery, in the first instance of it,--namely, the administration of
+justice in the country. There is another system of bribery which I shall
+state before my friends produce the evidence. He put up all the great
+offices of the country to sale; he makes use of the trust he had of the
+revenues in order to destroy the whole system of those revenues, and to
+bind them and make them subservient to his system of bribery: and this
+will make it necessary for your Lordships to couple the consideration of
+the charge of the revenues, in some instances, with that of bribery.
+
+The next day your Lordships meet (when I hope I shall not detain you so
+long) I mean to open the second stage of his bribery, the period of
+discovery: for the first stage was the period of concealment. When he
+found his bribes could no longer be concealed, he next took upon him to
+discover them himself, and to take merit from them.
+
+When I shall have opened the second scene of his peculation, and his new
+principles of it, when you see him either treading in old corruptions,
+and excelling the examples he imitated, or exhibiting new ones of his
+own, in which of the two his conduct is the most iniquitous, and
+attended with most evil to the Company, I must leave your Lordships to
+judge.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Document wanting.
+
+[3] Document wanting.
+
+[4] Document wanting.
+
+[5] Document wanting.
+
+[6] Document wanting.
+
+[7] Document wanting.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--Agreeably to your Lordships' proclamation, which I have just
+heard, and the duty enjoined me by the House of Commons, I come forward
+to make good their charge of high crimes and misdemeanors against Warren
+Hastings, Esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal, and now a prisoner
+at your bar.
+
+My Lords, since I had last the honor of standing in this place before
+your Lordships, an event has happened upon which it is difficult to
+speak and impossible to be silent. My Lords, I have been disavowed by
+those who sent me here to represent them. My Lords, I have been
+disavowed in a material part of that engagement which I had pledged
+myself to this House to perform. My Lords, that disavowal has been
+followed by a censure. And yet, my Lords, so censured and so disavowed,
+and by such an authority, I am sent here again, to this the place of my
+offence, under the same commission, by the same authority, to make good
+the same charge, against the same delinquent.
+
+My Lords, the situation is new and awful: the situation is such as, I
+believe, and I am sure, has nothing like it on the records of
+Parliament, nor, probably, in the history of mankind. My Lords, it is
+not only new and singular, but, I believe, to many persons, who do not
+look into the true interior nature of affairs, it may appear that it
+would be to me as mortifying as it is unprecedented. But, my Lords, I
+have in this situation, and upon the consideration of all the
+circumstances, something more to feed my mind with than mere
+consolation; because, my Lords, I look upon the whole of these
+circumstances, considered together, as the strongest, the most decisive,
+and the least equivocal proof which the Commons of Great Britain can
+give of their sincerity and their zeal in this prosecution. My Lords, is
+it from a mistaken tenderness or a blind partiality to me, that, thus
+censured, they have sent me to this place? No, my Lords, it is because
+they feel, and recognize in their own breasts, that active principle of
+justice, that zeal for the relief of the people of India, that zeal for
+the honor of Great Britain, which characterizes me and my excellent
+associates, that, in spite of any defects, in consequence of that zeal
+which they applaud, and while they censure its mistakes, and, because
+they censure its mistakes, do but more applaud, they have sent me to
+this place, instructed, but not dismayed, to pursue this prosecution
+against Warren Hastings, Esquire. Your Lordships will therefore be
+pleased to consider this, as I consider it, not as a thing honorable to
+me, in the first place, but as honorable to the Commons of Great
+Britain, in whose honor the national glory is deeply concerned; and I
+shall suffer myself with pleasure to be sacrificed, perhaps, in what is
+dearer to me than my life, my reputation, rather than let it be supposed
+that the Commons should for one moment have faltered in their duty. I,
+my Lords, on the one hand, feeling myself supported and encouraged,
+feeling protection and countenance from this admonition and warning
+which has been given to me, will show myself, on the other hand, not
+unworthy so great and distinguished a mark of the favor of the
+Commons,--a mark of favor not the consequence of flattery, but of
+opinion. I shall feel animated and encouraged by so noble a reward as I
+shall always consider the confidence of the Commons to be: the only
+reward, but a rich reward, which I have received for the toils and
+labors of a long life.
+
+The Commons, then, thus vindicated, and myself thus encouraged, I shall
+proceed to make good the charge in which the honor of the Commons, that
+is, the national honor, is so deeply concerned. For, my Lords, if any
+circumstance of weakness, if any feebleness of nerve, if any yielding to
+weak and popular opinions and delusions were to shake us, consider what
+the situation of this country would be. This prosecution, if weakly
+conceived, ill digested, or intemperately pursued, ought never to have
+been brought to your Lordships' bar: but being brought to your
+Lordships' bar, the nation is committed to it, and the least appearance
+of uncertainty in our minds would disgrace us forever. _Esto perpetua_,
+has been said. To the glory of this nation, much more be it said, _Esto
+perpetua_; and I will say, that, as we have raised and exhibited a
+theatre of justice which has excited the admiration of all Europe, there
+would be a sort of lustre in our infamy, and a splendor in the disgrace
+that we should bring upon ourselves, if we should, just at that moment,
+turn that theatre of our glory into a spectacle of dishonor beyond what
+has ever happened to any country of the world.
+
+The Commons of Great Britain, whilst willing to keep a strong and firm
+hand over all those who represent them in any business, do at the same
+time encourage them in the prosecution of it, by allowing them a just
+discretion and latitude wherever their own orders have not marked a
+distinction. I shall therefore go on with the more cheerful confidence,
+not only for the reasons that I have stated, but for another and
+material reason. I know and am satisfied, that, in the nobleness of your
+judgment, you will always make a distinction between the person that
+gives the order and the organ that is to execute it. The House of
+Commons know no such thing as indiscretion, imprudence, or impropriety:
+it is otherwise with their instruments. Your Lordships very well know,
+that, if you hear anything that shall appear to you to be regular, apt
+to bring forward the charge, just, prudent, cogent, you are to give it
+to the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled; if you should
+hear from me (and it must be from me alone, and not from any other
+member of the Committee) anything that is unworthy of that situation,
+that comes feeble, weak, indigested, or ill-prepared, you are to
+attribute that to the instrument. Your Lordships' judgment would do this
+without my saying it. But whilst I claim it on the part of the Commons
+for their dignity, I claim for myself the necessary indulgence that must
+be given to all weakness. Your Lordships, then, will impute it where you
+would have imputed it without my desire. It is a distinction you would
+naturally have made, and the rather because what is alleged by us at the
+bar is not the ground upon which you are to give judgment. If not only
+I, but the whole body of managers, had made use of any such expressions
+as I made use of,--even if the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament
+assembled, if the collective body of Parliament, if the voice of Europe,
+had used them,--if we had spoken with the tongues of men and angels,
+you, in the seat of judicature, are not to regard what we say, but what
+we prove; you are to consider whether the charge is well substantiated,
+and proof brought out by legal inference and argument. You know, and I
+am sure the habits of judging which your Lordships have acquired by
+sitting in judgment must better inform you than any other men, that the
+duties of life, in order to be well performed, must be methodized,
+separated, arranged, and harmonized in such a manner that they shall not
+clash with one another, but each have a department assigned and
+separated to itself. My Lords, in that manner it is that we, the
+prosecutors, have nothing to do with the principles which are to guide
+the judgment, that we have nothing to do with the defence of the
+prisoner. Your Lordships well know, that, when we come before you, you
+hear a party; that, when the accused come before you, you hear a party:
+that it is for you to doubt, and wait till you come to the close, before
+you decide; that it is for us, the prosecutors, to have decided before
+we came here. To act as prosecutors, we ought to have no doubt or
+hesitation, nothing trembling or quivering in our minds upon the
+occasion. We ought to be fully convinced of guilt, before we come to
+you. It is, then, our business to bring forward the proofs,--to enforce
+them with all the clearness, illustration, example, that we can bring
+forward,--that we are to show the circumstances that can aggravate the
+guilt,--that we are to go further, show the mischievous consequences and
+tendency of those crimes to society,--and that we are, if able so to do,
+to arouse and awaken in the minds of all that hear us those generous and
+noble sympathies which Providence has planted in the breasts of all men,
+to be the true guardians of the common rights of humanity. Your
+Lordships know that this is the duty of the prosecutors, and that
+therefore we are not to consider the defence of the party, which is
+wisely and properly left to himself; but we are to press the accusation
+with all the energy of which it is capable, and to come with minds
+perfectly convinced before an august and awful tribunal which at once
+tries the accuser and the accused.
+
+Having stated thus much with respect to the Commons, I am to read to
+your Lordships the resolution which the Commons have come to upon this
+great occasion, and upon which I shall take the liberty to say a very
+few words.
+
+My Lords, the Commons have resolved last night, and I did not see the
+resolution till this morning, "that no direction or authority was given
+by this House to the committee appointed to manage the impeachment
+against Warren Hastings, Esquire, to make any charge or allegation
+against the said Warren Hastings respecting the condemnation or
+execution of Nundcomar; and that the words spoken by the Right Honorable
+Edmund Burke, one of the said managers, _videlicet_, that he (meaning
+Mr. Hastings) murdered that man (meaning Nundcomar) by the hands of Sir
+Elijah Impey, ought not to have been spoken."
+
+My Lords, this is the resolution of the House of Commons. Your
+Lordships well know and remember my having used such or similar words,
+and the end and purpose for which I used them. I owe a few words of
+explanation to the Commons of Great Britain, who attend in a committee
+of the whole House to be the observers and spectators of my conduct. I
+owe it to your Lordships, I owe it to this great auditory, I owe it to
+the present times and to posterity, to make some apology for a
+proceeding which has drawn upon me the disavowal of the House which I
+represent. Your Lordships will remember that this charge which I have
+opened to your Lordships is primarily a charge founded upon the evidence
+of the Rajah Nundcomar; and consequently I thought myself obliged, I
+thought it a part of my duty, to support the credit of that person, who
+is the principal evidence to support the direct charge that is brought
+before your Lordships. I knew that Mr. Hastings, in his anticipated
+defence before the House of Commons, had attempted to shake the credit
+of that witness. I therefore thought myself justified in informing your
+Lordships, and in warning him, that, if he did attempt to shake the
+credit of an important witness against him by an allegation of his
+having been condemned and executed for a forgery, I would endeavor to
+support his credit by attacking that very prosecution which brought on
+that condemnation and that execution; and that I did consider it, and
+would lay grounds before your Lordships to prove it, to be a murder
+committed, instead of a justification set up, or that ought to be set
+up.
+
+Now, my Lords, I am ordered by the Commons no longer to persist in that
+declaration; and I, who know nothing in this place, and ought to know
+nothing in this place, but obedience to the Commons, do mean, when Mr.
+Hastings makes that objection (if he shall be advised to make it)
+against the credit of Rajah Nundcomar, not thus to support that credit;
+and therefore that objection to the credit of the witness must go
+unrefuted by me. My Lords, I must admit, perhaps against my private
+judgment, (but that is of no consideration for your Lordships, when
+opposed to the judgment of the House of Commons,) or, at least, not
+contest, that a first minister of state, in a great kingdom, who had the
+benefit of the administration, and of the entire and absolute command of
+a revenue of fifteen hundred thousand pounds a year, had been guilty of
+a paltry forgery in Calcutta; that this man, who had been guilty of this
+paltry forgery, had waited for his sentence and his punishment, till a
+body of English judges, armed with an English statute, came to Calcutta;
+and that this happened at the very happy nick and moment when he was
+accusing Mr. Hastings of the bribery with which we now in the name of
+the Commons charge him; that it was owing to an entirely fortuitous
+concurrence of circumstances, in which Mr. Hastings had no share, or
+that it was owing to something beyond this, something that is rather
+pious than fortuitous, namely, that, as Mr. Hastings tells you himself,
+"all persuasions of men were impressed with a superstitious belief that
+a fortunate influence directed all my actions to their destined ends."
+I, not being at that time infected with the superstition, and
+considering what I thought Mr. Hastings's guilt to be, and what I must
+prove it to be as well as I can, did not believe that Providence did
+watch over Mr. Hastings, so as in the nick of time, like a god in a
+machine, to come down to save him in the moment of his imminent peril
+and distress: I did not think so, but I must not say so.
+
+But now, to show that it was not weakly, loosely, or idly, that I took
+up this business, or that I anticipated a defence which it was not
+probable for Mr. Hastings to make, (and I wish to speak to your
+Lordships in the first instance, but to the Commons in the next,) I will
+read part of Mr. Hastings's defence before the House of Commons: it is
+in evidence before your Lordships. He says,--"My accuser" (meaning
+myself, then acting as a private member of Parliament) "charges me with
+'the receipt of large sums of money, corruptly taken before the
+promulgation of the Regulating Act of 1773, contrary to my covenants
+with the Company, and with the receipt of very large sums taken since,
+in defiance of that law, and contrary to my declared sense of its
+provisions.' And he ushers in this charge in the following pompous
+diction: 'That in March, 1775, the late Rajah Nundcomar, a native Hindoo
+of the highest caste in his religion, and of the highest rank in
+society, by the offices which he had held under the country government,
+did lay before the Council an account of various sums of money,' &c. It
+would naturally strike every person ignorant of the character of
+Nundcomar, that an accusation made by a person of the highest caste in
+his religion and of the highest rank by his offices demanded particular
+notice, and acquired a considerable degree of credit, from a prevalent
+association of ideas that a nice sense of honor is connected with an
+elevated rank of life: but when this honorable House is informed that my
+accuser knew (though he suppressed the facts) that this person, of high
+rank and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to honor, veracity,
+and credit,--that there are facts recorded on the very Proceedings which
+my accuser partially quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a
+most flagrant forgery of letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram
+ul Dowlah, (independent of the forgery for which he suffered death,) of
+the most deliberate treachery to the state, for which he was confined,
+by the orders of the Court of Directors, to the limits of the town of
+Calcutta, in order to prevent his dangerous intrigues, and of having
+violated every principle of common honesty in private life,--I say, when
+this honorable House is acquainted it is from mutilated and garbled
+assertions, founded on the testimony of such an evidence, without the
+whole matter being fairly stated, I do hope and trust it will be
+sufficient for them to reject _now_ these vague and unsupported charges,
+in like manner as they were _before_ rejected by the Court of Directors
+and his Majesty's ministers, when they were first made by General
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis.--I must here interrupt the
+course of my defence to explain on what grounds I employed or had any
+connection with a man of so flagitious a character as Nundcomar."
+
+My Lords, I hope this was a good and reasonable ground for me to
+anticipate the defence which Mr. Hastings would make in this
+House,--namely, on the known, recognized, infamous character of
+Nundcomar, with regard to certain proceedings there charged at large,
+with regard to one forgery for which he suffered and two other forgeries
+with which Mr. Hastings charged him. I, who found that the Commons of
+Great Britain had received that very identical charge of Nundcomar, and
+given it to me in trust to make it good, did naturally, I hope
+excusably, (for that is the only ground upon which I stand,) endeavor to
+support that credit upon which the House acted. I hope I did so; and I
+hope that the goodness of that intention may excuse me, if I went a
+little too far on that occasion. I would have endeavored to support that
+credit, which it was much Mr. Hastings's interest to shake, and which he
+had before attempted to shake.
+
+Your Lordships will have the goodness to suppose me now making my
+apology, and by no manner of means intending to persist either in this,
+or in anything which the House of Commons shall desire me not to declare
+in their name. But the House of Commons has not denied me the liberty to
+make you this just apology: God forbid they should! for they would be
+guilty of great injustice, if they did. The House of Commons, whom I
+represent, will likewise excuse me, their representative, whilst I have
+been endeavoring to support their characters in the face of the world,
+and to make an apology, and only an humble apology, for my conduct, for
+having considered that act in the light that I represented it,--and
+which I did merely from my private opinion, without any formal
+instruction from the House. For there is no doubt that the House is
+perfectly right, inasmuch as the House did neither formally instruct me
+nor at all forbid my making use of such an argument; and therefore I
+have given your Lordships the reason why it was fit to make use of such
+argument,--if it was right to make use of it. I am in the memory of your
+Lordships that I did conceive it to be relevant, and it was by the
+poverty of the language I was led to express my private feelings under
+the name of a _murder_. For, if the language had furnished me, under the
+impression of those feelings, with a word sufficient to convey the
+complicated atrocity of that act, as I felt it in my mind, I would not
+have made use of the word _murder_. It was on account of the language
+furnishing me with no other I was obliged to use that word. Your
+Lordships do not imagine, I hope, that I used that word in any other
+than a moral and popular sense, or that I used it in the legal and
+technical sense of the word _murder_. Your Lordships know that I could
+not bring before this bar any commoner of Great Britain on a charge for
+murder. I am not so ignorant of the laws and constitution of my country.
+I expressed an act which I conceived to be of an atrocious and evil
+nature, and partaking of some of the moral evil consequences of that
+crime. What led me into that error? Nine years' meditation upon that
+subject.
+
+My Lords, the prisoner at the bar in the year 1780 sent a petition to
+the House of Commons complaining of that very chief-justice, Sir Elijah
+Impey. The House of Commons, who then had some trust in me, as they have
+some trust still, did order me, along with persons more wise and
+judicious than myself, several of whom stand near me, to make an inquiry
+into the state of the justice of that country. The consequence of that
+inquiry was, that we began to conceive a very bad opinion both of the
+complainant and defendant in that business,--that we found the English
+justice to be, as we thought it, and reported it to the House, a
+grievance, instead of a redress, to the people of India. I could bring
+before your Lordships, if I did not spare your patience, whole volumes
+of reports, whole bodies of evidence, which, in the progress we have
+made in the course of eight or nine years, brought to my mind such a
+conviction as will never be torn from my heart but with my life; and I
+should have no heart that was fit to lodge any honest sentiment, if I
+departed from my opinion upon that occasion. But when I declare my own
+firm opinion upon it,--when I declare the reasons that led me to
+it,--when I mention the long meditation that preceded my founding a
+judgment upon it, the strict inquiry, the many hours and days spent in
+consideration, collation, and comparison,--I trust that infirmity which
+could be actuated by no malice to one party or the other may be excused;
+I trust that I shall meet with this indulgence, when your Lordships
+consider, that, as far as you know me, as far as my public services for
+many years account for me, I am a man of a slow, laborious, inquisitive
+temper, that I do seldom leave a pursuit without leaving marks, perhaps
+of my weakness, but leaving marks of that labor, and that, in
+consequence of that labor, I made that affirmation, and thought the
+nature of the cause obliged me to support and substantiate it. It is
+true that those who sent me here have sagacity to decide upon the
+subject in a week; they can in one week discover the errors of my labors
+for nine years.
+
+Now that I have made this apology to you, I assure you, you shall never
+hear me, either in my own name here, much less in the name of the
+Commons, urge one thing to you in support of the credit of Nundcomar
+grounded upon that judgment, until the House shall instruct and order me
+otherwise; because I know, that, when I can discover their sentiments,
+I ought to know nothing here but what is in strict and literal obedience
+to them.
+
+My Lords, another thing might make me, perhaps, a little willing to be
+admitted to the proof of what I advanced, and that is, the very answer
+of Mr. Hastings to this charge, which the House of Commons, however,
+have adopted, and therefore in some degree purified. "To the malicious
+part of this charge, which is the condemnation of Nundcomar for a
+forgery, I do declare, in the most solemn and unreserved manner, that I
+had no concern, either directly or indirectly, in the apprehending,
+prosecuting, or executing of Nundcomar. He suffered for a crime of
+forgery which he had committed in a private trust that was delegated to
+him, and for which he had been prosecuted in the dewanny courts of the
+country before the institution of the Supreme Court of Judicature. To
+adduce this circumstance, therefore, as a confirmation of what was
+before suspicious from his general depravity of character, is just as
+reasonable as to assert that the accusations of Empson and Dudley were
+confirmed because they suffered death for their atrocious acts."
+
+My Lords, this was Mr. Hastings's defence before the House of Commons,
+and it is now in evidence before your Lordships. In this defence, he
+supposes the charge which was made originally before the Commons, and
+which the Commons voted, (though afterwards, for the convenience of
+shortening it, the affair was brought before your Lordships in the way
+in which it is,)--he supposes, I say, the whole to proceed from a
+malicious intention; and I hope your Lordships will not think, and I
+hope the Commons, reconsidering this matter, will not think, that, when
+such an imputation of malice was made for the purpose of repelling this
+corroborating argument which was used in the House of Commons to prove
+his guilt, I was wrong in attempting to support the House of Commons
+against his imputation of malice.
+
+I must observe where I am limited and where I am not. I am limited,
+strictly, fully, (and your Lordships and my country, who hear me, will
+judge how faithfully I shall adhere to that limitation,) not to support
+the credit of Nundcomar by any allegation against Mr. Hastings
+respecting his condemnation or execution; but I am not at all limited
+from endeavoring to support his credit against Mr. Hastings's charges of
+other forgeries, and from showing you, what I hope to show you clearly
+in a few words, that Nundcomar cannot be presumed guilty of forgery with
+more probability than Mr. Hastings is guilty of bringing forward a light
+and dangerous (for I use no other words than a light and dangerous)
+charge of forgery, when it serves his purpose. Mr. Hastings charges
+Nundcomar with two other forgeries. "These two forgeries," he says, "are
+facts recorded in the very Proceedings which my accuser partially
+quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery
+of a letter from Munny Begum, and of a letter from the Nabob Yeteram ul
+Dowlah"; and therefore he infers malice in those who impute anything
+improper to him, knowing that the proof stood so. Here he asserts that
+there are records before the House of Commons, and on the Company's
+Proceedings and Consultations, proving Nundcomar to have been guilty of
+these two forgeries. Turn over the next page of his printed defence, and
+you find a very extraordinary thing. You would have imagined that this
+forgery of a letter from Munny Begum, which, he says, is recognized and
+proved on the Journals, was a forgery charged by Munny Begum herself, or
+by somebody on her part, or some person concerned in this business.
+There is no other charge of it whatever, but the charge of Warren
+Hastings himself. He wants you to discredit a man for forgery upon no
+evidence under heaven but that of his own, who thinks proper, without
+any sort of authority, without any sort of reference, without any sort
+of collateral evidence, to charge a man with that very direct forgery.
+"You are," he says, "well informed of the reasons which first induced me
+to give any share of my confidence to Nundcomar, with whose character I
+was acquainted by an experience of many years. The means which he
+himself took to acquire it were peculiar to himself. He sent a messenger
+to me at Madras, on the first news of my appointment to this Presidency,
+with pretended letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah,
+the brother of the Nabob Jaffier Ali Khân, filled with bitter invectives
+against Mahomed Reza Khân, and of as warm recommendations, as I
+recollect, of Nundcomar. I have been since informed by the Begum that
+the letter which bore her seal was a complete forgery, and that she was
+totally unacquainted with the use which had been made of her name till I
+informed her of it. Juggut Chund, Nundcomar's son-in-law, was sent to
+her expressly to entreat her not to divulge it. Mr. Middleton, whom she
+consulted on the occasion, can attest the truth of this story."
+
+Mr. Middleton is dead, my Lords. This is not the Mr. Middleton whom your
+Lordships have heard and know well in this House, but a brother of that
+Mr. Middleton, who is since dead. Your Lordships find, when we refer to
+the records of the Company for the proof of this forgery, that there is
+no other than the unsupported assertion of Mr. Hastings himself that he
+was guilty of it. Now that was bad enough; but then hear the rest. Mr.
+Hastings has charged this unhappy man, whom we must not defend, with
+another forgery; he has charged him with a forgery of a letter from
+Yeteram ul Dowlah to Mr. Hastings. Now you would imagine that he would
+have given his own authority at least for that assertion, which he says
+was proved. He goes on and says, "I have not yet had the curiosity to
+inquire of the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah whether his letter was of the
+same stamp; but I cannot doubt it."
+
+Now here he begins, in this very defence which is before your Lordships,
+to charge a forgery upon the credit of Munny Begum, without supporting
+it even by his own testimony,--and another forgery in the name of
+Yeteram ul Dowlah, which he said he had not even the curiosity to
+inquire into, and yet desires you, at the same time, to believe it to be
+proved. Good God! in what condition do men of the first character and
+situation in that country stand, when we have here delivered to us, as a
+record of the Company, Mr. Hastings's own assertions, saying that these
+forgeries were proved, though you have for the first nothing but his own
+unsupported assertion, and for the second his declaration only that he
+had not the curiosity to inquire into it! I am not forbidden by the
+Commons to state how and on what slight grounds Warren Hastings charges
+the natives of the country with forgery; neither am I forbidden to bring
+forward the accusation which Mr. Hastings made against Nundcomar for a
+conspiracy, nor the event of it, nor any circumstance relative to it. I
+shall therefore proceed in the best manner I can. There was a period,
+among the revolutions of philosophy, when there was an opinion, that, if
+a man lost one limb or organ, the strength of that which was lost
+retired into what was left. My Lords, if we are straitened in this, then
+our vigor will be redoubled in the rest, and we shall use it with double
+force. If the top and point of the sword is broken off, we shall take
+the hilt in our hand, and fight with whatever remains of the weapon
+against bribery, corruption, and peculation; and we shall use double
+diligence under any restraint which the wisdom of the Commons may lay
+upon us, or your Lordships' wisdom may oblige us to submit to.
+
+Having gone through this business, and shown in what manner I am
+restrained, where I am not to repel Mr. Hastings's defence, and where I
+am left at large to do it, I shall submit to the strict injunction with
+the utmost possible humility, and enjoy the liberty which is left to me
+with vigor, with propriety, and with discretion, I trust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Lords, when the circumstance happened which has given occasion to the
+long parenthesis by which my discourse has been interrupted, I remember
+I was beginning to open to your Lordships the second period of Mr.
+Hastings's scheme and system of bribery. My Lords, his bribery is so
+extensive, and has had such a variety in it, that it must be
+distinguished not only with regard to its kind, but must be likewise
+distinguished according to the periods of bribery and the epochas of
+peculation committed by him. In the first of those periods we shall
+prove to your Lordships, I believe, without the aids that we hoped for,
+(your Lordships allowing, as I trust you will do, a good deal for our
+situation,)--we shall be able, I say, to prove that Mr. Hastings took,
+as a bribe for appointing Munny Begum, three lac and an half of rupees;
+we shall prove the taking at the same time the Rajeshaye bribes. Mr.
+Hastings at that time followed bribery in a natural manner: he took a
+bribe; he took it as large as he could; he concealed it as well as he
+could; and he got out of it by artifice or boldness, by use of trick or
+use of power, just as he was enabled: he acted like a wild, natural man,
+void of instruction, discipline, and art.
+
+The second period opened another system of bribery. About this time he
+began to think (from what communication your Lordships may guess) of
+other means by which, when he could no longer conceal any bribe that he
+had received, he not only might exempt himself from the charge and the
+punishment of guilt, but might convert it into a kind of merit, and,
+instead of a breaker of laws, a violator of his trust, a receiver of
+scandalous bribes, a peculator of the first magnitude, might make
+himself to be considered as a great, distinguishing, eminent financier,
+a collector of revenue in new and extraordinary ways, and that we should
+thus at once praise his diligence, industry, and ingenuity. The scheme
+he set on foot was this: he pretended that the Company could not exist
+upon principles of strict justice, (for so he expresses it,) and that
+their affairs, in many cases, could not be so well accommodated by a
+regular revenue as by privately taking money, which was to be applied to
+their service by the person who took it, at his discretion. This was the
+principle he laid down. It would hardly be believed, I imagine, unless
+strong proof appeared, that any man could be so daring as to hold up
+such a resource to a regular government, which had three million of
+known, avowed, a great part of it territorial, revenue. But it is
+necessary, it seems, to piece out the lion's skin with a fox's tail,--to
+tack on a little piece of bribery and a little piece of peculation, in
+order to help out the resources of a great and flourishing state; that
+they should have in the knavery of their servants, in the breach of
+their laws, and in the entire defiance of their covenants, a real
+resource applicable to their necessities, of which they were not to
+judge, but the persons who were to take the bribes; and that the bribes
+thus taken were, by a mental reservation, a private intention in the
+mind of the taker, unknown to the giver, to be some time or other, in
+some way or other, applied to the public service. The taking such bribes
+was to become a justifiable act, in consequence of that reservation in
+the mind of the person who took them; and he was not to be called to
+account for them in any other way than as he thought fit.
+
+My Lords, an act of Parliament passed in the year 1773, the whole drift
+of which, I may say, was to prevent bribery, peculation, and extortion
+in the Company's servants; and the act was penned, I think, with as much
+strictness and rigor as ever act was penned. The 24th clause of Chap.
+63, 13 Geo. III., has the following enactment: "And be it further
+enacted by the authority aforesaid, that, from and after the first day
+of August, 1774, no person holding or exercising any civil or military
+office under the crown, or the said United Company, in the East Indies,
+shall accept, receive, or take, directly or indirectly, by himself, or
+any other person or persons on his behalf, or for his use or benefit,
+of and from any of the Indian princes or powers, or their ministers or
+agents, or any of the natives of Asia, any present, gift, donation,
+gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise, upon any account, or on any
+pretence whatsoever, or any promise or engagement for any present, gift,
+donation, gratuity, or reward: and if any person, holding or exercising
+any such civil or military office, shall be guilty of any such offence,
+and shall be thereof legally convicted," &c., &c. It then imposes the
+penalties: and your Lordships see that human wisdom cannot pen an act
+more strongly directed against taking bribes upon any pretence whatever.
+
+This act of Parliament was in affirmance of the covenant entered into by
+the servants of the Company, and of the explicit orders of the Company,
+which forbid any person whatever in trust, "directly or indirectly, to
+accept, take, or receive, or agree to accept, take, or receive, any
+gift, reward, gratuity, allowance, donation, or compensation, in money,
+effects, jewels, _or otherwise howsoever_, from any of the Indian
+princes, sovereigns, subahs, or nabobs, or any of their ministers,
+servants, or agents, exceeding the value of four thousand rupees, &c.,
+&c. And that he, the said Warren Hastings, shall and will convey,
+assign, and make over to the said United Company, for their sole and
+proper use and benefit, all and every such gifts, rewards, gratuities,
+allowances, donations, or compensations whatsoever, which, contrary to
+the true intent and meaning of these presents, shall come into the
+hands, possession, or power of the said Warren Hastings, or any other
+person or persons in trust for him or for his use."
+
+The nature of the covenant, the act of Parliament, and the Company's
+orders are clear. First, they have not forbidden their
+Governor-General, nor any of their Governors, to take and accept from
+the princes of the country, openly and publicly, for their use, any
+territories, lands, sums of money, or other donations, which may be
+offered in consequence of treaty or otherwise. It was necessary to
+distinguish this from every other species of acceptance, because many
+occasions occurred in which fines were paid to the Company in
+consequence of treaties; and it was necessary to authorize the receipt
+of the same in the Company's treasury, as an open and known proceeding.
+It was never dreamed that this should justify the taking of bribes,
+privately and clandestinely, by the Governor, or any other servant of
+the Company, for the purpose of its future application to the Company's
+use. It is declared that all such bribes and money received should be
+the property of the Company. And why? As a means of recovering them out
+of the corrupt hands that had taken them. And therefore this was not a
+license for bribery, but a prohibitory and penal clause, providing the
+means of coercion, and making the prohibition stronger. Now Mr. Hastings
+has found out that this very coercive clause, which was made in order to
+enable his superiors to get at him and punish him for bribery, is a
+license for him to receive bribes. He is not only a practitioner of
+bribery, but a professor, a doctor upon the subject. His opinion is,
+that he might take presents or bribes to himself; he considers the penal
+clause which the Company attached to their prohibition, and by which all
+such bribes are constructively declared to be theirs, in order to
+recover them out of his hands, as a license to receive bribes, to extort
+money; and he goes with the very prohibition in his hand, the very
+means by which he was to be restrained, to exercise an unlimited
+bribery, peculation, and extortion over the unhappy natives of the
+country.
+
+The moment he finds that the Company has got a scent of any one of his
+bribes, he comes forward and says, "To be sure, I took it as a bribe; I
+admit the party gave me it as a bribe: I concealed it for a time,
+because I thought it was for the interest of the Company to conceal it;
+but I had a secret intention, in my own mind, of applying it to their
+service: you shall have it; but you shall have it as I please, and when
+I please; and this bribe becomes sanctified the moment I think fit to
+apply it to your service." Now can it be supposed that the India
+Company, or that the act of Parliament, meant, by declaring that the
+property taken by a corrupt servant, contrary to the true intent of his
+covenant, was theirs, to give a license to take such property,--and that
+one mode of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very covenants
+which were meant to prevent extortion, peculation, and corruption? What
+sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of
+bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist
+upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited
+by the violation of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? It is
+an odd sort of body to be so fed and so supported. This new constitution
+of revenue that he has made is indeed a very singular contrivance. It is
+a revenue to be collected by any officer of the Company, (for they are
+all alike forbidden, and all alike permitted,)--to be collected by any
+person, from any person, at any time, in any proportion, by any means,
+and in any way he pleases; and to be accounted for, or not to be
+accounted for, at the pleasure of the collector, and, if applied to
+their use, to be applied at his discretion, and not at the discretion of
+his employers. I will venture to say that such a system of revenue never
+was before thought of. The next part is an exchequer, which he has
+formed, corresponding with it. You will find the board of exchequer made
+up of officers ostensibly in the Company's service, of their public
+accountant and public treasurer, whom Mr. Hastings uses as an accountant
+and treasurer of bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to
+himself, acting in no public manner, and never acting but upon his
+requisition, concealing all his frauds and artifices to prevent
+detection and discovery. In short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may
+be permitted to repeat the words I made use of on a former occasion,
+extortion is the assessor, in which fraud is the treasurer, confusion
+the accountant, oblivion the remembrancer. That these are not mere
+words, I will exemplify as I go through the detail: I will show you that
+every one of the things I have stated are truths, in fact, and that
+these men are bound by the condition of their recognized fidelity to Mr.
+Hastings to keep back his secrets, to change the accounts, to alter the
+items, to make him debtor or creditor at pleasure, and by that means to
+throw the whole system of the Company's accounts into confusion.
+
+I have shown the impossibility of the Company's having intended to
+authorize such a revenue, much less such a constitution of it as Mr.
+Hastings has drawn from the very prohibitions of bribery, and such an
+exchequer as he has formed upon the principles I have stated. You will
+not dishonor the legislature or the Company, be it what it may, by
+thinking that either of them could give any sanction to it. Indeed, you
+will not think that such a device could ever enter into the head of any
+rational man. You are, then, to judge whether it is not a device to
+cover guilt, to prevent detection by destroying the means of it; and at
+the same time your Lordships will judge whether the evidence we bring
+you to prove that revenue is a mere pretext be not stronger than the
+strange, absurd reasons which he has produced for forming this new plan
+of an exchequer of bribery.
+
+My Lords, I am now going to read to you a letter in which Mr. Hastings
+declares his opinion upon the operation of the act, which he now has
+found the means, as he thinks, of evading. My Lords, I will tell you, to
+save you a good deal of reading, that there was certain prize-money
+given by Sujah ul Dowlah to a body of the Company's troops serving in
+the field,--that this prize-money was to be distributed among them; but
+upon application being made to Mr. Hastings for his opinion and sanction
+in the distribution, Mr. Hastings at first seemed inclined to give way
+to it, but afterwards, upon reading and considering the act of
+Parliament, before he allowed the soldiery to receive this public
+donation, he thus describes his opinion of the operation of the act.
+
+
+_Extract of a Letter from Mr. Hastings to Colonel Champion, 31 August,
+1774._
+
+"Upon a reference to the new act of Parliament, I was much disappointed
+and sorry to find that our intentions were entirely defeated by a clause
+in the act, (to be in force after the 1st of August, 1774,) which
+divests us of the power to grant, and expressly prohibits the army to
+receive, the Nabob's intended donation. Agreeable to the positive sense
+of this clause, notwithstanding it is expressed individually, there is
+not a doubt but the army is included with all other persons in the
+prohibition from receiving presents or donations; a confirmation of
+which is, that in the clause of exceptions, wherein 'counsellors-at-law,
+physicians, surgeons, and chaplains are permitted to receive the fees
+annexed to their profession,' no mention whatever is made of any
+latitude given to the army, or any circumstances wherein it would be
+allowable for them to receive presents.... This unlucky discovery of an
+exclusion by act of Parliament, which admits of no abatement or evasion
+wherever its authority extends, renders a revisal of our proceedings
+necessary, and leaves no option to our decision. It is not like the
+ordinances of the Court of Directors, where a favorable construction may
+be put, and some room is left for the interposition of the authority
+vested in ourselves,--but positive and decisive, admitting neither of
+refinement nor misconstruction. I should be happy, if in this instance a
+method could be devised of setting the act aside, which I should most
+willingly embrace; but, in my opinion, an opposition would be to incur
+the penalty."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings considered this act to be a most
+unlucky discovery: indeed, as long as it remained in force, it would
+have been unlucky for him, because it would have destroyed one of the
+principal sources of his illegal profits. Why does he consider it
+unlucky? Because it admits of no reservation, no exception, no
+refinement whatever, but is clear, positive, decisive. Now in what case
+was it that Mr. Hastings made this determination? In the case of a
+donation publicly offered to an army serving in the field by a prince
+then independent of the Company. If ever there was a circumstance in
+which any refinement, any favorable construction of the act could be
+used, it was in favor of a body of men serving in the field, fighting
+for their country, spilling their blood for it, suffering all the
+inconveniences of that climate. It was undoubtedly voluntarily offered
+to them by the party, in the height of victory, and enriched by the
+plunder of whole provinces. I believe your Lordships will agree with me,
+that, if any relaxation, any evasion, of an act of Parliament could be
+allowed, if the intention of the legislature could for a moment be
+trifled with, or supposed for a moment doubtful, it was in this
+instance; and yet, upon the rigor of the act, Mr. Hastings refuses that
+army the price of their blood, money won solely almost by their arms for
+a prince who had acquired millions by their bravery, fidelity, and
+sufferings. This was the case in which Mr. Hastings refused a public
+donation to the army; and from that day to this they have never received
+it.
+
+If the receipt of this public donation could be thus forbidden, whence
+has Mr. Hastings since learned that he may privately take money, and
+take it not only from princes, and persons in power, and abounding in
+wealth, but, as we shall prove, from persons in a comparative degree of
+penury and distress? that he could take it from persons in office and
+trust, whose power gave them the means of ruining the people for the
+purpose of enabling themselves to pay it? Consider in what a situation
+the Company must be, if the Governor-General can form such a secret
+exchequer of direct bribes, given _eo nomine_ as bribes, and accepted as
+such, by the parties concerned in the transaction, to be discovered only
+by himself, and with only the inward reservation that I have spoken of.
+
+In the first place, if Mr. Hastings should die without having made a
+discovery of all his bribes, or if any other servant of the Company
+should imitate his example without his heroic good intentions in doing
+such villanous acts, how is the Company to recover the bribe-money? The
+receivers need not divulge it till they think fit; and the moment an
+informer comes, that informer is ruined. He comes, for instance, to the
+Governor-General and Council, and charges, say, not Mr. Hastings, but
+the head of the Board of Revenue, with receiving a bribe. "Receive a
+bribe? So I did; but it was with an intention of applying it to the
+Company's service. There I nick the informer: I am beforehand with him:
+the bribe is sanctified by my inward jesuitical intention. I will make a
+merit of it with the Company. I have received 40,000_l._ as a bribe;
+there it is for you: I am acquitted; I am a meritorious servant: let the
+informer go and seek his remedy as he can." Now, if an informer is once
+instructed that a person who receives bribes can turn them into merit,
+and take away his action from him, do you think that you ever will or
+can discover any one bribe? But what is still worse, by this method
+disclose but one bribe, and you secure all the rest that you possibly
+can receive upon any occasion. For instance, strong report prevails that
+a bribe of 40,000_l._ has been given, and the receiver expects that
+information will be laid against him. He acknowledges that he has
+received a bribe of 40,000_l._, but says that it was for the service of
+the Company, and that it is carried to their account. And thus, by
+stating that he has taken some money which he has accounted for, but
+concealing from whom that money came, which is exactly Mr. Hastings's
+case, if at last an information should be laid before the Company of a
+specific bribe having been received of 40,000_l._, it is said by the
+receiver, "Lord! this is the 40,000_l._ I told you of: it is broken into
+fragments, paid by instalments; and you have taken it and put it into
+your own coffers."
+
+Again, suppose him to take it through the hand of an agent, such as
+Gunga Govind Sing, and that this agent, who, as we have lately
+discovered, out of a bribe of 40,000_l._, which Mr. Hastings was to have
+received, kept back half of it, falls into their debt like him: I desire
+to know what the Company can do in such a case. Gunga Govind Sing has
+entered into no covenants with the Company. There is no trace of his
+having this money, except what Mr. Hastings chooses to tell. If he is
+called upon to refund it to the Company, he may say he never received
+it, that he was never ordered to extort this money from the people; or
+if he was under any covenant not to take money, he may set up this
+defence: "I am forbidden to receive money; and I will not make a
+declaration which will subject me to penalties": or he may say in India,
+before the Supreme Court, "I have paid the bribe all to Mr. Hastings";
+and then there must be a bill and suit there, a bill and suit here, and
+by that means, having one party on one side the water and the other
+party on the other, the Company may never come to a discovery of it. And
+that in fact this is the way in which one of his great bribe-agents has
+acted I shall prove to your Lordships by evidence.
+
+Mr. Hastings had squeezed out of a miserable country a bribe of
+40,000_l._, of which he was enabled to bring to the account of the
+Company only 20,000_l._, and of which we should not even have known the
+existence, if the inquiries pursued with great diligence by the House of
+Commons had not extorted the discovery: and even now that we know the
+fact, we can never get at the money; the Company can never receive it;
+and before the House had squeezed out of him that some such money had
+been received, he never once told the Court of Directors that his black
+bribe-agent, whom he recommended to their service, had cheated both them
+and him of 20,000_l._ out of the fund of the bribe-revenue. If it be
+asked, Where is the record of this? Record there is none. In what office
+is it entered? It is entered in no office; it is mentioned as privately
+received for the Company's benefit: and you shall now further see what a
+charming office of receipt and account this new exchequer of Mr.
+Hastings's is.
+
+For there is another and a more serious circumstance attending this
+business. Every one knows, that, by the law of this, and, I believe, of
+every country, any money which is taken illegally from any person, as
+every bribe or sum of money extorted or paid without consideration is,
+belongs to the person who paid it, and he may bring his action for it,
+and recover it. Then see how the Company stands. The Company receives a
+bribe of 40,000_l._ by Mr. Hastings; it is carried to its account; it
+turns bribery into a revenue; it sanctifies it. In the mean time, the
+man from whom this money is illegally taken sues Mr. Hastings. Must not
+he recover of Mr. Hastings? Then, if so, must not Mr. Hastings recover
+it again from the Company? The Company undoubtedly is answerable for it.
+And here is a revenue which every man who has paid it may drag out of
+the treasury again. Mr. Hastings's donations of his bribes to the
+treasury are liable to be torn from it at pleasure by every man who
+gives the money. First it may be torn from him who receives it; and then
+he may recover it from the treasury, to which he has given it.
+
+But admitting that the taking of bribes can be sanctified by their
+becoming the property of the Company, it may still be asked, For what
+end and purpose has the Company covenanted with Mr. Hastings that money
+taken extorsively shall belong to the Company? Is it that satisfaction
+and reparation may be awarded against the said Warren Hastings to the
+said Company for their own benefit? No: it is for the benefit of the
+injured persons; and it is to be carried to the Company's account, "but
+in trust, nevertheless, and to the intent that the said Company may and
+do render and pay over the moneys received or recovered by them to the
+parties injured or defrauded, which the said Company accordingly hereby
+agree and covenant to do." Now here is a revenue to be received by Mr.
+Hastings for the Company's use, applied at his discretion to that use,
+and which the Company has previously covenanted to restore to the
+persons that are injured and damaged. This is a revenue which is to be
+torn away by the action of any person,--a revenue which they must
+return back to the person complaining, as they in justice ought to do:
+for no nation ever avowed making a revenue out of bribery and
+peculation. They are, then, to restore it back again. But how can they
+restore it? Mr. Hastings has applied it: he has given it in presents to
+princes,--laid it out in budgeros,--in pen, ink, and wax,--in salaries
+to secretaries: he has laid it out just in any way he pleased: and the
+India Company, who have covenanted to restore all this money to the
+persons from whom it came, are deprived of all means of performing so
+just a duty. Therefore I dismiss the idea that any man so acting could
+have had a good intention in his mind: the supposition is too weak,
+senseless, and absurd. It was only in a desperate cause that he made a
+desperate attempt: for we shall prove that he never made a disclosure
+without thinking that a discovery had been previously made or was likely
+to be made, together with an exposure of all the circumstances of his
+wicked and abominable concealment.
+
+You will see the history of this new scheme of bribery, by which Mr.
+Hastings contrived by avowing some bribes to cover others, attempted to
+outface his delinquency, and, if possible, to reconcile a weak breach of
+the laws with a sort of spirited observance of them, and to become
+infamous for the good of his country.
+
+The first appearance of this practice of bribery was in a letter of the
+29th of November, 1780. The cause which led to the discovery was a
+dispute between him and Mr. Francis at the board, in consequence of a
+very handsome offer made by Mr. Hastings to the board relative to a
+measure proposed by him, to which he found one objection to be the
+money that it would cost. He made the most generous and handsome offer,
+as it stands upon record, that perhaps any man ever made,--namely, that
+he would defray the expense out of his own private cash, and that he had
+deposited with the treasurer two lac of rupees. This was in June, 1780,
+and Mr. Francis soon after returned to Europe. I need not inform your
+Lordships, that Mr. Hastings had before this time been charged with
+bribery and peculation by General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr.
+Francis. He suspected that Mr. Francis, then going to Europe, would
+confirm this charge by the suspicious nature and circumstances of this
+generous offer; and this suspicion was increased by the connection which
+he supposed, and which we can prove he thought, Mr. Francis had with
+Cheyt Sing. Apprehending, therefore, that he might discover and bring
+the bribe to light some way or other, he resolved to anticipate any such
+discovery by declaring, upon the 29th of November, that this money was
+not his own. I will mention to your Lordships hereafter the
+circumstances of this money. He says, "My present reason for adverting
+to my conduct," (that is, his offer of two lac of rupees out of his own
+private cash for the Company's service, upon the 26th of June, 1780,)
+"on the occasion I have mentioned, is to obviate the false conclusions
+or purposed misrepresentations which may be made of it, either as an
+artifice of ostentation or as the effect of corrupt influence, by
+assuring you that the money, by whatever means it came into your
+possession, was not my own,--that I had myself no right to it, nor would
+or could have received it, but for the occasion, which prompted me to
+avail myself of the accidental means which were at that instant
+afforded me of accepting and converting it to the property and use of
+the Company: and with this brief apology I shall dismiss the subject."
+
+My Lords, you see what an account Mr. Hastings has given of some obscure
+transaction by which he contradicts the record. For, on the 26th of
+June, he generously, nobly, full of enthusiasm for their service, offers
+to the Company money of his own. On the 29th of November he tells the
+Court of Directors that the money he offered on the former day was not
+his own,--that his assertion was totally false,--that the money was not
+his,--that he had no right to receive it,--and that he would not have
+received it, but for the occasion, which prompted him to avail himself
+of the accidental means which at that instant offered.
+
+Such is the account sent by their Governor in India, acting as an
+accountant, to the Company,--a company with whom everything is matter of
+account. He tells them, indeed, that the sum he had offered was not his
+own,--that he had no right to it,--and that he would not have taken it,
+if he had not been greatly tempted by the occasion; but he never tells
+them by what means he came at it, the person from whom he received it,
+the occasion upon which he received it, (whether justifiable or not,) or
+any one circumstance under heaven relative to it. This is a very
+extraordinary account to give to the public of a sum which we find to be
+somewhere above twenty thousand pounds, taken by Mr. Hastings in some
+way or other. He set the Company blindly groping in the dark by the very
+pretended light, the ignis-fatuus, which he held out to them: for at
+that time all was in the dark, and in a cloud: and this is what Mr.
+Hastings calls _information_ communicated to the Company on the subject
+of these bribes.
+
+You have heard of obscurity illustrated by a further
+obscurity,--_obscurum per obscurius_. He continues to tell
+them,--"Something of affinity to this anecdote may appear in the first
+aspect of another transaction, which I shall proceed to relate, and of
+which it is more immediately my duty to inform you." He then tells them
+that he had contrived to give a sum of money to the Rajah of Berar, and
+the account he gives of that proceeding is this. "We had neither money
+to spare, nor, in the apparent state of that government in its relation
+to ours, would it have been either prudent or consistent with our public
+credit to have afforded it. It was, nevertheless, my decided opinion
+that some aid should be given, not less as a necessary relief than as an
+indication of confidence, and a return for the many instances of
+substantial kindness which we had within the course of the two last
+years experienced from the government of Berar. I had an assurance that
+such a proposal would receive the acquiescence of the board; but I knew
+that it would not pass without opposition, and it would have become
+public, which might have defeated its purpose. Convinced of the
+necessity of the expedient, and assured of the sincerity of the
+government of Berar, from evidences of stronger proof to me than I could
+make them appear to the other members of the board, I resolved to adopt
+it and take the entire responsibility of it upon myself. In this mode a
+less considerable sum would suffice. I accordingly caused three lac of
+rupees to be delivered to the minister of the Rajah of Berar resident in
+Calcutta. He has transmitted it to Cuttack. Two thirds of this sum I
+have raised by my own credit, and shall charge it in my official
+accounts; the other third I have supplied from the cash in my hands
+belonging to the Honorable Company."
+
+Your Lordships see in this business another mode which he has of
+accounting with the Company, and informing them of his bribe. He begins
+his account of this transaction by saying that it has something of
+affinity to the last anecdote,--meaning the account of the first bribe.
+An anecdote is made a head of an account; and this, I believe, is what
+none of your Lordships ever have heard of before,--and I believe it is
+yet to be learned in this commercial nation, a nation of accurate
+commercial account. The account he gives of the first is an anecdote;
+and what is his account of the second? A relation of an anecdote: not a
+near relation, but something of affinity,--a remote relation, cousin
+three or four times removed, of the half-blood, or something of that
+kind, to this anecdote: and he never tells them any circumstance of it
+whatever of any kind, but that it has some affinity to the former
+anecdote. But, my Lords, the thing which comes to some degree of
+clearness is this, that he did give money to the Rajah of Berar. And
+your Lordships will be so good as to advert carefully to the proportions
+in which he gave it. He did give him two lac of rupees of money raised
+by his own credit, his own money; and the third he advanced out of the
+Company's money in his hands. He might have taken the Company's money
+undoubtedly, fairly, openly, and held it in his hands, for a hundred
+purposes; and therefore he does not tell them that even that third was
+money he had obtained by bribery and corruption. No: he says it is money
+of the Company's, which he had in his hand. So that you must get
+through a long train of construction before you ascertain that this sum
+was what it turns out to be, a bribe, which he retained for the Company.
+Your Lordships will please to observe, as I proceed, the nature of this
+pretended generosity in Mr. Hastings. He is always generous in the same
+way. As he offered the whole of his first bribe as his own money, and
+afterward acknowledged that no part of it was his own, so he is now
+generous again in this latter transaction,--in which, however, he shows
+that he is neither generous nor just. He took the first money without
+right, and he did not apply it to the very service for which it was
+pretended to be taken. He then tells you of another anecdote, which, he
+says, has an affinity to that anecdote, and here he is generous again.
+In the first he appears to be generous and just, because he appears to
+give his own money, which he had a right to dispose of; then he tells
+you he is neither generous nor just, for he had taken money he had no
+right to, and did not apply it to the service for which he pretended to
+have received it. And now he is generous again, because he gives two lac
+of his own money,--and just, because he gives one lac which belonged to
+the Company; but there is not an idea suggested from whom he took it.
+
+But to proceed, my Lords. In this letter he tells you he had given two
+thirds his own money and one third the Company's money. So it stood upon
+the 29th of November, 1780. On the 5th of January following we see the
+business take a totally different turn; and then Mr. Hastings calls for
+three Company's bonds, upon two different securities, antedated to the
+1st and 2d of October, for the three lac, which he before told them was
+two thirds his own money and one third the Company's. He now declares
+the whole of it to be his own, and he thus applies by letter to the
+board, of which he himself was a majority.
+
+     "Honorable Sir and Sirs,--Having had occasion to disburse the sum
+     of three lacs of sicca rupees on account of secret services, which
+     having been advanced from my own private cash, I request that the
+     same may be repaid to me in the following manner.
+
+     "A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the second loan, bearing
+     date from 1st October, for one lac of sicca rupees.
+
+     "A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the first loan, bearing
+     date from 1st October, for one lac of sicca rupees."
+
+     "A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the first loan, bearing
+     date from the 2d October, for one lac of sicca rupees."
+
+Here are two accounts, one of which must be directly and flatly false:
+for he could not have given two thirds his own, and have supplied the
+other third from money of the Company's, and at the same time have
+advanced the whole as his own. He here goes the full length of the
+fraud: he declares that it is all his own,--so much his own that he does
+not trust the Company with it, and actually takes their bonds as a
+security for it, bearing an interest to be paid to him when he thinks
+proper.
+
+Thus it remained from the 5th of January, 1781, till 16th December,
+1782, when this business takes another turn, and in a letter of his to
+the Company these bonds become all their own. All the money advanced is
+now, all of it, the Company's money. First he says two thirds were his
+own; next, that the whole is his own; and the third account is, that the
+whole is the Company's, and he will account to them for it.
+
+Now he has accompanied this account with another very curious one. For
+when you come to look into the particulars of it, you will find there
+are three bonds declared to be the Company's bonds, and which refer to
+the former transactions, namely, the money for which he had taken the
+bonds; but when you come to look at the numbers of them, you will find
+that one of the three bonds which he had taken as his own disappears,
+and another bond, of another date, and for a much larger sum, is
+substituted in its place, of which he had never mentioned anything
+whatever. So that, taking his first account, that two thirds is his own
+money, then that it is all his own, in the third that it is all the
+Company's money, by a fourth account, given in a paper describing the
+three bonds, you will find that there is one lac which he does not
+account for, but substitutes in its place a bond before taken as his
+own. He sinks and suppresses one bond, he gives two bonds to the
+Company, and to supply the want of the third, which he suppresses, he
+brings forward a bond for another sum, of another date, which he had
+never mentioned before. Here, then, you have four different accounts: if
+any one of them is true, every one of the other three is totally false.
+Such a system of cogging, such a system of fraud, such a system of
+prevarication, such a system of falsehood, never was, I believe, before
+exhibited in the world.
+
+In the first place, why did he take bonds at all from the Company for
+the money that was their own? I must be cautious how I charge a legal
+crime. I will not charge it to be forgery, to take a bond from the
+Company for money which was their own. He was employed to make out bonds
+for the Company, to raise money on their credit. He pretends he lent
+them a sum of money, which was not his to lend: but he gives their own
+money to them as his own, and takes a security for it. I will not say
+that it is a forgery, but I am sure it is an offence as grievous,
+because it is as much a cheat as a forgery, with this addition to it,
+that the person so cheating is in a trust; he violates that trust, and
+in so doing he defrauds and falsifies the whole system of the Company's
+accounts.
+
+I have only to show what his own explanation of all these actions was,
+because it supersedes all observation of mine. Hear what prevaricating
+guilt says for the falsehood and delusion which had been used to cover
+it; and see how he plunges deeper and deeper upon every occasion. This
+explanation arose out of another memorable bribe, which I must now beg
+leave to state to your Lordships.
+
+About the time of the receipt of the former bribes, good fortune, as
+good things seldom come singly, is kind to him; and when he went up and
+had nearly ruined the Company's affairs in Oude and Benares, he received
+a present of 100,000_l._ sterling, or thereabouts. He received bills for
+it in September, 1781, and he gives the Company an account of it in
+January, 1782. Remark in what manner the account of this money was
+given, and the purposes for which he intends to apply it. He says, in
+this letter, "I received the offer of a considerable sum of money, both
+on the Nabob's part and that of his ministers, as a present to myself,
+not to the Company: I accepted it without hesitation, and gladly, being
+entirely destitute both of means and credit, whether for your service or
+the relief of my own necessities." My Lords, upon this you shall hear a
+comment, made by some abler persons than me. This donation was not made
+in species, but in bills upon the house of Gopaul Doss, who was then a
+prisoner in the hands of Cheyt Sing. After mentioning that he took this
+present for the Company, and for their exigencies, and partly for his
+own necessities, and in consequence of the distress of both, he desires
+the Company, in the moment of this their greatest distress, to award it
+to him, and therefore he ends, "If you should adjudge the deposit to me,
+I shall consider it as the most honorable approbation and reward of my
+labors: and I wish to owe my fortune to your bounty. I am now in the
+fiftieth year of my life: I have passed thirty-one years in the service
+of the Company, and the greatest part of that time in employments of the
+highest trust. My conscience allows me boldly to claim the merit of zeal
+and integrity; nor has fortune been unpropitious to their exertions. To
+these qualities I bound my pretensions. I shall not repine, if you shall
+deem otherwise of my services; nor ought your decision, however it may
+disappoint my hope of a retreat adequate to the consequence and
+elevation of the office which I now possess, to lessen my gratitude for
+having been so long permitted to hold it, since it has at least enabled
+me to lay up a provision with which I can be contented in a more humble
+station."
+
+And here your Lordships will be pleased incidentally to remark the
+circumstance of his condition of life and his fortune, to which he
+appeals, and upon account of which he desires this money. Your
+Lordships will remember that in 1773 he said, (and this I stated to you
+from himself,) that, if he held his then office for a very few years, he
+should be enabled to lay by an ample provision for his retreat. About
+nine years after that time, namely, in the month of January, 1782, he
+finds himself rather pinched with want, but, however, not in so bad a
+way but that the holding of his office had enabled him to lay up a
+provision with which he could be contented in a more humble station. He
+wishes to have affluence; he wishes to have dignity; he wishes to have
+consequence and rank: but he allows that he has competence. Your
+Lordships will see afterwards how miserably his hopes were disappointed:
+for the Court of Directors, receiving this letter from Mr. Hastings, did
+declare, that they could not give it to him, because the act had ordered
+that "no fees of office, perquisites, emoluments, or advantages
+whatsoever, should be accepted, received, or taken by such
+Governor-General and Council, or any of them, in any manner or on any
+account or pretence whatsoever"; "and as the same act further directs,
+'that no Governor-General, or any of the Council, shall directly take,
+accept, or receive, of or from any person or persons, in any manner or
+on any account whatsoever, any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or
+reward, pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement for any
+present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,' we cannot, were we so
+inclined, decree the amount of this present to the Governor-General. And
+it is further enacted, 'that any such present, gift, gratuity, donation,
+or reward, accepted, taken, or received, shall be deemed and construed
+to have been received to and for the sole use of the Company.'" And
+therefore they resolved, most unjustly and most wickedly, to keep it to
+themselves. The act made it in the first instance the property of the
+Company, and they would not give it him. And one should think this, with
+his own former construction of the act, would have made him cautious of
+taking bribes. You have seen what weight it had with him to stop the
+course of bribes which he was in such a career of taking in every place
+and with both hands.
+
+Your Lordships have now before you this hundred thousand pounds,
+disclosed in a letter from Patna, dated the 20th January, 1782. You find
+mystery and concealment in every one of Mr. Hastings's discoveries. For
+(which is a curious part of it) this letter was not sent to the Court of
+Directors in their packet regularly, but transmitted by Major Fairfax,
+one of his agents, to Major Scott, another of his agents, to be
+delivered to the Company. Why was this done? Your Lordships will judge,
+from that circuitous mode of transmission, whether he did not thereby
+intend to leave some discretion in his agent to divulge it or not. We
+are told he did not; but your Lordships will believe that or not,
+according to the nature of the fact. If he had been anxious to make this
+discovery to the Directors, the regular way would have been to send his
+letter to the Directors immediately in the packet: but he sent it in a
+box to an agent; and that agent, upon due discretion, conveyed it to the
+Court of Directors. Here, however, he tells you nothing about the
+persons from whom he received this money, any more than he had done
+respecting the two former sums.
+
+On the 2d of May following the date of this Patna letter he came down to
+Calcutta with a mind, as he himself describes it, greatly agitated. All
+his hope of plundering Benares had totally failed. The produce of the
+robbing of the Begums, in the manner your Lordships have heard, was all
+dissipated to pay the arrears of the armies: there was no fund left. He
+felt himself agitated and full of dread, knowing that he had been
+threatened with having his place taken from him several times, and that
+he might be called home to render an account. He had heard that
+inquiries had begun in a menacing form in Parliament; and though at that
+time Bengal was not struck at, there was a charge of bribery and
+peculation brought against the Governor of Madras. With this dread, with
+a mind full of anxiety and perturbation, he writes a letter, as he
+pretends, on the 22d of May, 1782. Your Lordships will remark, that,
+when he came down to Calcutta from his expedition up the country, he did
+not till the 22d of May give any account whatever of these
+transactions,--and that this letter, or pretended letter, of the 22d of
+May was not sent till the 16th of December following. We shall clearly
+prove that he had abundant means of sending it, and by various ways,
+before the 16th of December, 1782, when he inclosed in another letter
+that of the 22d of May. This is the letter of discovery; this is the
+letter by which his breast was to be laid open to his employers, and all
+the obscurity of his transactions to be elucidated. Here are indeed new
+discoveries, but they are like many new-discovered lands, exceedingly
+inhospitable, very thinly inhabited, and producing nothing to gratify
+the curiosity of the human mind.
+
+This letter is addressed to the Honorable the Court of Directors, dated
+Fort William, 22d May, 1782. He tells them he had promised to account
+for the ten lacs of rupees which he had received, and this promise, he
+says, he now performs, and that he takes that opportunity of accounting
+with them likewise for several other sums which he had received. His
+words are,--
+
+"This promise I now perform, and, deeming it consistent with the spirit
+of it, I have added such other sums as have been occasionally converted
+to the Company's property through my means, in consequence of the like
+original destination. Of the second of these sums you have already been
+advised in a letter which I had the honor to address the Honorable Court
+of Directors, dated 29th November, 1780. Both this and the third article
+were paid immediately to the treasury, by my order to the sub-treasurer
+to receive them on the Company's account, but never passed through my
+hands. The three sums for which bonds were granted were in like manner
+paid to the Company's treasury, without passing through my hands, but
+their _application_ was not specified. The sum of 50,000 current rupees
+was received while I was on my journey to Benares, and applied as
+expressed in the account.
+
+"As to the manner in which these sums have been expended, the reference
+which I have made of it in the accompanying account, to the several
+accounts in which they are credited, renders any other specification of
+it unnecessary,--_besides_ that these accounts either have or will have
+received a much stronger authentication than any that I could give to
+mine."
+
+I wish your Lordships to attend to the next paragraph, which is meant by
+him to explain why he took bribes at all,--why he took bonds for some of
+them, as moneys of his own, and not moneys of the Company,--why he
+entered some upon the Company's accounts, and why of the others he
+renders no account at all. Light, however, will beam upon you as we
+proceed.
+
+"Why these sums were taken by me,--why they were, except the second,
+quietly transferred to the Company's use,--why bonds were taken for the
+first, and not for the rest,--might, were this matter exposed to the
+view of the public, furnish a variety of conjectures, to which it would
+be of little use to reply. Were your Honorable Court to question me on
+these points, I would answer, that the sums were taken for the Company's
+benefit, at times when the Company very much needed them,--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 could at this distance of time verify, and that I did not
+think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. I trust,
+Honorable Sirs, to your breasts for a candid interpretation of my
+actions,--and assume the freedom to add, that I think myself, on such a
+subject, on such _an occasion_, entitled to it."
+
+Lofty, my Lords! You see, that, after the Directors had expected an
+explanation for so long a time, he says, "Why these sums were taken by
+me, and, except the second, quietly transferred to the Company's use, I
+cannot tell; why bonds were taken for the first, and not for the rest, I
+cannot tell: if this matter were exposed to view, it would furnish a
+variety of conjectures." Here is an account which is to explain the most
+obscure, the most mysterious, the most evidently fraudulent
+transactions. When asked how he came to take these bonds, how he came
+to use these frauds, he tells you he really does not know,--that he
+might have this motive for it, that he might have another motive for
+it,--that he wished to conceal it from public curiosity,--but, which is
+the most extraordinary, he is not quite sure that he had any motive for
+it at all, which his memory can trace. The whole of this is a period of
+a year and a half; and here is a man who keeps his account upon
+principles of whim and vagary. One would imagine he was guessing at some
+motive of a stranger. Why he came to take bonds for money not due to
+him, and why he enters some and not others,--he knows nothing of these
+things: he begs them not to ask about it, because it will be of no use.
+"You foolish Court of Directors may conjecture and conjecture on. You
+are asking me why I took bonds to myself for money of yours, why I have
+cheated you, why I have falsified my account in such a manner. I will
+not tell you."
+
+In the satisfaction which he had promised to give them he neither
+mentions the persons, the times, the occasions, or motives for any of
+his actions. He adds, "I did not think it worth my care to observe the
+same means with the rest." For some purposes, he thought it necessary to
+use the most complicated and artful concealments; for some, he could not
+tell what his motives were; and for others, that it was mere
+carelessness. Here is the exchequer of bribery!--have I falsified any
+part of my original stating of it?--an exchequer in which the man who
+ought to pay receives, the man who ought to give security takes it, the
+man who ought to keep an account says he has forgotten; an exchequer in
+which oblivion was the remembrancer; and, to sum up the whole, an
+exchequer into the accounts of which it was useless to inquire. This is
+the manner in which the account of near two hundred thousand pounds is
+given to the Court of Directors. You can learn nothing in this business
+that is any way distinct, except a premeditated design of a concealment
+of his transactions. That is avowed.
+
+But there is a more serious thing behind. Who were the instruments of
+his concealment? No other, my Lords, than the Company's public
+accountant. That very accountant takes the money, knowing it to be the
+Company's, and that it was only pretended to be advanced by Mr. Hastings
+for the Company's use. He sees Mr. Hastings make out bonds to himself
+for it, and Mr. Hastings makes him enter him as creditor, when in fact
+he was debtor. Thus he debauches the Company's accountant, and makes him
+his confederate. These fraudulent and corrupt acts, covered by false
+representations, are proved to be false not by collation with anything
+else, but false by a collation with themselves. This, then, is the
+account, and his explanation of it; and in this insolent, saucy,
+careless, negligent manner, a public accountant like Mr. Hastings, a man
+bred up a book-keeper in the Company's service, who ought to be exact,
+physically exact, in his account, has not only been vicious in his own
+account, but made the public accounts vicious and of no value.
+
+But there is in this account another curious circumstance with regard to
+the deposit of this sum of money, to which he referred in his first
+paragraph of his letter of the 29th of November, 1780. He states that
+this deposit was made and passed into the hands of Mr. Larkins on the
+1st of June. It did so; but it is not entered in the Company's accounts
+till November following. Now in all that intermediate space where was
+it? what account was there of it? It was entirely a secret between Mr.
+Larkins and Mr. Hastings, without a possibility of any one discovering
+any particular relative to it. Here is an account of two hundred
+thousand pounds received, juggled between the accountant and him,
+without a trace of it appearing in the Company's books. Some of those
+committees, to whom, for their diligence at least, I must say the public
+have some obligation, and in return for which they ought to meet with
+some indulgence, examining into all these circumstances, and having
+heard that Mr. Hastings had deposited a sum of money in the hands of the
+Company's sub-treasurer in the month of June, sent for the Company's
+books. They looked over those books, but they did not find the least
+trace of any such sum of money, and not any account of it: nor could
+there be, because it was not paid to the Company's account till the
+November following. The accountant had received the money, but never
+entered it from June till November. Then, at last, have we an account of
+it. But was it even then entered regularly upon the Company's accounts?
+No such thing: it is a deposit carried to the Governor-General's credit.
+
+    [_The entry of the several species in which this deposit was made
+    was here read from the Company's General Journal of 1780 and 1781._]
+
+My Lords, when this account appears at last, when this money does emerge
+in the public accounts, whose is it? Is it the Company's? No: Mr.
+Hastings's. And thus, if, notwithstanding this obscure account in
+November, the Directors had claimed and called for this affinity to an
+anecdote,--if they had called for this anecdote and examined the
+account,--if they had said, "We observe here entered two lac and
+upwards; come, Mr. Hastings, let us see where this money is,"--they
+would find that it is Mr. Hastings's money, not the Company's; they
+would find that it is carried to his credit. In this manner he hands
+over this sum, telling them, on the 22d of May, 1782, that not only the
+bonds were a fraud, but the deposit was a fraud, and that neither bonds
+nor deposit did in reality belong to him. Why did he enter it at all?
+Then, afterwards, why did he not enter it as the Company's? Why make a
+false entry, to enter it as his own? And how came he, two years after,
+when he does tell you that it was the Company's and not his own, to
+alter the public accounts? But why did he not tell them at that time,
+when he pretends to be opening his breast to the Directors, from whom he
+received it, or say anything to give light to the Company respecting it?
+who, supposing they had the power of dispensing with an act of
+Parliament, or licensing bribery at their pleasure, might have been
+thereby enabled to say, "Here you ought to have received it,--there it
+might be oppressive and of dreadful example."
+
+I have only to state, that, in this letter, which was pretended to be
+written on the 22d of May, 1782, your Lordships will observe that he
+thinks it his absolute duty (and I wish to press this upon your
+Lordships, because it will be necessary in a comparison which I shall
+have hereafter to make) to lay open all their affairs to them, to give
+them a full and candid explanation of his conduct, which he afterwards
+confesses he is not able to do. The paragraph has been just read to you.
+It amounts to this: "I have taken many bribes,--have falsified your
+accounts,--have reversed the principle of them in my own favor; I now
+discover to you all these my frauds, and think myself entitled to your
+confidence upon this occasion." Now all the principles of diffidence,
+all the principles of distrust, nay, more, all the principles upon which
+a man may be convicted of premeditated fraud, and deserve the severest
+punishment, are to be found in this case, in which he says he holds
+himself to be entitled to their confidence and trust. If any of your
+Lordships had a steward who told you he had lent you your own money, and
+had taken bonds from you for it, and if he afterwards told you that that
+money was neither yours nor his, but extorted from your tenants by some
+scandalous means, I should be glad to know what your Lordships would
+think of such a steward, who should say, "I will take the freedom to
+add, that I think myself, on such a subject, on such an occasion,
+entitled to your confidence and trust." You will observe his cavalier
+mode of expression. Instead of his exhibiting the rigor and severity of
+an accountant and a book-keeper, you would think that he had been a
+reader of sentimental letters; there is such an air of a novel running
+through the whole, that it adds to the ridicule and nausea of it: it is
+an oxymel of squills; there is something to strike you with horror for
+the villany of it, something to strike you with contempt for the fraud
+of it, and something to strike you with utter disgust for the vile and
+bad taste with which all these base ingredients are assorted.
+
+Your Lordships will see, when the account which is subjoined to this
+unaccountable letter comes before you, that, though the Company had
+desired to know the channels through which he got those sums, there is
+not (except by a reference that appears in another place to one of the
+articles) one single syllable of explanation given from one end to the
+other, there is not the least glimpse of light thrown upon these
+transactions. But we have since discovered from whom he got these
+bribes; and your Lordships will be struck with horror, when you hear it.
+
+I have already remarked to you, that, though this letter is dated upon
+the 22d of May, it was not dispatched for Europe till December
+following; and he gets Mr. Larkins, who was his agent and instrument in
+falsifying the Company's accounts, to swear that this letter was written
+upon the 22d of May, and that he had no opportunity to send it, but by
+the "Lively" in December. On the 16th of that month he writes to the
+Directors, and tells them that he is quite shocked to find he had no
+earlier opportunity of making this discovery, which he thought himself
+bound to make; though this discovery, respecting some articles of it,
+had now been delayed nearly two years, and though it since appears that
+there were many opportunities, and particularly by the "Resolution," of
+sending it. He was much distressed, and found himself in an awkward
+situation, from an apprehension that the Parliamentary inquiry, which he
+knew was at this time in progress, might have forced from him this
+notable discovery. He says, "I do not fear the consequences of any
+Parliamentary process." Indeed, he needed not to fear any Parliamentary
+inquiry, if it produced no further discovery than that which your
+Lordships have in the letter of the 22d of May, and in the accounts
+subjoined to it. He says, that "the delay is of no public consequence;
+but it has produced a situation which, with respect to myself, I regard
+as unfortunate, because it exposes me to the meanest imputation, from
+the occasion which the late Parliamentary inquiries have since
+furnished."
+
+Now here is a very curious letter, that I wish to have read for some
+other reasons, which will afterwards appear, but principally at present
+for the purpose of showing you that he held it to be his duty and
+thought it to the last degree dishonorable not to give the Company an
+account of those secret bribes: he thought it would reflect upon him,
+and ruin his character forever, if this account did not come voluntarily
+from him, but was extorted by terror of Parliamentary inquiry. In this
+letter of the 16th December, 1782, he thus writes.
+
+"The delay is of no public consequence, but it has produced a situation
+which, with respect to myself, I regard as unfortunate; because it
+exposes me to the meanest imputation, from the occasion which the late
+Parliamentary inquiries have since furnished, but which were unknown
+when my letter was written, and written in the necessary consequence of
+a promise made to that effect in a former letter to your Honorable
+Committee, dated 20th January last. However, to preclude the possibility
+of such reflections from affecting me, I have desired Mr. Larkins, who
+was privy to the whole transaction, to affix to the letter his affidavit
+of the date in which it was written. I own I feel most sensibly the
+mortification of being reduced to the necessity of using such
+precautions to guard my reputation from dishonor. If I had at any time
+possessed that degree of confidence from my immediate employers which
+they never withheld from the meanest of my predecessors, I should have
+disdained to use these attentions. How I have drawn on me a different
+treatment I know not; it is sufficient that I have not merited it. And
+in the course of a service of thirty-two years, and ten of these
+employed in maintaining the powers and discharging the duties of the
+first office of the British government in India, that honorable court
+ought to know whether I possess the integrity and honor which are the
+first requisites of such a station. If I wanted these, they have
+afforded me but too powerful incentives to suppress the information
+which I now convey to them through you, and to appropriate to my own use
+the sums which I have already passed to their credit, by the unworthy
+and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which they have passed
+upon me for the first communication of this kind: and your own
+experience will suggest to you, that there are persons who would profit
+by such a warning.
+
+"Upon the whole of these transactions, which to you, who are accustomed
+to view business in an official and regular light, may appear
+unprecedented, if not improper, I have but a few short remarks to
+suggest to your consideration.
+
+"If I appear in any unfavorable light by these transactions, I resign
+the common and legal security of those who commit crimes or errors. I am
+ready to answer every particular question that may be put against
+myself, upon honor or upon oath.
+
+"The sources from which these reliefs to the public service have come
+would never have yielded them to the Company publicly; and the
+exigencies of your service (exigencies created by the exposition of
+your affairs, and faction in your councils) required those supplies.
+
+"I could have concealed them, had I had a wrong motive, from yours and
+the public eye forever; and I know that the difficulties to which a
+spirit of injustice may subject me for my candor and avowal are greater
+than any possible inconvenience that could have attended the
+concealment, except the dissatisfaction of my own mind. These
+difficulties are but a few of those which I have suffered in your
+service. The applause of my own breast is my surest reward, and was the
+support of my mind in meeting them. Your applause, and that of my
+country, are my next wish in life."
+
+Your Lordships will observe at the end of this letter, that this man
+declares his first applause to be from his own breast, and that he next
+wishes to have the applause of his employers. But reversing this, and
+taking their applause first, let us see on what does he ground his hope
+of their applause? Was it on his former conduct? No: for he says that
+conduct had repeatedly met with their disapprobation. Was it upon the
+confidence which he knew they had in him? No: for he says they gave more
+of their confidence to the meanest of his predecessors. Observe, my
+Lords, the style of insolence he constantly uses with regard to all
+mankind. Lord Clive was his predecessor, Governor Cartier was his
+predecessor, Governor Verelst was his predecessor: every man of them as
+good as himself: and yet he says the Directors had given "more of their
+confidence to the _meanest_ of his predecessors." But what was to
+entitle him to their applause? A clear and full explanation of the
+bribes he had taken. Bribes was to be the foundation of their
+confidence in him, and the clear explanation of them was to entitle him
+to their applause! Strange grounds to build confidence upon!--the rotten
+ground of corruption, accompanied with the infamy of its avowal! Strange
+ground to expect applause!--a discovery which was no discovery at all!
+Your Lordships have heard this discovery, which I have not taken upon me
+to state, but have read his own letter on the occasion. Has there, at
+this moment, any light broken in upon you concerning this matter?
+
+But what does he say to the Directors? He says, "Upon the whole of these
+transactions, which to you, who are accustomed to view business in an
+official and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not improper, I
+have but a few short remarks to suggest to your consideration." He looks
+upon them and treats them as a set of low mechanical men, a set of
+low-born book-keepers, as base souls, who in an account call for
+explanation and precision. If there is no precision in accounts, there
+is nothing of worth in them. You see he himself is an eccentric
+accountant, a Pindaric book-keeper, an arithmetician in the clouds. "I
+know," he says, "what the Directors desire: but they are mean people;
+they are not of elevated sentiments; they are modest; they avoid
+ostentation in taking of bribes: I therefore am playing cups and balls
+with them, letting them see a little glimpse of the bribes, then
+carrying them fairly away." Upon this he founds the applause of his own
+breast.
+
+        Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo
+    Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.
+
+That private _ipse plaudo_ he may have in this business, which is a
+business of money; but the applause of no other human creature will he
+have for giving such an account as he admits this to be,--irregular,
+uncertain, problematical, and of which no one can make either head or
+tail. He despises us also, who are representatives of the people, and
+have amongst us all the regular officers of finance, for expecting
+anything like a regular account from him. He is hurt at it; he considers
+it as a cruel treatment of him; he says, "Have I deserved this
+treatment?" Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment, if
+treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of which he complains.
+The Court of Directors had, however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and
+pusillanimous, begged of him, as if they were his dependants, and not
+his masters, to give them some light into the account; they desire a
+receiver of money to tell from whom he received it, and how he applied
+it. He answers, They may be hanged for a parcel of mean, contemptible
+book-keepers, and that he will give them no account at all. He says, "If
+you sue me"--There is the point: he always takes security in a court of
+law. He considers his being called upon by these people, to whom he
+ought as a faithful servant to give an account, and to do which he was
+bound by an act of Parliament specially intrusting him with the
+administration of the revenues, as a gross affront. He adds, that he is
+ready to resign his defence, and to answer upon honor or upon oath.
+Answering upon honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your
+Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But he forgets, that,
+being the Company's servant, the Company may bring a bill in Chancery
+against him, and force him upon oath to give an account. He has not,
+however, given them light enough or afforded them sufficient ground for
+a fishing bill in Chancery. Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a
+Chancery way, or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms, and
+give you some account." In consequence of this the Company did demand
+from him an account, regularly, and as fully and formally as if they had
+demanded it in a court of justice. He positively refused to give them
+any account whatever; and they have never, to this very day in which we
+speak, had any account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your
+Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of fraud, falsification,
+iniquity, and prevarication, that, in defiance of his promise, which
+promise they quote upon him over and over again, he has never given them
+any account of this matter.
+
+He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming) that by calling
+him to account they may provoke him--to what? "To appropriate," he says,
+"to my own use the sums which I have already passed to your credit, by
+the unworthy and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which you
+have passed upon me for the first communication of this kind." They
+passed no reflections: they said they would neither praise nor blame
+him, but pressed him for an account of a matter which they could not
+understand: and I believe your Lordships understand it no more than
+they, for it is not in the compass of human understanding to conceive or
+comprehend it. Instead of an account of it, he dares to threaten them:
+"I may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be an honest
+man,--to falsify your account a second time, and to reclaim those sums
+which I have passed to your credit,--to alter the account again, by the
+assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration is this of his
+dominion over the public accounts, and of his power of altering them! a
+declaration, that, having first falsified those accounts in order to
+deceive them, and afterwards having told them of this falsification in
+order to gain credit with them, if they provoke him, he shall take back
+the money he had carried to their account, and make them his debtors for
+it! He fairly avows the dominion he has over the Company's accounts; and
+therefore, when he shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able
+to rebut that evidence, and say, "The Company's accounts are corrupted
+by you, through your agent, Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them,
+because you not only told the Company you could do so, but we can prove
+that you have actually done it." What a strange medley of evasion,
+pretended discovery, real concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears
+in every part of this letter!
+
+But admitting this letter to have been written upon the 22d of May, and
+kept back to the 16th of December, you would imagine that during all
+that interval of time he would have prepared himself to give some light,
+some illustration of these dark and mysterious transactions, which
+carried fraud upon the very face of them. Did he do so? Not at all. Upon
+the 16th of December, instead of giving them some such clear accounts as
+might have been expected, he falls into a violent passion for their
+expecting them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he tells them
+they knew who had profited by these transactions: thus, in order to
+strike terror into their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had
+practised or protected. What weight this may have had with them I know
+not; but your Lordships will expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after
+giving four accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three must
+necessarily be false,--after having thrown the Company's accounts into
+confusion, and being unable to tell, as he says himself, why he did
+so,--will at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who
+continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints that he ought to do
+it.--You have heard nothing yet but the consequences of their refusing
+to give him the present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had taken
+from the Nabob. They did right to refuse it to him; they did wrong to
+take it to themselves.
+
+We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges, in September, 1784,--that
+Ganges whose purifying water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and
+which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings's hands a little
+clean of bribery, and would have rolled down its golden sands like
+another Pactolus. Here we find him discovering another of his bribes.
+This was a bribe taken upon totally a different principle, according to
+his own avowal: it is a bribe not pretended to be received for the use
+of the Company,--a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself. He tells
+them that he had taken between thirty and forty thousand pounds. This
+bribe, which, like the former, he had taken without right, he tells them
+that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he insists upon their
+sanction for so doing. He says, he had in vain, upon a former occasion,
+appealed to their honor, liberality, and generosity,--that he now
+appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing this
+bribe--which he had taken without telling them from whom, where, or on
+what account--to his own use.
+
+Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which he wrote from Patna,
+on the 20th of January, 1782, he there states that he was in tolerable
+good circumstances, and that this had arisen from his having continued
+long in their service. Now, he has continued two years longer in their
+service, and he is reduced to beggary! "This," he says, "is a single
+example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit,
+and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want, and to
+sink in obscurity."
+
+So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could save an exceeding good
+fortune out of his place. In 1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has
+made a decent private competency; but in two years after he sunk to the
+extremity of private want. And how does he seek to relieve that want? By
+taking a bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the Company's
+service, but for his own. He takes the bribe with an express intention
+of keeping it for his own use, and he calls upon the Company for their
+sanction. If the money was taken without right, no claim of his could
+justify its being appropriated to himself: nor could the Company so
+appropriate it; for no man has a right to be generous out of another's
+goods. When he calls upon their justice and generosity, they might
+answer, "If you have a just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we
+will pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state your merits,
+and we will consider them." "But I have paid myself by a bribe; I have
+taken another man's money; and I call upon your justice--to do what? to
+restore it to its owner? no--to allow me to keep it myself." Think, my
+Lords, in what a situation the Company stands! "I have done a great
+deal for you; this is the jackal's portion; you have been the lion; I
+have been endeavoring to prog for you; I am your bribe-pander, your
+factor of corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn and
+ignominy, to insults even from you. I have been preying and plundering
+for you; I have gone through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness,
+wading through every species of dirt and corruption, for your advantage.
+I am now sinking into the extremity of private want; do give me
+this--what? money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me this
+bribe; vote me--what? money of your own? that would be generous: money
+you owe me? that would be just: no, money which I have extorted from
+another man; and I call upon your justice to give it me." This is his
+idea of justice. He says, "I am compelled to depart from that liberal
+plan which I originally adopted, and to claim from your justice (for you
+have forbid me to appeal to your generosity) the discharge of a debt
+which I can with the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due,
+and which I cannot sustain." Now, if any of the Company's servants may
+say, "I have been extravagant, profuse,--it was all meant for your
+good,--let me prey upon the country at my pleasure,--license my bribes,
+frauds, and peculations, and then you do me justice,"--what country are
+we in, where these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?
+
+It might naturally be expected that in this letter he would have given
+some account of the person from whom he had taken this bribe. But here,
+as in the other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the Ganges,
+like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw in Mr. Middleton; they
+recollect nothing, they know nothing. He has not stated, from that day
+to this, from whom he took that money. But we have made the discovery.
+And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to the
+present age and posterity, will be their use, that, if we pursue them
+with the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon us demands, and
+if your Lordships do firmly administer justice upon this man's frauds,
+you will at once put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever.
+Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry, it is the diligence of
+the House of Commons, which he has the audacity to call _malice_, that
+has discovered and brought to light the frauds which we shall be able to
+prove against him.
+
+I will now read to your Lordships an extract from that stuff, called a
+defence, which he has either written himself or somebody else has
+written for him, and which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases,
+when, under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment, he
+discovered at length from whom he got this last bribe.
+
+"The last part of the charge states, that, in my letter to the Court of
+Directors of the 21st February, 1784, I have confessed to have received
+another sum of money, the amount of which is not declared, but which,
+from the application of it, could not be less than thirty-four thousand
+pounds sterling, &c. In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a
+sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the Company not having at
+that time sufficient cash in their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed
+three lacs of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta, whom
+I desired to call upon me with a bond properly filled up. He did so; but
+at the time I was going to execute it he entreated I would rather
+accept the money than execute the bond. I neither accepted the offer nor
+refused it; and my determination upon it remained suspended between the
+alternative of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid, and of taking
+it, and applying it, as I had done other sums, to the Company's use. And
+there the matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow, when I
+determined to accept the money for the Company's use; and these were my
+motives. Having made disbursements from my own cash for services, which,
+though required to enable me to execute the duties of my station, I had
+hitherto omitted to enter into my public accounts, I resolved to
+reimburse myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the
+Company's affairs, by charging these disbursements in my durbar accounts
+of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received,
+which was this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company were not
+founded in justice, and _bonâ fide_ due, my acceptance of three lacs of
+rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that
+sum from me. No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of
+the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts."
+
+We do not _suspect_ him of presenting false accounts: we can prove, we
+are now radically proving, that he presents false accounts. We suspect
+no man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse no man who has
+not given ground for accusation; and we do not attempt to bring before a
+court of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively to
+prove. This will put an end to all idle prattle of malice, of groundless
+suspicions of guilt, and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring
+the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test,
+between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In
+his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited
+himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe
+from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years
+afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he
+wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is,
+for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great
+number of years. He proceeds:--
+
+"If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would
+furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that
+in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account
+of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have
+passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled
+it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts
+all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath
+overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent
+than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores
+for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of
+private want and to sink in obscurity."
+
+Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the House of Commons that
+he never made up any contingent accounts; and yet, as a set-off against
+this bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended to apply
+to the current use of the Company, he feigns and invents a claim upon
+them, namely, that he had, without any authority of the Company,
+squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and other idle services, a
+sum amounting to 34,000_l._ But was it for the Company's service? Is
+this language to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit to expend I
+have expended for the Company's service. I intended, indeed, at that
+time, to have been generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have
+paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I was then in the
+prime of my life, flowing in money, and had great expectations: I am now
+old; I cannot afford to be generous: I will look back into all my former
+accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I generously or prodigally
+spent as my own humor might suggest; and though, at the same time, I
+know you have given me a noble allowance, I now make a charge upon you
+for this sum of money, and intend to take a bribe in discharge of it."
+Now suppose Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope will long,
+and honorably and worthily, fill the seat, which that gentleman
+possessed,--suppose Lord Cornwallis, after never having complained of
+the insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two years ago said
+he had saved a sufficient competency out of it, should now tell you that
+30,00_l._ a year was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into
+want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged want taking a
+bribe, and then make out a bill of contingent expenses to cover it,
+would your Lordships bear this?
+
+Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow money for his own
+use, and that he applied to Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it
+upon him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you will be astonished
+to hear of generosity in a banian; there never was a banian and
+generosity united together: but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at
+once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings's face beams upon him.
+"Here," says Mr. Hastings, "I have prepared bonds for you."
+"Astonishing! how can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call upon
+me to lend you 34,000_l._, and propose bonds? No, you shall have it: you
+are the Governor-General, who have a large and ample salary; but I know
+you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity: I give you all
+this money." Nobkissin was quite shocked at Mr. Hastings's offering him
+a bond. My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower, a little
+more penurious, a little more exacting, a little more cunning, a little
+more money-making, than a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner
+of Duke's Place in London that is so crafty, so much a usurer, so
+skilful how to turn money to profit, and so resolved not to give any
+money but for profit, as a Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned.
+But this man, however, at once grows generous, and will not suffer a
+bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, is thrown into
+very great distress. You see sentiment always prevailing in Mr.
+Hastings. The sentimental dialogue which must have passed between him
+and a Gentoo broker would have charmed every one that has a taste for
+pathos and sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the money as a
+gift. He really does not know what to do: whether to insist upon giving
+a bond or not,--whether he shall take the money for his own use, or
+whether he shall take it for the Company's use. But it may be said of
+man as it is said of woman: the woman who deliberates is lost: the man
+that deliberates about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he
+deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is lost, the walls
+shake, down it comes,--and at the same moment enters Nobkissin into the
+citadel of his honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums
+beating, and Mr. Hastings's garrison goes out, very handsomely indeed,
+with the honors of war, all for the benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings
+consents to take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the money,
+and is perfectly satisfied.
+
+Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it to the Company's
+service. How? To pay his own contingent bills. "Everything that I do,"
+says he, "and all the money I squander, is all for the Company's
+benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look into them; they are
+given you upon honor. Let me take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be
+just or generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it." But in every
+transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have got a name, there we have got
+a crime. Nobkissin gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I
+believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately afterwards enters
+upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable
+districts in Bengal. We know very well, and shall prove to your
+Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from
+the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had
+been taken from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence of the
+Company's service, but sooner or later they fall upon the Company's
+treasury. And we shall prove that Nobkissin, within a year from the time
+when he gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Company, as
+their steward, to the amount of a sum the very interest of which,
+according to the rate of interest in that country, amounted to more than
+this bribe, taken, as was pretended, for the Company's service. Such are
+the consequences of a banian's generosity, and of Mr. Hastings's
+gratitude, so far as the interest of the country is concerned; and this
+is a good way to pay Mr. Hastings's contingent accounts. But this is not
+all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country to take the
+management of it, and the fortunes of all the great families in it are
+given entirely into his power. This is the way by which the Company are
+to keep their own servants from falling into "the extremity of private
+want." And the Company itself, in this pretended saving to their
+treasury by the taking of bribes, lose more than the amount of the
+bribes received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand, there is a
+balance accruing on the other. No man, who had any share in the
+management of the Company's revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not
+either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in
+balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both. In short,
+Mr. Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did
+not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit,
+but the Company's treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.
+
+And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic in bribes brought to
+light by the Court of Directors? No: we got it in the House of Commons.
+These bribes appear to have been taken at various times and upon various
+occasions; and it was not till his return from Patna, in February, 1782,
+that the first communication of any of them was made to the Court of
+Directors. Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of Directors
+wrote back to him, requiring some further explanation upon the subject.
+No explanation was given, but a communication of other bribes was made
+in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year, but not
+dispatched to Europe till the December following. This produced another
+requisition from the Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships
+are to observe that this correspondence is never in the way of letters
+written and answers given; but he and the Directors are perpetually
+playing at hide-and-seek with each other, and writing to each other at
+random: Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the Directors
+requiring an explanation the next; Mr. Hastings giving an account of
+another bribe on the third day, without giving any explanation of the
+former. Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their chase. But it
+was not till they learned that the committees of the House of Commons
+(for committees of the House of Commons had then some weight) were
+frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings, that at last
+some honest men in the Direction were permitted to have some ascendency,
+and that a proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your
+Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact account of all the
+bribes that he had received, and painting to him, in colors as strong at
+least as those I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations,--and
+what does them great honor for that moment, they particularly direct
+that the money which was taken from the Nabob of Oude should be carried
+to his account. These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee of
+Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved by the Court of
+Directors, but never were sent out to India. However, something was
+sent, but miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings never
+answered it, or gave them any explanation whatever. He now, being
+prepared for his departure from Calcutta, and having finished all his
+other business, went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now we cannot
+follow him. He returned in great disgust to Calcutta, and soon after set
+sail for England, without ever giving the Directors one word of the
+explanation which he had so often promised, and they had repeatedly
+asked.
+
+We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where you will suppose some
+satisfactory account of all these matters would be obtained from him.
+One would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he would have been a
+little quickened by a menace, as he expresses it, which had been thrown
+out against him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would be made
+into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive of the same thing,
+thought it good gently to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom
+and how we do not know, that he ought to give some explanation of these
+accounts. This produced a letter which I believe in the business of the
+whole world cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his parallel
+in this. Never did inventive folly, working upon conscious guilt, and
+throwing each other totally in confusion, ever produce such a false,
+fraudulent, prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given to
+you.
+
+You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the country, on the Ganges:
+now you see him at the waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his
+letter from that place to comprehend the substance of all his former
+letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity, fraud, and nonsense
+contained in the whole of them. Here it is, and your Lordships will
+suffer it to be read. I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that
+it has been the most difficult of all things to explain, but much more
+difficult to make pleasant and not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued
+through all its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most
+painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication, so there is
+nothing that more calls for the attention, the patience, the vigilance,
+and the scrutiny of an exact court of justice. But as you have already
+had almost the whole of the man, do not think it too much to hear the
+rest in this letter from Cheltenham. It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of
+July, 1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire;[8] and it begins
+thus:--
+
+"Sir,--The Honorable Court of Directors, in their general letter to
+Bengal by the 'Surprise,' dated the 16th of March, 1784, were pleased to
+express their desire that I should inform them of the periods when each
+sum of the presents mentioned in my address of the 22d May, 1782, was
+received,--what were my motives for withholding the several receipts
+from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors,--and
+what were my reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums, and for
+paying other sums into the treasury as deposits, on my own account."
+
+I wish your Lordships to pause a moment. Here is a letter written in
+July, 1785. You see that from the 29th of December [November?], 1780,
+till that time, during which interval, though convinced in his own
+conscience and though he had declared his own opinion of the necessity
+of giving a full explanation of these money transactions, he had been
+imposing upon the Directors false and prevaricating accounts of them,
+they were never able to obtain a full disclosure from him.
+
+He goes on:--"I have been kindly apprised that the information required
+as above is yet expected from me. I hope that the circumstances of my
+past situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for having thus
+long withheld it. The fact is, that I was not at the Presidency when the
+'Surprise' arrived; and when I returned to it, my time and attention
+were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my final departure from it, by
+a variety of other more important occupations, of which, Sir, I may
+safely appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion
+contributed by myself of the volumes which compose our Consultations of
+that period,"--
+
+These Consultations, my Lords, to which he appeals, form matter of one
+of the charges that the Commons have brought against Mr.
+Hastings,--namely, a fraudulent attempt to ruin certain persons employed
+in subordinate situations under him, for the purpose, by intruding
+himself into their place, of secretly carrying on his own transactions.
+These volumes of Consultations were written to justify that act.
+
+He next says,--"The submission which my respect would have enjoined me
+to pay to the command imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps
+from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it
+had left on my mind, that it was rather intended as a reprehension for
+something which had given offence in my report of the original
+transaction than an expression of any want of a further elucidation of
+it."
+
+Permit me to make a few remarks upon this extraordinary passage. A
+letter is written to him, containing a repetition of the request which
+had been made a thousand times before, and with which he had as often
+promised to comply. And here he says, "It was lost to my recollection."
+Observe his memory: he can forget the command, but he has an obscure
+recollection that he thought it a reprehension rather than a demand! Now
+a reprehension is a stronger mode of demand. When I say to a servant,
+"Why have you not given me the account which I have so often asked for?"
+is he to answer, "The reason I have not given it is because I thought
+you were railing at and abusing me"?
+
+He goes on:--"I will now endeavor to reply to the different questions
+which have been stated to me, in as explicit a manner as I am able. To
+such information as I can give the Honorable Court is fully entitled;
+and where that shall prove defective, I will point out the only means by
+which it may be rendered more complete."
+
+In order that your Lordships may thoroughly enter into the spirit of
+this letter, I must request that you will observe how handsomely and
+kindly these tools of Directors have expressed themselves to him, and
+that even their baseness and subserviency to him were not able to draw
+from him anything that could be satisfactory to his enemies: for as to
+these his friends, he cares but little about satisfying them, though
+they call upon him in consequence of his own promise; and this he calls
+a reprehension. They thus express themselves:--"Although it is not our
+intention to express any doubt of the integrity of the
+Governor-General,--on the contrary, after having received the presents,
+we cannot avoid expressing our approbation of his conduct in bringing
+them to the credit of the Company,--yet we must confess the statement of
+those transactions appears to us in many points so unintelligible, that
+we feel ourselves under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General
+for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily made to us. We
+therefore desire to be informed of the different periods when each sum
+was received, and what were the Governor-General's motives for
+withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council and
+of the Court of Directors, and what were his reasons for taking bonds
+for part of these sums and paying other sums into the treasury as
+deposits upon his own account." Such is their demand, and this is what
+his memory furnishes as nothing but a reprehension.
+
+He then proceeds:--"First, I believe I can affirm with certainty that
+the several sums mentioned in the account transmitted with my letter
+above mentioned were received at or within a very few days of the dates
+which are affixed to them in the account. But as this contains only the
+gross sums, and each of these was received in different payments, though
+at no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign a great degree
+of accuracy to the account."--Your Lordships see, that, after all, he
+declares he cannot make his account accurate. He further adds, "Perhaps
+the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient"--that is, this
+explanation, namely, that he can give none--"for any purpose to which
+their inquiry was directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave
+to refer, for a more minute information, and for the means of making any
+investigation which they may think it proper to direct, respecting the
+particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your
+accountant-general, who was privy to every process of it, and possesses,
+as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only account that
+I ever kept of it."
+
+Here is a man who of his bribe accounts cannot give an account in the
+country where they are carried on. When you call upon him in Bengal, he
+cannot give the account, because he is in Bengal; when he comes to
+England, he cannot give the account here, because his accounts are left
+in Bengal. Again, he keeps no accounts himself, but his accounts are in
+Bengal, in the hands of somebody else: to him he refers, and we shall
+see what that reference produced.
+
+"In this, each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically inserted, with
+the name of the person by whom it was made; and I shall write to him to
+desire that he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still in
+being and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect
+concerning it."--Here are accounts kept for the Company, and yet he does
+not know whether they are in existence anywhere.
+
+"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."
+
+You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in the banian language, a
+_painche_, in English, a _screw_. It is a puzzled and studied involution
+of a period, framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and the
+detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better exemplified than in
+this sentence: "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."
+Observe, that he says, not _facts stated_, but _facts implied in the
+report_. And of what was this to be a report? Of things which the
+Directors declared they did not understand. And then the inferences
+which are to follow these implied facts are to follow them--But how?
+_With a strong probability_. If you have a mind to study this Oriental
+figure of rhetoric, the _painche_, here it is for you in its most
+complete perfection. No rhetorician ever gave an example of any figure
+of oratory that can match this.
+
+But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that,
+in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's
+accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and
+afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or
+with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all,
+which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those
+sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run
+mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do you
+call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could
+not give you them? I cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating
+to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you
+may learn something from them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr.
+Larkins for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing this with his
+other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of
+fraud and concealment to cover his peculation. He tells them,--"I have
+said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the
+Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these
+was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense
+of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia,
+under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly
+apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December
+[November?], 1780." He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he
+received it: we have found it out by other collateral means.--"The other
+two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made
+public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it.
+The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every
+pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I
+could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized
+them."--Allowable means of receiving bribes! for such I shall prove them
+to be in the particular instances.--"But neither could it occur to me as
+necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid that I could thus
+procure; nor do I know how I could have stated it without appearing to
+court favor by an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the chance
+of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion
+of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my
+station, to which they might have had an equal claim."
+
+Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for many years, he does
+find out his motive, which he could not verify at the time,--namely,
+that, if he let his colleagues know that he was receiving bribes, and
+gaining the glory of receiving them, they might take it into their heads
+likewise to have their share in the same glory, as they were joined in
+the same commission, enjoyed the same powers, and were subject to the
+same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous in Mr. Hastings, not
+behaving like a good, fair colleague in office, not to let them know
+that he was going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive
+them of their share in the glory of it: but they were grovelling
+creatures, who thought that keeping clean hands was some virtue.--"Well,
+but you have applied some of these bribes to your own benefit: why did
+you give no account of those bribes?" "I did not," he says, "because it
+might have excited the envy of my colleagues." To be sure, if he was
+receiving bribes for his own benefit, and they not receiving such
+bribes, and if they had a liking to that kind of traffic, it is a good
+ground of envy, that a matter which ought to be in common among them
+should be confined to Mr. Hastings, and he therefore did well to conceal
+it; and on the other hand, if we suppose him to have taken them, as he
+pretends, for the Company's use, in order not to excite a jealousy in
+his colleagues for being left out of this meritorious service, to which
+they had an equal claim, he did well to take bonds for what ought to be
+brought to the Company's account. These are reasons applicable to his
+colleagues, who sat with him at the same board,--Mr. Macpherson, Mr.
+Stables, Mr. Wheler, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis:
+he was afraid of exciting their envy or their jealousy.
+
+You will next see another reason, and an extraordinary one it is, which
+he gives for concealing these bribes from his inferiors. But I must
+first tell your Lordships, what, till the proof is brought before you,
+you will take on credit,--indeed, it is on his credit,--that, when he
+formed the Committee of Revenue, he bound them by a solemn oath, "not,
+under any name or pretence whatever, to take from any zemindar, farmer,
+person concerned in the revenue, or any other, any gift, gratuity,
+allowance, or reward whatever, or anything beyond their salary"; and
+this is the oath to which he alludes. Now his reason for concealing his
+bribes from his inferiors, this Committee, under these false and
+fraudulent bonds, he states thus:--"I should have deemed it particularly
+dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a
+certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to
+my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them: I was
+therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it,
+which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the
+money to be brought to my own house, or that of any person known to be
+in trust for me."
+
+My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that he knew the practice of
+taking money from these people was a thing dishonorable in itself. "I
+should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own
+use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had
+interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by
+oath not to receive them." He held it particularly dishonorable to
+receive them; he had bound others by an oath not to receive them: but he
+received them himself; and why does he conceal it? "Why, because," says
+he, "if the suspicion came upon me, the dishonor would fall upon my
+pate." Why did he, by an oath, bind his inferiors not to take these
+bribes? "Why, because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and because
+it would be mischievous and ruinous to the Company's affairs to suffer
+them to take bribes." Why, then, did he take them himself? It was ten
+times more ruinous, that he, who was at the head of the Company's
+government, and had bound up others so strictly, should practise the
+same himself; and "therefore," says he, "I was more than ordinarily
+cautious." What! to avoid it? "No; to carry it on in so clandestine and
+private a manner as might secure me from the suspicion of that which I
+know to be detestable, and bound others up from practising."
+
+We shall prove that the kind of men from whom he interdicted his
+Committee to receive bribes were the identical men from whom he received
+them himself. If it was good for him, it was good for them to be
+permitted these means of extorting; and if it ought at all to be
+practised, they ought to be admitted to extort for the good of the
+Company. Rajah Nobkissin was one of the men from whom he interdicted
+them to receive bribes, and from whom he received a bribe for his own
+use. But he says he concealed it from them, because he thought great
+mischief might happen even from their suspicion of it, and lest they
+should thereby be inclined themselves to practise it, and to break their
+oaths.
+
+You take it, then, for granted that he really concealed it from them? No
+such thing. His principal confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr.
+Croftes, who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue, and whom
+he had made to swear not to take bribes: he is the confidant, and the
+very receiver, as we shall prove to your Lordships. What will your
+Lordships think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood, that
+he did it to conceal it from these men, when one of them was his
+principal confidant and agent in the transaction? What will you think of
+his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it? He
+ought to have avoided the crime, and the suspicion would take care of
+itself.
+
+"For these reasons," he says, "I caused it to be transported immediately
+to the treasury. There I well knew, Sir, it could not be received,
+without being passed to some credit; and this could only be done by
+entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The first was the least liable to
+reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the
+second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant. Possibly it
+was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was
+the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction
+itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed."
+
+My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false or groundless: it
+is completely fallacious in every part. The first sum, he says, was
+entered as a loan, the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because,
+when you enter moneys of this kind, you must enter them under some name,
+some head of account; "and I entered them," he says, "under these,
+because otherwise there was no entering them at all." Is this true? Will
+he stick to this? I shall desire to know from his learned counsel, some
+time or other, whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your
+Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which he brought under
+a regular official head, namely, _durbar charges_; and there is no
+reason why he should not have brought these under the same head.
+Therefore what he says, that there is no other way of entering them but
+as loans and deposits, is not true. He next says, that in the second sum
+there was no reason for concealment, because it was avowed. But that
+false deposit was as much concealment as the false loan, for he entered
+that money as his own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any money to
+the Company's account, he knew how to do it, for he had been accustomed
+to enter it under a general name, called durbar charges,--a name which,
+in its extent at least, was very much his own invention, and which, as
+he gives no account of those charges, is as large and sufficient to
+cover any fraudulent expenditure in the account as, one would think, any
+person could wish. You see him, then, first guessing one thing, then
+another,--first giving this reason, then another; at last, however, he
+seems to be satisfied that he has hit upon the true reason of his
+conduct.
+
+Now let us open the next paragraph, and see what it is.--"Although I am
+firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I
+will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the
+remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain
+that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the
+principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it. Of this I
+am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the
+receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of
+the Court of Directors. They had answered my purpose of public utility,
+and I had almost dismissed them from my remembrance."
+
+My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing account which he
+gives here, that several of these sums he meant to conceal forever, even
+from the knowledge of the Directors. Look back to his letter of 22d May,
+1782, and his letter of the 16th of December, and in them he tells you
+that he might have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to
+conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable so to do; that his
+conscience would have been wounded, if he had done it; and that he was
+afraid it would be thought that this discovery was brought from him in
+consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries. Here he says of a discovery
+which he values himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it
+should be attributed to arise from motives of fear. Now, at last, he
+tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time when he had just cause to dread
+the strict account to which he is called this day, first, that he cannot
+tell whether any one motive which he assigns, either in this letter or
+in the former, were his real motive or not; that he does not know
+whether he has not invented them since, in consequence of a train of
+meditation upon what he might have done or might have said; and, lastly,
+he says, contrary to all his former declarations, "that he had never
+meant nor could give the Directors the least notice of them at all, as
+they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed them from his
+remembrance." "I intended," he says, "always to keep them secret, though
+I have declared to you solemnly, over and over again, that I did not. I
+do not care how you discovered them; I have forgotten them; I have
+dismissed them from my remembrance." Is this the way in which money is
+to be received and accounted for?
+
+He then proceeds thus:--"But when fortune threw a sum of money in my way
+of a magnitude which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy
+of my situation at the time I received it made me more circumspect of
+appearances, I chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily
+and generally: hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity
+of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of
+which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession. I promised
+to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of
+it; and, in the performance of my promise, I thought it consistent with
+it to add to the amount all the former appropriations of the same kind:
+my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution which
+might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally
+attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards
+known, I might be asked what were my motives for withholding a part of
+these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of Directors and
+informing them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up every doubt."
+
+I am almost ashamed to remark upon the tergiversations and
+prevarications perpetually ringing the changes in this declaration. He
+would not have discovered this hundred thousand pounds, if he could have
+concealed it: he would have discovered it, lest malicious persons should
+be telling tales of it. He has a system of concealment: he never
+discovers anything, but when he thinks it can be forced from him. He
+says, indeed, "I could conceal these things forever, but my conscience
+would not give me leave": but it is guilt, and not honesty of
+conscience, that always prompts him. At one time it is the malice of
+people and the fear of misrepresentation which induced him to make the
+disclosure; and he values himself on the precaution which this fear had
+suggested to him. At another time it is the magnitude of the sum which
+produced this effect: nothing but the impossibility of concealing it
+could possibly have made him discover it. This hundred thousand pounds
+he declares he would have concealed, if he could; and yet he values
+himself upon the discovery of it. Oh, my Lords, I am afraid that sums of
+much greater magnitude have not been discovered at all! Your Lordships
+now see some of the artifices of this letter. You see the variety of
+styles he adopts, and how he turns himself into every shape and every
+form. But, after all, do you find any clear discovery? do you find any
+satisfactory answer to the Directors' letter? does he once tell you from
+whom he received the money? does he tell you for what he received it,
+what the circumstances of the persons giving it were, or any explanation
+whatever of his mode of accounting for it? No: and here, at last, after
+so many years' litigation, he is called to account for his
+prevaricating, false accounts in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.
+
+His explanation of his conduct relative to the bonds now only remains
+for your Lordships' consideration. Before he left Calcutta, in July,
+1784 [1781?], he says, when he was going upon a service which he thought
+a service of danger, he indorsed the false bonds which he had taken from
+the Company, declaring them to be none of his. You will observe that
+these bonds had been in his hands from the 9th or 15th of January (I am
+not quite sure of the exact date) to the day when he went upon this
+service, some time in the month of July, 1784 [1781?]. This service he
+had formerly declared he did not apprehend to be a service of danger;
+but he found it to be so after: it was in anticipation of that danger
+that he made this attestation and certificate upon the bonds. But who
+ever saw them? Mr. Larkins saw them, says he: "I gave them Mr. Larkins."
+We will show you hereafter that Mr. Larkins deserves no credit in this
+business,--that honor binds him not to discover the secrets of Mr.
+Hastings. But why did he not deliver them up entirely, when he was going
+upon that service? for all pretence of concealment in the business was
+now at an end, as we shall prove. Why did he not cancel these bonds?
+Why keep them at all? Why not enter truly the state of the account in
+the Company's records? "But I indorsed them," he says. "Did you deliver
+them so indorsed into the treasury?" "No, I delivered them indorsed into
+the hands of my bribe-broker and agent." "But why not destroy them, or
+give them up to the Company, and say you were paid, which would have
+been the only truth in this transaction? Why did you not indorse them
+before? Why not, during the long period of so many years, cancel them?"
+No, he kept them to the very day when he was going from Calcutta, and
+had made a declaration that they were not his. Never before, upon any
+account, had they appeared; and though the Committee of the House of
+Commons, in the Eleventh Report, had remarked upon all these scandalous
+proceedings and prevarications, yet he was not stimulated, even then, to
+give up these bonds. He held them in his hands till the time when he was
+preparing for his departure from Calcutta, in spite of the Directors, in
+spite of the Parliament, in spite of the cries of his own conscience, in
+a matter which was now grown public, and would knock doubly upon his
+reputation and conduct. He then declares they are not for his own use,
+but for the Company's service. But were they then cancelled? I do not
+find a trace of their being cancelled. In this letter of the 17th of
+January, 1785, he says with regard to these bonds, "The following sums
+were paid into the treasury, and bonds granted for the same in the name
+of the Governor-General, in whose possession the bonds remain, with a
+declaration upon each, indorsed and signed by him, that he has no claim
+on the Company for the amount either of principal or interest, no part
+of the latter having been received."
+
+To the account of the 22d of May, of the indorsement, is added the
+declaration upon oath. But why any man need to declare upon oath that
+the money which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from another
+person is not his is the most extraordinary thing in the world. If he
+had a mind to have it placed to his credit as his own, then an oath
+would be necessary; but in this case any one would believe him upon his
+word. He comes, however, and says, "This is indorsed upon oath." Oath!
+before what magistrate? In whose possession were the bonds? Were they
+given up? There is no trace of that upon the record, and it stands for
+him to prove that they were ever given up, and in any hands but Mr.
+Larkins's and his own. So here are the bonds, begun in obscurity and
+ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, corruption to
+corruption, and fraud to fraud. This is all we see of these bonds, till
+Mr. Larkins, to whom he writes some letter concerning them which does
+not appear, is called to read a funeral sermon over them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Lords, I am come now near the period of this class of Mr. Hastings's
+bribes. I am a little exhausted. There are many circumstances that might
+make me wish not to delay this business by taking up another day at your
+Lordships' bar, in order to go through this long, intricate scene of
+corruption. But my strength now fails me. I hope within a very short
+time, to-morrow or the next court-day, to finish it, and to go directly
+into evidence, as I long much to do, to substantiate the charge; but it
+was necessary that the evidence should be explained. You have heard as
+much of the drama as I could go through: bear with my weakness a little:
+Mr. Larkins's letter will be the epilogue to it. I have already incurred
+the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by bringing home to
+him the proof of his crimes, and to display them in all their force and
+turpitude. It is my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to my
+heart.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth Charges,
+Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+
+FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--When I had the honor last to address you from this place, I
+endeavored to press this position upon your minds, and to fortify it by
+the example of the proceedings of Mr. Hastings,--that obscurity and
+inaccuracies in a matter of account constituted a just presumption of
+fraud. I showed, from his own letters, that his accounts were confused
+and inaccurate. I am ready, my Lords, to admit that there are situations
+in which a minister in high office may use concealment: it may be his
+duty to use concealment from the enemies of his masters; it may be
+prudent to use concealment from his inferiors in the service. It will
+always be suspicious to use concealment from his colleagues and
+coördinates in office; but when, in a money transaction, any man uses
+concealment with regard to them to whom the money belongs, he is guilty
+of a fraud. My Lords, I have shown you that Mr. Hastings kept no
+account, by his own confession, of the moneys that he had privately
+taken, as he pretends, for the Company's service, and we have but too
+much reason to presume for his own. We have shown you, my Lords, that he
+has not only no accounts, but no memory; we have shown that he does not
+even understand his own motives; that, when called upon to recollect
+them, he begs to guess at them; and that as his memory is to be supplied
+by his guess, so he has no confidence in his guesses. He at first finds,
+after a lapse of about a year and a half, or somewhat less, that he
+cannot recollect what his motives were to certain actions which upon the
+very face of them appeared fraudulent. He is called to an account some
+years after, to explain what they were, and he makes a just reflection
+upon it,--namely, that, as his memory did not enable him to find out his
+own motive at the former time, it is not to be expected that it would be
+clearer a year after. Your Lordships will, however, recollect, that in
+the Cheltenham letter, which is made of no perishable stuff, he begins
+again to guess; but after he has guessed and guessed again, and after he
+has gone through all the motives he can possibly assign for the action,
+he tells you he does not know whether those were his real motives, or
+whether he has not invented them since.
+
+In that situation the accounts of the Company were left with regard to
+very great sums which passed through Mr. Hastings's hands, and for which
+he, instead of giving his masters credit, took credit to himself, and,
+being their debtor, as he confesses himself to be at that time, took a
+security for that debt as if he had been their creditor. This required
+explanation. Explanation he was called upon for, over and over again;
+explanation he did not give, and declared he could not give. He was
+called upon for it when in India: he had not leisure to attend to it
+there. He was called upon for it when in Europe: he then says he must
+send for it to India. With much prevarication, and much insolence too,
+he confesses himself guilty of falsifying the Company's accounts by
+making himself their creditor when he was their debtor, and giving false
+accounts of this false transaction. The Court of Directors was slow to
+believe him guilty; Parliament expressed a strong suspicion of his
+guilt, and wished for further information. Mr. Hastings about this time
+began to imagine his conscience to be a faithful and true
+monitor,--which it were well he had attended to upon many occasions, as
+it would have saved him his appearance here,--and it told him that he
+was in great danger from the Parliamentary inquiries that were going on.
+It was now to be expected that he would have been in haste to fulfil the
+promise which he had made in the Patna letter of the 20th of January,
+1782; and accordingly we find that about this time his first agent,
+Major Fairfax, was sent over to Europe, which agent entered himself at
+the India House, and appeared before the Committee of the House of
+Commons, as an agent expressly sent over to explain whatever might
+appear doubtful in his conduct. Major Fairfax, notwithstanding the
+character in which Mr. Hastings employed him, appeared to be but a
+letter-carrier: he had nothing to say: he gave them no information in
+the India House at all: to the Committee (I can speak with the clearness
+of a witness) he gave no satisfaction whatever. However, this agent
+vanished in a moment, in order to make way for another, more
+substantial, more efficient agent,--an agent perfectly known in this
+country,--an agent known by the name given to him by Mr. Hastings, who,
+like the princes of the East, gives titles: he calls him an incomparable
+agent; and by that name he is very well known to your Lordships and the
+world. This agent, Major Scott, who I believe was here prior to the
+time of Major Fairfax's arrival in the character of an agent, and for
+the very same purposes, was called before the Committee, and examined,
+point by point, article by article, upon all that obscure enumeration of
+bribes which the Court of Directors declare they did not understand; but
+he declared that he could speak nothing with regard to any of these
+transactions, and that he had got no instructions to explain any part of
+them. There was but one circumstance which in the course of his
+examination we drew from him,--namely, that one of these articles,
+entered in the account of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received
+from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing. He produced an extract of
+a letter relative to it, which your Lordships in the course of this
+trial may see, and which will lead us into a further and more minute
+inquiry on that head; but when that committee made their report in 1783,
+not one single article had been explained to Parliament, not one
+explained to the Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr.
+Hastings had never thought proper to communicate to the East India
+Company, either by himself, nor, as far as we could find out, by his
+agent; nor was it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn out
+from him by a long examination in the Committee of the House of Commons.
+And thus, notwithstanding the letters he had written and the agents he
+employed, he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to give his employers
+no satisfaction at all. What is curious in this proceeding is, that Mr.
+Hastings, all the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the credit
+of a discovery. Your Lordships have seen what his discovery is; but Mr.
+Hastings, among his other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an
+effectual method of concealment through discovery. I will venture to
+say, that, whatever suspicions there might have been of Mr. Hastings's
+bribes, there was more effectual concealment in regard to every
+circumstance respecting them in that discovery than if he had kept a
+total silence. Other means of discovery might have been found, but this,
+standing in the way, prevented the employment of those means.
+
+Things continued in this state till the time of the letter from
+Cheltenham. The Cheltenham letter declared that Mr. Hastings knew
+nothing of the matter,--that he had brought with him no accounts to
+England upon the subject; and though it appears by this very letter that
+he had with him at Cheltenham (if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a
+great deal of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of the
+22d of May with him, yet any account that could elucidate that letter he
+declared that he had not; but he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India,
+whom your Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly
+apprised of all that transaction. Your Lordships will observe that Mr.
+Hastings has all his faculties, some way or other, in deposit: one
+person can speak to his motives; another knows his fortune better than
+himself; to others he commits the sentimental parts of his defence; to
+Mr. Larkins he commits his memory. We shall see what a trustee of memory
+Mr. Larkins is, and how far he answers the purpose which might be
+expected, when appealed to by a man who has no memory himself, or who
+has left it on the other side of the water, and who leaves it to another
+to explain for him accounts which he ought to have kept himself, and
+circumstances which ought to be deposited in his own memory.
+
+This Cheltenham letter, I believe, originally became known, as far as I
+can recollect, to the House of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Hastings's
+own agent: I do not like to be positive upon that point, but I think
+that was the first appearance of it. It appeared likewise in public: for
+it was thought so extraordinary and laborious a performance, by the
+writer or his friends, (as indeed it is,) that it might serve to open a
+new source of eloquence in the kingdom, and consequently was printed, I
+believe, at the desire of the parties themselves. But however it became
+known, it raised an extreme curiosity in the public to hear, when Mr.
+Hastings could say nothing, after so many years, of his own concerns and
+his own affairs, what satisfaction Mr. Larkins at last would give
+concerning them. This letter was directed to Mr. Devaynes, Chairman of
+the Court of Directors. It does not appear that the Court of Directors
+wrote anything to India in consequence of it, or that they directed this
+satisfactory account of the business should be given them; but some
+private communications passed between Mr. Hastings, or his agents, and
+Mr. Larkins. There was a general expectation upon this occasion, I
+believe, in the House of Commons and in the nation at large, to know
+what would become of the portentous inquiry. Mr. Hastings has always
+contrived to have half the globe between question and answer: when he
+was in India, the question went to him, and then he adjourned his answer
+till he came to England; and when he came to England, it was necessary
+his answer should arrive from India; so that there is no manner of doubt
+that all time was given for digesting, comparing, collating, and making
+up a perfect memory upon the occasion.
+
+But, my Lords, Mr. Larkins, who has in custody Mr. Hastings's memory, no
+small part of his conscience, and all his accounts, did, at last, in
+compliance with Mr. Hastings's desire, think proper to send an account.
+Then, at last, we may expect light. Where are we to look for accounts,
+but from an accountant-general? Where are they to be met with, unless
+from him? And accordingly, in that night of perplexity into which Mr.
+Hastings's correspondence had plunged them, men looked up to the dawning
+of the day which was to follow that star, the little Lucifer, which with
+his lamp was to dispel the shades of night, and give us some sort of
+light into this dark, mysterious transaction. At last the little lamp
+appeared, and was laid on the table of this House of Commons, on the
+motion of Mr. Hastings's friends: for we did not know of its arrival. It
+arrives, with all the intelligence, all the memory, accuracy, and
+clearness which Mr. Larkins can furnish for Mr. Hastings upon a business
+that before was nothing but mystery and confusion. The account is
+called,--
+
+_"Copy of the particulars of the dates on which the component parts of
+sundry sums included in the account of sums received on the account of
+the Honorable Company by the Governor-General, or paid to their Treasury
+by his order, and applied to their service, were received for Mr.
+Hastings, and paid to the Sub-Treasurer."_
+
+The letter from Mr. Larkins consisted of two parts: first, what was so
+much wanted, an account; next, what was wanted most of all to such an
+account as he sent, a comment and explanation. The account consisted of
+two members: one gave an account of several detached bribes that Mr.
+Hastings had received within the course of about a year and a half; and
+the other, of a great bribe which he had received in one gross sum of
+one hundred thousand pounds from the Nabob of Oude. It appeared to us,
+upon looking into these accounts, that there was some geography, a
+little bad chronology, but nothing else in the first: neither the
+persons who took the money, nor the persons from whom it was taken, nor
+the ends for which it was given, nor any other circumstances are
+mentioned.
+
+The first thing we saw was _Dinagepore_. I believe you know this piece
+of geography,--that it is one of the provinces of the kingdom of Bengal.
+We then have a long series of months, with a number of sums added to
+them; and in the end it is said, that on the 18th and 19th of Asin,
+(meaning part of September and part of October,) were paid to Mr.
+Croftes two lac of rupees; and then remains one lac, which was taken
+from a sum of three lac six thousand nine hundred and seventy-three
+rupees. After we had waited for Mr. Hastings's own account, after it had
+been pursued through a series of correspondence in vain, after his
+agents had come to England to explain it, this is the explanation that
+your Lordships have got of this first article, Dinagepore. Not the
+person paid to, not the person paying, are mentioned, nor any other
+circumstance, except the signature, _G.G.S._: this might serve for
+_George Gilbert Sanders_, or any other name you please; and seeing
+_Croftes_ above it, you might imagine it was an Englishman. And this,
+which I call a geographical and a chronological account, is the only
+account we have. Mr. Larkins, upon the mere face of the account, sadly
+disappoints us; and I will venture to say that in matters of account
+Bengal book-keeping is as remote from good book-keeping as the Bengal
+_painches_ are remote from all the rules of good composition. We have,
+however, got some light: namely, that one G.G.S. has paid some money to
+Mr. Croftes for some purpose, but from whom we know not, nor where; that
+there is a place called Dinagepore; and that Mr. Hastings received some
+money from somebody in Dinagepore.
+
+The next article is _Patna_. Your Lordships are not so ill acquainted
+with the geography of India as not to know that there is such a place as
+Patna, nor so ill acquainted with the chronology of it as not to know
+that there are three months called Baisakh, Asin, Chait. Here was paid
+to Mr. Croftes two lac of rupees, and there was left a balance of about
+two more. But though you learn with regard to the province of Dinagepore
+that there is a balance to be discharged by G.G.S., yet with regard to
+Patna we have not even a G.G.S.: we have no sort of light whatever to
+know through whose hands the money passed, nor any glimpse of light
+whatever respecting it.
+
+You may expect to be made amends in the other province, called _Nuddea_,
+where Mr. Hastings had received a considerable sum of money. There is
+the very same darkness: not a word from whom received, by whom received,
+or any other circumstance, but that it was paid into the hands of Mr.
+Hastings's _white banian_, as he was commonly called in that country,
+into the hands of Mr. Croftes, who is his white agent in receiving
+bribes: for he was very far from having but one.
+
+After all this inquiry, after so many severe animadversions from the
+House of Commons, after all those reiterated letters from the
+Directors, after an application to Mr. Hastings himself, when you are
+hunting to get at some explanation of the proceedings mentioned in the
+letter of the month of May, 1782, you receive here by Mr. Larkins's
+letter, which is dated the 5th of August, 1786, this account, which, to
+be sure, gives an amazing light into this business: it is a letter for
+which it was worth sending to Bengal, worth waiting for with all that
+anxious expectation with which men wait for great events. Upon the face
+of the account there is not one single word which can tend to illustrate
+the matter: he sums up the whole, and makes out that there was received
+five lac and fifty thousand rupees, that is to say, 55,000_l._, out of
+the sum of nine lac and fifty thousand engaged to be paid: namely,--
+
+From Dinagepore       4,00,000
+From Nuddea           1,50,000
+And from Patna        4,00,000
+                      --------
+                      9,50,000
+                      --------
+                    Or £95,000
+
+Now you have got full light! _Cabooleat_ signifies a contract, or an
+agreement; and this agreement was, to pay Mr. Hastings, as one should
+think, certain sums of money,--it does not say from whom, but only that
+such a sum of money was paid, and that there remains such a balance.
+When you come and compare the money received by Mr. Croftes with these
+cabooleats, you find that the cabooleats amount to 95,000_l._, and that
+the receipt has been about 55,000_l._, and that upon the face of this
+account there is 40,000_l._ somewhere or other unaccounted for. There
+never was such a mode of account-keeping, except in the new system of
+this bribe exchequer.
+
+Your Lordships will now see, from this luminous, satisfactory, and clear
+account, which could come from no other than a great accountant and a
+great financier, establishing some new system of finance, and
+recommending it to the world as superior to those old-fashioned foolish
+establishments, the Exchequer and Bank of England, what lights are
+received from Mr. Hastings.
+
+However, it does so happen that from these obscure hints we have been
+able to institute examinations which have discovered such a mass of
+fraud, guilt, corruption, and oppression as probably never before
+existed since the beginning of the world; and in that darkness we hope
+and trust the diligence and zeal of the House of Commons will find light
+sufficient to make a full discovery of his base crimes. We hope and
+trust, that, after all his concealments, and though he appear resolved
+to die in the last dike of prevarication, all his artifices will not be
+able to secure him from the siege which the diligence of the House of
+Commons has laid to his corruptions.
+
+Your Lordships will remark, in a paragraph, which, though it stands
+last, is the first in principle, in Mr. Larkins's letter, that, having
+before given his comment, he perorates, as is natural upon such an
+occasion. This peroration, as is usual in perorations, is in favor of
+the parties speaking it, and _ad conciliandum auditorem_. "Conscious,"
+he says, "that the concern which I have had in these transactions needs
+neither an apology nor an excuse,"--that is rather extraordinary,
+too!--"and that I have in no action of my life sacrificed the duty and
+fidelity which I owed to my honorable employers either to the regard
+which I felt for another or to the advancement of my own fortune, I
+shall conclude this address, firmly relying upon the candor of those
+before whom it may be submitted for its being deemed a satisfactory as
+well as a circumstantial compliance with the requisition in conformity
+to which the information it affords has been furnished,"--meaning, as
+your Lordships will see in the whole course of the letter, that he had
+written it in compliance with the requisition and in conformity to the
+information he had been furnished with by Mr. Hastings,--"without which
+it would have been as base as dishonorable for me spontaneously to have
+afforded it: for, though the duty which every man owes to himself should
+render him incapable of making an assertion not strictly true, no man
+actuated either by virtuous or honorable sentiments could mistakenly
+apprehend, that, unless he betrayed the confidence reposed in him by
+another, he might be deemed deficient in fidelity to his employers."
+
+My Lords, here is, in my opinion, a discovery very well worthy your
+Lordships' attention; here is the accountant-general of the Company, who
+declares, and fixes it as a point of honor, that he would not have made
+a discovery so important to them, if Mr. Hastings himself had not
+authorized him to make it: a point to which he considers himself bound
+by his honor to adhere. Let us see what becomes of us, when the
+principle of honor is so debauched and perverted. A principle of honor,
+as long as it is connected with virtue, adds no small efficacy to its
+operation, and no small brilliancy and lustre to its appearance: but
+honor, the moment that it becomes unconnected with the duties of
+official function, with the relations of life, and the eternal and
+immutable rules of morality, and appears in its substance alien to them,
+changes its nature, and, instead of justifying a breach of duty,
+aggravates all its mischiefs to an almost infinite degree; by the
+apparent lustre of the surface, it hides from you the baseness and
+deformity of the ground. Here is Mr. Hastings's agent, Mr. Larkins, the
+Company's general accountant, prefers his attachment to Mr. Hastings to
+his duty to the Company. Instead of the account which he ought to give
+to them in consequence of the trust reposed in him, he thinks himself
+bound by honor to Mr. Hastings, if Mr. Hastings had not called for that
+explanation, not to have given it: so that, whatever obscurity is in
+this explanation, it is because Mr. Hastings did not authorize or
+require him to give a clearer. Here is a principle of treacherous
+fidelity, of perfidious honor, of the faith of conspirators against
+their masters, the faith of robbers against the public, held up against
+the duty of an officer in a public situation. You see how they are bound
+to one another, and how they give their fidelity to keep the secrets of
+one another, to prevent the Directors having a true knowledge of their
+affairs; and I am sure, if you do not destroy this honor of conspirators
+and this faith of robbers, that there will be no other honor and no
+other fidelity among the servants in India. Mr. Larkins, your Lordships
+see, adheres to the principle of secrecy.
+
+You will next remark that Mr. Hastings had as many bribe-factors as
+bribes. There was confidence to be reposed in each of them, and not one
+of these men appears to be in the confidence of another. You will find
+in this letter the policy, the frame, and constitution of this new
+exchequer. Mr. Croftes seems to have known things which Mr. Larkins did
+not; Mr. Larkins knew things which Gunga Govind Sing did not; Gunga
+Govind Sing knew things which none of the rest of the confederates knew.
+Cantoo Baboo, who appears in this letter as a principal actor, was in a
+secret which Mr. Larkins did not know; it appears likewise, that there
+was a Persian moonshee in a secret of which Cantoo Baboo was ignorant;
+and it appears that Mr. Palmer was in the secret of a transaction not
+intrusted to any of the rest. Such is the labyrinth of this practical
+_painche_, or screw, that, if, for instance, you were endeavoring to
+trace backwards some transaction through Major Palmer, you would be
+stopped there, and must go back again; for it had begun with Cantoo
+Baboo. If in another you were to penetrate into the dark recess of the
+black breast of Cantoo Baboo, you could not go further; for it began
+with Gunga Govind Sing. If you pierce the breast of Gunga Govind Sing,
+you are again stopped; a Persian moonshee was the confidential agent. If
+you get beyond this, you find Mr. Larkins knew something which the
+others did not; and at last you find Mr. Hastings did not put entire
+confidence in any of them. You will see, by this letter, that he kept
+his accounts in all colors, black, white, and mezzotinto; that he kept
+them in all languages,--in Persian, in Bengalee, and in a language
+which, I believe, is neither Persian nor Bengalee, nor any other known
+in the world, but a language in which Mr. Hastings found it proper to
+keep his accounts and to transact his business. The persons carrying on
+the accounts are Mr. Larkins, an Englishman, Cantoo Baboo, a Gentoo, and
+a Persian moonshee, probably a Mahometan. So all languages, all
+religions, all descriptions of men are to keep the account of these
+bribes, and to make out this valuable account which Mr. Larkins gave
+you!
+
+Let us now see how far the memory, observation, and knowledge of the
+persons referred to can supply the want of them in Mr. Hastings. These
+accounts come at last, though late, from Mr. Larkins, who, I will
+venture to say, let the banians boast what they will, has skill perhaps
+equal to the best of them: he begins by explaining to you something
+concerning the present of the ten lac. I wish your Lordships always to
+take Mr. Hastings's word, where it can be had,--or Mr. Larkins's, who
+was the representative of and memory-keeper to Mr. Hastings; and then I
+may perhaps take the liberty of making some observations upon it.
+
+
+_Extract of a Letter from William Larkins, Accountant-General of Bengal,
+to the Chairman of the East India Company, dated 5th August, 1786._
+
+"Mr. Hastings returned from Benares to Calcutta on the 5th February,
+1782. At that time I was wholly ignorant of the letter which on the 20th
+January he wrote from Patna to the Secret Committee of the Honorable
+the Court of Directors. The rough draught of this letter, in the
+handwriting of Major Palmer, is now in my possession. Soon after his
+arrival at the Presidency, he requested me to form the account of his
+receipts and disbursements, which you will find journalized in the
+280th, &c., and 307th pages of the Honorable Company's general books of
+the year 1781-2. My official situation as accountant-general had
+previously convinced me that Mr. Hastings could not have made the issues
+which were acknowledged as received from him by some of the paymasters
+of the army, unless he had obtained some such supply as that which he
+afterwards, viz., on the 22d May, 1782, made known to me, when I
+immediately suggested to him the necessity of his transmitting that
+account which accompanied his letter of that date, till when the promise
+contained in his letter of 20th January had entirely escaped his
+recollection."
+
+The first thing I would remark on this (and I believe your Lordships
+have rather gone before me in the remark) is, that Mr. Hastings came
+down to Calcutta on the 5th of February; that then, or a few days after,
+he calls to him his confidential and faithful friend, (not his official
+secretary, for he trusted none of his regular secretaries with these
+transactions,)--he calls him to help him to make out his accounts during
+his absence. You would imagine that at that time he trusted this man
+with his account. No such thing: he goes on with the accountant-general,
+accounting with him for money expended, without ever explaining to that
+accountant-general how that money came into his hands. Here, then, we
+have the accountant making out the account, and the person accounting.
+The accountant does not in any manner make an objection, and say, "Here
+you are giving me an account by which it appears that you have expended
+money, but you have not told me where you received it: how shall I make
+out a fair account of debtor and creditor between you and the Company?"
+He does no such thing. There lies a suspicion in his breast that Mr.
+Hastings must have taken some money in some irregular way, or he could
+not have made those payments. Mr. Larkins begins to suspect him. "Where
+did you lose this bodkin?" said one lady to another, upon a certain
+occasion. "Pray, Madam, where did you find it?" Mr. Hastings, at the
+very moment of his life when confidence was required, even when making
+up his accounts with his accountant, never told him one word of the
+matter. You see he had no confidence in Mr. Larkins. This makes out one
+of the propositions I want to impress upon your Lordships' minds, that
+no one man did he let into every part of his transactions: a material
+circumstance, which will help to lead your Lordships' judgment in
+forming your opinion upon many parts of this cause.
+
+You see that Mr. Larkins suspected him. Probably in consequence of those
+suspicions, or from some other cause, he at last told him, upon the 22d
+of May, 1782, (but why at that time, rather than at any other time, does
+not appear; and this we shall find very difficult to be accounted
+for,)--he told him that he had received a bribe from the Nabob of Oude,
+of 100,000_l._ He informs him of this on the 22d of May, which, when the
+accounts were making up, he conceals from him. And he communicates to
+him the rough draught of his letter to the Court of Directors, informing
+them that this business was not transacted by any known secretary of the
+Company, nor with the intervention of any interpreter of the Company,
+nor passed through any official channel whatever, but through a
+gentleman much in his confidence, his military secretary; and, as if
+receiving bribes, and receiving letters concerning them, and carrying on
+correspondence relative to them, was a part of military duty, the rough
+draught of this letter was in the hands of this military secretary. Upon
+the communication of the letter, it rushes all at once into the mind of
+Mr. Larkins, who knows Mr. Hastings's recollection, who knows what does
+and what does not escape it, and who had a memory ready to explode at
+Mr. Hastings's desire, "Good God!" says he, "you have promised the
+Directors an account of this business!"--a promise which Mr. Larkins
+assures the Directors, upon his word, had entirely escaped Mr.
+Hastings's recollection. Mr. Hastings, it seems, had totally forgotten
+the promise relative to the paltry sum of 100,000_l._ which he had made
+to the Court of Directors in the January before; he never once thought
+of it, no, not even when he was making up his accounts of that very
+identical sum, till the 22d of May. So that these persons answer for one
+another's bad memory: and you will see they have good reason. Mr.
+Hastings's want of recollection appears in things of some moment.
+However lightly he may regard the sum of 100,000_l._, which, considering
+the enormous sums he has received, I dare say he does,--for he totally
+forgot it, he knew nothing about it,--observe what sort of memory this
+registrar and accountant of such sums as 100,000_l._ has. In what
+confusion of millions must it be, that such sums can be lost to Mr.
+Hastings's recollection! However, at last it was brought to his
+recollection, and he thought that it was necessary to give some account
+of it. And who is the accountant whom he produces? His own memory is no
+accountant. He had dismissed the matter (as he happily expresses it in
+the Cheltenham letter) from his memory. Major Palmer is not the
+accountant. One is astonished that a man who had had 100,000_l._ in his
+hands, and laid it out, as he pretends, in the public service, has not a
+scrap of paper to show for it. No ordinary or extraordinary account is
+given of it. Well, what is to be done in such circumstances? He sends
+for a person whose name you have heard and will often hear of, the
+faithful Cantoo Baboo. This man comes to Mr. Larkins, and he reads to
+him (be so good as to remark the words) from a Bengal paper the account
+of the detached bribes. Your Lordships will observe that I have stated
+the receipt of a number of detached bribes, and a bribe in one great
+body: one, the great _corps d'armée_; the other, flying scouting bodies,
+which were only to be collected together by a skilful man who knew how
+to manage them, and regulate the motions of those wild and disorderly
+troops. When No. 2 was to be explained, Cantoo Baboo failed him; he was
+not worth a farthing as to any transaction that happened when Mr.
+Hastings was in the Upper Provinces, where though he was his faithful
+and constant attendant through the whole, yet he could give no account
+of it. Mr. Hastings's moonshee then reads three lines from a paper to
+Mr. Larkins. Now it is no way even insinuated that both the Bengal and
+Persian papers did not contain the account of other immense sums; and,
+indeed, from the circumstance of only three lines being read from the
+Persian paper, your Lordships will be able, in your own minds, to form
+some judgment upon this business.
+
+I shall now proceed with his letter of explanation. "The particulars,"
+he goes on to say, "of the paper No. 1 were read to me from a Bengal
+paper by Mr. Hastings's banian, Cantoo Baboo; and if I am not mistaken,
+the three first lines of that No. 2 were read over to me from a Persian
+paper by his moonshee. The translation of these particulars, made by me,
+was, as I verily believe, the first complete memorandum that he ever
+possessed of them in the English language; and I am confident, that, if
+I had not suggested to him the necessity of his taking this precaution,
+he would at this moment have been unable to have afforded any such
+information concerning them."
+
+Now, my Lords, if he had not got, on the intimation of Mr. Larkins, some
+scraps of paper, your Lordships might have at this day wanted that
+valuable information which Mr. Larkins has laid before you.
+These, however, contain, Mr. Larkins says, "the first
+complete"--what?--account, do you imagine?--no, "the first complete
+_memorandum_." You would imagine that he would himself, for his own use,
+have notched down, somewhere or other, in short-hand, in Persian
+characters, short without vowels, or in some other way, _memorandums_.
+But he had not himself even a memorandum of this business; and
+consequently, when he was at Cheltenham, and even here at your bar, he
+could never have had any account of a sum of 200,000_l._, but by this
+account of Mr. Larkins, taken, as people read them, from detached pieces
+of paper.
+
+One would have expected that Mr. Larkins, being warned that day, and
+cautioned by the strange memory of Mr. Hastings, and the dangerous
+situation, therefore, in which he himself stood, would at least have
+been very guarded and cautious. Hear what he next says upon this
+subject. "As neither of the other sums passed through his hands, these"
+(meaning the scraps) "contained no such specification, and consequently
+could not enable him to afford the information with which he has
+requested me to furnish you; and it is more than probable, that, if the
+affidavit which I took on the 16th December, 1782, had not exposed my
+character to the suspicion of my being capable of committing one of the
+basest trespasses upon the confidence of mankind, I should, at this
+distance of time, have been equally unable to have complied with this
+request: but after I became acquainted with the insinuation suggested in
+the Eleventh Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, I
+thought it but too probable, that, unless I was possessed of the
+original memorandum which I had made of these transactions, I might not
+at some distant period be able to prove that I had not descended to
+commit so base an action. I have therefore always most carefully
+preserved every paper which I possessed regarding these transactions."
+
+You see that Mr. Hastings had no memorandums of his accounts; you see,
+that, after Mr. Larkins had made his memorandums of them, he had no
+design of guarding or keeping them; and you will commend those wicked
+and malicious committees who by their reports have told an
+accountant-general and first public officer of revenue, that, in order
+to guard his character from their suspicions, it was necessary that he
+should keep some paper or other of an account. We have heard of the
+base, wicked, and mercenary license that has been used by these
+gentlemen of India towards the House of Commons: a license to libel and
+traduce the diligence of the House of Commons, the purity of their
+motives, and the fidelity of their actions, by which the very means of
+informing the people are attempted to be used for the purpose of leaving
+them in darkness and delusion. But, my Lords, when the
+accountant-general declares, that, if the House of Commons had not
+expressed, as they ought to express, much diffidence and distrust
+respecting these transactions, and even suspected him of perjury, this
+very day that man would not have produced a scrap of those papers to
+you, but might have turned them to the basest and most infamous of uses.
+If, I say, we have saved these valuable fragments by suspecting his
+integrity, your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use: and I hope
+the world will learn that punishment will be of use, too, in preventing
+such transactions.
+
+Your Lordships have seen that no two persons knew anything of these
+transactions; you see that even memorandums of transactions of very
+great moment, some of which had passed in the year 1779, were not even
+so much as put in the shape of complete memoranda until May, 1782; you
+see that Mr. Hastings never kept them: and there is no reason to imagine
+that a black banian and a Persian moonshee would have been careful of
+what Mr. Hastings himself, who did not seem to stimulate his accountants
+to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity, was negligent.
+You see that Mr. Larkins, our last, our only hope, if he had not been
+suspected by the House of Commons, probably would never have kept these
+papers; and that you could not have had this valuable cargo, such as it
+is, if it had not been for the circumstance Mr. Larkins thinks proper to
+mention.
+
+From the specimen which we have given of Mr. Hastings's mode of
+accounts, of its vouchers, checks, and counter-checks, your Lordships
+will have observed that the mode itself is past describing, and that the
+checks and counter-checks, instead of being put upon one another to
+prevent abuse, are put upon each other to prevent discovery and to
+fortify abuse. When you hear that one man has an account of receipt,
+another of expenditure, another of control, you say that office is well
+constituted: but here is an office constituted by different persons
+without the smallest connection with each other; for the only purpose
+which they have ever answered is the purpose of base concealment.
+
+We shall now proceed a little further with Mr. Larkins. The first of the
+papers from which he took the memoranda was a paper of Cantoo Baboo. It
+contained detached payments, amounting in the whole, with the cabooleat,
+or agreement, to about 95,000_l._ sterling, and of which it appears that
+there was received by Mr. Croftes 55,000_l._, and no more.
+
+Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest in your memory what
+sort of an exchequer this is, even with regard to its receipts? As your
+Lordships have seen the economy and constitution of this office, so now
+see the receipt. It appears that in the month of May, 1782, out of the
+sums beginning to be received in the month of Shawal, that is in July,
+1779, there was, during that interval, 40,000_l._ out of 95,000_l._ sunk
+somewhere, in some of the turnings over upon the gridiron, through some
+of those agents and panders of corruption which Mr. Hastings uses. Here
+is the _valuable_ revenue of the Company, _which is to supply them in
+their exigencies, which is to come from sources which otherwise never
+would have yielded it_,--which, though small in proportion to the other
+revenue, yet is a diamond, something that by its value makes amends for
+its want of bulk,--falling short by 40,000_l._ out of 95,000_l._ Here is
+a system made for fraud, and producing all the effects of it.
+
+Upon the face of this account, the agreement was to yield to Mr.
+Hastings, some way or other, to be paid to Mr. Croftes, 95,000_l._, and
+there was a deficiency of 40,000_l._ Would any man, even with no more
+sense than Mr. Hastings, who wants all the faculties of the human mind,
+who has neither memory nor judgment, any man who was that poor
+half-idiot creature that Mr. Hastings pretends to be, engage in a
+dealing that was to extort from some one or other an agreement to pay
+95,000_l._ which was not to produce more than 55,000_l._? What, then, is
+become of it? Is it in the hands of Mr. Hastings's wicked bribe-brokers,
+or in his own hands? Is it in arrear? Do you know anything about it?
+Whom are you to apply to for information? Why, to G.G.S.--G.G.S. I find
+to be, what indeed I suspected him to be, a person that I have mentioned
+frequently to your Lordships, and that you will often hear of, commonly
+called Gunga Govind Sing,--in a short word, the wickedest of the whole
+race of banians: the consolidated wickedness of the whole body is to be
+found in this man.
+
+Of the deficiency which appears in this agreement with somebody or other
+on the part of Mr. Hastings through Gunga Govind Sing you will expect to
+hear some explanation. Of the first sum, which is said to have been paid
+through Gunga Govind Sing, amounting on the cabooleat to four lac, and
+of which no more than two lac was actually received,--that is to say,
+half of it was sunk,--we have this memorandum only: "Although Mr.
+Hastings was extremely dissatisfied with the excuses Gunga Govind Sing
+assigned for not paying Mr. Croftes the sum stated by the paper No. 1 to
+be in his charge, he never could obtain from him any further payments
+on this account." Mr. Hastings is exceedingly dissatisfied with those
+excuses, and this is the whole account of the transaction. This is the
+only thing said of Gunga Govind Sing in the account: he neither states
+how he came to be employed, or for what he was employed. It appears,
+however, from the transaction, as far as we can make our way through
+this darkness, that he had actually received 10,000_l._ of the money,
+which he did not account for, and that he pretended that there was an
+arrear of the rest. So here Mr. Hastings's bribe-agent admits that he
+had received 10,000_l._, but he will not account for it; he says there
+is an arrear of another 10,000_l._; and thus it appears that he was
+enabled to take from somebody at Dinagepore, by a cabooleat, 40,000_l._,
+of which Mr. Hastings can get but 20,000_l._: there is cent per cent
+loss upon it. Mr. Hastings was so exceedingly dissatisfied with this
+conduct of Gunga Govind Sing, that you would imagine a breach would have
+immediately ensued between them. I shall not anticipate what some of my
+honorable friends will bring before your Lordships; but I tell you,
+that, so far from quarrelling with Gunga Govind Sing, or being really
+angry with him, it is only a little pettish love quarrel with Gunga
+Govind Sing: _amantium iræ amoris integratio est_. For Gunga Govind
+Sing, without having paid him one shilling of this money, attended him
+to the Ganges; and one of the last acts of Mr. Hastings's government was
+to represent this man, who was unfaithful even to fraud, who did not
+keep the common faith of thieves and robbers, this very man he
+recommends to the Company as a person who ought to be rewarded, as one
+of their best and most faithful servants. And how does he recommend him
+to be rewarded? By giving him the estate of another person,--the way in
+which Mr. Hastings desires to be always rewarded himself: for, in
+calling upon the Company's justice to give him some money for expenses
+with which he never charged them, he desires them to assign him the
+money upon some person of the country. So here Mr. Hastings recommends
+Gunga Govind Sing not only to trust, confidence, and employment, which
+he does very fully, but to a reward taken out of the substance of other
+people. This is what Mr. Hastings has done with Gunga Govind Sing; and
+if such are the effects of his anger, what must be the effect of his
+pleasure and satisfaction? Now I say that Mr. Hastings, who, in fact,
+saw this man amongst the very last with whom he had any communication in
+India, could not have so recommended him after this known fraud, in one
+business only, of 20,000_l._,--he could not so have supported him, he
+could not so have caressed him, he could not so have employed him, he
+could not have done all this, unless he had paid to Mr. Hastings
+privately that sum of money which never was brought into any even of
+these miserable accounts, without some payment or other with which Mr.
+Hastings was and ought to be satisfied, or unless Gunga Govind Sing had
+some dishonorable secret to tell of him which he did not dare to provoke
+him to give a just account of, or, lastly, unless the original agreement
+was that half or a third of the bribe should go to Gunga Govind Sing.
+
+Such is this patriotic scheme of bribery, this public-spirited
+corruption which Mr. Hastings has invented upon this occasion, and by
+which he thinks out of the vices of mankind to draw a better revenue
+than out of any legal source whatever; and therefore he has resolved to
+become the most corrupt of all Governors-General, in order to be the
+most useful servant to the finances of the Company.
+
+So much as to the first article of Dinagepore peshcush. All you have is,
+that G.G.S is Gunga Govind Sing; that he has cheated the public of half
+of it; that Mr. Hastings was angry with him, and yet went away from
+Bengal, rewarding, praising, and caressing him. Are these things to pass
+as matters of course? They cannot so pass with your Lordships' sagacity:
+I will venture to say that no court, even of _pie-poudre_, could help
+finding him guilty upon such a matter, if such a court had to inquire
+into it.
+
+The next article is _Patna_. Here, too, he was to receive 40,000_l._;
+but from whom this deponent saith not. At this circumstance Mr. Larkins,
+who is a famous deponent, never hints once. You may look through his
+whole letter, which is a pretty long one, (and which I will save your
+Lordships the trouble of hearing read at length now, because you will
+have it before you when you come to the Patna business,) and you will
+only find that somebody had engaged to pay him 40,000_l._, and that but
+half of this sum was received. You want an explanation of this. You have
+seen the kind of explanation given in the former case, a conjectural
+explanation of G.G.S. But when you come to the present case, who the
+person paying was, why the money was not paid, what the cause of failure
+was, you are not told: you only learn that there was that sum deficient;
+and Mr. Larkins, who is our last resort and final hope of elucidation in
+this transaction, throws not the smallest glimpse of light upon it. We
+of the House of Commons have been reduced to form the best legitimate
+conjectures we could upon this business, and those conjectures have led
+us to further evidence, which will enable us to fix one of the most
+scandalous and most mischievous bribes, in all the circumstances of it,
+upon Mr. Hastings, that was ever known. If he extorted 40,000_l._ under
+pretence of the Company's service, here is again another failure of half
+the money. Oh, my Lords, you will find that even the remaining part was
+purchased with the loss of one of the best revenues in India, and with
+the grievous distress of a country that deserved well your protection,
+instead of being robbed to give 20,000_l._ to the Company, and another
+20,000_l._ to some robber or other, black or white. When I say, given to
+some other robber, black or white, I do not suppose that either
+generosity, friendship, or even communion, can exist in that country
+between white men and black: no, their colors are not more adverse than
+their characters and tempers. There is not that _idem velle et idem
+nolle_, there are none of those habits of life, nothing, that can bind
+men together even in the most ordinary society: the mutual means of such
+an union do not exist between them. It is a money-dealing, and a
+money-dealing only, which can exist between them; and when you hear that
+a black man is favored, and that 20,000_l._ is pretended to be left in
+his hands, do not believe it: indeed, you cannot believe it; for we will
+bring evidence to show that there is no friendship between those
+people,--and that, when black men give money to a white man, it is a
+bribe,--and that, when money is given to a black man, he is only a
+sharer with the white man in their infamous profits. We find, however,
+somebody, anonymous, with 20,000_l._ left in his hands; and when we come
+to discover who the man is, and the final balance which appears against
+him in his account with the Company, we find that for this 20,000_l._,
+which was received for the Company, they paid such a compound interest
+as was never before paid for money advanced: the most violently griping
+usurer, in dealing with the most extravagant heir, never made such a
+bargain as Mr. Hastings has made for the Company by this bribe.
+Therefore it could be nothing but fraud that could have got him to have
+undertaken such a revenue. This evidently shows the whole to be a
+pretence to cover fraud, and not a weak attempt to raise a revenue,--and
+that Mr. Hastings was not that idiot he represents himself to be, a man
+forgetting all his offices, all his duties, all his own affairs, and all
+the public affairs. He does not, however, forget how to make a bargain
+to get money; but when the money is to be recovered for the Company, (as
+he says,) he forgets to recover it: so that the accuracy with which he
+begins a bribe, _acribus initiis et soporosâ fine_, and the carelessness
+with which he ends it, are things that characterize, not weakness and
+stupidity, but fraud.
+
+The next article we proceed to is _Nuddea_. Here we have more light; but
+does Mr. Larkins anywhere tell you anything about Nuddea? No it appears
+as if the account had been paid up, and that the cabooleat and the
+payments answer and tally with each other; yet, when we come to produce
+the evidence upon these parts, you will see most abundant reason to be
+assured that there is much more concealed than is given in this
+account,--that it is an account current, and not an account
+closed,--and that the agreement was for some other and greater sum than
+appears. It might be expected that the Company would inquire of Mr.
+Hastings, and ask, "From whom did he get it? Who has received it? Who is
+to answer for it?" But he knew that they were not likely to make any
+inquiry at all,--they are not that kind of people. You would imagine
+that a mercantile body would have some of the mercantile excellencies,
+and even you would allow them perhaps some of the mercantile faults. But
+they have, like Mr. Hastings, forgotten totally the mercantile
+character; and, accordingly, neither accuracy nor fidelity of account do
+they ever require of Mr. Hastings. They have too much confidence in him;
+and he, accordingly, acts like a man in whom such confidence, without
+reason, is reposed.
+
+Your Lordships may perhaps suppose that the payment of this money was an
+act of friendship and generosity in the people of the country. No: we
+have found out, and shall prove, from whom he got it; at least we shall
+produce such a conjecture upon it as your Lordships will think us bound
+to do, when we have such an account before us. Here on the face of the
+account there is no deficiency; but when we look into it, we find
+skulking in a corner a person called Nundulol, from whom there is
+received 58,000 rupees. You will find that he, who appears to have paid
+up this money, and which Mr. Hastings spent as he pleased in his journey
+to Benares, and who consequently must have had some trust reposed in
+him, was the wickedest of men, next to those I have mentioned,--always
+giving the first rank to Gunga Govind Sing, _primus inter pares_, the
+second to Debi Sing, the third to Cantoo Baboo: this man is fit to be
+one next on a par with them. Mr. Larkins, when he comes to explain this
+article, says, "I believe it is for a part of the Dinagepore peshcush,
+which would reduce the balance to about 5,000_l._": but he does not
+pretend to know what it is given for; he gives several guesses at it;
+"but," he says, "as I do not know, I shall not pretend to give more than
+my conjecture upon it." He is in the right; because we shall prove
+Nundulol never did have any thing to do with the Dinagepore peshcush.
+These are very extraordinary proceedings. It is my business simply to
+state them to your Lordships now; we will give them in afterwards in
+evidence, and I will leave that evidence to be confirmed and fortified
+by further observations.
+
+One of the objects of Mr. Larkins's letter is to illustrate the bonds.
+He says, "The two first stated sums" (namely, Dinagepore and Patna, in
+the paper marked No. 1, I suppose, for he seems to explain it to be
+such) "are sums for a part of which Mr. Hastings took two bonds: viz.,
+No. 1539, dated 1st October, 1780, and No. 1540, dated 2d October, 1780,
+each for the sum of current rupees 1,16,000, or sicca rupees one lac.
+The remainder of that amount was carried to the credit of the head,
+_Four per Cent Remittance Loan:_ Mr. Hastings having taken a bond for
+it, (No. 89,) which has been since completely liquidated, conformable to
+the law." But before I proceed with the bonds, I will beg leave to
+recall to your Lordships' recollection that Mr. Larkins states in his
+letter that these sums were received in November. How does this agree
+with another state of the transaction given by Mr. Hastings, namely,
+that the time of his taking the bonds was the 1st and 2d of October? Mr.
+Larkins, therefore, who has thought proper to say that the money was
+received in the month of November, has here given as extraordinary an
+instance either of fraudulent accuracy or shameful official inaccuracy
+as was ever perhaps discovered. The first sums are asserted to be paid
+to Mr. Croftes on the 18th and 19th of Asin, 1187. The month of Asin
+corresponds with the month of September and part of October, and not
+with November; and it is the more extraordinary that Mr. Larkins should
+mistake this, because he is in an office which requires monthly
+payments, and consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual
+transfer from one month to another: we cannot suppose any accountant in
+England can be more accurately acquainted with the succession of months
+than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative state of Bengal and
+English months. How are we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you
+have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a moralist
+inaccurate, you know that these are cases which, from the narrow bounds
+of our weak faculties, do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what is an
+inaccurate _accountant_ good for? "Silly man, that dost not know thy own
+silly trade!" was once well said: but the trade here is not silly. You
+do not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because you have
+thousands of them; but you justly blame a public accountant who is
+guilty of a gross inaccuracy. But what end could his being inaccurate
+answer? Why not name October as well as November? I know no reason for
+it; but here is certainly a gross mistake: and from the nature of the
+thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be a mere mistake. But
+take it that it is a mistake, and to have nothing of fraud, but mere
+carelessness; this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very
+punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.
+
+But to return to the bonds. We find a bond taken in the month of Shawal,
+1186, or 1779, but the receipt is said to be in Asin, 1780: that is to
+say, there was a year and about three months between the collection and
+the receipt; and during all that period of time an enormous sum of money
+had lain in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed when Mr.
+Hastings should think fit. He employed it, he says, for the Mahratta
+expedition. Now he began that letter on the 29th of November by telling
+you that the bribe would not have been taken from Cheyt Sing, if it had
+not been at the instigation of an exigency which it seems required a
+supply of money, to be procured lawfully or unlawfully. But in fact
+there was no exigency for it before the Berar army came upon the borders
+of the country,--that army which he invited by his careless conduct
+towards the Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to buy
+off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was taken from Cheyt Sing long
+before he had this occasion for it. The fund lay in Gunga Govind Sing's
+hands; and he afterwards applied to that purpose a part of this fund,
+which he must have taken without any view whatever to the Company's
+interest. This pretence of the exigency of the Company's affairs is the
+more extraordinary, because the first receipt of these moneys was some
+time in the year 1779 (I have not got the exact date of the agreement);
+and it was but a year before that the Company was so far from being in
+distress, that he declared he should have, at very nearly the period
+when this bribe became payable, a very large sum (I do not recollect the
+precise amount) in their treasury. I cannot certainly tell when the
+cabooleat, or agreement, was made; yet I shall lay open something very
+extraordinary upon that subject, and will lead you, step by step, to the
+bloody scenes of Debi Sing. Whilst, therefore, Mr. Hastings was carrying
+on these transactions, he was carrying them on without any reference to
+the pretended object to which he afterwards applied them. It was an old,
+premeditated plan; and the money to be received could not have been
+designed for an exigency, because it was to be paid by monthly
+instalments. The case is the same with respect to the other cabooleats:
+it could not have been any momentary exigence which he had to provide
+for by these sums of money; they were paid regularly, period by period,
+as a constant, uniform income, to Mr. Hastings.
+
+You find, then, Mr. Hastings first leaving this sum of money for a year
+and three months in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; you find, that, when
+an exigence pressed him by the Mahrattas suddenly invading Bengal, and
+he was obliged to refer to his bribe-fund, he finds that fund empty, and
+that, in supplying money for this exigence, he takes a bond for two
+thirds of his own money and one third of the Company's. For, as I stated
+before, Mr. Larkins proves of one of these accounts, that he took, in
+the month of January, for this bribe-money, which, according to the
+principles he lays down, was the Company's money, three bonds as for
+money advanced from his own cash. Now this sum of three lacs, instead of
+being all his own, as it should appear to be in the month of January,
+when he took the bonds, or two thirds his own and one third the
+Company's, as he said in his letter of the 29th of November, turns out,
+by Mr. Larkins's account, paragraph 9, which I wish to mark to your
+Lordships, to be two thirds the Company's money and one third his own;
+and yet it is all confounded under bonds, as if the money had been his
+own. What can you say to this heroic sharper disguised under the name of
+a patriot, when you find him to be nothing but a downright cheat, first
+taking money under the Company's name, then taking their securities to
+him for their own money, and afterwards entering a false account of
+them, contradicting that by another account?--and God knows whether the
+third be true or false. These are not things that I am to make out by
+any conclusion of mine; here they are, made out by himself and Mr.
+Larkins, and, comparing them with his letter of the 27th, you find a
+gross fraud covered by a direct falsehood.
+
+We have now done with Mr. Larkins's account of the bonds, and are come
+to the other species of Mr. Hastings's frauds, (for there is a great
+variety in them,) and first to Cheyt Sing's bribe. Mr. Larkins came to
+the knowledge of the bond-money through Gunga Govind Sing and through
+Cantoo Baboo. Of this bribe he was not in the secret originally, but was
+afterwards made a confidant in it; it was carried to him; and the
+account he gives of it I will state to your Lordships.
+
+"The fourth sum stated in Mr. Hastings's account was the produce of
+sundry payments made to me by Sadamund, Cheyt Sing's buckshee, who
+either brought or sent the gold mohurs to my house, from whence they
+were taken by me to Mr. Croftes, either on the same night or early in
+the morning after: they were made at different times, and I well
+remember that the same people never came twice. On the 21st June, 1780,
+Mr. Hastings sent for me, and desired that I would take charge of a
+present that had been offered to him by Cheyt Sing's buckshee, under the
+plea of atoning for the opposition which he had made towards the payment
+of the extra subsidy for defraying part of the expenses of the war, but
+really in the hope of its inducing Mr. Hastings to give up that claim;
+with which view the present had first been offered. Mr. Hastings
+declared, that, although he would not take this for his own use, he
+would apply it to that of the Company, in removing Mr. Francis's
+objections to the want of a fund for defraying the extra expenses of
+Colonel Camac's detachment. On my return to the office, I wrote down the
+substance of what Mr. Hastings had said to me, and requested Mr. James
+Miller, my deputy, to seal it up with his own seal, and write upon it,
+that he had then done so at my request. He was no further informed of my
+motive for this than merely that it contained the substance of a
+conversation which had passed between me and another gentleman, which,
+in case that conversation should hereafter become the subject of
+inquiry, I wished to be able to adduce the memorandum then made of it,
+in corroboration of my own testimony; and although that paper has
+remained unopened to this hour, and notwithstanding that I kept no
+memorandum whatever of the substance thereof, yet, as I have wrote this
+representation under the most scrupulous adherence to what I conceived
+to be truth, should it ever become necessary to refer to this paper, I
+am confident that it will not be found to differ materially from the
+substance of this representation."
+
+I forgot to mention, that, besides these two bonds, which Mr. Hastings
+declared to be the Company's, and one bond his own, that he slipped into
+the place of the bond of his own a much better, namely, a bond of
+November, which he never mentioned to the Company till the 22d of May;
+and this bond for current rupees 1,74,000, or sicca rupees 1,50,000, was
+taken for the payment stated in the paper No. 1 to have been made to Mr.
+Croftes on the 11th Aghan, 1187, which corresponds to the 23d of
+November, 1780. This is the Nuddea money, and this is all that you know
+of it; you know that this money, for which he had taken this other bond
+from the Company, was not his own neither, but bribes taken from the
+other provinces.
+
+I am ashamed to be troublesome to your Lordships in this dry affair, but
+the detection of fraud requires a good deal of patience and assiduity,
+and we cannot wander into anything that can relieve the mind: if it was
+in my power to do it, I would do it. I wish, however, to call your
+Lordships' attention to this last bribe before I quit these bonds. Such
+is the confusion, so complicated, so intricate are these bribe accounts,
+that there is always something left behind, glean never so much from the
+paragraphs of Mr. Hastings and Mr. Larkins. "I could not bring them to
+account," says Mr. Larkins. "They were received before the 1st and 2d of
+October." Why does not the running treasury account give an account of
+them? The Committee of the House of Commons examined whether the running
+treasury account had any such account of sums deposited. No such thing.
+They are said by Mr. Hastings to be deposited in June: they were not
+deposited in October, nor any account of them given till the January
+following. "These bonds," says he, "I could not enter as regular money,
+to be entered on the Company's account, or in any public way, until I
+had had an order of the Governor-General and Council." But why had not
+you an order of the Governor-General and Council? We are not calling on
+you, Mr. Larkins, for an account of your conduct: we are calling upon
+Mr. Hastings for an account of his conduct, and which he refers to you
+to explain. Why did not Mr. Hastings order you to carry them to the
+public account? "Because," says he, "there was no other way." Every one
+who knows anything of a treasury or public banking-place knows, that if
+any person brings money as belonging to the public, that the public
+accountant is bound, no doubt, to receive it and enter it as such.
+"But," says he, "I could not do it until the account could be settled,
+as between debtor and creditor: I did not do it till I could put on one
+side durbar charges, secret service, to such an amount, and balance that
+again with bonds to Mr. Hastings." That is, he could not make an entry
+regularly in the Company's books until Mr. Hastings had enabled him to
+commit one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public trust that
+ever was committed, by ordering that money of the Company's to be
+considered as his own, and a bond to be taken as a security for it from
+the Company, as if it was his own.
+
+But to proceed with this deposit. What is the substance of Mr. Larkins's
+explanation of it? The substance of this explanation is, that here was a
+bribe received by Mr. Hastings from Cheyt Sing, guarded with such
+scrupulous secrecy, that it was not carried to the house of Mr. Croftes,
+who was to receive it finally, but to the house of Mr. Larkins, as a
+less suspected place; and that it was conveyed in various sums, no two
+people ever returning twice with the various payments which made up that
+sum of 23,000_l._ or thereabouts. Now do you want an instance of
+prevarication and trickery in an account? If any person should inquire
+whether 23,000_l._ had been paid by Cheyt Sing to Mr. Hastings, there
+was not any one man living, or any person concerned in the transaction,
+except Mr. Larkins, who received it, that could give an account of how
+much he received, or who brought it. As no two people are ever his
+confidants in the same transaction in Mr. Hastings's accounts, so here
+no two people are permitted to have any share whatever in bringing the
+several fragments that make up this sum. This bribe, you might imagine,
+would have been entered by Mr. Larkins to some public account, at least
+to the fraudulent account of Mr. Hastings. No such thing. It was never
+entered till the November following. It was not entered till Mr. Francis
+had left Calcutta. All these corrupt transactions were carried on
+privately by Mr. Hastings alone, without any signification to his
+colleagues of his carrying on this patriotic traffic, as he called it.
+Your Lordships will also consider both the person who employs such a
+fraudulent accountant, and his ideas of his duty in his office. These
+are matters for your Lordships' grave determination; but I appeal to
+you, upon the face of these accounts, whether you ever saw anything so
+gross,--and whether any man could be daring enough to attempt to impose
+upon the credulity of the weakest of mankind, much more to impose upon
+such a court as this, such accounts as these are.
+
+If the Company had a mind to inquire what is become of all the debts due
+to them, and where is the cabooleat, he refers them to Gunga Govind
+Sing. "Give us," say they, "an account of this balance that remains in
+your hands." "I know," says he, "of no balance." "Why, is there not a
+cabooleat?" "Where is it? What are the date and circumstances of it?
+There is no such cabooleat existing." This is the case even where you
+have the name of the person through whose hands the money passed. But
+suppose the inquiry went to the payments of the Patna cabooleat. "Here,"
+they say, "we find half the money due: out of forty thousand pounds
+there is only twenty thousand received: give us some account of it." Who
+is to give an account of it? Here there is no mention made of the name
+of the person who had the cabooleat: whom can they call upon? Mr.
+Hastings does not remember; Mr. Larkins does not tell; they can learn
+nothing about it. If the Directors had a disposition, and were honest
+enough to the Proprietors and the nation to inquire into it, there is
+not a hint given, by either of those persons, who received the Nuddea,
+who received the Patna, who received the Dinagepore peshcush.
+
+But in what court can a suit be instituted, and against whom, for the
+recovery of this balance of 40,000_l._ out of 95,000_l._? I wish your
+Lordships to examine strictly this account,--to examine strictly every
+part, both of the account itself, and Mr. Larkins's explanation: compare
+them together, and divine, if you can, what remedy the Company could
+have for their loss. Can your Lordships believe that this can be any
+other than a systematical, deliberate fraud, grossly conducted? I will
+not allow Mr. Hastings to be the man he represents himself to be: he was
+supposed to be a man of parts; I will only suppose him to be a man of
+mere common sense. Are these the accounts we should expect from such a
+man? And yet he and Mr. Larkins are to be magnified to heaven for great
+financiers; and this is to be called book-keeping! This is the Bengal
+account saved so miraculously on the 22d of May.
+
+Next comes the Persian account. You have heard of a present to which it
+refers. It has been already stated, but it must be a good deal farther
+explained. Mr. Larkins states that this account was taken from a paper,
+of which three lines, and only three lines, were read to him by a
+Persian moonshee; and it is not pretended that this was the whole of it.
+The three lines read are as follows.
+
+"From the Nabob" (meaning the Nabob
+  of Oude) "to the Governor-General,
+  six lac                               £60,000
+
+From Hussein Reza Khân and Hyder Beg
+  Khân to ditto, three lac               30,000
+
+And ditto to Mrs. Hastings, one lac      10,000."
+
+Here, I say, are the three lines that were read by a Persian moonshee.
+Is he a man you can call to account for these particulars? No: he is an
+anonymous moonshee; his name is not so much as mentioned by Mr. Larkins,
+nor hinted at by Mr. Hastings; and you find these sums, which Mr.
+Hastings mentions as a sum in gross given to himself, are not so. They
+were given by three persons: one, six lacs, was given by the Nabob to
+the Governor; another, of three lacs more, by Hussein Reza Khân [and
+Hyder Beg Khân?]; and a third, one lac, by both of them clubbing, as a
+present to Mrs. Hastings. This is the first discovery that appears of
+Mrs. Hastings having been concerned in receiving presents for the
+Governor-General and others, in addition to Gunga Govind Sing, Cantoo
+Baboo, and Mr. Croftes. Now, if this money was not received for the
+Company, is it proper and right to take it from Mrs. Hastings? Is there
+honor and justice in taking from a lady a gratuitous present made to
+her? Yet Mr. Hastings says he has applied it all to the Company's
+service. He has done ill, in suffering it to be received at all, if she
+has not justly and properly received it. Whether, in fact, she ever
+received this money at all, she not being upon the spot, as I can find,
+at the time, (though, to be sure, a present might be sent her,) I
+neither affirm nor deny, farther than that, as Mr. Larkins says, there
+was a sum of 10,000_l._ from these ministers to Mrs. Hastings. Whether
+she ever received any other money than this, I also neither affirm nor
+deny. But in whatever manner Mrs. Hastings received this or any other
+money, I must say, in this grave place in which I stand, that, if the
+wives of Governors-General, the wives of Presidents of Council, the
+wives of the principal officers of the India Company, through all the
+various departments, can receive presents, there is an end of the
+covenants, there is an end of the act of Parliament, there is an end to
+every power of restraint. Let a man be but married, and if his wife may
+take presents, that moment the acts of Parliament, the covenants, and
+all the rest expire. There is something, too, in the manners of the East
+that makes this a much more dangerous practice. The people of the East,
+it is well known, have their zenanah, the apartment for their wives, as
+a sanctuary which nobody can enter,--a kind of holy of holies, a
+consecrated place, safe from the rage of war, safe from the fury of
+tyranny. The rapacity of man has here its bounds: here you shall come,
+and no farther. But if English ladies can go into these zenanahs and
+there receive presents, the natives of Hindostan cannot be said to have
+anything left of their own. Every one knows that in the wisest and best
+time of the Commonwealth of Rome, towards the latter end of it, (I do
+not mean the best time for morals, but the best for its knowledge how to
+correct evil government, and to choose the proper means for it,) it was
+an established rule, that no governor of a province should take his wife
+along with him into his province,--wives not being subject to the laws
+in the same manner as their husbands; and though I do not impute to any
+one any criminality here, I should think myself guilty of a scandalous
+dereliction of my duty, if I did not mention the fact to your Lordships.
+But I press it no further: here are the accounts, delivered in by Mr.
+Larkins at Mr. Hastings's own requisition.
+
+The three lines which were read out of a Persian paper are followed by a
+long account of the several species in which this present was received,
+and converted by exchange into one common standard. Now, as these three
+lines of paper, which are said to have been read out of a Persian paper,
+contain an account of bribes to the amount of 100,000_l._, and as it is
+not even insinuated that this was the whole of the paper, but rather the
+contrary indirectly implied, I shall leave it for your Lordships, in
+your serious consideration, to judge what mines of bribery that paper
+might contain. For why did not Mr. Larkins get the whole of that paper
+read and translated? The moment any man stops in the midst of an
+account, he is stopping in the midst of a fraud.
+
+My Lords, I have one farther remark to make upon these accounts. The
+cabooleats, or agreements for the payments of these bribes, amount, in
+the three specified provinces, to 95,000_l._ Do you believe that these
+provinces were thus particularly favored? Do you think that they were
+chosen as a little demesne for Mr. Hastings? that they were the only
+provinces honored with his protection, so far as to take bribes from
+them? Do you perceive anything in their local situation that should
+distinguish them from other provinces of Bengal? What is the reason why
+Dinagepore, Patna, Nuddea, should have the post of honor assigned them?
+What reason can be given for not taking bribes also from Burdwan, from
+Bissunpore, in short, from all the sixty-eight collections which
+comprise the revenues of Bengal, and for selecting only three? How came
+he, I say, to be so wicked a servant, that, out of sixty-eight
+divisions, he chose only three to supply the exigencies of the Company?
+He did not do his duty in making this distinction, if he thought that
+bribery was the best way of supplying the Company's treasury, and that
+it formed the most useful and effectual resource for them,--which he has
+declared over and over again. Was it right to lay the whole weight of
+bribery, extortion, and oppression upon those three provinces, and
+neglect the rest? No: you know, and must know, that he who extorts from
+three provinces will extort from twenty, if there are twenty. You have a
+standard, a measure of extortion, and that is all: _ex pede Herculem_:
+guess from thence what was extorted from all Bengal. Do you believe he
+could be so cruel to these provinces, so partial to the rest, as to
+charge them with that load, with 95,000_l._, knowing the heavy
+oppression they were sinking under, and leave all the rest untouched?
+You will judge of what is concealed from us by what we have discovered
+through various means that have occurred, in consequence both of the
+guilty conscience of the person who confesses the fact with respect to
+these provinces, and of the vigor, perseverance and sagacity of those
+who have forced from him that discovery. It is not, therefore, for me to
+say that the 100,000_l._ and 95,000_l._ only were taken. Where the
+circumstances entitle me to go on, I must not be stopped, but at the
+boundary where human nature has fixed a barrier.
+
+You have now before you the true reason why he did not choose that this
+affair should come before a court of justice. Rather than this exposure
+should be made, he to-day would call for the mountains to cover him: he
+would prefer an inquiry into the business of the three seals, into
+anything foreign to the subject I am now discussing, in order to keep
+you from the discovery of that gross bribery, that shameful peculation,
+that abandoned prostitution and corruption, which he has practised with
+indemnity and impunity to this day, from one end of India to the other.
+
+At the head of the only account we have of these transactions stands
+Dinagepore; and it now only remains for me to make some observations
+upon Mr. Hastings's proceedings in that province. Its name, then, and
+that money was taken from it, is all that appears; but from whom, by
+what hands, by what means, under what pretence it was taken, he has not
+told you, he has not told his employers. I believe, however, I can tell
+from whom it was taken, and I believe it will appear to your Lordships
+that it must have been taken from the unhappy Rajah of Dinagepore; and I
+shall in a very few words state the circumstances attending, and the
+service performed for it: from these you will be able to form a just
+opinion concerning this bribe.
+
+Dinagepore, a large province, was possessed by an ancient family, the
+last of which, about the year 1184 of their era, the Rajah Bija Naut,
+had no legitimate issue. When he was at the point of death, he wished to
+exclude from the succession to the zemindary his half-brother, Cantoo
+Naut, with whom he had lived upon ill terms for many years, by adopting
+a son. Such an adoption, when a person has a half-brother, as he had, in
+my poor judgment is not countenanced by the Gentoo laws. But Gunga
+Govind Sing, who was placed, by the office he held, at the head of the
+registry, where the records were kept by which the rules of succession
+according to the custom of the country are ascertained, became master of
+these Gentoo laws; and through his means Mr. Hastings decreed in favor
+of the adoption. We find that immediately after this decree Gunga Govind
+Sing received a cabooleat on Dinagepore for the sum of 40,000_l._, of
+which it appears that he has actually exacted 30,000_l._, though he has
+paid to Mr. Hastings only 20,000_l._ We find, before the young Rajah had
+been in possession a year, his natural guardians and relations, on one
+pretence or another, all turned out of their offices. The peshcush, or
+fixed annual rent, payable to the Company for his zemindary, fell into
+arrear, as might naturally be expected, from the Rajah's inability to
+pay both his rent and this exorbitant bribe, extorted from a ruined
+family. Instantly, under pretext of this arrearage, Gunga Govind Sing,
+and the fictitious Committee which Mr. Hastings had made for his wicked
+purposes, composed of Mr. Anderson, Mr. Shore, and Mr. Croftes, who were
+but the tools, as they tell us themselves, of Gunga Govind Sing, gave
+that monster of iniquity, Debi Sing, the government of this family. They
+put this noble infant, this miserable Rajah, together with the
+management of the provinces of Dinagepore and Rungpore, into his wicked
+and abominable hands, where the ravages he committed excited what was
+called a rebellion, that forced him to fly from the country, and into
+which I do not wonder he should be desirous that a political and not a
+juridical inquiry should be made. The savage barbarities which were
+there perpetrated I have already, in the execution of my duty, brought
+before this House and my country; and it will be seen, when we come to
+the proof, whether what I have asserted was the effect either of a
+deluded judgment or disordered imagination, and whether the facts I
+state cannot be substantiated by authentic reports, and were none of my
+invention, and, lastly, whether the means that were taken to discredit
+them do not infinitely aggravate the guilt of the offenders. Mr.
+Hastings wanted to fly from judicial inquiry; he wanted to put Debi Sing
+anywhere but in a court of justice. A court of justice, where a direct
+assertion is brought forward, and a direct proof applied to it, is an
+element in which he cannot live for a moment. He would seek refuge
+anywhere, even in the very sanctuary of his accusers, rather than abide
+a trial with him in a court of justice. But the House of Commons was too
+just not to send him to this tribunal, whose justice they cannot doubt,
+whose penetration he cannot elude, and whose decision will justify those
+managers whose characters he attempted to defame.
+
+But this is not all. We find, that, after the cruel sale of this infant,
+who was properly and directly under the guardianship of the Company,
+(for the Company acts as steward and dewan of the province, which office
+has the guardianship of minors,) after he had been robbed of 40,000_l._
+by the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, and afterwards, under pretence of his
+being in debt to the Company, delivered into the hands of that monster,
+Debi Sing, Mr. Hastings, by way of anticipation of these charges, and in
+answer to them, has thought proper to produce the certificate from this
+unfortunate boy which I will now again read to you.
+
+     "I, Radanaut, Zemindar of Purgunnah Havelly Punjera, commonly
+     called Dinagepore:--As it has been learnt by me, the mutsuddies,
+     and the respectable officers of my zemindary, that the ministers of
+     England are displeased with the late Governor, Warren Hastings,
+     Esquire, upon the suspicion that he oppressed us, took money from
+     us by deceit and force, and ruined the country; therefore we, upon
+     the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent on and
+     necessary for us to abide by, following the rules laid down in
+     giving evidence, declare the particulars of the acts and deeds of
+     Warren Hastings, Esquire, full of circumspection and caution,
+     civility and justice, superior to the caution of the most learned,
+     and, by representing what is fact, wipe away the doubts that have
+     possessed the minds of the ministers of England: that Mr. Hastings
+     is possessed of fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to
+     us; that he is clear of the contamination of mistrust and wrong,
+     and his mind is free of covetousness or avarice. During the time of
+     his administration, no one saw other conduct than that of
+     protection to the husbandmen, and justice; no inhabitant ever
+     experienced afflictions, no one ever felt oppression from him. Our
+     reputations have always been guarded from attacks by his prudence,
+     and our families have always been protected by his justice. He
+     never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards us, but
+     healed the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation, by
+     means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never permitting one of
+     us to sink in the pit of despondence. He supported every one by his
+     goodness, overset the designs of evil-minded men by his authority,
+     tied the hands of oppression with the strong bandage of justice,
+     and by these means expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness
+     and joy over us. He reëstablished justice and impartiality. We
+     were, during his government, in the enjoyment of perfect happiness
+     and ease, and many of us are thankful and satisfied. As Mr.
+     Hastings was well acquainted with our manners and customs, he was
+     always desirous, in every respect, of doing whatever would preserve
+     our religious rites, and guard them against every kind of accident
+     and injury, and at all times protected us. Whatever we have
+     experienced from him, and whatever happened from him, we have
+     written without deceit or exaggeration."
+
+My Lords, this Radanaut, zemindar of the purgunnah, who, as your
+Lordships hear, bears evidence upon oath to all the great and good
+qualities of the Governor, and particularly to his absolute freedom from
+covetousness,--this person, to whom Mr. Hastings appeals, was, as the
+Committee state, a boy between five and six years old at the time when
+he was given into the hands of Debi Sing, and when Mr. Hastings left
+Bengal, which was in 1786 [1785?], was between eleven and twelve years
+old. This is the sort of testimony that Mr. Hastings produces, to prove
+that he was clear from all sort of extortion, oppression, and
+covetousness, in this very zemindary of Dinagepore. This boy, who is so
+observant, who is so penetrating, who is so accurate in his knowledge of
+the whole government of Mr. Hastings, was, I say, when he left his
+government, at the utmost, but eleven years and a half old. Now to what
+an extremity is this unhappy man at your bar driven, when, oppressed by
+this accumulative load of corruption charged upon him, and seeing his
+bribery, his prevarication, his fraudulent bonds brought before you, he
+gives the testimony of this child, who for the greatest part of his time
+lived three hundred miles from the seat of Mr. Hastings's government!
+Consider the miserable situation of this poor, unfortunate boy, made to
+swear, with all the solemnities of his religion, that Mr. Hastings was
+never guilty in his province of any act of rapacity! Such are the
+testimonies, which are there called _razinamas_, in favor of Mr.
+Hastings, with which all India is said to sound. Do we attempt to
+conceal them from your Lordships? No, we bring them forth, to show you
+the wickedness of the man, who, after he has robbed innocence, after he
+has divided the spoil between Gunga Govind Sing and himself, gets the
+party robbed to perjure himself for his sake,--if such a creature is
+capable of being guilty of perjury. We have another razinama sent from
+Nuddea, by a person nearly under the same circumstances with Radanaut,
+namely, Maha Rajah Dirauje Seo Chund Behadre, only made to differ in
+some expressions from the former, that it might not appear to originate
+from the same hand. These miserable razinamas he delivers to you as the
+collected voice of the country, to show how ill-founded the impressions
+are which committees of the House of Commons (for to them they allude, I
+suppose) have taken concerning this man, during their inquiries into the
+management of the affairs of the Company in India.
+
+Before I quit this subject, I have only to give you the opinion of Sir
+Elijah Impey, a name consecrated to respect forever, (your Lordships
+know him in this House as well as I do,) respecting these petitions and
+certificates of good behavior.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"From the reasons and sentiments that they contain," &c.[9]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The moment an Englishman appears, as this gentleman does, in the
+province of Dinagepore, to collect certificates for Mr. Hastings, it is
+a command for them, the people, to say what he pleases.
+
+And here, my Lords, I would wish to say something of the miserable
+situation of the people of that country; but it is not in my commission,
+and I must be silent, and shall only request your Lordships to observe
+how this crime of bribery grows in its magnitude. First, the bribe is
+taken, through Gunga Govind Sing, from this infant, for his succession
+to the zemindary. Next follows the removal from their offices, and
+consequent ruin, of all his nearest natural relations. Then the delivery
+of the province to Debi Sing, upon the pretence of the arrears due to
+the Company, with all the subsequent horrors committed under the
+management of that atrocious villain. And lastly, the gross subornation
+of perjury, in making this wretched minor, under twelve years of age,
+bear testimony upon oath to the good qualities of Mr. Hastings and of
+his government,--this minor, I say, who lived three hundred miles from
+the seat of his government, and who, if he knew anything at all of his
+own affairs, must have known that Mr. Hastings was the cause of all his
+sufferings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Lords, I have now gone through the whole of what I have in charge. I
+have laid before you the covenants by which the Company have thought fit
+to guard against the avarice and rapacity of their Governors. I have
+shown that they positively forbid the taking of all sorts of bribes and
+presents; and I have stated the means adopted by them for preventing the
+evasion of their orders, by directing, in all money transactions, the
+publicity of them. I have farther shown, that, in order to remove every
+temptation to a breach of their orders, the next step was the framing a
+legal fiction, by which presents and money, under whatever pretence
+taken, were made the legal property of the Company, in order to enable
+them to recover them out of any rapacious hands that might violate the
+new act of Parliament. I have also stated this act of Parliament. I have
+stated Mr. Hastings's sense of it. I have stated the violation of it by
+his taking bribes from all quarters. I have stated the fraudulent bonds
+by which he claimed a security for money as his own which belonged to
+the Company. I have stated the series of frauds, prevarications,
+concealments, and all that mystery of iniquity, which I waded through
+with pain to myself, I am sure, and with infinite pain, I fear, to your
+Lordships. I have shown your Lordships that his evasions of the clear
+words of his covenant and the clear words of an act of Parliament were
+such as did not arise from an erroneous judgment, but from a corrupt
+intention; and I believe you will find that his attempt to evade the law
+aggravates infinitely his guilt in breaking it. In all this I have only
+_opened_ to you the package of this business; I have opened it to
+ventilate it, and give air to it; I have opened it, that a quarantine
+might be performed,--that the sweet air of heaven, which is polluted by
+the poison it contains, might be let loose upon it, and that it may be
+aired and ventilated before your Lordships touch it. Those who follow me
+will endeavor to explain to your Lordships what Mr. Hastings has
+endeavored to involve in mystery, by bringing proof after proof that
+every bribe that was here concealed was taken with corrupt purposes and
+followed with the most pernicious consequences. These are things which
+will be brought to you in proof. I have only regarded the system of
+bribery; I have endeavored to show that it is a system of mystery and
+concealment, and consequently a system of fraud.
+
+You now see some of the means by which fortunes have been made by
+certain persons in India; you see the confederacies they have formed
+with one another for their mutual concealment and mutual support; you
+will see how they reply to their own deceitful inquiries by fraudulent
+answers; you will see that Cheltenham calls upon Calcutta, as one deep
+calls upon another, and that the call which is made for explanation is
+answered in mystery; in short, you will see the very constitution of
+their minds here developed.
+
+And now, my Lords, in what a situation are we all placed! This
+prosecution of the Commons, I wish to have it understood, and I am sure
+I shall not be disclaimed in it, is a prosecution not only for the
+punishing a delinquent, a prosecution not merely for preventing this and
+that offence, but it is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose
+of preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that characterize the
+people of England. The situation in which we stand is dreadful. These
+people pour in upon us every day. They not only bring with them the
+wealth which they have acquired, but they bring with them into our
+country the vices by which it was acquired. Formerly the people of
+England were censured, and perhaps properly, with being a sullen,
+unsocial, cold, unpleasant race of men, and as inconstant as the climate
+in which they are born. These are the vices which the enemies of the
+kingdom charged them with: and people are seldom charged with vices of
+which they do not in some measure partake. But nobody refused them the
+character of being an open-hearted, candid, liberal, plain, sincere
+people,--qualities which would cancel a thousand faults, if they had
+them. But if, by conniving at these frauds, you once teach the people of
+England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded conduct,--if you teach
+them qualities directly the contrary to those by which they have
+hitherto been distinguished,--if you make them a nation of concealers, a
+nation of dissemblers, a nation of liars, a nation of forgers,--my
+Lords, if you, in one word, turn them into a people of _banians_, the
+character of England, that character which, more than our arms, and more
+than our commerce, has made us a great nation, the character of England
+will be gone and lost.
+
+Our liberty is as much in danger as our honor and our national
+character. We, who here appear representing the Commons of England, are
+not wild enough not to tremble both for ourselves and for our
+constituents at the effect of riches. _Opum metuenda potestas._ We dread
+the operation of money. Do we not know that there are many men who wait,
+and who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution, to let loose
+all the corrupt wealth of India, acquired by the oppression of that
+country, for the corruption of all the liberties of this, and to fill
+the Parliament with men who are now the object of its indignation?
+To-day the Commons of Great Britain prosecute the delinquents of India:
+to-morrow the delinquents of India may be the Commons of Great Britain.
+We know, I say, and feel the force of money; and we now call upon your
+Lordships for justice in this cause of money. We call upon you for the
+preservation of our manners, of our virtues. We call upon you for our
+national character. We call upon you for our liberties; and hope that
+the freedom of the Commons will be preserved by the justice of the
+Lords.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[9] This document cannot be found
+
+
+END OF VOL. X.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable
+Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
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+*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
+
diff --git a/18192-8.zip b/18192-8.zip
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+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke.
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+		margin-left: 5%;
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+		/* text-align: right;    MP, I DON'T LIKE THIS */
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+ * (not to be confused with linenum, used for poetry line#s).
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+
+/* MP... In konqueror, the numbers all pile up together at the first item */
+
+	ul.TOC { /* styling the Table of Contents */
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+/*
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+ */
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+ */
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+ */
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+			background-color: rgb(90%,90%,90%); /* ..optional tint */
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+ * style floating images just like sidebars but no border
+ * Use image class="plain", as div border encloses all.
+ * Use div when caption accompanies image, span for image-only
+ * Note: guiguts expects class names figleft, figright
+ */
+	.floatr, .figright {
+			float: right;
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+			margin-left: 4px; /* keep body text away from border */
+			padding: 3px; /* keep caption text away border */
+		}
+
+	.floatl, .figleft {
+			float: left;
+			clear: left; /* don't allow overlaps */
+			text-align: center; /* img, caption centered in box */
+			border: 1px solid black; /* thin border */
+			margin-right: 4px; /* keep body text away from border */
+			padding: 3px; /* keep caption text from touching border */
+		}
+/*
+ *   Styling tables and their content
+ */
+
+	table { /* style all < table> elements */
+		margin-top: 1em; /* space above the table */
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+		empty-cells: show; /* usual default is hide */
+	}
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+	thead td, tfoot td { /* center & bold */
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+		font-weight: bold;
+		background-color: #ddd; /* dubious: gray background */
+	}
+	table .shade { /* tr or td class="shade" */
+		background-color: #ddd;
+	}
+	td, td > p {
+		margin-top: 0.25em;
+		/* line-height: 1.1em; OLD */
+		/* font-size: 90%; OLD */
+		/* text-align: left; OLD*/
+	}
+        td.wrap { /* MP's magic table: For cells in 1st col with lots of text,
+                     allows rewrap with indent.
+                     set padding-left: to 1 on main table...
+                     Numbers following should be "valign: bottom"*/
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+        }
+                  /* use to add borders to table cells */
+        .bb       {border-bottom: solid 1px;}
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+        .bt       {border-top: solid 1px;}
+        .br       {border-right: solid 1px;}
+        .bbox     {border: solid 1px;}
+        .center   {text-align: center;}
+/*
+ * Styling Poetry the method generated by Guiguts:
+ *  div class=poem encloses poem
+ *  h4 within the poem div for poem title
+ *  div class=stanza encloses stanza
+ *	p [class=iN] encloses line
+ *  span class=linenum encloses line number
+ */
+	.poem {
+		text-align: left;
+		margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;
+		position: relative;  /* basis of .linenum positions */
+		/* background-color: #fdc; /* Demonstration only: DELETE */
+		}
+	.poem h4 {
+		margin-left: 5em;
+		text-decoration: underline;
+		}
+	.poem .stanza {
+		margin-top: 1em; /* vertical break between stanzas */
+		}
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+		line-height: 1.2em;
+		margin-top: 0em;
+		margin-left: 2em;
+		text-indent: -2em;
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+	.poem .i1 {margin-left: 2em;} /* p or span indents */
+	.poem .i2 {margin-left: 4em;} /* indents */
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+	.poem .i4 {margin-left: 6em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i5 {margin-left: 7em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i6 {margin-left: 8em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i7 {margin-left: 9em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i8 {margin-left: 10em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i9 {margin-left: 11em;} /* indents */
+    .poem .caesura	{	/* vertical break in mid-line */
+    	vertical-align: -200%;
+    	}
+
+	.poem .linenum {
+		margin: 0; text-indent:0;
+		font-size: 90%;			/* they are smaller */
+		text-align: center;		/* centered in a space... */
+		width: 1.75em;				/* ...about 3+ digits wide */
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+/*
+ * Making page numbers visible: Change the display: value of this class
+ *		for visible page numbers: "inline"
+ *		for hidden page numbers: "none"
+ */
+
+/* THESE LINES ADDED BY MP */
+    /*.pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right; color: #778899;} /* page numbers */
+    /*.pagenum  {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: smaller; text-align: left; color: #778899;} /* page numbers */
+    .pagenum {
+      font-size: smaller;
+      text-align: right;
+      padding: 0 0 0 0 ;
+      margin: 0 0 0 0;
+      position: absolute; right: 1%;
+      color: #778899;
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+    /* Uncomment to get page numbers displayed with text */
+    a.pagenum:after            {display: inline; color: #778899; /* background-color: yellow;*/ content: "{" attr(title) "}";}
+
+    /* Change cursor over Greek text (the transliteration will appear in a popup) */
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+
+
+/*
+ * This code uses the :after selector to display the title string
+ * from the anchor inline in the text. It presumes every page anchor is:
+ *   <a class="page1" id="Page_NN" title="NN" > < /a>
+ *
+ * Advantage: non-CSS browsers display nothing.
+ * Problem: display is within the text between words. (you can't do
+ * absolute positioning of generated content.)
+ */
+	.page1:after {
+				display: inline; /* none or inline */
+				content: "[" attr(title) "]";
+				font-size: 50%;
+				background-color: rgb(95%,95%,95%);
+				vertical-align: 0.25em; /* raise its baseline */
+				}
+/*
+ * This code uses absolute positioning to display page numbers in the
+ * right margin. It presumes that every page-number anchor is augmented
+ * with a text span:
+ *	<a id="Page_NN">< /a> <span class="page2">NN< /span>
+ *
+ * Advantage: absolute positioning lets you put #s in the margin.
+ * Drawback: non-CSS browsers display the number inline instead.
+ * Drawback: multiple pagenumbers in the same text line overlap in the margin
+ */
+
+	.page2 {	display: inline; /* none or inline	*/
+				font-size:50%;
+				text-align: right;
+				padding: 0 0 0 0 ;
+				margin: 0 0 0 0;
+				position: absolute; right: 1%;}
+
+/*
+ * Styling footnotes and their references. See text for discussion.
+ * NOTE: Guiguts keeps changing the classnames it uses for the
+ * footnote div and p's. Be prepared to change these to match.
+ */
+
+	.fnanchor {   /* MODIFIED FROM fnref BY MP FOR GUIGUTS NOMENCLATURE */
+			font-size: smaller; /* discreet [X] */
+			vertical-align: 2px; /* bumped up a trace from baseline */
+		}
+
+	.note {
+			font-size: 90%;  /* somewhat smaller */
+			margin: 0 2em 2em 1em;
+                        text-align: justify;
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+	.footnotes {  /* ADDED BY MP */
+                      border: dashed 1px;  /* Added by MP */
+                /*but note that knoqueror messes it up (though readable)*/
+		}
+/*
+ * Stylings for drama:
+ *    h4.scn is the scene-header, centered, italic
+ *    span.cnm is for all character-names
+ *    p.sdn is the stage-direction paragraph
+ *    span.sdr is the end-of-line right-aligned direction
+ *    span.sdm is the mid-line embedded direction
+ */
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+		text-align: center; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;
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+		text-align: center; font-style: italic;
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+		position: relative; /* establish "container" for span.sdn */
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+	.dlg .in5em { position:relative; left: 5em; }
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+		font-style: italic;
+		position: absolute;
+		text-align: right;
+		right: 0; top:auto;
+	}
+	span.sdr:before { font-style:normal; content: "[" }
+	.cnm { /* Character NaMe default (dialog) */
+		font-style: italic;
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+	.sdn .cnm, sdm .cnm, .sdr .cnm { /* Character NaMe inside Stage DirectioN */
+		font-style: normal;
+	}
+	.dlg .linenum {
+		margin: 0; text-indent:0;
+		font-size: 90%;			/* they are smaller */
+		text-align: center;		/* centered in a space... */
+		width: 1.75em;			/* ...about 3+ digits wide */
+		position: absolute;		/* positioned out of text flow */
+		/*  left: -5em; 		  ...positioned in LEFT margin */
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+		color: #000; background-color: #ccc; /* black on light gray */
+		}
+
+    /* XML end  ]]> */ /*old browser end */ -->
+    </style>
+   </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund
+Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12)
+
+Author: Edmund Burke
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2006 [EBook #18192]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF THE RIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Susan Skinner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
+http://gallica.bnf.fr)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p><a name="Page_-3" id="Page_-3"></a></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>THE WORKS
+<br /><br />
+<span style="font-size: 71%">OF</span>
+<br /><br />
+THE RIGHT HONOURABLE<br />
+
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 200%">EDMUND BURKE</span></h2>
+
+<h3>IN TWELVE VOLUMES<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller">VOLUME THE TENTH</span></h3>
+<p />
+<div style="text-align: center">
+<img src="images/001.png" alt="BURKE COAT OF ARMS." title="BURKE COAT OF ARMS" />
+</div>
+<p />
+<p style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0"><b>London</b><br />
+
+<br />
+
+JOHN C. NIMMO<br />
+<br />
+14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W.C.<br />
+
+MDCCCLXXXVII<br /></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_X" id="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_X"></a>CONTENTS OF VOL. X.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+<ul class="TOCSub"><li><a href="#SPEECHES_IN_THE_IMPEACHMENT">SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE, LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.</a></li>
+
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li>    <a href="#SPEECH_IN_OPENING">SPEECH IN OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.</a></li>
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li>      <a href="#THIRD_DAY_MONDAY_FEBRUARY_18_1788">THIRD DAY: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1788</a>                    <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#FOURTH_DAY_TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_19_1788">FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19</a>                       <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></span></li></ul></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li><a href="#SPEECH_ON_THE_SIXTH_ARTICLE_OF_CHARGE">SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.</a></li>
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li>      <a href="#FIRST_DAY_TUESDAY_APRIL_21_1789">FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789</a>                    <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#SECOND_DAY_SATURDAY_APRIL_25_1789">SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25</a>                        <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#THIRD_DAY_TUESDAY_MAY_5_1789">THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5</a>                             <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_306">306</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#FOURTH_DAY_THURSDAY_MAY_7_1789">FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7</a>                           <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_396">396</a></span></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SPEECHES_IN_THE_IMPEACHMENT" id="SPEECHES_IN_THE_IMPEACHMENT"></a>SPEECHES<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+THE IMPEACHMENT<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">OF</span><br />
+<br />
+WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.</span></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="SPEECH_IN_OPENING" id="SPEECH_IN_OPENING"></a>SPEECH IN OPENING.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 75%;">(CONTINUED.)</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 75%;">FEBRUARY, 1788.</span></h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">{2}</a></span></p><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">{3}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="THIRD_DAY_MONDAY_FEBRUARY_18_1788" id="THIRD_DAY_MONDAY_FEBRUARY_18_1788"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 75%;">THIRD DAY: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1788.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">{4}</a></span>
+and directly with the corruptions of India,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was my design to class the crimes of the late
+Governor of Bengal,&mdash;to show their mutual bearings,&mdash;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,&mdash;to
+show how that led to prodigality of the
+public money,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">{5}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have to state to-day the root of all
+these misdemeanors,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;<i>arbitrary
+power</i>. 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">{6}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>We say, then, not only that he governed arbitrarily,
+but corruptly,&mdash;that is to say, that he was a giver
+and receiver of bribes, and formed a system for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">{7}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">{8}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;money got by oppression, violence, extortion
+from the poor, or the heavy hand of power
+upon the rich and great.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">{9}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">{10}</a></span>&mdash;namely,
+<i>territories</i> or <i>sums of money</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>When these covenants arrived in India, the servants
+refused at first to execute them,&mdash;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 re&euml;stablished
+in the province of Oude, and paid a sum of 500,000<i>l.</i>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">{11}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">{12}</a></span>fused
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;next,
+by covenant,&mdash;and lastly, by act of Parliament:
+that is to say, by all the things that bind mankind, or
+that can bind them,&mdash;first, moral obligation inherent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>
+in the duty of their office,&mdash;next, the positive injunctions
+of the legislature of the country,&mdash;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,&mdash;that they should take no presents.</p>
+
+<p>I am to mark to your Lordships, that this law and
+this covenant did consider indirect ways of taking
+presents&mdash;taking them by others, and such like&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">{14}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Governors, we know very well, cannot with their
+own hands be continually receiving bribes,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;they
+were necessary,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 bri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">{15}</a></span>bery:
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">{16}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,)&mdash;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,&mdash;that is, either given to themselves to
+hold on the footing of farmers, or totally confiscated,&mdash;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 <i>moneyed
+merit</i>. 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,&mdash;corrupt and treacherous, as it
+was,&mdash;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<i>l.</i> Then a new source of corruption
+was opened,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">{17}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;yet, in fact, this business
+of balances is that <i>nidus</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 knowl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">{18}</a></span>edge
+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 <i>ad infinitum</i>. 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,&mdash;Was such a one farmer? No. Cantoo
+Baboo? No. Another? No,&mdash;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 <i>them</i> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">{19}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>him</i> 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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i>, gave
+him farms paying a revenue of 130,000<i>l.</i> a year to
+government. Men undoubtedly have been known
+to be under the dominion of their domestics; such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">{20}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">{21}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;by the direct sale of the
+successions of families,&mdash;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,&mdash;that is, in the
+case of those <i>vakeels</i>, (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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">{22}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">{23}</a></span>
+of it, that they will serve as a shield to cover the
+honor of England, whenever this country is upbraided
+in India.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With the other gentlemen, who were visible too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">{24}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">{25}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;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 Kh&acirc;n. He shall not blow
+hot and cold. In what respect was Mr. Hastings
+better than Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, 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?&mdash;Such was the accuser. He
+was the man that gave the bribes, and, in addition to
+his own evidence, offers proof by other witnesses.</p>
+
+<p>What was the accusation? Was the accusation
+improbable, either on account of the subject-matter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">{26}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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?&mdash;But I cannot mention
+this proceeding without shame and horror.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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,&mdash;time, place, persons, species, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">{27}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;this
+man whom he dared not meet as a defendant.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">{28}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then he took another step: he accused Nundcomar
+of a conspiracy,&mdash;which was a way he then and
+ever since has used, whenever means were taken to
+detect any of his own iniquities.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;he flew to this court, charging this Nundcomar
+and others with being conspirators.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>stone-dead</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">{29}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;hanged justly, if you please; and that
+it did so happen,&mdash;luckily for Mr. Hastings,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>His accuser was supposed to be what men may be,
+and yet very competent for accusers, namely, one of
+his accomplices in guilty actions,&mdash;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,&mdash;and that Mr. Hastings was proved afterwards
+to have received a sum of money from him,
+which may be well referred to bribes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">{30}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But though Nundcomar was put out of the way by
+the means by which <i>he</i> 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<i>l.</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">{31}</a></span>
+200<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> a year
+for himself; and as I find his companion was put on
+the same allowance, it will be 146,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">{32}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">{33}</a></span>
+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 Kh&acirc;n 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<i>l.</i> 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 Kh&acirc;n, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Kh&acirc;n's salary as a
+spoil.</p>
+
+<p>When the orders of the Court to restore Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">{34}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;informs her that he was compelled
+by necessity to the present arrangement in
+favor of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, 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 Kh&acirc;n from the lieutenancy and controllership,
+leaving him only the judicial department miserably
+curtailed.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">{35}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> payable to
+him yearly, to give up to the Company no less than
+40,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Under this head you will have produced to you full
+proof of his sale of a judicial office to a person called
+Kh&acirc;n Jehan Kh&acirc;n, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">{36}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">{37}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;I am upon my defence,&mdash;let all
+charges remain against me,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">{38}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I
+am on my guard,&mdash;I will give you no satisfaction,&mdash;I
+have promised it, but I have already
+deferred it for seven or eight years"? Is not this
+tantamount to a denial?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">{39}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of this inquiry we find a sort of
+pause in his peculations, a sort of gap in the history,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">{40}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">{41}</a></span>
+bribes: for I would not suggest, nor have your Lordships
+to think, that I believe that these were his only
+bribes,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>would</i> have concealed the Nabob's 100,000<i>l.</i>, but
+that the magnitude rendered it easy of discovery.
+He, therefore, avows an intention of concealment.</p>
+
+<p>But it happens here, very singularly, that this sum,
+which his fears of discovery by <i>others</i> obliged him to
+discover <i>himself</i>, 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;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">{42}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;"<i>Exoriare,
+aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor</i>,"&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">{43}</a></span>
+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 <i>for their
+own use</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">{44}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote over to the Court of Directors, that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">{45}</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a bold, ferocious, plain, downright
+use of power. In the second, he is grown a little
+more careful and guarded,&mdash;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 sci<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">{46}</a></span>ence,
+and have for the first time established the corruption
+of the supreme magistrate as a principle of
+resource for government."</p>
+
+<p>There are crimes, undoubtedly, of great magnitude,
+naturally fitted to create horror, and that
+loudly call for punishment, that have yet no idea of
+<i>turpitude</i> 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 <i>horrible</i>, 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,&mdash;"<i>Dicam insigne,
+recens, alio indictum ore</i>"&mdash;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 corrup<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>tion.
+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,&mdash;he steals, he filches, he
+plunders, he oppresses, he extorts,&mdash;all for the good
+of the dear East India Company,&mdash;all for the advantage
+of his honored masters, the Proprietors,&mdash;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,&mdash;who never had the confidence in him
+that they had in the meanest of his predecessors."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">{48}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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. <i>Semel malus pr&aelig;sumitur semper malus.</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>His conduct upon these occasions may be thought
+irrational. But, thank God, guilt was never a rational<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">{49}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">{50}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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 affirma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">{51}</a></span>tion
+of the facts implied in that report of them, and
+such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability,
+follow them."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;gentle hints, <i>gemitus columb&aelig;</i>,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">{52}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">{53}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;your Lordships will remark the
+whole of this most daring and systematic plan of bribery
+and peculation,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that is, to four
+covenanted servants&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">{54}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">{55}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">{56}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> a year upon the establishment. But for
+great, eminent, capital services, 62,000<i>l.</i>, though a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">{57}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>many</i> people
+speak ill of him, ever pointed to any particular <i>act</i> 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,&mdash;"He had many enemies
+at the time he was proposed to be employed in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">{58}</a></span>
+the Company's service, and not <i>one advocate</i> 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 <i>specific</i>
+facts. I have heard him loaded, as I have many
+others, with general reproaches, but have never heard
+any one express a doubt of <i>his abilities</i>." 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I do, then, declare my conviction, and wish it may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">{59}</a></span>
+stand recorded to posterity, that there never was a
+<i>bad man</i> that had ability for <i>good service</i>. 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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">{60}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i>, 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,&mdash;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, "<i>Dinagepore, No. 1</i>," I find
+"<i>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</i>." We find here, "<i>Dinagepore
+peshcush, four lacs of rupees, cabooleat</i>": 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">{61}</a></span>
+monthly payments, a sum of about three lacs of rupees,
+upon an engagement to pay him four; that is, he
+received about 30,000<i>l.</i> out of 40,000<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> out of the 40,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you are not very much enlightened,
+I believe, by seeing these words, <i>Dinagepore peshcush</i>.
+We find a province, we find a sum of money, we find
+an agent, and we find a receiver. The <i>province</i> is
+<i>Dinagepore</i>, the <i>agent</i> is <i>Gunga Govind Sing</i>, the <i>sum</i>
+agreed on is 40,000<i>l.</i>, and the <i>receiver</i> of a part of
+that is <i>Mr. Hastings</i>. 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 <i>murder
+by persons unknown</i>: 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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, however, now see what was the state of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">{62}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">{63}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> for a judgment; which,
+whether that judgment was right or wrong, true or
+false, he corruptly received.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">{64}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>This history of this Dinagepore peshcush is the
+public one received by the Company, and which is
+entered upon the record,&mdash;but not the private, and
+probably the true history of this corrupt transaction.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<i>l.</i> a year,&mdash;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,)&mdash;this Gunga Govind Sing produces
+soon after another character, to whom he consigns<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">{65}</a></span>
+the custody of the whole family and the whole province.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Arcades ambo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Et cantare pares, et respondere parati.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noindent">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<i>l.</i> for <i>his
+own</i> inheritance, if it was his due,&mdash;for the inheri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">{66}</a></span>tance
+of <i>others</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">{67}</a></span>
+of three great and once wealthy provinces,&mdash;(which
+is best or worst I shall not pretend to determine,)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>[<i>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.</i>]</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>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 transmit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">{68}</a></span>ted
+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,)&mdash;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<i>l.</i> as a part of a bribe.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary to inform your Lordships who this
+Debi Sing was, to whom these great trusts were committed,
+and those great provinces given.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">{69}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Kh&acirc;n, 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<i>l.</i> in debt: that is to say, as soon
+as he was a great debtor, he ceased to be a great
+criminal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">{70}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Debi Sing obtained by his services no slight influence
+over Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, a person of a character
+very different from his.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> sterling a year, was with difficulty
+leased for a yearly sum under 90,000<i>l.</i>, and with all
+rigor of exaction produced in effect little more than
+60,000<i>l.</i>, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">{71}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Debi Sing found this administration composed mostly
+of young men, dissipated and fond of pleasure, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">{72}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">{73}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">{74}</a></span>times
+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 <i>by proxy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>carte blanche</i> on the table,&mdash;all to no purpose.
+"What are you?&mdash;stones? Have I not men to deal
+with? Will flesh and blood refuse me?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a
+set of innocent officers,&mdash;sold his fellow-servants of
+the Company, entitled by every duty to his protection,&mdash;sold
+English subjects, recommended by every
+tie of national sympathy,&mdash;sold the honor of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">{75}</a></span>
+British government itself,&mdash;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 <i>him</i> 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,)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;territories
+making together a tract of land superior
+in dimensions to the northern counties of England,
+Yorkshire included.</p>
+
+<p>To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">{76}</a></span>
+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 <i>dewan</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> 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 <i>this</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">{77}</a></span>
+discretion of the donor in what manner he was to
+indemnify himself for it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;as from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">{78}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;sold for&mdash;what
+do your Lordships think? They were sold for less
+than one year's purchase,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>When he had thus sold and separated these lands,
+he united the whole body of them, amounting to about
+7,000<i>l.</i> sterling a year (but, according to the rate of
+money and living in that country, equivalent to a rental
+in England of 30,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a circumstance attending this business<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">{79}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">{80}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;even
+the very feeble consolations of death, were, by
+the same rigid hand of tyranny,&mdash;a tyranny more
+consuming than the funeral pile, more greedy than
+the grave, and more inexorable than death itself,&mdash;seized
+and taken to make good the honor of corruption
+and the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or
+his instruments.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">{81}</a></span>
+houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a <i>thousand</i>
+of which would not perhaps produce twenty
+shillings."</p>
+
+<p>These were the opulent people from whose superfluities
+Mr. Hastings was to obtain a gift of 40,000<i>l.</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>
+means, in a very short time they fell into the hands
+of usurers.</p>
+
+<p>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?&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">{83}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>I come now to the last stage of their miseries.
+Everything visible and vendible was seized and sold.
+Nothing but the bodies remained.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">{84}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">{85}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">{86}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>Bechettea</i>, 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">{87}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">{88}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;(I cannot
+proceed for shame and horror!)&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">{89}</a></span>
+cruelty,&mdash;there, where the reverence of nature and
+the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture
+to describe their practices.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">{90}</a></span>
+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 <i>halicore</i>, if (which is rare) he survives that miserable
+degradation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous
+and oppressive demands, exacted with such tor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">{91}</a></span>tures,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In our Indian government, whatever grievance is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">{92}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">{93}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;not only to
+inquire and to report, but to decide and to redress.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">{94}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">{95}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">{96}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Persons even less informed than your Lordships
+are well apprised that all officers representing government,
+and making in that character an author<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">{97}</a></span>ized
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">{98}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit
+down. After some time Mr. Burke again addressed
+the House.</i>]</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House,
+on the motion of His Royal Highness the Prince of
+Wales, adjourned.</i>]<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">{99}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="FOURTH_DAY_TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_19_1788" id="FOURTH_DAY_TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_19_1788"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 noth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">{100}</a></span>ing
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">{101}</a></span>
+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 <i>pensioner</i>. No longer the sneaking tone
+of apology; no longer the modest allegations that
+the commissioner was misinformed;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Things were now in a proper train; the Committee
+find the cause growing and ripening to their wishes;&mdash;answers,
+replies, objections, and interrogatories,&mdash;accounts
+opposed to accounts,&mdash;balances now on the
+one side, now on the other,&mdash;now debtor becomes
+creditor, and creditor debtor,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">{102}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;and at a time
+when they saw <i>him</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>A new commission of junior servants was at the
+same time sent out to review and re&euml;xamine 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>vakeel</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">{104}</a></span>
+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, "<i>If he should be left under
+a guard, the people would consider him as under
+disgrace.</i>" 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">{105}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;an
+equal judge, however. The judge was Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, his original patron, and the author of all
+his fortunes,&mdash;a judge who depends on him, as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">{106}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I have stated before that I considered Mr. Hastings
+as responsible for the characters of the people he employed,&mdash;doubly
+responsible, if he <i>knew</i> them to be
+bad. I therefore charge him with putting in situations
+in which any evil may be committed persons of
+known evil characters.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">{107}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;that is to say, by Gunga Govind Sing
+himself, the confidential agent of Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings is further responsible, because he
+took a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> from some person in power
+in Dinagepore and Rungpore, the countries which
+were ravaged in this manner, through the hands of
+Gunga Govind Sing,&mdash;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<i>l.</i> a year,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>
+to supersede all the English provincial authorities,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">{109}</a></span>ductive
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings says,&mdash;"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."</p>
+
+<p>We shall now see what things Mr. Hastings did,
+what course he was in, a little before his departure,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>One of his last political acts was this.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">{110}</a></span>
+such things were doing, I shall prove. But that is
+not now my consideration.</p>
+
+<p>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," &amp;c., &amp;c., &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,) <i>even he</i> 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">{111}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;here the native
+authority which he settled, and the establishment of
+native iniquity in a regular system under Gunga
+Govind Sing,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">{112}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i>
+in bribes, and 30,000<i>l.</i> 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,&mdash;this is clear, and what we undertake to
+prove,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I must re-state to your Lordships, because I wish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">{113}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;when they know they are tools for his
+own corrupt purposes?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">{114}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">{115}</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>There is the real President of the Committee,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;for what?&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">{116}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">{117}</a></span>
+Hastings left Bengal eight or nine, Mr. Hastings had
+received from that country a bribe of about 40,000<i>l.</i>
+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,&mdash;that he
+should not be robbed, if Gunga Govind Sing could
+help it,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">{118}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 accompanying <i>durkhausts</i>, or petitions, for grants
+of lands lying in different districts, the total <i>jumma</i>,
+or rent, of which amount to Rupees 2,38,061. 12. 1."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships recollect that Mr. Larkins was one
+of the bribe-agents of Mr. Hastings,&mdash;one, I mean,
+of a corporation, but not corporate in their acts.
+My Lords, Mr. Larkins has told you, he has told us,
+and he has told the Court of Directors, that Mr. Hastings
+parted in a quarrel with Gunga Govind Sing, because
+he had not faithfully kept his engagement with
+regard to his bribe, and that, instead of 40,000<i>l.</i> from
+Dinagepore, he had only paid him 30,000<i>l.</i> My
+Lords, that iniquitous men will defraud one another
+I can conceive; but you will perceive by Mr. Hastings's
+behavior at parting, that he either had in fact
+received this money from Gunga Govind Sing, or in
+some way or other had abundant reason to be satis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">{119}</a></span>fied,&mdash;that
+he totally forgot his anger upon this occasion,
+and that at parting his last act was to ratify
+<i>grants of lands</i> (so described by Mr. Hastings) to
+Gunga Govind Sing. Your Lordships will recollect
+the tender and forgiving temper of Mr. Hastings.
+Whatever little bickerings there might have been between
+them about their small money concerns, the
+purifying waters of the Ganges had washed away all
+sins, enmities, and discontent. By some of those arts
+which Gunga Govind Sing knows how to practise, (I
+mean conciliatory, honest arts,) he had fairly wiped
+away all resentment out of Mr. Hastings's mind; and
+he, who so long remembered the affront offered him
+by Cheyt Sing, totally forgets Gunga Govind Sing's
+fraud of 10,000<i>l.</i>, and attempts to make others the
+instruments of giving him what he calls his reward.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings states, among Gunga Govind's merits,
+that he had, from the time of its institution, and with
+a very short intermission, served the office of dewan
+to the Calcutta Committee. That short intermission
+was when he was turned out of office upon proof of
+peculation and embezzlement of public money; but
+of this cause of the intermission in the political life
+and political merits of Gunga Govind Sing Mr. Hastings
+does not tell you.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships shall now hear what opinion a
+member of the Provincial Council at Calcutta, in
+which he had also served, had of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Gunga Govind Sing?" The answer is,
+"He was, when I left Bengal, dewan to the Committee
+of Revenue.&mdash;What was his office and power
+during Mr. Hastings's administration since 1780?&mdash;He
+was formerly dewan to the Provincial Council
+stationed at Calcutta, of which I was a member. His<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">{120}</a></span>
+conduct then was licentious and unwarrantable, oppressive
+and extortionary. He was stationed under
+us to be an humble and submissive servant, and to be
+of use to us in the discharge of our duty. His conduct
+was everything the reverse. We endeavored to
+correct the mischiefs he was guilty of as much as
+possible. In one attempt to release fifteen persons
+illegally confined by him, we were dismissed our offices:
+a different pretence was held out for our dismission,
+but it was only a pretence. Since his appointment
+as dewan to the present Committee of Revenue,
+his line of conduct has only been a continuance of
+what I have described, but upon a larger scale.&mdash;What
+was the general opinion of the natives of the
+use he made of his power? He was looked up to by
+the natives as the second person in the government,
+if not the first. He was considered as the only channel
+for obtaining favor and employment from the
+Governor. There is hardly a native family of rank
+or credit within the three provinces whom he has not
+some time or other distressed and afflicted; scarce
+a zemindary that he has not dismembered and plundered.&mdash;Were
+you in a situation to know this to be
+true?&mdash;I certainly was.&mdash;What was the general opinion,
+and your own, concerning his wealth?&mdash;It is almost
+impossible to form a competent judgment, his
+means of acquiring it have been so extensive. I had
+an account shown to me, about July, 1785, stating his
+acquisitions at three hundred and twenty lacs of rupees,&mdash;that
+is, 3,200,000<i>l.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have only to add, that, from the best
+inquiries I have been able to make, those who speak
+highest of his wealth are those who obtain the greatest
+credit. The estimate of any man's wealth is un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">{121}</a></span>certain;
+but the enormity of his wealth is universally
+believed. Yet Mr. Hastings seemed to act as if he
+needed a reward; and it is therefore necessary to
+inquire what recommended him particularly to Mr.
+Hastings. Your Lordships have seen that he was on
+the point of being dismissed for misbehavior and oppression
+by that Calcutta Committee his services to
+which Mr. Hastings gives as one proof of his constant
+and uniform good behavior. "He had executed," he
+says, "the duties of his office with fidelity, diligence,
+and ability." These are his public merits; but he
+has private merits. "To myself," says he, "he has
+given proofs of constancy and attachment."</p>
+
+<p>Now we, who have been used to look very diligently
+over the Company's records, and to compare one part
+with another, ask what those services were, which
+have so strongly recommended him to Mr. Hastings,
+and induced him to speak so favorably of his public
+services. What those services are does not appear;
+we have searched the records for them, (and those
+records are very busy and loquacious,) about that period
+of time during which Mr. Hastings was laboring
+under an eclipse, and near the dragon's mouth,
+and all the drums of Bengal beating to free him from
+this dangerous eclipse. During this time there is
+nothing publicly done, there is nothing publicly said,
+by Gunga Govind Sing. There were, then, some
+services of Gunga Govind Sing that lie undiscovered,
+which he takes as proofs of attachment. What could
+they be? They were not public; nobody knows anything
+of them; they must, by reference to the time,
+as far as we can judge of them, be services of concealment:
+otherwise, in the course of this business, it will
+be necessary, and Mr. Hastings will find occasion, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">{122}</a></span>
+show what those personal services of Gunga Govind
+Sing to him were. <i>His</i> services to Gunga Govind
+Sing were pretty conspicuous: for, after he was turned
+out for peculation, Mr. Hastings restored him to his
+office; and when he had imprisoned fifteen persons
+illegally and oppressively, and when the Council were
+about to set them at liberty, they were set at liberty
+themselves, they were dismissed their offices. Your
+Lordships see, then, what his public services were.
+His private services are unknown: they must be, as
+we conceive from their being unknown, of a suspicious
+nature; and I do not go further than suspicion, because
+I never heard, and I have not been without attempts
+to make the discovery, what those services were
+that recommended him to Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>Having looked at his public services, which are
+well-known scenes of wickedness, barbarity, and corruption,
+we next come to see what his reward is.
+Your Lordships hear what reward he thought proper
+to secure for himself; and I believe a man who has
+power like Gunga Govind Sing, and a disposition like
+Gunga Govind Sing, can hardly want the means of
+rewarding himself; and if every virtue rewards itself,
+and virtue is said to be its own reward, the virtue of
+Gunga Govind Sing was in a good way of seeking its
+own reward. Mr. Hastings, however, thought it was
+not right that such a man should reward himself, but
+that it was necessary for the honor and justice of government
+to find him a reward. Then the next thing
+is, what that reward shall be. It is a grant of lands.
+Your Lordships will observe, that Mr. Hastings declares
+some of these lands to be unoccupied, others
+occupied, but not by the just owners. Now these
+were the very lands of the Rajah of Dinagepore from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>
+whence he had taken the bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> My Lords,
+this was a monstrous thing. Mr. Hastings had the
+audacity, as his parting act, when he was coming to
+England, and ought to have expected (whatever he
+did expect) the responsibility of this day,&mdash;he was,
+I say, shameless enough not only to give this recommendation,
+but to perpetuate the mischiefs of his
+reign, as he has done, to his successors: for he has
+really done so, by making it impossible, almost, to
+know anything of the true state of that country; and
+he has thereby made them much less responsible and
+criminal than before in any ill acts they may have
+done since his time. But Mr. Hastings not only
+recommends and backs the petition of Gunga Govind
+Sing with his parting authority, which authority he
+made the people there believe would be greater in
+England than it was in India, but he is an evidence;
+he declares, that, "to his own knowledge, these lands
+are vacant, and confessedly, therefore, by the laws of
+this as well as of most other countries, in the absolute
+gift of government."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, as I said, Mr. Hastings becomes a witness,
+and I believe in the course of the proceedings
+you will find a false witness, for Gunga Govind Sing.
+"To my own knowledge," says he, "they are vacant."
+Why, I cannot find that Mr. Hastings had ever been
+in Dinagepore; or if he had, it must have been only
+as a passenger. He had not the supervision of the
+district, in any other sense than with that kind of
+eagle eye which he must have had over all Bengal,
+and which he had for no other purposes than those
+for which eagles' eyes are commonly used. He becomes,
+you see, a witness for Gunga Govind Sing, and
+orders to be given him, as a recompense for all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">{124}</a></span>
+iniquitous acts this man committed, the lands of that
+very Rajah who through the hands of Gunga Govind
+Sing had given an enormous bribe to Mr. Hastings.
+These lands were not without an ownership, but
+were lands in the hands of the Rajah, and were to
+be severed from the zemindary, and given to Gunga
+Govind Sing. The manner of obtaining them is something
+so shocking, and contains such a number of
+enormities completed in one act, that one can scarce
+imagine how such a compound could exist.</p>
+
+<p>This man, besides his office of dewan to the Calcutta
+Committee, which gave him the whole management
+and power of the revenue, was, as I have stated, at the
+head of all the registers in the kingdom, whose duty
+it was to be a control upon him as dewan. As Mr.
+Hastings destroyed every other constitutional settlement
+of the country, so the office which was to be a
+check upon Gunga Govind Sing, namely, the register
+of the country, had been superseded, and revived in
+another shape, and given to the own son of this very
+man. God forbid that a son should not be under
+a certain and reasonable subordination! But though
+in this country we know a son may possibly be free
+from the control of his father, yet the meanest slave
+is not in a more abject condition of slavery than a son
+is in that country to his father; for it extends to the
+power of a Roman parent. The office of register is to
+take care that a full and fair rent is secured to government;
+and above all, it is his business to take care
+of the body of laws, the <i>Rawaj-ul-Mulk</i>, or custom
+of the country, of which he is the guardian as the
+head of the law. It was his business to secure that
+fundamental law of the government, and fundamental
+law of the country, that a zemindary cannot be split,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">{125}</a></span>
+or any portion of it separated, without the consent of
+the government. This man betrayed his trust, and
+did privately, contrary to the duty of his office, get
+this minor Rajah, who was but an infant, who was
+but nine years old at the time, to make over to him a
+part of his zemindary, to a large amount, under color
+of a fraudulent and fictitious sale. By the laws of that
+country, by the common laws of Nature, the act of
+this child was void. The act was void as against the
+government, by giving a zemindary without the consent
+of the government to the very man who ought to
+have prevented such an act. He has the same sacred
+guardianship of minors that the Chancellor of England
+has. This man got to himself those lands by a
+fraudulent, and probably forged deed,&mdash;for that is
+charged too; but whether it was forged or not, this
+miserable minor was obliged to give the lands to him:
+he did not dare to quarrel with him upon such an
+article; because he who would purchase could take.
+The next step was to get one of his nearest relations
+to seem to give a consent; because taking it of the
+minor was too gross. The relation, who could no
+more consent by the law of that country than the law
+of this, gave apparently his consent. And these were
+the very lands that Mr. Hastings speaks of as "lands
+entirely at the disposal of government."</p>
+
+<p>All this came before the Council. The moment
+Mr. Hastings was gone, India seemed a little to respire;
+there was a vast, oppressive weight taken off it,
+there was a mountain removed from its breast; and
+persons did dare then, for the first time, to breathe
+their complaints. And accordingly, this minor Rajah
+got some person kind enough to tell him that he was
+a minor, that he could not part with his estate; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">{126}</a></span>
+this, with the other shocking and illegal parts of the
+process, was stated by him to the Council, who had
+Mr. Hastings's recommendation of Gunga Govind
+Sing before them. The Council, shocked to see a minor
+attempted to be dispossessed in such a manner
+by him who was the natural guardian of all minors,
+shocked at such an enormous, daring piece of iniquity,
+began to inquire further, and to ask, "How
+came this his near relation to consent?" He was apparently
+partner in the fraud. Partner in the fraud
+he was, but not partner in the profit; for he was to do
+it without getting anything for it: the wickedness
+was in him, and the profit in Gunga Govind Sing.
+In consequence of this inquiry, the man comes down
+to account for his conduct, and declares another atrocious
+iniquity, that shows you the powers which Gunga
+Govind Sing possessed. "Gunga Govind Sing,"
+says he, "is master of the country; he had made a
+great festival for the burial of his mother; all those
+of that caste ought to be invited to the funeral festival;
+he would have disgraced me forever, if I had not
+been invited to that funeral festival." These funeral
+festivals, you should know, are great things in that
+country, and celebrated in this manner, and, you may
+depend upon it, in a royal manner by him, upon burying
+his mother: any person left out was marked, despised,
+and disgraced. "But he had it in his power,
+and I was threatened to be deprived of my caste by
+his register, who had the caste in his absolute disposition."
+Says he, "I was under terror, I was under
+duress, and I did it."</p>
+
+<p>Gunga Govind Sing was fortified by the opinion,
+that the Governor, though departed, virtually resided
+in that country. God grant that his power may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">{127}</a></span>
+be extirpated out of it now! I doubt it; but, most
+assuredly, it was residing in its plenitude when he
+departed from thence; and there was not a man in
+India who was not of opinion, either that he was
+actually to return to govern India again, or that his
+power is such in England as that he might govern it
+here. And such were the hopes of those who had intentions
+against the estates of others. Gunga Govind
+Sing, therefore, being pressed to the wall by this declaration
+of the Rajah's relation, when he could say
+nothing against it, when it was clear and manifest,
+and there were only impudent barefaced denials, and
+asseverations against facts which carried truth with
+themselves, did not in his answer pretend to say that
+a zemindary might be parted without the consent of
+the government, that a minor might be deprived of
+it, that the next relation had a power of disposing
+of it. He did indeed say, but nobody believed him,
+that he had used no force upon this relation; but as
+every one knew the act would be void, he was driven
+to Mr. Hastings's great refuge,&mdash;he was driven to
+say, "The government in this country has arbitrary
+power; the power of government is everything, the
+right of the subject nothing; they have at all times
+separated zemindaries from their lawful proprietors.
+Give me what Mr. Hastings has constantly given to
+other people without any right, or shadow or semblance
+of right at all." God knows, it is well that
+I walk with my authority in my hand; for there are
+such crimes, such portentous, incredible crimes, to be
+brought before your Lordships, that it would hardly
+be believed, were it not that I am constantly, as I
+hope I shall constantly be, guarded with evidence, and
+that the strongest that can be, even the evidence of
+the parties themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">{128}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"From your inquiry," Gunga Govind Sing says
+to the Council, "every circumstance will appear in
+its true colors. With respect to the alienation of
+parts of zemindaries, the extent and consequence of
+the great zemindars depend in a great measure on
+the favor and countenance of the ruling powers.
+By what means did this zemindar of Dinagepore get
+possession of Purgunnah Buttassim after the death
+of Rycobad Chowdry in 1158, of Purgunnah Coolygong
+after the death of Sahebrance Chowderanne
+in the same year, notwithstanding his heirs existed,
+and of Purgunnah Suntoe, &amp;c., during the lifetime
+of Sumboonant, the zemindar, in 1167, all without
+right, title, or pecuniary consideration? This has
+been the case with many purgunnahs in his zemindary,
+and indeed exists in many other zemindaries
+besides since the Company's accession. Ramkissen,
+in 1172, got possession of Nurrulloor, the zemindary
+of Mahomed Ali. The purgunnah of Ichanguipore,
+&amp;c., was in three divisions in 1173. The petition
+of Govind Deo Sheopersaud was made over to the
+son of Bousser Chowdry, possessor of the third share.
+Purgunnah Baharbund belonged to the zemindary
+of Ranny Bhowanny, and in 1180 was made over
+to Lucknaut Nundy. All these changes took place
+in the lifetime of the rightful possessors, without
+right, title, or purchase."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships have not heard before of Lucknaut
+Nundy. He was the son of a person of whom your
+Lordships have heard before, called Cantoo Baboo, the
+banian of Mr. Hastings. Mr. Hastings has proved
+in abundance of other cases that a grant to father
+and son is the same thing. The fathers generally
+take out grants in the names of their sons: and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">{129}</a></span>
+the Ranny Bhowanny, possessing the zemindary of
+Radshi, an old lady of the first rank and family in
+India, was stripped of part of her zemindary, and it
+was given to Lucknaut Nundy, the son of Mr. Hastings's
+banian; and then (you see the consequence of
+good examples) comes Gunga Govind Sing, and says,
+"I am as good a man as he; there is a zemindary
+given; then do as much for Gunga Govind Sing as
+you have done for Cantoo Baboo." Here is an argument
+drawn from the practice of Mr. Hastings. And
+this shows your Lordships the necessity of suppressing
+such iniquities by punishing the author of them.
+You will punish Mr. Hastings, and no man will hereafter
+dare to rob minors, no man will hereafter dare
+to rob widows, to give to the vilest of mankind, their
+own base instruments for their own nefarious purposes,
+the lands of others, without right, title, or purchase.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will not after this state to you the false
+representation of the value of these lands which this
+man gave in to government. He represented it to be
+much less than it was, when he desired the grant of
+them,&mdash;as shall be stated, when it comes before your
+Lordships, at the proper time. But at present I am
+only touching upon principles, and bringing examples
+so far as they illustrate principles, and to show how
+precedents spread.</p>
+
+<p>I believe your Lordships will conceive better of the
+spirit of these transactions by my intermixing with
+them, as I shall endeavor to do, as much as possible
+of the grounds of them. I will venture to say, that
+no description that I can give, no painting, if I was
+either able or willing to paint, could make these transactions
+appear to your Lordships with the strength<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>
+which they have in themselves; and your Lordships
+will be convinced of this, when you see, what nobody
+could hardly believe, that a man can say, "It was
+given to others without right, title, or purchase,&mdash;give
+it to me without right, title, or purchase; give
+me the estates of minors without right, title, or purchase,
+because Mr. Hastings gave the estates of widows
+without right, title, or purchase."</p>
+
+<p>Of this exemplary grant, of this pattern for future
+proceedings, I will show your Lordships the consequence.
+I will read to your Lordships part of the
+examination of a witness, taken from a report of a
+committee of the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you acquainted with the situation of the
+zemindary of Baharbund?&mdash;It lies to the eastward
+of Dinagepore and Rungpore. I was stationed in that
+neighborhood.&mdash;To whom did it originally belong?&mdash;I
+believe, to the zemindary of Radshi, belonging
+to Ranny Bhowanny.&mdash;For what reason was it taken
+from the Ranny of Radshi and given to Cantoo Baboo?&mdash;I
+do not exactly recollect: I believe, on some
+plea of incapacity or insufficiency in her to manage it,
+or some pretended decline in the revenue, owing to
+mismanagement.&mdash;On what terms was it granted to
+Cantoo Baboo or his son?&mdash;I believe it was a grant in
+perpetuity, at the revenue of Rupees 82,000 or 83,000
+per annum.&mdash;What amount did he collect from the
+country?&mdash;I cannot tell. The year I was in that
+neighborhood, the settlement with his under-tenants
+was something above 3,53,000 rupees. The inhabitants
+of the country objected to it. They assembled in
+a body of about five thousand, and were proceeding to
+Calcutta to make known their grievances to the Committee
+of Revenue. They were stopped at Cossim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">{131}</a></span>bazar
+by Noor Sing Baboo, the brother of Cantoo
+Baboo, and there the matter was compromised,&mdash;in
+what manner I cannot say."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings's banian got
+this zemindary belonging to this venerable lady; unable
+to protect herself; that it was granted to him
+without right, title, or purchase. To show you that
+Mr. Hastings had been in a constant course of such
+proceeding, here is a petition from a person called
+&mdash;&mdash; for some favor from government which it is
+not necessary now to state. In order to make good
+his claim, he states what nobody denied, but which
+is universally known in fact. Says he, "I have
+never entertained any such intention or idea," that
+is, of seizing upon other people's zemindaries; "neither
+am I at all desirous of acquiring any other
+person's zemindary in this country," &amp;c....</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>[<i>The document read here is wanting, ending</i>] "as
+several Calcutta banians have done," &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<p>He states it as a kind of constant practice, by
+which the country had been robbed under Mr. Hastings,
+known and acknowledged to be so, to seize upon
+the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless. In
+this manner did Gunga Govind Sing govern himself,
+upon the direct precedent of Cantoo Baboo, the banian
+of Mr. Hastings; and this other instrument of
+his in like manner calls upon government for favor
+of some kind or other, upon the same principle and
+the same precedent.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships now see how necessary it was to
+say something about arbitrary power. For, first, the
+wicked people of that country (Mr. Hastings's instru<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">{132}</a></span>ments,
+I mean) pretend right, title, purchase, grant;
+and when their frauds in all these legal means are
+discovered, then they fly off, and have recourse to
+arbitrary power, and say, "It is true I can make out
+no right, title, grant, or purchase; the parties are
+minors; I am bound to take care of their right: but
+you have arbitrary power; you have exercised it upon
+other occasions; exercise it upon this; give me the
+rights of other people." This was the last act, and I
+hope will be the last act, of Mr. Hastings's wicked
+power, done by the wickedest man in favor of the
+wickedest man, and by the wickedest means, which
+failed upon his own testimony.</p>
+
+<p>To bring your Lordships to the end of this business,
+which I hope will lead me very near to the end of
+what I have to trouble your Lordships with, I will
+now state the conduct of the Council, and the resolution
+about Gunga Govind Sing. I am to inform your
+Lordships that there was a reference made by the
+Council to the Committee of Revenue, namely, to
+Gunga Govind Sing himself,&mdash;a reference with regard
+to the right, title, mode, and proceeding, and
+many other circumstances; upon which the Committee,
+being such as I have described, very naturally
+were silent. Gunga Govind Sing <i>loquitur solus</i>,&mdash;in
+the manner you have just heard; the Committee
+were the chorus,&mdash;they sometimes talk, fill up a vacant
+part,&mdash;but Gunga Govind Sing was the great
+actor, the sole one. The report of this Committee
+being laid before the Council, Mr. Stables, one of the
+board, entered the following minute on the 15th of
+May, 1785.</p>
+
+<p>"I have perused the several papers upon this subject,
+and am sorry to observe that the Committee of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">{133}</a></span>
+Revenue are totally silent on the most material points
+therein, and sending the petition to them has only
+been so much time thrown away: I mean, on the
+actual value of the lands in question, what the
+amount derived from them has been in the last year,
+and what advantages or disadvantages to government
+by the sale, and whether, in their opinion, the supposed
+sale was compulsive or not. But it is not necessary
+for the discussion of the question respecting
+the regularity or irregularity of the pretended sale
+of Salbarry to Gunga Govind Sing, the dewan, to
+enter into the particular assertions of each party.</p>
+
+<p>"The representations of the Rajah's agent, confirmed
+by the petitions of his principal, positively
+assert the sale to have been compulsive and violent;
+and the dewan as positively denies it, though the fears
+he expresses, 'that their common enemies would set
+aside the act before it was complete,' show clearly
+that they were sensible the act was unjustifiable, if
+they do not tend to falsify his denial.</p>
+
+<p>"But it is clearly established and admitted by the
+language and writings of both parties, that there has
+been a most unwarrantable collusion in endeavoring
+to alienate the rights of government, contrary to the
+most positive original laws of the constitution of
+these provinces, 'that no zemindar and other landholder,
+paying revenue to government, shall be permitted
+to alienate his lands without the express
+authority of that government.'</p>
+
+<p>"The defence set up by Gunga Govind Sing does
+not go to disavow the transaction; for, if it did, the
+deed of sale, &amp;c., produced by himself, and the petition
+to the board for its confirmation, would detect
+him: on the contrary, he openly admits its existence,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">{134}</a></span>
+and only strives to show that it was a voluntary one
+on the part of the Ranny and the servants of the
+Rajah. Whether voluntary or not, it was equally
+criminal in Gunga Govind Sing, as the public officer
+of government: because diametrically opposite to the
+positive and repeated standing orders of that government
+for the rule of his conduct, as dewan, and native
+guardian of the public rights intrusted especially
+to his care; because it was his duty, not only not
+to be guilty of a breach of those rules himself, but,
+as dewan, and exercising the efficient office of <i>kanungo</i>,
+to prevent, detect, expose, and apprise his employers
+of every instance attempted to the contrary;
+because it was his duty to prevent the government
+being defrauded, and the Rajah, a child of nine years
+old, robbed of his hereditary possessions, as he would
+have been, if this transaction had not been detected:
+whereas, on the contrary, the dewan is himself the
+principal mover and sole instrument in that fraud and
+robbery, if I am rightly informed, to the amount
+of 42,474 rupees<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor" title="Vakeel states Mofussil Jumma, of Salbarry, for 1,191
+">[1]</a> in perpetuity, by which he alone
+was to benefit; and because he has even dared to
+stand forward in an attempt to obtain our sanction,
+and thereby make us parties to (in my opinion) a
+false deed and fraudulent transaction, as his own
+defence now shows the bill of sale and all its collateral
+papers to be.</p>
+
+<p>"If offences of this dark tendency and magnitude
+were not to be punished in a public manner, the high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">{135}</a></span>
+example here set the natives employed under the government
+by their first native officer would very soon
+render our authority contemptible, and operate to
+the destruction of the public revenues. I will not
+dwell further on the contradictions in these papers
+before us on this subject.</p>
+
+<p>"But I beg leave to point out how tenacious the
+government have been of insuring implicit obedience
+to their rules on this subject in particular, and in
+prohibiting conduct like that here exhibited against
+their public officer, and how sacredly they have
+viewed the public institutes on this subject, which
+have been violated and trampled on; and it will suffice
+to show their public orders on a similar instance
+which happened some time ago, and which the dewan,
+from his official situation, must have been a party in
+detecting.</p>
+
+<p>"I desire the board's letter to the Committee on
+this subject, dated the 31st May, 1782, may be read,
+and a copy be annexed to this minute.</p>
+
+<p>"I therefore move the board that Gunga Govind
+Sing may be forthwith required to surrender the
+original deeds produced by him as a title to the grant
+of Salbarry, in order that they may be returned to
+the Rajah's agents, to be made null and void.</p>
+
+<p>"I further move the board, that the dewan, Gunga
+Govind Sing, together with his naib, Prawn Kishin
+Sing, his son, and all his dependants, be removed
+from their offices, and that the Roy Royan, Rajah
+Rajebullub, whose duty only Gunga Govind Sing virtually
+is to perform, be reinstated in the exercise of
+the duties of his department; and that Gunga Govind
+Sing be ordered to deliver up all official papers of
+the circar to the Committee of Revenue and the Roy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>
+Royan, and that they be ordered accordingly to take
+charge of them, and finally settle all accounts."</p>
+
+<p>This motion was overruled, and no final proceeding
+appears.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you have heard the proceedings of the
+court before which Gunga Govind Sing thought proper
+to appeal, in consequence of the power and protection
+of Mr. Hastings being understood to exist after he
+left India, and authenticated by his last parting deed.
+Your Lordships will judge by that last act of Mr.
+Hastings what the rest of his whole life was.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than
+just to remind your Lordships of this, that Mr. Hastings's
+government was one whole system of oppression,
+of robbery of individuals, of destruction of the
+public, and of suppression of the whole system of the
+English government, in order to vest in the worst of
+the natives all the powers that could possibly exist in
+any government,&mdash;in order to defeat the ends which
+all governments ought in common to have in view.
+Thus, my Lords, I show you at one point of view
+what you are to expect from him in all the rest. I
+have, I think, made out as clear as can be to your
+Lordships, so far as it was necessary to go, that his
+bribery and peculation was not occasional, but habitual,&mdash;that
+it was not urged upon him at the moment,
+but was regular and systematic. I have shown
+to your Lordships the operation of such a system on
+the revenues.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, Mr. Hastings pleads one constant merit
+to justify those acts,&mdash;namely, that they produce an
+increase of the public revenue; and accordingly he
+never sells to any of those wicked agents any trusts
+whatever in the country, that you do not hear that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">{137}</a></span>
+will considerably tend to the increase of the revenue.
+Your Lordships will see, when he sold to wicked men
+the province of Bahar in the same way in which Debi
+Sing had this province of Dinagepore, that consequences
+of a horrid and atrocious nature, though not to
+so great an extent, followed from it. I will just beg
+leave to state to your Lordships, that the kingdom
+of Bahar is annexed to the kingdom of Bengal; that
+this kingdom was governed by another Provincial
+Council; that he turned out that Provincial Council,
+and sold that government to two wicked men: one of
+no fortune at all, and the other of a very suspicious
+fortune; one a total bankrupt, the other justly excommunicated
+for his wickedness in his country, and then
+in prison for misdemeanors in a subordinate situation
+of government. Mr. Hastings destroyed the Council
+that imprisoned him; and, instead of putting one of
+the best and most reputable of the natives to govern
+it, he takes out of prison this excommunicated
+wretch, hated by God and man,&mdash;this bankrupt, this
+man of evil and desperate character, this mismanager
+of the public revenue in an inferior station; and, as
+he had given Bengal to Gunga Govind Sing, he gave
+this province to Rajahs Kelleram and Cullian Sing.
+It was done upon this principle, that they would increase
+and very much better the revenue. These men
+seemed to be as strange instruments for improving
+a revenue as ever were chosen, I suppose, since the
+world began. Perhaps their merit was giving a bribe
+of 40,000<i>l.</i> to Mr. Hastings. How he disposed of it
+I don't know. He says, "I disposed of it to the public,
+and it was in a case of emergency." You will
+see in the course of this business the falsehood of that
+pretence; for you will see, though the obligation is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">{138}</a></span>
+given for it as a round sum of money, that the payment
+was not accomplished till a year after; that
+therefore it could not answer any immediate exigence
+of the Company. Did it answer in an increase of the
+revenue? The very reverse. Those persons who
+had given this bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> at the end of that
+year were found 80,000<i>l.</i> in debt to the Company.
+The Company always loses, when Mr. Hastings takes
+a bribe; and when he proposes an increase of the revenue,
+the Company loses often double. But I hope
+and trust your Lordships will consider this idea of a
+monstrous rise of rent, given by men of desperate fortunes
+and characters, to be one of the grievances instead
+of one of the advantages of this system.</p>
+
+<p>It has been necessary to lay these facts before you,
+(and I have stated them to your Lordships far short
+of their reality, partly through my infirmity, and
+partly on account of the odiousness of the task of
+going through things that disgrace human nature,)
+that you may be enabled fully to enter into the dreadful
+consequences which attend a system of bribery
+and corruption in a Governor-General. On a transient
+view, bribery is rather a subject of disgust than
+horror,&mdash;the sordid practice of a venal, mean, and
+abject mind; and the effect of the crime seems to end
+with the act. It looks to be no more than the corrupt
+transfer of property from one person to another,&mdash;at
+worst a theft. But it will appear in a very different
+light, when you regard the consideration for
+which the bribe is given,&mdash;namely, that a Governor-General,
+claiming an arbitrary power in himself, for
+that consideration delivers up the properties, the liberties,
+and the lives of an whole people to the arbitrary
+discretion of any wicked and rapacious person,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>
+who will be sure to make good from their blood the
+purchase he has paid for his power over them. It is
+possible that a man may pay a bribe merely to redeem
+himself from some evil. It is bad, however, to
+live under a power whose violence has no restraint
+except in its avarice. But no man ever paid a bribe
+for a power to charge and tax others, but with a view
+to oppress them. No man ever paid a bribe for the
+handling of the public money, but to peculate from
+it. When once such offices become thus privately
+and corruptly venal, the very worst men will be chosen
+(as Mr. Hastings has in fact constantly chosen
+the very worst); because none but those who do not
+scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently
+with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands
+of a severe public revenue and the private bribes of a
+rapacious chief magistrate. Not only the worst men
+will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no
+dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions.
+Their protection is sure. The authority
+that is to restrain, to control, to punish them is previously
+engaged; he has his retaining fee for the support
+of their crimes. Mr. Hastings never dared,
+because he could not, arrest oppression in its course,
+without drying up the source of his own corrupt
+emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the
+fact, to punish extortion in others, because he could
+not, without risking the discovery of bribery in himself.
+The same corruption, the same oppression, and
+the same impunity will reign through all the subordinate
+gradations.</p>
+
+<p>A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of
+wicked, violent, and unjust instruments. But when
+once the line of just and legal demand is trans<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">{140}</a></span>gressed,
+such instruments are of absolute necessity;
+and they comport themselves accordingly. When we
+know that men must be well paid (and they ought to
+be well paid) for the performance of honorable duty,
+can we think that men will be found to commit wicked,
+rapacious, and oppressive acts with fidelity and
+disinterestedness for the sole emolument of dishonest
+employers? No: they must have their full share of
+the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer
+and more necessary instruments of the general extortion.
+We must not, therefore, flatter ourselves,
+when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000<i>l.</i> in bribes for Dinagepore
+and its annexed provinces, that from the
+people nothing more than 40,000<i>l.</i> is extorted. I
+speak within compass, four times forty must be levied
+on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent
+purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable
+tortures, imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general
+despair, general insurrection, the massacre of the
+officers of revenue by the people, the massacre of the
+people by the soldiery, and the total waste and destruction
+of the finest provinces in India, are things
+of course,&mdash;and all a necessary consequence involved
+in the very substance of Mr. Hastings's bribery.</p>
+
+<p>I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed,
+for private purposes, the whole system of
+government by the six Provincial Councils, which
+he had no right to destroy.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having delegated to others that
+power which the act of Parliament had directed him
+to preserve unalienably in himself.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having formed a committee to
+be mere instruments and tools, at the enormous expense
+of 62,000<i>l.</i> per annum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">{141}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having appointed a person their
+dewan to whom these Englishmen were to be subservient
+tools,&mdash;whose name, to his own knowledge,
+was, by the general voice of India, by the general
+recorded voice of the Company, by recorded official
+transactions, by everything that can make a man
+known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy;
+and with giving him the whole power which he
+had thus separated from the Council-General, and
+from the Provincial Councils.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind
+Sing.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with not having done that bribe-service
+which fidelity even in iniquity requires at the
+hands of the worst of men.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having robbed those people of
+whom he took the bribes.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having fraudulently alienated
+the fortunes of widows.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having, without right, title, or
+purchase, taken the lands of orphans, and given them
+to wicked persons under him.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having removed the natural
+guardians of a minor Rajah, and with having given
+that trust to a stranger, Debi Sing, whose wickedness
+was known to himself and all the world, and by
+whom the Rajah, his family, and dependants were
+cruelly oppressed.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having committed to the management
+of Debi Sing three great provinces; and
+thereby with having wasted the country, ruined the
+landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt
+their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded
+their persons, and destroyed the honor of the
+whole female race of that country.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">{142}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the name of the Commons of England, I charge
+all this villany upon Warren Hastings, in this last
+moment of my application to you.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great
+act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my
+Lords? You have the cause of oppressed princes,
+of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces,
+and of wasted kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was
+there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any
+one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish
+any other such delinquent from India. Warren
+Hastings has not left substance enough in India to
+nourish such another delinquent.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have
+before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors;
+and I believe, my Lords, that the sun, in his
+beneficent progress round the world, does not behold
+a more glorious sight than that of men, separated
+from a remote people by the material bounds and
+barriers of Nature, united by the bond of a social
+and moral community,&mdash;all the Commons of England
+resenting, as their own, the indignities and
+cruelties that are offered to all the people of India.</p>
+
+<p>Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example
+of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing
+in the range of human imagination, can supply us
+with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see
+virtually, in the mind's eye, that sacred majesty of
+the crown, under whose authority you sit, and whose
+power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority,
+what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent
+powers and protecting justice of his Majesty. We
+have here the heir-apparent to the crown, such as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>
+the fond wishes of the people of England wish an
+heir-apparent of the crown to be. We have here all
+the branches of the royal family, in a situation between
+majesty and subjection, between the sovereign
+and the subject,&mdash;offering a pledge in that situation
+for the support of the rights of the crown and the liberties
+of the people, both which extremities they
+touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage
+here,&mdash;those who have their own honor, the
+honor of their ancestors and of their posterity to
+guard, and who will justify, as they have always
+justified, that provision in the Constitution by which
+justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we
+have here a new nobility, who have risen and exalted
+themselves by various merits,&mdash;by great military services
+which have extended the fame of this country
+from the rising to the setting sun. We have those
+who, by various civil merits and various civil talents,
+have been exalted to a situation which they well deserve,
+and in which they will justify the favor of their
+sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects,
+and make them rejoice to see those virtuous
+characters that were the other day upon a level
+with them now exalted above them in rank, but
+feeling with them in sympathy what they felt in common
+with them before. We have persons exalted
+from the practice of the law, from the place in which
+they administered high, though subordinate, justice,
+to a seat here, to enlighten with their knowledge and
+to strengthen with their votes those principles which
+have distinguished the courts in which they have
+presided.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you have here also the lights of our religion,
+you have the bishops of England. My Lords,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">{144}</a></span>
+you have that true image of the primitive Church, in
+its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified
+from the superstitions and the vices which a long succession
+of ages will bring upon the best institutions.
+You have the representatives of that religion which
+says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit
+of their institution is charity,&mdash;a religion which so
+much hates oppression, that, when the God whom we
+adore appeared in human form, He did not appear in
+a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with
+the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm
+and ruling principle that their welfare was the object
+of all government, since the Person who was the Master
+of Nature chose to appear Himself in a subordinate
+situation. These are the considerations which influence
+them, which animate them, and will animate
+them, against all oppression,&mdash;knowing that He who
+is called first among them, and first among us all,
+both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it,
+made Himself "the servant of all."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, these are the securities which we have
+in all the constituent parts of the body of this House.
+We know them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and
+commit safely the interests of India and of humanity
+into your hands. Therefore it is with confidence,
+that, ordered by the Commons,</p>
+
+<p>I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high
+crimes and misdemeanors.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of the Commons of
+Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary
+trust he has betrayed.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of
+Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">{145}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of the people of India,
+whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted,
+whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he
+has laid waste and desolate.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those
+eternal laws of justice which he has violated.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of human nature itself,
+which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed,
+in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition
+of life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">{146}</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Vakeel states Mofussil Jumma, of Salbarry, for 1,191
+</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='ctr'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='center'>S* R*</td><td align='left'>96,229</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Purchase money</td><td align='left'>53,755</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Per annum, loss</td><td align='left' class="bt">42,474</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">{147}</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="SPEECH_ON_THE_SIXTH_ARTICLE_OF_CHARGE" id="SPEECH_ON_THE_SIXTH_ARTICLE_OF_CHARGE"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECHES<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+THE IMPEACHMENT<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">OF</span><br />
+<br />
+WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.</span></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+<h2>SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">April and May, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">{148}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>NOTE.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>After Mr. Burke had concluded the opening speeches, the
+first article of the impeachment was brought forward, on the 22d
+of February, 1788, by Mr. Fox, and supported by Mr. Grey on
+the 25th. After the evidence upon this article had been adduced,
+it was summed up and enforced by Mr. Anstruther, on the 11th
+day of April following.</p>
+
+<p>The next article with which the Commons proceeded was
+brought forward on the 15th of April, 1788, by Mr. Adam, and
+supported by Mr. Pelham; and the evidence, in part upon the
+second article of charge, was summed up and enforced, on the 3d
+of June, by Mr. Sheridan.</p>
+
+<p>On the 21st of April, 1789, Mr. Burke opened the sixth charge,
+bribery and corruption, in the following speech, which was continued
+on the 25th of April, and on the 6th and 7th May, in
+the same session.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">{149}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="FIRST_DAY_TUESDAY_APRIL_21_1789" id="FIRST_DAY_TUESDAY_APRIL_21_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;An event which had spread for a
+considerable time an universal grief and consternation
+through this kingdom, and which in its issue
+diffused as universal and transcendent a joy, has
+in the circumstances both of our depression and of our
+exaltation produced a considerable delay, if not a total
+suspension, of the most important functions of
+government.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, we now resume our office,&mdash;and we
+resume it with new and redoubled alacrity, and, we
+trust, under not less propitious omens than when we
+left it, in this House, at the end of the preceding session.
+We come to this duty with a greater degree
+of earnestness and zeal, because we are urged to it by
+many and very peculiar circumstances. This day we
+come from an House where the last steps were taken
+(and I suppose something has happened similar in
+this) to prepare our way to attend with the utmost
+solemnity, in another place, a great national thanksgiving
+for having restored the sovereign to his Parliament
+and the Parliament to its sovereign.</p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, it is not only in the house of prayer
+that we offer to the First Cause the acceptable homage
+of our rational nature,&mdash;my Lords, in this House, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">{150}</a></span>
+this bar, in this place, in every place where His commands
+are obeyed, His worship is performed. And,
+my Lords, I must boldly say, (and I think I shall
+hardly be contradicted by your Lordships, or by any
+persons versed in the law which guides us all,) that
+the highest act of religion, and the highest homage
+which we can and ought to pay, is an imitation of
+the Divine perfections, as far as such a nature can
+imitate such perfections, and that by this means alone
+we can make our homage acceptable to Him.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in His temple we shall not forget that
+His most distinguished attribute is justice, and that
+the first link in the chain by which we are held to the
+Supreme Judge of All is justice; and that it is in this
+solemn temple of representative justice we may best
+give Him praise, because we can here best imitate His
+divine attributes. If ever there was a cause in which
+justice and mercy are not only combined and reconciled,
+but incorporated, it is in this cause of suffering
+nations, which we now bring before your Lordships
+this second session of Parliament, unwearied and unfatigued
+in our persevering pursuit; and we feel it
+to be a necessary preliminary, a necessary fact, a necessary
+attendant and concomitant of every public
+thanksgiving, that we should express our gratitude
+by our virtues, and not merely with our mouths, and
+that, when we are giving thanks for acts of mercy,
+we should render ourselves worthy of them by doing
+acts of mercy ourselves. My Lords, these considerations,
+independent of those which were our first movers
+in this business, strongly urge us at present to
+pursue with all zeal and perseverance the great cause
+we have now in hand. And we feel this to be the
+more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">{151}</a></span>
+light, unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious
+minds soon tire in any pursuit that requires
+strength, steadiness, and perseverance. Such persons,
+who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not
+resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say,
+How long is this business to continue? Our answer
+is, It is to continue till its ends are obtained.</p>
+
+<p>We know, that, by a mysterious dispensation of
+Providence, injury is quick and rapid, and justice
+slow; and we may say that those who have not patience
+and vigor of mind to attend the tardy pace of
+justice counteract the order of Providence, and are
+resolved not to be just at all. We, therefore, instead
+of bending the order of Nature to the laxity of our
+characters and tempers, must rather confirm ourselves
+by a manly fortitude and virtuous perseverance to
+continue within those forms, and to wrestle with injustice,
+until we have shown that those virtues which
+sometimes wickedness debauches into its cause, such
+as vigor, energy, activity, fortitude of spirit, are called
+back and brought to their true and natural service,&mdash;and
+that in the pursuit of wickedness, in the following
+it through all the winding recesses and mazes of
+its artifices, we shall show as much vigor, as much
+constancy, as much diligence, energy, and perseverance,
+as any others can do in endeavoring to elude the
+laws and triumph over the justice of their country.
+My Lords, we have thought it the more necessary to
+say this, because it has been given out that we might
+faint in this business. No: we follow, and trust we
+shall always follow, that great emblem of antiquity, in
+which the person who held out to the end of a long
+line of labors found the reward of all the eleven in the
+twelfth. Our labor, therefore, will be our reward;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">{152}</a></span>
+and we will go on, we will pursue with vigor and
+diligence, in a manner suitable to the Commons of
+Great Britain, every mode of corruption, till we have
+thoroughly eradicated it.</p>
+
+<p>I think it necessary to say a word, too, upon another
+circumstance, of which there is some complaint,
+as if some injustice had arisen from voluntary delay
+on our part.</p>
+
+<p>I have already alluded to, first, the melancholy,
+then the joyful occasion of this delay; and I shall
+now make one remark on another part of the complaint,
+which I understand was formally made to
+your Lordships soon after we had announced our
+resolution to proceed in this great cause of suffering
+nations before you. It has been alleged, that the
+length of the pursuit had already very much distressed
+the person who is the object of it,&mdash;that it leaned
+upon a fortune unequal to support it,&mdash;and that
+30,000<i>l.</i> had been already spent in the preliminary
+preparations for the defence.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and
+unadulterated justice considers with a certain degree
+of tenderness the person whom it is called to punish,
+and never oppresses those by the process who ought
+not to be oppressed but by the sentence of the court
+before which they are brought. The Commons have
+heard, indeed, with some degree of astonishment, that
+30,000<i>l.</i> hath been laid out by Mr. Hastings in this
+business. We, who have some experience in the
+conduct of affairs of this nature, we, who profess to
+proceed with regard not to the economy so much as
+to the rigor of this prosecution, (and we are justified
+by our country in so doing,) upon a collation and
+comparison of the public expenses with those which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">{153}</a></span>
+the defendant is supposed to have incurred, are much
+surprised to hear it. We suppose that his solicitors
+can give a good account to him of those expenses,&mdash;that
+the thing is true,&mdash;and that he has actually,
+through them, incurred this expense. We have nothing
+to do with this: but we shall remove any degree
+of uneasiness from your Lordships' minds, and from
+our own, when we show you in the charge which we
+shall bring before you this day, that one bribe only
+received by Mr. Hastings, the smallest of his bribes,
+or nearly the smallest, the bribe received from Rajah
+Nobkissin, is alone more than equal to have paid all
+the charges Mr. Hastings is stated to have incurred;
+and if this be the case, your Lordships will not be
+made very uneasy in a case of bribery by finding that
+you press upon the sources of peculation.</p>
+
+<p>It has also been said that we weary out the public
+patience in this cause. The House of Commons do
+not call upon your Lordships to do anything of which
+they do not set the example. They have very lately
+sat in the Colchester Committee as many, within one
+or two, days successively as have been spent in this
+trial interruptedly in the course of two years. Every
+cause deserves that it should be tried according to
+its nature and circumstances; and in the case of the
+Colchester Committee, in the trial of paltry briberies
+of odd pounds, shillings, and pence, in the corruption
+of a returning officer, who is but a miller, they spent
+nearly the same number of days that we have been
+inquiring into the ruin of kingdoms by the peculation
+and bribery of the chief governor of the provinces of
+Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Therefore God forbid
+that we should faint at thrice thirty days, if the proceedings
+should be drawn into such a length, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">{154}</a></span>
+for a small crime as much time has been spent as has
+yet been spent in this great cause!</p>
+
+<p>Having now cleared the way with regard to the
+local and temporary circumstances of this case,&mdash;having
+shown your Lordships that too much time has
+not been spent in it,&mdash;having no reason to think,
+from the time which has hitherto been spent, that
+time will be unnecessarily spent in future,&mdash;I trust
+your Lordships will think that time ought neither to
+be spared nor squandered in this business: we will
+therefore proceed, article by article, as far as the discretion
+of the House of Commons shall think fit, for
+the justice of the case, to limit the inquiry, or to
+extend it.</p>
+
+<p>We are now going to bring before your Lordships
+the sixth article. It is an article of charge of bribery
+and corruption against Mr. Hastings; but yet
+we must confess that we feel some little difficulty <i>in
+limine</i>. We here appear in the name and character
+not only of representatives of the Commons of Great
+Britain, but representatives of the inhabitants of Bengal:
+and yet we have had lately come into our hands
+such ample certificates, such full testimonials, from
+every person in whose cause we complain, that we
+shall appear to be in the strangest situation in the
+world,&mdash;the situation of persons complaining, who
+are disavowed by the persons in whose name and
+character they complain. This would have been a
+very great difficulty in the beginning, especially as it
+is come before us in a flood-tide of panegyric. No
+encomium can be more exalted or more beautifully
+expressed. No language can more strongly paint
+the perfect satisfaction, the entire acquiescence, of
+all the nations of Bengal, and their wonderful ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">{155}</a></span>miration
+of the character of the person whom we
+have brought as a criminal to your bar upon their
+part. I do admit that it is a very awkward circumstance;
+but yet, at the same time, the same candor
+which has induced the House of Commons to bring
+before you the bosom friends and confidants of Mr.
+Hastings as their evidence will not suffer them to
+suppress or withhold for a moment from your Lordships
+this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation
+in Mr. Hastings's favor, and we shall produce it as a
+part of our evidence. Oh, my Lords, consider the
+situation of a people who are forced to mix their
+praises with their groans, who are forced to sign,
+with hands which have been in torture, and with
+the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an attestation
+in favor of the person from whom all their
+sufferings have been derived! When we prove to
+you the things that we shall prove, this will, I hope,
+give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory
+proof of the misery to which these people have
+been reduced. You will see before you, what is so
+well expressed by one of our poets as the homage
+of tyrants, "that homage with the mouth which the
+heart would fain deny, but dares not." Mr. Hastings
+has received that homage, and that homage we
+mean to present to your Lordships: we mean to present
+it, because it will show your Lordships clearly,
+that, after Mr. Hastings has ransacked Bengal from
+one end to the other, and has used all the power which
+he derives from having every friend and every dependant
+of his in every office from one end of that government
+to the other, he has not, in all those panegyrics,
+those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums, got one
+word of refutation or one word of evidence against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">{156}</a></span>
+any charge whatever which we produce against him.
+Every one knows, that, in the course of criminal
+trials, when no evidence of <i>alibi</i> can be brought,
+when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted,
+the last thing produced is evidence to character.
+His cause, therefore, is gone, when, having ransacked
+Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at
+length appeals to his character. In those little papers
+which are given us of our proceedings in our
+criminal courts, it is always an omen of what is to
+follow: after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or
+robbery, it ends in his character: "He has an admirable
+character; I have known him from a boy; he
+is wonderfully good; he is the best of men; I would
+trust him with untold gold": and immediately follows,
+"Guilty,&mdash;Death." This is the way in which,
+in our courts, character is generally followed by sentence.
+The practice is not modern. Undoubtedly
+Mr. Hastings has the example of criminals of high
+antiquity; for Caius Verres, Antonius, and every
+other man who has been famous for the pillage and
+destruction of provinces, never failed to bring before
+their judges the attestations of the injured to their
+character. Voltaire says, "<i>Les bons mots sont toujours
+redits</i>." A similar occasion has here produced
+a similar conduct. He has got just the same character
+as Caius Verres got in another cause; and the
+<i>laudationes</i>, which your Lordships know always followed,
+to save trouble, we mean ourselves to give
+your Lordships; we mean to give them with this
+strong presumption of guilt, that in all this panegyric
+there is not one word of defence to a single
+article of charge; they are mere lip-honors: but we
+think we derive from those panegyrics, which Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">{157}</a></span>
+Hastings has had sent over as evidence to supply
+the total want of it, an indication of the impossibility
+of attaining it. Mr. Hastings has brought them
+here, and I must say we are under some difficulty
+about them, and the difficulty is this. We think we
+can produce before your Lordships proofs of barbarity
+and peculation by Mr. Hastings; we have the proofs
+of them in specific provinces, where those proofs may
+be met by contrary proofs, or may lose their weight
+from a variety of circumstances. We thought we
+had got the matter sure, that everything was settled,
+that he could not escape us, after he had himself confessed
+the bribes he had taken from the specific provinces.
+But in what condition are we now? We
+have from those specific provinces the strongest attestations
+that there is not any credit to be paid to
+his own acknowledgments. In short, we have the
+complaints, concerning these crimes of Mr. Hastings,
+of the injured persons themselves; we have his own
+confessions; we shall produce both to your Lordships.
+But these persons now declare, that not only their own
+complaints are totally unfounded, but that Mr. Hastings's
+confessions are not true, and not to be credited.
+These are circumstances which your Lordships will
+consider in the view you take of this wonderful body
+of attestation.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pleasant thing to see in these addresses the
+different character and modes of eloquence of different
+countries. In those that will be brought before your
+Lordships you will see the beauty of chaste European
+panegyric improved by degrees into high, Oriental,
+exaggerated, and inflated metaphor. You will see
+how the language is first written in English, then
+translated into Persian, and then retranslated into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">{158}</a></span>
+English. There may be something amusing to your
+Lordships in this, and the beauty of these styles may,
+in this heavy investigation, tend to give a little gayety
+and pleasure. We shall bring before you the European
+and Asiatic incense. You will have the perfume-shops
+of the two countries.</p>
+
+<p>One of the accusations which we mean to bring
+against Mr. Hastings is upon the part of the Zemindar
+Radanaut, of the country of Dinagepore. Now
+hear what the Zemindar says himself. "As it has
+been learned by me, the mutsuddies, and the respectable
+officers of my zemindary, that the ministers
+of England are displeased with the late Governor,
+Warren Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that
+he oppressed us, took money from us by deceit and
+force, and ruined the country, therefore we, upon the
+strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent
+on and necessary for us to abide by, following the
+rules laid down in giving evidence, declare the particulars
+of the acts and deeds of Warren Hastings,
+Esquire, full of circumspection and caution, civility
+and justice, superior to the conduct of the most
+learned, and, by representing what is fact, wipe away
+the doubts that have possessed the minds of the ministers
+of England; that Mr. Hastings is possessed of
+fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to us;
+that he is clear of the contamination of mistrust and
+wrong, and his mind is free of covetousness or avarice.
+During the time of his administration no one
+saw other conduct than that of protection to the husbandman,
+and justice. No inhabitant ever experienced
+afflictions, no one ever felt oppression from him;
+our reputations have always been guarded from attacks
+by his prudence, and our families have always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">{159}</a></span>
+been protected by his justice. He never omitted the
+smallest instance of kindness towards us, but healed
+the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation
+by means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never
+permitting one of us to sink in the pit of despondence.
+He supported every one by his goodness, overset the
+designs of evil-minded men by his authority, tied the
+hand of oppression with the strong bandage of justice,
+and by these means expanded the pleasing appearance
+of happiness and joy over us. He re&euml;stablished
+justice and impartiality. We were during his government
+in the enjoyment of perfect happiness and
+ease, and many of us are thankful and satisfied. As
+Mr. Hastings was well acquainted with our manners
+and customs, he was always desirous, in every respect,
+of doing whatever would preserve our religious rites,
+and guard them against every kind of accident and injury,
+and at all times protected us. Whatever we have
+experienced from him, and whatever happened from
+him, we have written without deceit or exaggeration."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is a panegyric; and, directly contrary
+to the usual mode of other accusers, we begin
+by producing the panegyrics made upon the person
+whom we accuse. We shall produce along with the
+charge, and give as evidence, the panegyric and certificate
+of the persons whom we suppose to have suffered
+these wrongs. We suffer ourselves even to
+abandon, what might be our last resource, his own
+confession, by showing that one of the princes from
+whom he confesses that he took bribes has given a
+certificate of the direct contrary.</p>
+
+<p>All these things will have their weight upon your
+Lordships' minds; and when we have put ourselves
+under this disadvantage, (what disadvantage it is your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">{160}</a></span>
+Lordships will judge,) at least we shall stand acquitted
+of unfairness in charging him with crimes directly
+contrary to the panegyrics in this paper contained.
+Indeed, I will say this for him, that general charge
+and loose accusation may be answered by loose and
+general panegyric, and that, if ours were of that
+nature, this panegyric would be sufficient to overset
+our accusation. But we come before your Lordships
+in a different manner and upon different grounds.
+I am ordered by the Commons of Great Britain to
+support the charge that they have made, and persevere
+in making, against Warren Hastings, Esquire,
+late Governor-General of Bengal, and now a culprit
+at your bar: First, for having taken corruptly several
+bribes, and extorted by force, or under the power
+and color of his office, several sums of money from
+the unhappy natives of Bengal. The next article
+which we shall bring before you is, that he is not only
+personally corrupted, but that he has personally corrupted
+all the other servants of the Company,&mdash;those
+under him, whose corruptions he ought to have controlled,
+and those above him, whose business it was to
+control his corruptions.</p>
+
+<p>We purpose to make good to your Lordships the
+first of these, by submitting to you, that part of those
+sums which are specified in the charge were taken by
+him with his own hand and in his own person, but
+that much the greater part have been taken from the
+natives by the instrumentality of his black agents,
+banians, and other dependants,&mdash;whose confidential
+connection with him, and whose agency on his part
+in corrupt transactions, if his counsel should be bold
+enough to challenge us to the proof, we shall fully
+prove before you. The next part, and the second<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">{161}</a></span>
+branch of his corruption, namely, what is commonly
+called his active corruption, distinguishing the personal
+under the name of passive, will appear from his
+having given, under color of contracts, a number of
+corrupt and lucrative advantages from a number of
+unauthorized and unreasonable grants, pensions, and
+allowances, by which he corrupted actively the whole
+service of the Company. And, lastly, we shall show,
+that, by establishing a universal connivance from one
+end of the service to the other, he has not only corrupted
+and contaminated it in all its parts, but bound
+it in a common league of iniquity to support mutually
+each other against the inquiry that should detect and
+the justice that should punish their offences. These
+two charges, namely, of his active and passive corruption,
+we shall bring one after the other, as strongly
+and clearly illustrating and as powerfully confirming
+each other.</p>
+
+<p>The first which we shall bring before you is his own
+passive corruption,&mdash;so we commonly call it. Bribes
+are so little known in this country that we can hardly
+get clear and specific technical names to distinguish
+them; but in future, I am afraid, the conduct of Mr.
+Hastings will improve our law vocabulary. The first,
+then, of these offences with which Mr. Hastings stands
+charged here is receiving bribes himself, or through
+his banians. Every one of these are overt acts of the
+general charge of bribery, and they are every one
+of them, separately taken, substantive crimes. But
+whatever the criminal nature of these acts was, (and
+the nature was very criminal, and the consequences
+to the country very dreadful,) yet we mean to prove
+to your Lordships that they were not single acts, that
+they were not acts committed as opportunity offered,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>
+or as necessity tempted or urged upon the occasion,
+but that they are parts of a general systematic plan
+of corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense
+of his integrity; that he has, for that purpose, not
+only taken the opportunity of his own power, but
+made whole establishments, altered and perverted
+others, and created complete revolutions in the country's
+government, for the purpose of making the power
+which ought to be subservient to legal government
+subservient to corruption; that, when he could no
+longer cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice,
+he endeavored to justify them by principle. These
+artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean
+to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish,
+destroy, and subvert forever.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which
+is a matter of collusion, concealment, and deceit, your
+Lordships will, perhaps, not feel the same degree of
+interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had before
+you crimes of dignity: you have had before you
+the ruin and expulsion of great and illustrious families,
+the breach of solemn public treaties, the merciless
+pillage and total subversion of the first houses in
+Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to
+the imagination are not always the most pernicious
+in their effects: in these high, eminent acts of domineering
+tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort
+of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on
+which they can be exercised are rare; the persons
+upon whom they can be exercised few; the persons
+who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are
+not many. These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing
+tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the
+unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">{163}</a></span>guished
+and incommunicable attributes, of superior
+wickedness in eminent station.</p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and
+illiberal minds infect that high situation,&mdash;when theft,
+bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication,
+falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery&mdash;when
+all these follow in one train,&mdash;when these
+vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are
+nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their
+slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity
+and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate
+daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable,
+and it will be imitated, and will be improved,
+from the highest to the lowest, through all
+the gradations of a corrupt government. They are
+reptile vices. There are situations in which the acts
+of the individual are of some moment, the example
+comparatively of little importance. In the other, the
+mischief of the example is infinite.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives
+bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the
+inferior parts of the service. The bridles upon hard-mouthed
+passion are removed; they are taken away;
+they are broken. Fear and shame, the great guards
+to virtue next to conscience, are gone. Shame! how
+can it exist?&mdash;it will soon blush away its awkward
+sensibility. Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long,
+when it is seen that crimes which naturally bring
+disgrace are attended with all the outward symbols,
+characteristics, and rewards of honor and of virtue,&mdash;when
+it is seen that high station, great rank, general
+applause, vast wealth follow the commission of
+peculation and bribery. Is it to be believed that men
+can long be ashamed of that which they see to be the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>
+road to honor? As to fear, let a Governor-General
+once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service.
+What have they to fear? Is it the man whose
+example they follow that is to bring them before a
+tribunal for their punishment? Can he open any inquiry?
+He cannot: he that opens a channel of inquiry
+under these circumstances opens a high-road
+to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent
+it? None: for he can make no laws to restrain
+that practice without the breach of his own laws immediately
+in his own conduct. If we once can admit,
+for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle,
+however defended, upon any pretence whatever,
+to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is
+an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope
+left in the supreme justice of the country. We are
+sensible of all these difficulties; we have felt them;
+and perhaps it has required no small degree of exertion
+for us to get the better of these difficulties
+which are thrown in our way by a Governor-General
+accepting bribes, and thereby screening and protecting
+the whole service in such iniquitous proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to this matter, we are to state to your
+Lordships, in order to bring it fully and distinctly before
+you, what the nature of this distemper of bribery
+is in the Indian government. We are to state
+what the laws and rules are which have been opposed
+to prevent it, and the utter insufficiency of all that
+have been proposed: to state the grievance, the instructions
+of the Company and government, the acts
+of Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of
+Parliament. We are to state to your Lordships the
+particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are to
+state the trust the Company had in him for the pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">{165}</a></span>vention
+of all those evils; and then we are to prove
+that every evil, that all those grievances which the law
+intended to prevent, which there were covenants to
+restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements
+to smooth and make easy the path of duty,
+Mr. Hastings was invested with a special, direct, and
+immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your
+Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person
+collectively, has done more mischief than all those
+persons whose evil practices have produced all those
+laws, those regulations, and even his own appointment.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which
+we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery
+was the ancient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper
+of the Company's affairs in India, from the
+time of their first establishment there. Very often
+there are no words nor any description which can
+adequately convey the state of a thing like the direct
+evidence of the thing itself: because the former might
+be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that
+which was really fact to be nothing but the coloring
+of the person that explained it; and therefore I think
+that it will be much better to give to your Lordships
+here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when
+the Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings
+entered into, and when they took those measures
+to prevent the very evils from persons placed in those
+very stations and in those very circumstances in which
+we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the
+offences we now bring before you.</p>
+
+<p>I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to
+read a consultation of Lord Clive's, who was sent out
+for the express purpose of reforming the state of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">{166}</a></span>
+Company, in order to show the magnitude of the pecuniary
+corruptions that prevailed in it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>"It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and
+profess to your interests and to our own honor, that
+we think it indispensably necessary to lay open to your
+view a series of transactions too notoriously known
+to be suppressed, and too affecting to your interest,
+to the national character, and to the existence of the
+Company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured,&mdash;transactions
+which seem to demonstrate that
+every spring of this government was smeared with
+corruption, that principles of rapacity and oppression
+universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment
+and public spirit was lost and extinguished in
+the unbounded lust of unmerited wealth.</p>
+
+<p>"To illustrate these positions, we must exhibit to
+your view a most unpleasing variety of complaints,
+inquiries, accusations, and vindications, the particulars
+of which are entered in our Proceedings and the
+Appendix,&mdash;assuring you that we undertake this task
+with peculiar reluctance, from the personal regard we
+entertain for some of the gentlemen whose characters
+will appear to be deeply affected.</p>
+
+<p>"At Fort St. George we received the first advices
+of the demise of Mir Jaffier and of Sujah Dowlah's
+defeat. It was there firmly imagined that no definite
+measures would be taken, either in respect to a peace
+or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our arrival,&mdash;as
+the 'Lapwing' arrived in the month of January
+with your general letter, and the appointment
+of a committee with express powers to that purpose,
+for the successful exertion of which the happiest occasion
+now offered. However, a contrary resolution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">{167}</a></span>
+prevailed in the Council. The opportunity of acquiring
+immense fortunes was too inviting to be neglected,
+and the temptation too powerful to be resisted. A
+treaty was hastily drawn up by the board, or rather
+transcribed, with few unimportant additions, from
+that concluded with Mir Jaffier,&mdash;and a deputation,
+consisting of Messrs. Johnstone, senior, Middleton, and
+Leycester, appointed to raise the natural son of the deceased
+Nabob to the subahdarry, in prejudice of the
+claim of the grandson; and for this measure such
+reasons are assigned as ought to have dictated a diametrically
+opposite resolution. Meeran's son was a
+minor, which circumstance alone would have naturally
+brought the whole administration into our hands,
+at a juncture when it became indispensably necessary
+we should realize that shadow of power and influence
+which, having no solid foundation, was exposed
+to the danger of being annihilated by the first stroke
+of adverse fortune. But this inconsistence was not
+regarded; nor was it material to the views for precipitating
+the treaty, which was pressed on the young
+Nabob at the first interview, in so earnest and indelicate
+a manner as highly disgusted him and chagrined
+his ministers; while not a single rupee was stipulated
+for the Company, whose interests were sacrificed, that
+their servants might revel in the spoils of a treasury
+before impoverished, but now totally exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>"This scene of corruption was first disclosed, at
+a visit the Nabob was paid, to Lord Clive and the
+gentlemen of the Committee, a few days after our
+arrival. He there delivered to his Lordship a letter
+filled with bitter complaints of the insults and indignities
+he had been exposed to, and the embezzlement
+of near twenty lacs of rupees, issued from his treas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">{168}</a></span>ury
+for purposes unknown, during the late negotiations.
+So public a complaint could not be disregarded,
+and it soon produced an inquiry. We referred
+the letter to the board, in expectation of obtaining
+a satisfactory account of the application of
+this money, and were answered only by a warm remonstrance
+entered by Mr. Leycester against that
+very Nabob in whose elevation he boasts of having
+been a principal agent.</p>
+
+<p>"Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, the Naib Subah, was then
+called upon to account for this large disbursement
+from the treasury; and he soon delivered to the
+Committee the very extraordinary narrative entered
+in our Proceedings the 6th of June, wherein he specifies
+the several names and sums, by whom paid, and
+to whom, whether in cash, bills, or obligations. So
+precise, so accurate an account as this of money for
+secret and venal services was never, we believe, before
+this period, exhibited to the Honorable Court of Directors,&mdash;at
+least, never vouched by such undeniable
+testimony and authentic documents: by Juggut Seet,
+who himself was obliged to contribute largely to the
+sums demanded; by Muley Ram, who was employed
+by Mr. Johnstone in all those pecuniary transactions;
+by the Nabob and Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, who were
+the heaviest sufferers; and, lastly, by the confession
+of the gentlemen themselves whose names are specified
+in the distribution list.</p>
+
+<p>"Juggut Seet expressly declared in his narrative,
+that the sum which he agreed to pay the deputation,
+amounting to 125,000 rupees, was extorted by menaces;
+and since the close of our inquiry, and the
+opinions we delivered in the Proceedings of the 21st
+June, it fully appears that the presents from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">{169}</a></span>
+Nabob and Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, exceeding the immense
+sum of seventeen lacs, were not the voluntary
+offerings of gratitude, but contributions levied on the
+weakness of the government, and violently exacted
+from the dependent state and timid disposition of the
+minister. The charge, indeed, is denied on the one
+hand, as well as affirmed on the other. Your honorable
+board must therefore determine how far the circumstance
+of extortion may aggravate the crime of
+disobedience to your positive orders, the exposing the
+government in a manner to sale, and receiving the
+infamous wages of corruption from opposite parties
+and contending interests. We speak with boldness,
+because we speak from conviction founded upon indubitable
+facts, that, besides the above sums specified
+in the distribution account to the amount of 228,125
+pounds sterling, there was likewise to the value of
+several lacs of rupees procured from Nundcomar and
+Roydullub, each of whom aspired at and obtained a
+promise of that very employment it was predetermined
+to bestow on Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n.</p>
+
+<p>(Signed at the end)</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"CLIVE.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">W<sup>M</sup> B. SUMNER.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">JOHN CARNAC.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">H. VERELST.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">FRA<sup>S</sup> SYKES."<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This paper cannot be denied to be a paper of
+weight and authenticity, because it is signed by a
+gentleman now in this House, who sits on one side
+of the gentleman at your bar, as his bail. This
+grievance, therefore, so authenticated, so great, and
+described in so many circumstances, I think it might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">{170}</a></span>
+be sufficient for me, in this part of the business, to
+show was, when Mr. Hastings was sent to India, a
+prevalent evil.</p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, it is necessary that I should show
+to you something more, because, <i>prima fronte</i>, this
+is some exculpation of Mr. Hastings: for, if he was
+only a partaker in a general misconduct, it was
+rather <i>vitium loci et vitium temporis</i> than <i>vitium
+hominis</i>. This might be said in his exculpation.
+But I am next to show your Lordships the means
+which the Company took for removing this grievance;
+and that Mr. Hastings's peculiar trust, the
+great specific ground of his appointment, was a confidence
+that he would eradicate this very evil, of
+which we are going to prove that he has been one
+of the principal promoters. I wish your Lordships
+to advert to one particular circumstance,&mdash;namely,
+that the two persons who were bidders at this time,
+and at this auction of government, for the favor and
+countenance of the Presidency at Calcutta, were
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n and Rajah Nundcomar. I
+wish your Lordships to recollect this by-and-by, when
+we shall bring before you the very same two persons,
+who, in the same sort of transaction, and in circumstances
+exactly similar, or very nearly so, were candidates
+for the favor of Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, our next step will be to show you that
+the Company in 1768 had made a covenant expressly
+forbidding the taking of presents of above 400<i>l.</i> value
+in each present by the Governor-General. I take it
+for granted, this will not be much litigated. They renewed
+and enforced that with other covenants and
+other instructions; and at last came an act of Parliament,
+in the clearest, the most definite, the most spe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">{171}</a></span>cific
+words that all the wisdom of the legislature, intent
+upon the eradication of this evil, could use, to
+prevent the receiving of presents.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I think it is necessary to state, that
+there has been some little difficulty concerning this
+word, <i>presents</i>. Bribery and extortion have been
+covered by the name of presents, and the authority
+and practice of the East has been adduced as a palliation
+of the crime. My Lords, no authority of the
+East will be a palliation of the breach of laws enacted
+in the West: and to those laws of the West, and not
+the vicious customs of the East, we insist upon making
+Mr. Hastings liable. But do not your Lordships
+see that this is an entire mistake? that there never
+was any custom of the East for it? I do not mean
+vicious practices and customs, which it is the business
+of good laws and good customs to eradicate. There
+are three species of presents known in the East,&mdash;two
+of them payments of money known to be legal, and
+the other perfectly illegal, and which has a name exactly
+expressing it in the manner our language does.
+It is necessary that your Lordships should see that
+Mr. Hastings has made use of a perversion of the
+names of authorized gifts to cover the most abominable
+and prostituted bribery. The first of those presents is
+known in the country by the name of <i>peshcush</i>: this
+<i>peshcush</i> is a fine paid, upon the grant of lands, to
+the sovereign, or whoever grants them. The second
+is the <i>nuzzer</i>, or <i>nuzzerana</i>, which is a tribute of acknowledgment
+from an inferior to a superior. The
+last is called <i>reshwat</i>, in the Persian language,&mdash;that
+is to say, a bribe, or sum of money clandestinely
+and corruptly taken,&mdash;and is as much distinguished
+from the others as, in the English language, a fine or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">{172}</a></span>
+acknowledgment is distinguished from a bribe. To
+show your Lordships this, we shall give in evidence,
+that, whenever a peshcush or fine is paid, it is a sum
+of money publicly paid, and paid in proportion to the
+grant,&mdash;and that the sum is entered upon the very
+grant itself. We shall prove the nuzzer is in the
+same manner entered, and that all legal fees are indorsed
+upon the body of the grant for which they are
+taken: and that they are no more in the East than
+in the West any kind of color or pretence for corrupt
+acts, which are known by the circumstance of their
+being clandestinely taken, and which are acknowledged
+and confessed to be illegal and corrupt. Having
+stated that Mr. Hastings, in some of the evidence
+that we shall produce, endeavors to confound these
+three things, I am only to remark that the nuzzer is
+generally a very small sum of money, that it sometimes
+amounts to one gold mohur, that sometimes it
+is less, and that, in all the records of the Company, I
+have never known it exceed one gold mohur, or about
+thirty-five shillings,&mdash;passing by the fifty gold mohurs
+which were given to Mr. Hastings by Cheyt Sing,
+and a hundred gold mohurs which were given to the
+Mogul, as a nuzzer, by Mahomed Ali, Nabob of Arcot.</p>
+
+<p>The Company, seeing that this nuzzer, though
+small in each sum, might amount at last to a large
+tax upon the country, (and it did so in fact,) thought
+proper to prohibit any sum of money to be taken upon
+any pretext whatever; and the Company in the
+year 1775 did expressly explode the whole doctrine
+of peshcush, nuzzer, and every other private lucrative
+emolument, under whatever name, to be taken by
+the Governor-General, and did expressly send out an
+order that that was the construction of the act, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>
+that he was not even to take a nuzzer. Thus we
+shall show that that act had totally cut up the whole
+system of bribery and corruption, and that Mr. Hastings
+had no sort of color whatever for taking the
+money which we shall prove he has taken.</p>
+
+<p>I know that positive prohibitions, that acts of Parliament,
+that covenants, are things of very little validity
+indeed, as long as all the means of corruption
+are left in power, and all the temptations to corrupt
+profit are left in poverty. I should really think that
+the Company deserved to be ill served, if they had
+not annexed such appointments to great trusts as
+might secure the persons intrusted from the temptations
+of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases
+is the greatest security, given a lawful gratification
+to the natural passions of men. Matrimony is to be
+used, as a true remedy against a vicious course of
+profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and
+the just profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful
+means which might be made use of to supply them.
+For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any man
+to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in
+blessings, to expect labor without a prospect of reward,
+and fatigue without any means of securing
+rest, is an unreasonable demand in any human creature
+from another. Those who trust that they shall
+find in men uncommon and heroic virtues are themselves
+endeavoring to have nothing paid them but the
+common returns of the worst parts of human infirmity.
+And therefore I shall show your Lordships that
+the Company did provide large, ample, abundant
+means for supporting the Governor-General,&mdash;that
+Lord Clive, in the year 1765, and the Council with
+him, of which Mr. Sumner, I am glad and proud to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">{174}</a></span>
+say, was one, did fix such an allowance as they
+thought a sufficient security to the Governor-General
+against the temptations attendant upon his situation;
+and therefore, after they had fixed this sum, they
+say, "that, although by this means the Governor will
+not be able to amass a million or half a million in
+the space of two or three years, yet he will acquire
+a very handsome independency, and be in that very
+situation which a man of honor and true zeal for
+the service would wish to possess. Thus situated, he
+may defy all opposition in Council; he will have
+nothing to ask, nothing to propose, but what he wishes
+for the advantage of his employers; he may defy
+the law, because there can be no foundation for a bill
+of discovery; and he may defy the obloquy of the
+world, because there can be nothing censurable in
+his conduct. In short, if stability can be insured to
+such a government as this, where riches have been
+acquired in abundance in a small space of time, by
+all ways and means, and by men with or without capacities,
+it must be effected by a Governor thus restricted,"&mdash;that
+is, a Governor restricted from every
+emolument but that of his salary. I must remark,
+that this salary and these emoluments were not settled
+upon the vague speculations of men taking the
+measure of their necessities for India from the manners
+of England; but it was fixed by the Council
+themselves,&mdash;fixed in India,&mdash;fixed by those who
+knew and were in the situation of the Governor-General,
+and who knew what was necessary to support
+his dignity and to preserve him from the temptation
+of corruption: and they have laid open to you such a
+body of advantages arising from it as would lead any
+man, who had a regard to his honor or conscience, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">{175}</a></span>
+think himself happy in having such a provision made
+for him, and at the same time every temptation to
+act corruptly removed far from him.</p>
+
+<p>The emoluments of the office, though reduced from
+the original plan which Lord Clive had proposed,
+may be computed at near 30,000<i>l.</i> a year, when Mr.
+Hastings was President: 22,000<i>l.</i> in certain money,
+and the rest in other advantages. Whatever it was,
+I have shown that it was thought sufficient by those
+who were the best judges, and who, in carving for
+others, were carving for themselves their own allowance
+at the time. But, my Lords, I am to give a
+better opinion of the sufficiency of that provision to
+guard against the temptation, out of Mr. Hastings's
+own mouth. He says, in his letter to the Court of
+Directors, "Although I disclaim the consideration of
+my own interest in these speculations, and flatter myself
+that I proceed upon more liberal grounds, yet I
+am proud to avow the feelings of an honest ambition
+that stimulates me to aspire at the possession of my
+present station for years to come. Those who know
+my natural turn of mind will not ascribe this to sordid
+views. A very few years' possession of the government
+would undoubtedly enable me to retire with
+a fortune amply fitted to the measure of my desires,
+were I to consult only my ease: but in my present
+situation I feel my mind expand to something greater;
+I have catched the desire of applause in public
+life."</p>
+
+<p>Here Mr. Hastings confesses that the emoluments
+affixed to office were not only sufficient for the purposes
+and ends which the nature of his office demanded,
+and the support of present dignity, but that they
+were sufficient to secure him, in a very few years, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>
+comfortable retreat; but his object in wishing to hold
+his office long was <i>to catch applause in public life</i>.
+What an unfortunate man is he, who has so often
+told us, in so many places, and through so many
+mouths, that, after fourteen years' possession of an
+office which was to make him a comfortable fortune
+in a few years, he is at length bankrupt in fortune,
+and for his applause in public life is now at your
+Lordships' bar, and his accuser is his country! This,
+my Lords, is to be unfortunate: but there are some
+misfortunes that never do or ever can arrive but
+through crimes. He was a deserter from the path
+of honor. At the turning of the two ways he made a
+glorious choice,&mdash;he caught at the applause of ambition:
+which though I am ready to consent is not virtue,
+yet surely a generous ambition for applause for
+public services in life is one of the best counterfeits
+of virtue, and supplies its place in some degree; and
+it adds a lustre to real virtue, where it exists as the
+substratum of it. Human nature, while it is made
+as it is, never can wholly repudiate it for its imperfection,
+because there is something yet more perfect.
+But what shall we say to the deserter of that cause,
+who, having glory and honor before him, has chosen
+to plunge himself into the downward road to sordid
+riches?</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have shown the grievances that existed.
+I have shown the means that existed to put Mr.
+Hastings beyond a temptation to those practices of
+which we accuse him, even in his own opinion,&mdash;if
+he will not follow his example in the House of Commons,
+and disavow this letter, as he has done his defence
+before them, and say he never wrote it. That
+situation which was to afford him a comfortable for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">{177}</a></span>tune
+in a few years he has held for many years, and
+therefore he has not one excuse to make for himself;
+but I shall show your Lordships much greater and
+stronger proofs, that will lean heavy upon him in the
+day of your sentence. The first, the peculiar, trust
+that was put in him, was to redress all those grievances.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have stated to you the condition of
+India in 1765. You may suppose that the means
+that were taken, the regulations that were made by
+the Company at that period of time, had operated
+their effect, and that by the beginning of the year
+1772, when Mr. Hastings came first to his government,
+these evils did not then require, perhaps, so
+vigorous an example, or so much diligence in putting
+an end to them; but, my Lords, I have to show you
+a very melancholy truth, that, notwithstanding all
+these means, the Company was of opinion that all
+these disorders had increased, and accordingly they
+say, without entering into all the grievous circumstances
+of this letter, which was wrote on the 10th
+of April, 1773, "We wish we could refute the observation,
+that almost every attempt made by us and
+our administration at your Presidency for reforming
+abuses has rather increased them, and added to the
+misery of a country we are so anxious to protect and
+cherish." They say, that, "when oppression pervades
+the whole country, when youths have been suffered
+with impunity to exercise sovereign jurisdiction
+over the natives, and to acquire rapid fortunes by monopolizing
+of commerce, it cannot be a wonder to us
+or yourselves that Dadney merchants do not come
+forward to contract with the Company, that the manufactures
+find their way through foreign channels, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">{178}</a></span>
+that our investments are at once enormously dear
+and of a debased quality. It is evident, then, that
+the evils which have been so destructive to us lie too
+deep for any partial plans to reach or correct; it is
+therefore our resolution to aim at the root of those
+evils, and we are happy in having reason to believe
+that in every just and necessary regulation we shall
+meet with the approbation and support of the legislature,
+who consider the public as materially interested
+in the Company's prosperity."</p>
+
+<p>This is to show your Lordships that Mr. Hastings
+was armed with great powers to correct great abuses,
+and that there was reposed in him a special trust for
+that purpose. And now I shall show, by the twenty-fifth
+paragraph of the same letter, that they intrusted
+Mr. Hastings with this very great power from some
+particular hope they had, not only of his abstaining
+himself, which is a thing taken for granted, but of his
+restraining abuses through every part of the service;
+and therefore they say, "that, in order to effectuate
+this great end, the first step must be to restore perfect
+obedience and due subordination to your administration.
+Our Governor and Council must reassume and
+exercise their delegated powers upon every just occasion,&mdash;punish
+delinquents, cherish the meritorious,
+discountenance that luxury and dissipation which, to
+the reproach of government, prevailed in Bengal.
+Our President, Mr. Hastings, we trust, will set the
+example of temperance, economy, and application;
+and upon this, we are sensible, much will depend.
+And here we take occasion to indulge the pleasure
+we have in acknowledging Mr. Hastings's services
+upon the coast of Coromandel, in constructing with
+equal labor and ability the plan which has so much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">{179}</a></span>
+improved our investments there; and as we are persuaded
+he will persevere in the same laudable pursuit
+through every branch of our affairs in Bengal,
+he, in return, may depend on the steady support and
+favor of his employers." Here are not only laws to
+restrain abuse, here are not only salaries to prevent
+the temptation to it, but here are praises to animate
+and encourage him, here is what very few men, even
+bad in other respects, have resisted,&mdash;here is a great
+trust put in him, to call upon him with particular
+vigor and exertion to prevent all abuses through the
+settlement, and particularly these abuses of corruption.
+Much trust is put in his frugality, his order, his
+management of his private affairs; and from thence
+they hope that he would not ruin his own fortune, but
+improve it by honorable means, and teach the Company's
+servants the same order and management, in
+order to free them from temptation to rapacity in
+their own particular situations. There have been
+known to be men, otherwise corrupt and vicious, who,
+when great trust was put in them, have called forth
+principles of honor latent in their minds; and men
+who were nursed, in a manner, in corruption have
+been not only great reformers by institution, but
+greater reformers by the example of their own conduct.
+Then I am to show, that, soon after his coming
+to that government, there were means given him
+instantly of realizing those hopes and expectations, by
+putting into his hands several arduous and several
+difficult commissions.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in the year 1772 the Company had received
+alarming advices of many disorders throughout
+the country: there were likewise, at the same
+time, circumstances in the state of the government<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">{180}</a></span>
+upon which they thought it necessary to make new
+regulations. The famine which prevailed in and
+devastated Bengal, and the ill use that was made of
+that calamity to aggravate the distress for the advantage
+of individuals, produced a great many complaints,
+some true, some exaggerated, but universally spread,
+as I believe is in the memory of those who are not very
+young among us. This obliged the Company to a
+very serious consideration of an affair which dishonored
+and disgraced their government, not only at
+home, but through all the countries in Europe, much
+more than perhaps even more grievous and real oppressions
+that were exercised under them. It had
+alarmed their feelings, it had been marked, and had
+called the attention of the public upon them in an
+eminent manner.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships remember the death of Jaffier Ali
+Kh&acirc;n, the first of those subahs who introduced the
+English power into Bengal. He died about four or
+five years before this period. He was succeeded by
+two of his sons, who succeeded to one another in a
+very rapid succession. The first was the person of
+whom we have read an account to you. He was the
+natural son of the Nabob by a person called Munny
+Begum, who, for the corrupt gifts the circumstances
+of which we have recited, had, in prejudice of the lawful
+issue of the Nabob, been raised to the <i>musnud</i>;
+but as bastard slips, it is said in King Richard, (an
+abuse of a Scripture phrase,) do not take deep root,
+this bastard slip, Nujim ul Dowlah, shortly died, and
+the legitimate son, Syef ul Dowlah, succeeded him.
+After him another legitimate son, Mobarek ul Dowlah,
+succeeded in a minority. When I say <i>succeeded</i>, I
+wish your Lordships to understand that there is no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">{181}</a></span>
+regular succession in the office of subah or viceroy
+of the kingdom; but, in general, succession has been
+considered, and persons have been put in that place
+upon some principles resembling a regular succession.
+That regular succession had been broken in favor of
+a natural son, and the mother of that natural son did
+obtain the superiority in the female part of the family
+for a time.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of these two circumstances, namely,
+the famine, and the abuses that were supposed to
+arise from it, and from the circumstance of the minority
+of Mobarek ul Dowlah, who now reigns or
+appears to reign,&mdash;in consequence of these two circumstances,
+the Company gave two sets of orders.</p>
+
+<p>The first order related to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n,
+who was (as your Lordships remember I took, in the
+beginning of this affair, means of explaining) lord-deputy
+of the province under the native government,
+the English holding the dewanny,&mdash;and deputy dewan,
+or high-steward, under the name of the English,
+and had the command of the whole revenue;
+and who was accused before the Company (the channel
+of which accusation we now learn) of having
+aggravated that famine by a monopoly for his own
+benefit. The Company, upon these loose and general
+charges, ordered that he should be divested of his
+office, that he should be brought down to Calcutta,
+and there be obliged to render an account of his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>The next regulation they made was concerning the
+effective government of the country, which was become
+vacant by the removal of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n. The
+offices which he held were in effect these: he was
+guardian to the Nabob by the appointment of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">{182}</a></span>
+Company; he had the care and management of his
+family; he had the care of the public justice; and he
+represented that shadow of government to foreign
+nations which it was the policy of the Company, at
+that time, to keep up. This was the person whom
+Mr. Hastings was ordered to remove; in consequence
+of which removal all these offices were to be supplied,&mdash;of
+guardian of the Nabob's person and manager of
+his family, of chief magistrate, and of representative
+of the fallen dignity of the native government to the
+foreign nations which traded to Bengal.</p>
+
+<p>To these orders was added an instruction of a very
+remarkable nature, which was a third trust that was
+given to Mr. Hastings: that during the Nabob's minority
+he should reduce the annual allowance, which
+was thirty-two lacs, to sixteen; and that to prevent
+the abuse of this restricted sum, and to prevent its
+being directed by the minister's authority to other
+purposes than that for which the Company allowed
+it, (that is to say, allowed him out of what was his
+own,) of these sixteen lacs an account was to be
+regularly kept, as a check upon the person so appointed,
+which account was ordered to be transmitted
+to Calcutta, and to be sent to England.</p>
+
+<p>Now we are to show your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's
+conduct was upon all these occasions; and for
+this we mean to produce testimony recorded in the
+Company's books, and authentic documents taken
+from the public offices of that country. At the same
+time I do admit that there never was a positive testimony
+that did not stand something in need of the support
+of presumption: for, as we know that witnesses
+may be perjured, and as we know that documents
+can be forged, we have recourse to a known principle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">{183}</a></span>
+in the laws of all countries, that circumstances cannot
+lie; and therefore, if the testimony that is given was
+ever so clear and positive, yet, if it is contrary to the
+circumstances of the country, if it is contrary to the
+circumstances of the facts to which it alludes, if the
+deposition is totally adverse and alien to the characters
+of the persons, then I will say, that, though the
+testimonies should be many, though they should be
+consistent, and though they should be clear, yet they
+will still leave some degree of hesitation and doubt
+upon every mind timorous in the execution of justice,
+as every mind ought to be. If, for instance, ten witnesses
+were to swear that the Chief-Justice of England,
+that the Lord High-Chancellor, or the Archbishop
+of Canterbury, was seen, in the robes of his
+function, at noonday, robbing upon the highway, it
+is not the clearness, the weight, the authority of testimonies,
+that could make me believe it; I should
+attribute it to any cause, either corruption, mistake,
+error, or madness, rather than believe that fact.
+Why? Because it is totally alien to the character of
+the persons, the situation, the circumstances, and to
+all the rules of probability. But if, on the contrary,
+the crime charged has a perfect relation with the person,
+with his known conduct, with his known habits,
+with the situation and circumstances of the place that
+he is in, and with the very corrupt inherent nature of
+the act that he does, then much less proof than we
+are able to produce will serve; and according to the
+nature and strength of the presumptions arising from
+the inherent nature of a vicious principle and vicious
+motives in the act, will be strengthened the weakest
+evidence, or, if it comes to a sufficient height, the
+whole burden of proof will be turned upon the party<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>
+accused. And thus we shall think ourselves bound
+to show your Lordships, in every step of this proceeding,
+that there is an inherent presumption of corruption
+in every act. We shall show the presumptions
+which preceded, we shall show the presumptions which
+accompanied the proof; and these, with the subsequent
+presumptions, will make it impossible to disbelieve
+them. Such a body of proof was never given
+upon any such occasion: and it is such proof as will
+prevail against the whole voice of corruption, that
+amazing, active, diligent, spreading voice, which has
+been made, by buzzing in every part of this country,
+sometimes to sound like the public voice; it will put
+it to silence, by showing that your Lordships have
+proceeded upon the strongest evidence, active and
+passive.</p>
+
+<p>First, Mr. Hastings received a positive order to
+seize upon Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n. That order he
+executed with a military promptitude of obedience,
+which will show your Lordships what are the services
+which are congenial to his own mind, and which find
+in him always a ready acquiescence, a faithful agent,
+and a spirited instrument in the execution. The very
+day after he received the order, he sent up, privately,
+without communicating with the Council, from whom
+he was not ordered to keep this proceeding a secret,&mdash;he
+sent up, and found that great and respectable man
+and respectable magistrate, who was in all those high
+offices which I have stated: and if I was to compare
+them to circumstances and situations in this country,
+I should say he had united in himself the character
+of First Lord of the Treasury, the character of Chief-Justice,
+the character of Lord High-Chancellor, and
+the character of Archbishop of Canterbury: a man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">{185}</a></span>
+of great gravity, dignity, and authority, and advanced
+in years; had once 100,000<i>l.</i> a year for the support
+of his dignity, and had at that time 50,000<i>l.</i> This
+man, sitting in his garden, reposing himself after the
+toils of his situation, (for he was one of the most
+laborious men in the world,) was suddenly arrested,
+and, without a moment's respite, dragged down to
+Calcutta, and there by Mr. Hastings (exceeding the
+orders of the Company) confined near two years
+under a guard of soldiers. Mr. Hastings kept this
+great man for several months without even attempting
+the trial upon him. How he tried him afterwards
+your Lordships may probably in the course of this
+business inquire; and you will then judge, from the
+circumstances of that trial, that, as he was not tried
+for his crime, so neither was he acquitted for his
+innocence;&mdash;but at present I leave him in that situation.
+Mr. Hastings, unknown to the Council, having
+executed the orders of the Company in the last
+degree of rigor to this unhappy man, keeps him in
+that situation, without a trial, under a guard, separated
+from his country, disgraced and dishonored, and
+by Mr. Hastings's express order not suffered either to
+make a visit or receive a visitor.</p>
+
+<p>There was another commission for Mr. Hastings
+contained in these orders. The Company, because
+they were of opinion that justice could not be easily
+obtained while the first situations of the country were
+filled with this man's adherents, desired Mr. Hastings
+to displace them: leaving him a very large power,
+and confiding in his justice, prudence, and impartiality
+not to abuse a trust of such delicacy. But
+we shall prove to your Lordships that Mr. Hastings
+thought it necessary to turn out, from the highest to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">{186}</a></span>
+the lowest, several hundreds of people, for no other
+reason than that they had been put in their employments
+by that very man whom the English government
+had formerly placed there. If <i>we</i> were to insist that
+we could not possibly try Mr. Hastings, or come at
+his wickedness, until we had eradicated his influence
+in Bengal, and left not one man in it who was during
+his government in any place or office whatever, yet,
+though we should readily admit that we could not do
+the whole without it, at the same time, rather than
+make a general massacre of every person presumed to
+be under his influence, we would leave some of his
+crimes unproved. He did avow and declare, that,
+unless he turned all these persons out of their offices,
+he could never hope to come at the truth of any
+charges against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, against whom
+no specific charge had been made. Yet, upon loose
+and general charges, did he seize upon this man,
+confine him in this manner, and every person who
+derived any place or authority from him, high or low,
+was turned out. Mr. Hastings had in the Company's
+orders something to justify him in rigor, but he had
+likewise a prudential power over that rigor; and he
+not only treated this man in the manner described,
+but every human creature connected with him, as if
+they had been all guilty, without any charge whatever
+against them. These are his reasons for taking
+this extraordinary step.</p>
+
+<p>"I pretend not to enter into the views of others.
+My own were these. Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n's influence
+still prevailed generally throughout the country. In
+the Nabob's household, and at the capital, it was scarce
+affected by his present disgrace. His favor was still
+courted, and his anger dreaded. Who, under such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">{187}</a></span>
+discouragements, would give information or evidence
+against him? His agents and creatures filled every
+office of the nizamut and dewanny. How was the
+truth of his conduct to be investigated by these?
+It would be superfluous to add other arguments to
+show the necessity of prefacing the inquiry by breaking
+his influence, removing his dependants, and putting
+the direction of all the affairs which had been
+committed to his care into the hands of the most
+powerful or active of his enemies."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, if <i>we</i> of the House of Commons were to
+desire and to compel the East India Company, or to
+address the crown, to remove, according to their several
+situations and several capacities, every creature
+that had been put into office by Mr. Hastings, because
+we could otherwise make no inquiry into his conduct,
+should we not be justified by his own example
+in insisting upon the removal of every creature of the
+reigning power before we could inquire into his conduct?
+We have not done that, though we feel, as he
+felt, great disadvantages in proceeding in the inquiry
+while every situation in Bengal is notoriously held by
+his creatures,&mdash;always excepting the first of all, but
+which we could show is nothing under such circumstances.
+Then what do I infer from this,&mdash;from his
+obedience to the orders of the Company, carried so
+much beyond necessity, and prosecuted with so much
+rigor,&mdash;from the inquiry being suspended for so long
+a time,&mdash;from every person in office being removed
+from his situation,&mdash;from all these precautions being
+used as prefatory to the inquiry, when he himself says,
+that, after he had used all these means, he found not
+the least benefit and advantage from them? The use
+I mean to make of this is, to let your Lordships see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">{188}</a></span>
+the great probability and presumption that Mr. Hastings,
+finding himself in the very selfsame situation
+that had occurred the year before, when Nundcomar
+was sold to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, of selling Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n to Nundcomar, made a corrupt use of it,
+and that, as Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was not treated
+with severity for his crimes, so neither was he acquitted
+for his innocence. The Company had given
+Mr. Hastings severe orders, and very severely had he
+executed them. The Company gave him no orders
+not to institute a present inquiry; but he, under pretence
+of business, neglected that inquiry, and suffered
+this man to languish in prison to the utter ruin of his
+fortune.</p>
+
+<p>We have in part shown your Lordships what Mr.
+Hastings's own manner of proceeding with regard to
+a public delinquent is; but at present we leave Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n where he was. Do your Lordships
+think that there is no presumption of Mr. Hastings
+having a corrupt view in this business, and of his
+having put this great man, who was supposed to be
+of immense wealth, under contributions? Mr. Hastings
+never trusted his colleagues in this proceeding;
+and what reason does he give? Why, he supposed
+that they must be bribed by Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n.
+"For," says he, "as I did not know their characters
+at that time, I did not know whether Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n had not secured them to his interest by
+the known ways in which great men in the East secure
+men to their interest." He never trusted his
+colleagues with the secret; and the person that he
+employed to prosecute Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was his
+bitter enemy, Nundcomar. I will not go the length
+of saying that the circumstance of enmity disables a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">{189}</a></span>
+person from being a prosecutor; under some circumstances
+it renders a man incompetent to be a witness;
+but this I know, that the circumstance of having no
+other person to rely upon in a charge against any
+man but his enemy, and of having no other principle
+to go upon than what is supposed to be derived out
+of that enmity, must form some considerable suspicion
+against the proceeding. But in this he was justified
+by the Company; for Nundcomar, the great rival
+of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, was in the worst situation
+with the Company as to his credit. This Nundcomar's
+politics in the country had been by Mr. Hastings
+himself, and by several persons joined with him,
+cruelly represented to the Company; and accordingly
+he stood so ill with them, by reason of Mr. Hastings's
+representations and those of his predecessors, that the
+Company ordered and directed, that, if he could be
+of any use in the inquiry into Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n's
+conduct, some reward should be given him suitable
+to his services; but they caution Mr. Hastings at the
+same time against giving him any trust which he
+might employ to the disadvantage of the Company.
+Now Mr. Hastings began, before he could experience
+any service from him, by giving him his reward, and
+not the base reward of a base service, <i>money</i>, but
+every trust and power which he was prohibited from
+giving him. Having turned out every one of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n's dependants, he filled every office, as he
+avows, with the creatures of Nundcomar. Now when
+he uses a cruel and rigorous obedience in the case of
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, when he breaks through the
+principles of his former conduct with regard to Nundcomar,
+when he gives <i>him</i>, Nundcomar, trust, whom
+he was cautioned not to trust, and when he gives him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">{190}</a></span>
+that reward before any service could be done,&mdash;I say,
+when he does this, in violation of the Company's orders
+and his own principles, it is the strongest evidence
+that he now found them in the situation in
+which they were in 1765, when bribes were notoriously
+taken, and that each party was mutually sold
+to the other, and faith kept with neither. The situation
+in which Mr. Hastings thus placed himself should
+have been dreaded by him of all things, because he
+knew it was a situation in which the most outrageous
+corruption had taken place before.</p>
+
+<p>There is another circumstance which serves to
+show that in the persecution of these great men, and
+the persons employed by them, he could have no
+other view than to extort money from them. There
+was a person of the name of Shitab Roy, who had a
+great share in the conduct of the revenues of Bahar.
+Mr. Hastings, in the letter to the Company, complaining
+of the state of their affairs, and saying that there
+were great and suspicious balances in the kingdom
+of Bahar, does not even name the name of Shitab Roy.
+There was an English counsellor, a particular friend
+of Mr. Hastings's, there, under whose control Shitab
+Roy acted. Without any charges, without any orders
+from the Company, Mr. Hastings dragged down
+that same Shitab Roy, and in the same ignominious
+prison he kept him the same length of time, that is,
+one year and three months, without trial; and when
+the trial came on, there was as much appearance of
+collusion in the trial as there was of rigor in the previous
+process. This is the manner in which Mr. Hastings
+executed the command of the Company for removing
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n.</p>
+
+<p>When a successor to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">{191}</a></span>
+be appointed, your Lordships naturally expect, from
+the character I have given of him, and from the
+nature of his functions, that Mr. Hastings would be
+particularly precise, would use the utmost possible
+care in nominating a person to succeed him, who
+might fulfil the ends and objects of his employment,
+and be at the same time beyond all doubt and suspicion
+of corruption in any way whatever. Let us
+now see how he fills up that office thus vacant.
+When the Company ordered Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to
+be dispossessed of his office, they ordered at the same
+time that the salary of his successor should be reduced:
+that 30,000<i>l.</i> was a sufficient recompense for
+that office. Your Lordships will see by the allowance
+for the office, even reduced as it was, that they
+expected some man of great eminence, of great consequence,
+and fit for those great and various trusts.
+They cut off the dewanny from it, that is, the collection
+of the revenues; and having lessened his labors,
+they lessened his reward.&mdash;They ordered that
+this person, who was to be guardian of the Nabob in
+his minority, and who was to represent the government,
+should have but 30,000<i>l.</i> The order they give
+is this.</p>
+
+<p>"And that as Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n can no longer
+be considered by us as one to whom such a power can
+safely be committed, we trust to your local knowledge
+the selection of some person well qualified for the
+affairs of government, and of whose attachment to
+the Company you shall be well assured. Such person
+you will recommend to the Nabob, to succeed
+Mahomed Reza, as minister of the government, and
+guardian of the Nabob's minority; and we persuade
+ourselves that the Nabob will pay such regard to your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">{192}</a></span>
+recommendation as to invest him with the necessary
+power and authority.</p>
+
+<p>"As the advantages which the Company may receive
+from the appointment of such minister will
+depend on his readiness to promote our views and
+advance our interest, we are willing to allow him so
+liberal a gratification as may excite his zeal and insure
+his attachment to the Company; we therefore
+empower you to grant to the person whom you shall
+think worthy of this trust an annual allowance not
+exceeding three lacs of rupees, which we consider not
+only as a munificent reward for any services he shall
+render the Company, but sufficient to enable him to
+support his station with suitable rank and dignity.
+And here we must add, that, in the choice you shall
+make of a person to be the active minister of the Nabob's
+government, we hope and trust that you will
+show yourselves worthy of the confidence we have
+placed in you by being actuated therein by no other
+motives than those of the public good and the safety
+and interest of the Company."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here they have given a reward, and they
+have described a person fit to succeed in all capacities
+the man whom they had thought fit to depose. Now,
+as we have seen how Mr. Hastings obeyed the Company's
+orders in the manner of removing Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n from his office, let us see how he obeyed
+their order for filling it up. Your Lordships will
+naturally suppose that he made all the orders of
+Mahometan and Hindoo princes to pass in strict review
+before him; that he had considered their age,
+authority, dignity, the goodness of their manners;
+and upon the collation of all these circumstances had
+chosen a person fit to be a regent to guard the Na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>bob's
+minority from all rapacity whatever, and fit to
+instruct him in everything. I will give your Lordships
+Mr. Hastings's own idea of the person necessary
+to fill such offices.</p>
+
+<p>"That his rank ought to be such as at least ought
+not to wound the Nabob's honor, or lessen his credit
+in the estimation of the people, by the magisterial
+command which the new guardian must exercise
+over him,&mdash;with abilities and vigor of mind equal
+to the support of that authority; and the world will
+expect that the guardian be especially qualified by
+his own acquired endowments to discharge the duties
+of that relation in the education of his young pupil,
+to inspire him with sentiments suitable to his
+birth, and to instruct him in the principles of his religion."</p>
+
+<p>This, upon another occasion, is Mr. Hastings's
+sense of the man who ought to be placed in that situation
+of trust in which the Company ordered him to
+place him. Did Mr. Hastings obey that order? No,
+my Lords, he appointed no man to fill that office.
+What, no man at all? No, he appointed no person
+at all in the sense which is mentioned there, which
+constantly describes a person at least of the male sex:
+he appointed a woman to fill that office; he appointed
+a woman, in a country where no woman can be seen,
+where no woman can be spoken to by any one without
+a curtain between them; for all these various
+duties, requiring all these qualifications described by
+himself, he appointed a woman. Do you want more
+proof than this violent transgression of the Company's
+orders upon that occasion that some corrupt motive
+must have influenced him?</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, it is necessary for me to state the situa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">{194}</a></span>tion
+of the family, that you may judge from thence
+of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings's proceedings.
+The Nabob Jaffier Ali Kh&acirc;n had among the women
+of his seraglio a person called Munny Begum. She
+was a dancing-girl, whom he had seen at some entertainment;
+and as he was of a licentious turn, this
+dancing-girl, in the course of her profession as a prostitute,
+so far inveigled the Nabob, that, having a child
+or pretending to have had a child by him, he brought
+her into the seraglio; and the Company's servants
+sold to that son the succession of that father. This
+woman had been sold as a slave,&mdash;her profession a
+dancer, her occupation a prostitute. And, my Lords,
+this woman having put her natural son, as we state,
+and shall prove, in the place of the legitimate offspring
+of the Nabob, having got him placed by the Company's
+servants on the musnud, she came to be at the head
+of that part of the household which relates to the
+women: which is a large and considerable trust in
+a country where polygamy is admitted, and where
+women of great rank may possibly be attended by two
+thousand of the same sex in inferior situations. As
+soon as the legitimate son of the Nabob came to the
+musnud, there was no ground for keeping this woman
+any longer in that situation; and upon an application
+of the Company to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to know who
+ought to have the right of superiority, he answered,
+as he ought to have done, that, though all the women
+of the seraglio ought to have honor, yet the mother
+of the Nabob ought to have the superiority of it.
+Therefore this woman was removed, and the mother
+of the Nabob was placed in her situation. In that
+situation Mr. Hastings found the seraglio. If his duties
+had gone no further than the regulation of an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">{195}</a></span>
+Eastern household, he ought to have kept the Nabob's
+mother there by the rules of that country.</p>
+
+<p>What did he do? Not satisfied with giving to this
+prostitute every favor that she could desire, (and
+money must be the natural object of such a person,)
+Mr. Hastings deposes the Nabob's own mother, turns
+her out of the employment, and puts at the head of
+the seraglio this prostitute, who at the best, in relation
+to him, could only be a step-mother. If you heard no
+more, do your Lordships want anything further to
+convince you that this must be a violent, atrocious,
+and corrupt act,&mdash;suppose it had gone no further
+than the seraglio? But when I call this woman a
+dancing-girl, I state something lower than Europeans
+have an idea of respecting that situation. She was
+born a slave, bred a dancing-girl. Her dancing was
+not any of those noble and majestic movements which
+make part of the entertainment of the most wise, of
+the education of the most virtuous, which improve the
+manners without corrupting the morals of all civilized
+people, and of which, among uncivilized people, the
+professors have their due share of admiration; but
+these dances were not decent to be seen nor fit to be
+related. I shall pass them by. Your Lordships are
+to suppose the lowest degree of infamy in occupation
+and situation, when I tell you that Munny Begum
+was a slave and a dancing-girl.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the Munny Begum is this. "At a
+village called Balkonda, near Sekundra, there lived a
+widow, who, from her great poverty, not being able to
+bring up her daughter Munny, gave her to a slave-girl
+belonging to Summin Ali Kh&acirc;n, whose name was
+Bissoo. During the space of five years she lived at
+Shahjehanabad, and was educated by Bissoo after the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>
+manner of a dancing-girl. Afterwards the Nabob
+Shamut Jung, upon the marriage of Ikram ul Dowlah,
+brother to the Nabob Surajah ul Dowlah, sent for
+Bissoo Beg's set of dancing-girls from Shahjehanabad,
+of which Munny Begum was one, and allowed them
+ten thousand rupees for their expenses, to dance at
+the wedding. While the ceremony was celebrating,
+they were kept by the Nabob; but some months afterwards
+he dismissed them, and they took up their residence
+in this city. Mir Mahomed Jaffier Kh&acirc;n then
+took them into keeping, and allowed Munny and her
+set five hundred rupees per month, till at length,
+finding that Munny was pregnant, he took her into
+his own house. She gave birth to the Nabob Nujim
+ul Dowlah, and in this manner has she remained in
+the Nabob's family ever since."</p>
+
+<p>Now it required a very peculiar mode of selection
+to take such a woman, so circumstanced, (resembling
+whom there was not just such another,) to depose
+the Nabob's own mother from the superiority of the
+household, and to substitute this woman. It would
+have been an abominable abuse, and would have implied
+corruption in the grossest degree, if Mr. Hastings
+had stopped there. He not only did this, but he
+put <i>her</i>, this woman, in the very place of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n: he made her guardian, he made her
+regent, he made her viceroy, he made her the representative
+of the native government of the country in
+the eyes of strangers. There was not a trust, not a
+dignity in the country, which he did not put, during
+the minority of this unhappy person, her step-son, into
+the hands of this woman.</p>
+
+<p>Reject, if you please, the strong presumption of
+corruption in disobeying the order of the Company<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">{197}</a></span>
+directing him to select a <i>man</i> fit to supply the place
+of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, to exercise all the great and
+arduous functions of government and of justice, as
+well as the regulation of the Nabob's household; and
+then I will venture to say, that neither your Lordships,
+nor any man living, when he hears of this
+appointment, does or can hesitate a moment in concluding
+that it is the result of corruption, and that
+you only want to be informed what the corruption
+was. Here is such an arrangement as I believe never
+was before heard of: a secluded woman in the place
+of a man of the world; a fantastic dancing-girl in the
+place of a grave magistrate; a slave in the place of a
+woman of quality; a common prostitute made to superintend
+the education of a young prince; and a
+step-mother, a name of horror in all countries, made
+to supersede the natural mother from whose body the
+Nabob had sprung.</p>
+
+<p>These are circumstances that leave no doubt of
+the grossest and most flagrant corruption. But was
+there no application made to Mr. Hastings upon that
+occasion? The Nabob's uncle, whom Mr. Hastings
+declares to be a man of no dangerous ambition, no
+alarming parts, no one quality that could possibly exclude
+him from that situation, makes an application
+to Mr. Hastings for that place, and was by Mr. Hastings
+rejected. The reason he gives for his rejection
+is, because he cannot put any man in it without danger
+to the Company, who had ordered him to put
+a man into it. One would imagine the trust to be
+placed in him was such as enabled him to overturn
+the Company in a moment. Now the situation in
+which the Nabob's uncle, Yeteram ul Dowlah, would
+have been placed was this: he would have had no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>
+troops, he would have had no treasury, he would have
+had no collections of revenue, nothing, in short, that
+could have made him dangerous, but he would have
+been an absolute pensioner and dependant upon the
+Company, though in high office; and the least attempt
+to disturb the Company, instead of increasing,
+would have been subversive of his own power. If
+Mr. Hastings should still insist that there might be
+danger from the appointment of a man, we shall prove
+that he was of opinion that there could be no danger
+from any one,&mdash;that the Nabob himself was a mere
+shadow, a cipher, and was kept there only to soften
+the English government in the eyes and opinion of
+the natives.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will detail these circumstances no
+further, but will bring some collateral proofs to show
+that Mr. Hastings was at that very time conscious of
+the wicked and corrupt act he was doing. For, besides
+this foolish principle of policy, which he gives
+as a reason for defying the orders of the Company,
+and for insulting the country, that had never before
+seen a woman in that situation, and <i>his</i> declaration
+to the Company, that their government cannot
+be supported by private justice, (a favorite maxim,
+which he holds upon all occasions,) besides these
+reasons which he gave for his politic injustice, he
+gives the following. The Company had ordered that
+30,000<i>l.</i> should be given to the person appointed.
+He knew that the Company could never dream of
+giving this woman 30,000<i>l.</i> a year, and he makes use
+of that circumstance to justify him in putting her
+in that place: for he says, the Company, in the distressed
+state of its affairs, could never mean to give
+30,000<i>l.</i> a year for the office which they order to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">{199}</a></span>
+filled; and accordingly, upon principles of economy,
+as well as upon principles of prudence, he sees there
+could be no occasion for giving this salary, and that
+it will be saved to the Company. But no sooner had
+he given her the appointment than that appointment
+became a ground for giving her that money. The
+moment he had appointed her, he overturns the very
+principle upon which he had appointed her, and gives
+the 30,000<i>l.</i> to her, and the officers under her, saving
+not one shilling to the Company by this infamous
+measure, which he justified only upon the principle
+of economy. The 30,000<i>l.</i> was given, the principle
+of economy vanished, a shocking arrangement was
+made, and Bengal saw a dancing-girl administering
+its justice, presiding over all its remaining power,
+wealth, and influence, exhibiting to the natives of the
+country their miserable state of degradation, and the
+miserable dishonor of the English Company in Mr.
+Hastings's abandonment of all his own pretences.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a still stronger presumption. The
+Company ordered that this person, who was to have
+the management of the Nabob's revenue, and who
+was to be his guardian, should keep a strict account,
+which account should be annually transmitted to the
+Presidency, and by the Presidency to Europe; and
+the purpose of it was, to keep a control upon the reduced
+expenses of the sixteen lac which were ordered
+in the manner I mentioned. Your Lordships will
+naturally imagine that that control was kept safe.
+No, here is the order of the Directors, and you will
+see how Mr. Hastings obeyed it.</p>
+
+<p>"As the disbursement of the sums allotted to the
+Nabob for the maintenance of his household and family
+and the support of his dignity will pass through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">{200}</a></span>
+the hands of the minister who shall be selected by
+you, conformable to our preceding orders, we expect
+that you will require such minister to deliver annually
+to your board a regular and exact account of the
+application of the several sums paid by the Company
+to the Nabob. This you will strictly examine; and we
+trust that you will not suffer any part of the Nabob's
+stipend to be appropriated to the minister's own use,
+or wasted among the unnecessary dependants of the
+court, but that the whole amount be applied to the
+purposes for which it was assigned by us."</p>
+
+<p>One would have imagined, that, after Mr. Hastings
+had made so suspicious an arrangement, (I will not
+call it by any worse name,) he would have removed
+all suspicion with regard to money,&mdash;that he would
+have obeyed the Company by constituting the control
+which they had ordered to be placed over a man,
+even a fit man, and a man worthy of the trust committed
+to him. But what is his answer, when three
+years after he is desired to produce this account?
+His answer is,&mdash;"I can save the board the trouble
+of this reference by acquainting them that no such
+accounts have ever been transmitted, nor, as I can
+affirm with most certain knowledge, any orders given
+for that purpose, either to Gourdas, to whose office it
+did not properly belong, nor to the Begum, who had
+the actual charge and responsibility of those disbursements."</p>
+
+<p>He has given to this woman the charge of all the
+disbursements of the Company; the officer whom
+you would imagine would be responsible was not responsible,
+but to this prostitute and dancing-girl the
+whole of the revenue was given; when he was ordered
+to transmit that account, he not only did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">{201}</a></span>
+produce that account, but had given no order that it
+should be kept: so that no doubt can be left upon
+your Lordships' minds, that the sixteen lac, which
+were reserved for the support of the dignity of the
+government of that country, were employed for the
+purpose of Mr. Hastings's having a constant bank,
+from which he should draw every corrupt emolument
+he should think fit for himself and his associates.
+Thus your Lordships see that he appointed an improper
+person to the trust without any control, and
+that the very accounts which were to be the guardians
+of his purity, and which were to remove suspicion
+from him, he never so much as directed or ordered.
+If any one can doubt that that transaction
+was in itself corrupt, I can only say that his mind
+must be constituted in a manner totally different
+from that which prevails in any of the higher or lower
+branches of judicature in any country in the world.
+The suppression of an account is a proof of corruption.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Hastings committed these acts of violence
+against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, when he proceeded
+to make arrangements in the Company's affairs of
+the same kind with those in which corruption had
+been before exercised, he was bound by a particular
+responsibility that there should be nothing mysterious
+in his own conduct, and that at least all the accounts
+should be well kept. He appointed a person nominally
+for that situation,&mdash;namely, the Rajah Gourdas.
+Who was he? A person acting, he says, under
+the influence of Rajah Nundcomar, whom he had
+declared was not fit to be employed or trusted: all
+the offices were filled by him. But had Rajah Gourdas,
+whose character is that of an excellent man,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">{202}</a></span>
+against whom there could lie no reasonable objection
+on account of his personal character, and whose want
+of talents was to be supplied by those of Nundcomar,
+(and of <i>his</i> parts Mr. Hastings spoke as highly as
+possible,)&mdash;had he, I say, the management? No:
+but Munny Begum. Did she keep any accounts?
+No.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings was ordered, and a very disagreeable
+and harsh order it was, to take away one half of the
+Nabob's allowance which he had by treaty. I do
+not charge Mr. Hastings with this reduction: he had
+nothing to do with that. Sixteen lac were cut off,
+and sixteen left; these two sums had been distributed,
+one for the support of the seraglio and the dignity
+of the state, the other for the court establishment
+and the household. The sixteen lac which was left,
+therefore, required to be well economized, and well
+administered. There was a rigor in the Company's
+order relative to it, which was, that it should take
+place from an antedated time, that is, a whole year
+prior to the communication of their order to the
+Nabob. The order was, that the Nabob's stipend
+should be reduced to sixteen lac a year from the
+month of January. Mr. Hastings makes this reflection
+upon it, in order to leave no doubt upon your
+mind of his integrity in administering that great
+trust: he says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your order for the reduction of the Nabob's stipend
+was communicated to him in the month of December,
+1771. He remonstrated against it, and desired
+it might be again referred to the Company.
+The board entirely acquiesced in his remonstrance,
+and the subsequent payments of his stipend were paid
+as before. I might easily have availed myself of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">{203}</a></span>
+plea. I might have treated it as an act of the past
+government, with which I had no cause to interfere,
+and joined in asserting the impossibility of his defraying
+the vast expense of his court and household without
+it, which I could have proved by plausible arguments,
+drawn from the actual amount of the nizamut
+and bhela establishments; and both the Nabob and
+Begum would have liberally purchased my forbearance.
+Instead of pursuing this plan, I carried your
+orders rigidly and literally into execution. I undertook
+myself the laborious and reproachful task of
+limiting his charges, from an excess of his former
+stipend, to the sum of his reduced allowance."</p>
+
+<p>He says in another place,&mdash;"The stoppage of the
+king's tribute was an act of mine, and I have been
+often reproached with it. It was certainly in my power
+to have continued the payment of it, and to have
+made my terms with the king for any part of it which
+I might have chosen to reserve for my own use. He
+would have thanked me for the remainder."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I believe it is a singular thing, and what
+your Lordships have been very little used to, to see a
+man in the situation of Mr. Hastings, or in any situation
+like it, so ready in knowing all the resources
+by which sinister emolument may be made and concealed,
+and which, under pretences of public good,
+may be transferred into the pocket of him who uses
+those pretences. He is resolved, if he is innocent, that
+his innocence shall not proceed from ignorance. He
+well knows the ways of falsifying the Company's accounts;
+he well knows the necessities of the natives,
+and he knows that by paying a part of their dues they
+will be ready to give an acquittance of the whole.
+These are parts of Mr. Hastings's knowledge of which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">{204}</a></span>
+your Lordships will see he also well knows how to
+avail himself.</p>
+
+<p>But you would expect, when he reduced the allowance
+to sixteen lac, and took credit to himself as if
+he had done the thing which he professed, and had
+argued from his rigor and cruelty his strict and literal
+obedience to the Company, that he had in reality
+done it. The very reverse: for it will be in proof,
+that, after he had pretended to reduce the Company's
+allowance, he continued it a twelvemonth from the
+day in which he said he had entirely executed it, to
+the amount of 90,000<i>l.</i>, and entered a false account
+of the suppression in the Company's accounts; and
+when he has taken a credit as under pretence of reducing
+that allowance, he paid 90,000<i>l.</i> more than he
+ought. Can you, then, have a doubt, after all these
+false pretences, after all this fraud, fabrication, and
+suppression which he made use of, that that 90,000<i>l.</i>,
+of which he kept no account and transmitted no account,
+was money given to himself for his own private
+use and advantage?</p>
+
+<p>This is all that I think necessary to state to your
+Lordships upon this monstrous part of the arrangement;
+and therefore, from his rigorous obedience in
+cases of cruelty, and, where control was directed,
+from his total disobedience, and from his choice of
+persons, from his suppression of the accounts that
+ought to have been produced, and falsifying the accounts
+that were kept, there arises a strong inference
+of corruption. When your Lordships see all this in
+proof, your Lordships will justify me in saying that
+there never was (taking every part of the arrangement)
+such a direct, open violation of any trust.&mdash;I
+shall say no more with regard to the appointment of
+Munny Begum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">{205}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here ended the first scene, and here ends
+that body of presumption arising from the transaction
+and inherent in it. My Lords, the next scene
+that I am to bring before you is the positive proof of
+corruption in this transaction, in which I am sure
+you already see that corruption must exist. The
+charge was brought by a person in the highest trust
+and confidence with Mr. Hastings, a person employed
+in the management of the whole transaction, a person
+to whom the management, subordinate to Munny Begum,
+of all the pecuniary transactions, and all the arrangements
+made upon that occasion, was intrusted.</p>
+
+<p>On the 11th day of March, 1775, Nundcomar gives
+to Mr. Francis, a member of the Council, a charge
+against Mr. Hastings, consisting of two parts. The
+first of these charges was a vast number of corrupt
+dealings, with respect to which he was the informer,
+not the witness, but to which he indicated the modes
+of inquiry; and they are corrupt dealings, as Mr.
+Hastings himself states them, amounting to millions
+of rupees, and in transactions every one of which implies
+in it the strongest degree of corruption. The
+next part was of those to which he was not only an
+informer, but a witness, in having been the person
+who himself transmitted the money to Mr. Hastings
+and the agents of Mr. Hastings; and accordingly,
+upon this part, which is the only part we charge, his
+evidence is clear and full, that he gave the money
+to Mr. Hastings,&mdash;he and the Begum (for I put
+them together). He states, that Mr. Hastings received
+for the appointment of Munny Begum to the
+rajahship two lacs of rupees, or about 22,000<i>l.</i>, and
+that he received in another gross sum one lac and
+a half of rupees: in all making three lac and a half,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">{206}</a></span>
+or about 36,000<i>l.</i> This charge was signed by the
+man, and accompanied with the account.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, on that day, made no reflection or
+observation whatever upon this charge, except that
+he attempted to excite some suspicion that Mr. Francis,
+who had produced it, was concerned in the
+charge, and was the principal mover in it. He asks
+Mr. Francis that day this question:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The Governor-General observes, as Mr. Francis
+has been pleased to inform the board that he was unacquainted
+with the contents of the letter sent in to
+the board by Nundcomar, that he thinks himself justified
+in carrying his curiosity further than he should
+have permitted himself without such a previous intimation,
+and therefore begs leave to ask Mr. Francis
+whether he was before this acquainted with Nundcomar's
+intention of bringing such charges against him
+before the board.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Mr. Francis.</i>&mdash;As a member of this Council, I
+do not deem myself obliged to answer any question
+of mere curiosity. I am willing, however, to inform
+the Governor-General, that, though I was totally unacquainted
+with the contents of the paper I have now
+delivered in to the board till I heard it read, I did
+apprehend in general that it contained some charge
+against him. It was this apprehension that made
+me so particularly cautious in the manner of receiving
+the Rajah's letter. I was not acquainted with
+Rajah Nundcomar's intention of bringing in such
+charges as are mentioned in the letter.</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"WARREN HASTINGS.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">J. CLAVERING.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">GEO. MONSON.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">P. FRANCIS."<br /></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">{207}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now what the duty of Mr. Hastings and the Council
+was, upon receiving such information, I shall beg
+leave to state to your Lordships from the Company's
+orders; but, before I read them, I must observe,
+that, in pursuance of an act of Parliament, which was
+supposed to be made upon account of the neglect of
+the Company, as well as the neglects of their servants,
+and for which general neglects responsibility
+was fixed upon the Company for the future, while
+for the present their authority was suspended, and a
+Parliamentary commission sent out to regulate their
+affairs, the Company did, upon that occasion, send
+out a general code and body of instructions to be
+observed by their servants, in the 35th paragraph of
+which it is said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We direct that you immediately cause the strictest
+inquiry to be made into all oppressions which may
+have been committed either against the natives or
+Europeans, and into all abuses that may have prevailed
+in the collection of the revenues, or any part
+of the civil government of the Presidency: and that
+you communicate to us all information which you
+may be able to learn relative thereto, or to any dissipation
+or embezzlement of the Company's money."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see here that there is a direct duty
+fixed upon them to forward, to promote, to set on foot,
+without exception of any persons whatever, an inquiry
+into all manner of corruption, peculation, and oppression.
+Therefore this charge of Nundcomar's was a
+case exactly within the Company's orders; such a
+charge was not sought out, but was actually laid before
+them; but if it had not been actually laid before
+them, if they had any reason to suspect that such corruptions
+existed, they were bound by this order to
+make an active inquiry into them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">{208}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Upon that day (11th March, 1775) nothing further
+passed; and, on the part of Mr. Hastings, that charge,
+as far as we can find, might have stood upon the records
+forever, without his making the smallest observation
+upon it, or taking any one step to clear his
+own character. But Nundcomar was not so inattentive
+to his duties as an accuser as Mr. Hastings was
+to his duties as an inquirer; for, without a moment's
+delay, upon the first board-day, two days after, Nundcomar
+came and delivered the following letter.</p>
+
+<p>"I had the honor to lay before you, in a letter of
+the 11th instant, an abstracted, but true account of
+the Honorable Governor in the course of his administration.
+What is there written I mean not the least
+to alter: far from it. I have the strongest written
+vouchers to produce in support of what I have advanced;
+and I wish and entreat, for my honor's
+sake, that you will suffer me to appear before you,
+to establish the fact by an additional, incontestable
+evidence."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will venture to say, if ever there was
+an accuser that appeared well and with weight before
+any court, it was this man. He does not shrink from
+his charge; he offered to meet the person he charged
+face to face, and to make good his charge by his own
+evidence, and further evidence that he should produce.
+Your Lordships have also seen the conduct
+of Mr. Hastings on the first day; you have seen his
+acquiescence under it; you have seen the suspicion he
+endeavored to raise. Now, before I proceed to what
+Mr. Hastings thought of it, I must remark upon this
+accusation, that it is a specific accusation, coming
+from a person knowing the very transaction, and
+known to be concerned in it,&mdash;that it was an accusa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">{209}</a></span>tion
+in writing, that it was an accusation with a signature,
+that it was an accusation with a person to make
+it good, that it was made before a competent authority,
+and made before an authority bound to inquire
+into such accusation. When he comes to produce his
+evidence, he tells you, first, the sums of money given,
+the species in which they were given, the very bags
+in which they were put, the exchange that was made
+by reducing them to the standard money of the country;
+he names all the persons through whose hands
+the whole transaction went, eight in number, besides
+himself, Munny Begum, and Gourdas, being eleven,
+all referred to in this transaction. I do believe that
+since the beginning of the world there never was an
+accusation which was more deserving of inquiry, because
+there never was an accusation which put a false
+accuser in a worse situation, and that put an honest
+defendant in a better; for there was every means of
+collation, every means of comparison, every means of
+cross-examining, every means of control. There was
+every way of sifting evidence, in which evidence could
+be sifted. Eleven witnesses to the transaction are
+referred to; all the particulars of the payment, every
+circumstance that could give the person accused the
+advantage of showing the falsehood of the accusation,
+were specified. General accusations may be treated
+as calumnies; but particular accusations, like these,
+afford the defendant, if innocent, every possible means
+for making his defence: therefore the very making
+no defence at all would prove, beyond all doubt, a
+consciousness of guilt.</p>
+
+<p>The next thing for your Lordships' consideration
+is the conduct of Mr. Hastings upon this occasion.
+You would imagine that he would have treated the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">{210}</a></span>
+accusation with a cold and manly disdain; that he
+would have challenged and defied inquiry, and desired
+to see his accuser face to face. This is what
+any man would do in such a situation. I can conceive
+very well that a man composed, firm, and collected
+in himself, conscious of not only integrity, but
+known integrity, conscious of a whole life beyond the
+reach of suspicion,&mdash;that a man placed in such a
+situation might oppose general character to general
+accusation, and stand collected in himself, poised on
+his own base, and defying all the calumnies in the
+world. But as it shows a great and is a proof of a
+virtuous mind to despise calumny, it is the proof of
+a guilty mind to despise a specific accusation, when
+made before a competent authority, and with competent
+means to prove it. As Mr. Hastings's conduct
+was what no man living expected, I will venture to
+say that no expression can do it justice but his own.
+Upon reading the letter, and a motion being made
+that Rajah Nundcomar be brought before the board
+to prove the charge against the Governor-General,
+the Governor-General enters the following minute.</p>
+
+<p>"Before the question is put, I declare that I will
+not suffer Nundcomar to appear before the board as
+my accuser. I know what belongs to the dignity and
+character of the first member of this administration.
+I will not sit at this board in the character of a criminal,
+nor do I acknowledge the members of this board
+to be my judges. I am reduced on this occasion to
+make the declaration, that I look upon General Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis as my accusers.
+I cannot prove this in the direct letter of the
+law, but in my conscience I regard them as such, and
+I will give my reasons for it. On their arrival at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">{211}</a></span>
+place, and on the first formation of the Council, they
+thought proper to take immediate and decisive measures
+in contradiction and for the repeal of those which
+were formed by me in conjunction with the last administration.
+I appealed to the Court of Directors
+from their acts. Many subsequent letters have been
+transmitted both by them and by me to the Court of
+Directors: by me, in protestation against their conduct;
+by them, in justification of it. Quitting this
+ground, they since appear to me to have chosen other
+modes of attack, apparently calculated to divert my
+attention and to withdraw that of the public from the
+subject of our first differences, which regarded only
+the measures that were necessary for the good of the
+service, to attacks directly and personally levelled at
+me for matters which tend to draw a personal and
+popular odium upon me: and fit instruments they
+have found for their purpose,&mdash;Mr. Joseph Fowke,
+Mahrajah Nundcomar, Roopnarain Chowdry, and the
+Ranny of Burdwan.</p>
+
+<p>"It appears incontestably upon the records that the
+charges preferred by the Ranny against me proceeded
+from the office of Mr. Fowke. All the papers transmitted
+by her came in their original form written in
+the English language,&mdash;some with Persian papers, of
+which they were supposed to be translations, but all
+strongly marked with the character and idiom of the
+English language. I applied on Saturday last for Persian
+originals of some of the papers sent by her, and
+I was refused: I am justified in declaring my firm
+belief that no such originals exist.</p>
+
+<p>"With respect to Nundcomar's accusations, they
+were delivered by the hands of Mr. Francis, who has
+declared that he was called upon by Rajah Nund<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">{212}</a></span>comar,
+as a duty belonging to his office as a councillor
+of this state, to lay the packet which contained
+them before the board,&mdash;that he conceived that he
+could not, consistent with his duty, refuse such a letter
+at the instance of a person of the Rajah's rank,
+and did accordingly receive it, and laid it before the
+board,&mdash;declaring at the same time that he was unacquainted
+with the contents of it. I believe that
+the Court of Directors, and those to whom those proceedings
+shall be made known, will think differently
+of this action of Mr. Francis: that Nundcomar was
+guilty of great insolence and disrespect in the demand
+which he made of Mr. Francis; and that it was not
+a duty belonging to the office of a councillor of this
+state to make himself the carrier of a letter, which
+would have been much more properly committed to
+the hands of a peon or hircarra, or delivered by the
+writer of it to the secretary himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Francis has acknowledged that he apprehended
+in general that it contained some charge against
+me. If the charge was false, it was a libel. It might
+have been false for anything that Mr. Francis could
+know to the contrary, since he was unacquainted
+with the contents of it. In this instance, therefore,
+he incurred the hazard of presenting a libel to the
+board: this was not a duty belonging to his office
+as a councillor of this state. I must further inform
+the board that I have been long since acquainted
+with Nundcomar's intentions of making this attack
+upon me. Happily, Nundcomar, among whose talents
+for intrigue that of secrecy is not the first, has been
+ever too ready to make the first publication of his
+own intentions. I was shown a paper containing
+many accusations against me, which I was told was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">{213}</a></span>
+carried by Nundcomar to Colonel Monson, and that
+he himself was employed for some hours in private
+with Colonel Monson, explaining the nature of those
+charges.</p>
+
+<p>"I mention only what I was told; but as the rest
+of the report which was made to me corresponds
+exactly with what has happened since, I hope I shall
+stand acquitted to my superiors and to the world in
+having given so much credit to it as to bring the circumstance
+upon record. I cannot recollect the precise
+time in which this is said to have happened, but
+I believe it was either before or at the time of the
+dispatch of the 'Bute' and 'Pacific.' The charge
+has since undergone some alteration; but of the copy
+of the paper which was delivered to me, containing the
+original charge, I caused a translation to be made;
+when, suspecting the renewal of the subject in this
+day's consultation, I brought it with me, and I desire
+it may be recorded, that, when our superiors, or the
+world, if the world is to be made the judge of my
+conduct, shall be possessed of these materials, they
+may, by comparing the supposed original and amended
+list of accusations preferred against me by Nundcomar,
+judge how far I am justified in the credit
+which I give to the reports above mentioned. I do
+not mean to infer from what I have said that it makes
+any alteration in the nature of the charges, whether
+they were delivered immediately from my ostensible
+accusers, or whether they came to the board through
+the channel of patronage; but it is sufficient to authorize
+the conviction which I feel in my own mind,
+that those gentlemen are parties in the accusations of
+which they assert the right of being the judges.</p>
+
+<p>"From the first commencement of this administra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">{214}</a></span>tion,
+every means have been tried both to deprive me
+of the legal authority with which I have been trusted,
+and to proclaim the annihilation of it to the world;
+but no instance has yet appeared of this in so extraordinary
+a degree as in the question now before the
+board. The chief of the administration, your superior,
+Gentlemen, appointed by the legislature itself, shall I
+sit at this board to be arraigned in the presence of a
+wretch whom you all know to be one of the basest of
+mankind? I believe I need not mention his name;
+but it is Nundcomar. Shall I sit here to hear men
+collected from the dregs of the people give evidence,
+at his dictating, against my character and conduct?
+I will not. You may, if you please, form yourselves
+into a committee for the investigation of these matters
+in any manner which you may think proper; but
+I will repeat, that I will not meet Nundcomar at the
+board, nor suffer Nundcomar to be examined at the
+board; nor have you a right to it, nor can it answer
+any other purpose than that of vilifying and insulting
+me to insist upon it.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to have found it necessary to deliver
+my sentiments on a subject of so important a nature
+in an unpremeditated minute, drawn from me at the
+board, which I should have wished to have had leisure
+and retirement to have enabled me to express myself
+with that degree of caution and exactness which the
+subject requires. I have said nothing but what I
+believe and am morally certain I shall stand justified
+for in the eyes of my superiors and the eyes of the
+world; but I reserve to myself the liberty of adding
+my further sentiments in such a manner and form as
+I shall hereafter judge necessary."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you see here the picture of Nundcomar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">{215}</a></span>
+drawn by Mr. Hastings himself; you see the hurry,
+the passion, the precipitation, the confusion, into which
+Mr. Hastings is thrown by the perplexity of detected
+guilt; you see, my Lords, that, instead of defending
+himself, he rails at his accuser in the most indecent
+language, calling him a wretch whom they all knew
+to be the basest of mankind,&mdash;that he rails at the
+Council, by attributing their conduct to the worst of
+motives,&mdash;that he rails at everybody, and declares
+the accusation to be a libel: in short, you see plainly
+that the man's head is turned. You see there is not
+a word he says upon this occasion which has common
+sense in it; you see one great leading principle in it,&mdash;that
+he does not once attempt to deny the charge.
+He attempts to vilify the witness, he attempts to vilify
+those he supposes to be his accusers, he attempts
+to vilify the Council; he lags upon the accusation, he
+mixes it with other accusations, which had nothing
+to do with it, and out of the whole he collects a resolution&mdash;to
+do what? To meet his adversary and
+defy him? No,&mdash;that he will not suffer him to
+appear before him: he says, "I will not sit at this
+board in the character of a criminal, nor do I acknowledge
+the board to be my judges."</p>
+
+<p>He was not called upon to acknowledge them to be
+his judges. Both he and they were called upon to inquire
+into all corruptions without exception. It was
+his duty not merely [not?] to traverse and oppose
+them while inquiring into acts of corruption, but he
+was bound to take an active part in it,&mdash;that if they
+had a mind to let such a thing sleep upon their records,
+it was his duty to have brought forward the inquiry.
+They were not his judges, they were not his
+accusers; they were his fellow-laborers in the inquiry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">{216}</a></span>
+ordered by the Court of Directors, their masters, and
+by which inquiry he might be purged of that corruption
+with which he stood charged.</p>
+
+<p>He says, "Nundcomar is a wretch whom you all
+know to be the basest of mankind." I believe they
+did not know the man to be a wretch, or the basest of
+mankind; but if he was a wretch, and if he was the
+basest of mankind, if he was guilty of all the crimes
+with which we charge Mr. Hastings, (not one of which
+was ever proved against him,)&mdash;if any of your Lordships
+were to have the misfortune to be before this tribunal,
+before any inquest of the House of Commons,
+or any other inquest of this nation, would you not say
+that it was the greatest possible advantage to you that
+the man who accused you was a miscreant, the vilest
+and basest of mankind, by the confession of all the
+world? Do mankind really, then, think that to be accused
+by men of honor, of weight, of character, upon
+probable charges, is an advantage to them, and that
+to be accused by the basest of mankind is a disadvantage?
+No: give me, if ever I am to have accusers,
+miscreants, as he calls him,&mdash;wretches, the basest and
+vilest of mankind. "The board," says he, "are my
+accusers." If they were, it was their duty; but they
+were not his accusers, but were inquiring into matters
+which it was equally his duty to inquire into.
+He would not suffer Nundcomar to be produced; he
+would not suffer Nundcomar to be examined; he
+rather suffered such an accusation to stand against
+his name and character than permit it to be inquired
+into. Do I want any other presumption of his guilt,
+upon such an occasion, than such conduct as this?</p>
+
+<p>This man, whom he calls a wretch, the basest and
+vilest of mankind, was undoubtedly, by himself, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">{217}</a></span>
+records of the Company, declared to be one of the
+first men of that country, everything that a subject
+could be, a person illustrious for his birth, sacred with
+regard to his caste, opulent in fortune, eminent in
+situation, who had filled the very first offices in that
+country; and that he was, added to all this, a man
+of most acknowledged talents, and of such a superiority
+as made the whole people of Bengal appear to
+be an inferior race of beings compared to him,&mdash;a
+man whose outward appearance and demeanor used
+to cause reverence and awe, and who at that time was
+near seventy years of age, which, without any other
+title, generally demands respect from mankind. And
+yet this man he calls the basest of mankind, a name
+which no man is entitled to call another till he has
+proved something to justify him in so doing; and
+notwithstanding his opulence, his high rank, station,
+and birth, he despises him, and will not suffer him to
+be heard as an accuser before him. I will venture to
+say that Mr. Hastings, in so doing, whether elevated
+by philosophy or inflated by pride, is not like the rest
+of mankind. We do know, that, in all accusations,
+a great part of their weight and authority comes from
+the character, the situation, the name, the description,
+the office, the dignity of the persons who bring them;
+mankind are so made, we cannot resist this prejudice;
+and it has weight, and ever will have <i>prim&acirc; facie</i>
+weight, in all the tribunals in the world. If, therefore,
+Rajah Nundcomar was a man who (it is not degrading
+to your Lordships to say) was equal in rank,
+according to the idea of his country, to any peer in
+this House, as sacred as a bishop, of as much gravity
+and authority as a judge, and who was prime-minister
+in the country in which he lived, with what face can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">{218}</a></span>
+Mr. Hastings call this man a wretch, and say that he
+will not suffer him to be brought before him? If, indeed,
+joined with such circumstances, the accuser be
+a person of bad morals, then, I admit, those bad morals
+take away from their weight; but for a proof of that
+you must have some other grounds than the charges
+and the railing of the culprit against him.</p>
+
+<p>I might say that his passion is a proof of his guilt;
+and there is an action which is more odious than the
+crimes he attempts to cover,&mdash;<i>for he has murdered
+this man by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey</i>; and if his
+counsel should be unwise enough to endeavor to detract
+from the credit of this man by the pretended
+punishment to which he was brought, we will open
+that dreadful scene to your Lordships, and you will
+see that it does not detract from his credit, but brings
+an eternal stain and dishonor upon the justice of
+Great Britain: I say nothing further of it. As he
+stood there, as he gave that evidence that day, the
+evidence was to be received; it stands good, and is
+a record against Mr. Hastings,&mdash;with this addition,
+that he would not suffer it to be examined. He
+railed at his colleagues. He says, if the charge was
+false, they were guilty of a libel. No: it might have
+been the effect of conspiracy, it might be punished in
+another way; but if it was false, it was no libel.
+And all this is done to discountenance inquiry, to
+bring odium upon his colleagues for doing their duty,
+and to prevent that inquiry which could alone clear
+his character.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings had himself forgotten the character
+which he had given of Nundcomar; but he says that
+his colleagues were perfectly well acquainted with
+him, and knew that he was a wretch, the basest of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">{219}</a></span>
+mankind. But before I read to you the character
+which Mr. Hastings gave of him, when he recommended
+him to the Presidency, (to succeed Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n,) I am to let your Lordships understand fully
+the purpose for which Mr. Hastings gave it. Upon
+that occasion, all the Council, whom he stated to lie
+under suspicion of being bought by Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n, all those persons with one voice cried out
+against Nundcomar; and as Mr. Hastings was known
+to be of the faction the most opposite to Nundcomar,
+they charged him with direct inconsistency in raising
+Nundcomar to that exalted trust,&mdash;a charge which
+Mr. Hastings could not repel any other way than by
+defending Nundcomar. The weight of their objections
+chiefly lay to Nundcomar's political character;
+his moral character was not discussed in that proceeding.
+Mr. Hastings says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The President does not take upon him to vindicate
+the moral character of Nundcomar; his sentiments
+of this man's former political conduct are not
+unknown to the Court of Directors, who, he is persuaded,
+will be more inclined to attribute his present
+countenance of him to motives of zeal and fidelity to
+the service, in repugnance perhaps to his own inclinations,
+than to any predilection in his favor. He is
+very well acquainted with most of the facts alluded
+to in the minute of the majority, having been a principal
+instrument in detecting them: nevertheless he
+thinks it but justice to make a distinction between
+the violation of a trust and an offence committed
+against our government by a man who owed it no
+allegiance, nor was indebted to it for protection, but,
+on the contrary, was the minister and actual servant
+of a master whose interest naturally suggested that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">{220}</a></span>
+kind of policy which sought, by foreign aids, and the
+diminution of the power of the Company, to raise his
+own consequence, and to re&euml;stablish his authority.
+He has never been charged with any instance of infidelity
+to the Nabob Mir Jaffier, the constant tenor
+of whose politics, from his first accession to the nizamut
+till his death, corresponded in all points so exactly
+with the artifices which were detected in his minister
+that they may be as fairly ascribed to the one
+as to the other: their immediate object was beyond
+question the aggrandizement of the former, though
+the latter had ultimately an equal interest in their
+success. The opinion which the Nabob himself entertained
+of the services and of the fidelity of Nundcomar
+evidently appeared in the distinguished marks
+which he continued to show him of his favor and confidence
+to the latest hour of his life.</p>
+
+<p>"His conduct in the succeeding administration appears
+not only to have been dictated by the same
+principles, but, if we may be allowed to speak favorably
+of any measures which opposed the views of our
+own government and aimed at the support of an adverse
+interest, surely it was not only not culpable,
+but even praiseworthy. He endeavored, as appears
+by the abstracts before us, to give consequence to his
+master, and to pave the way to his independence, by
+obtaining a firman from the king for his appointment
+to the subahship; and he opposed the promotion
+of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, because he looked upon
+it as a supersession of the rights and authority of the
+Nabob. He is now an absolute dependant and subject
+of the Company, on whose favor he must rest all
+his hopes of future advancement."</p>
+
+<p>The character here given of him is that of an excel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">{221}</a></span>lent
+patriot, a character which all your Lordships, in
+the several situations which you enjoy or to which you
+may be called, will envy,&mdash;the character of a servant
+who stuck to his master against all foreign encroachments,
+who stuck to him to the last hour of his life, and
+had the dying testimony of his master to his services.</p>
+
+<p>Could Sir John Clavering, could Colonel Monson,
+could Mr. Francis know that this man, of whom Mr.
+Hastings had given that exalted character upon the
+records of the Company, was the basest and vilest of
+mankind? No, they ought to have esteemed him the
+contrary: they knew him to be a man of rank, they
+knew him to be a man perhaps of the first capacity
+in the world, and they knew that Mr. Hastings had
+given this honorable testimony of him on the records
+of the Company but a very little time before; and
+there was no reason why they should think or know,
+as he expresses it, that he was the basest and vilest of
+mankind. From the account, therefore, of Mr. Hastings
+himself, he was a person competent to accuse, a
+witness fit to be heard; and that is all I contend for.
+Mr. Hastings would not hear him, he would not suffer
+the charge he had produced to be examined into.</p>
+
+<p>It has been shown to your Lordships that Mr.
+Hastings employed Nundcomar to inquire into the
+conduct and to be the principal manager of a prosecution
+against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n. Will you suffer
+this man to qualify and disqualify witnesses and
+prosecutors agreeably to the purposes which his own
+vengeance and corruption may dictate in one case,
+and which the defence of those corruptions may dictate
+in another? Was Nundcomar a person fit to be
+employed in the greatest and most sacred trusts in
+the country, and yet not fit to be a witness to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">{222}</a></span>
+sums of money which he paid Mr. Hastings for those
+trusts? Was Nundcomar a fit witness to be employed
+and a fit person to be used in the prosecution of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, and yet not fit to be employed
+against Mr. Hastings, who himself had employed him
+in the very prosecution of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n?</p>
+
+<p>If Nundcomar was an enemy to Mr. Hastings, he
+was an enemy to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n; and Mr.
+Hastings employed him, avowedly and professedly on
+the records of the Company, on account of the very
+qualification of that enmity. Was he a wretch, the
+basest of mankind, when opposed to Mr. Hastings?
+Was he not as much a wretch, and as much the basest
+of mankind, when Mr. Hastings employed him in
+the prosecution of the first magistrate and Mahometan
+of the first descent in Asia? Mr. Hastings
+shall not qualify and disqualify men at his pleasure;
+he must accept them such as they are; and it is a
+presumption of his guilt accompanying the charge,
+(which I never will separate from it,) that he would
+not suffer the man to be produced who made the accusation.
+And I therefore contend, that, as the accusation
+was so made, so witnessed, so detailed, so specific,
+so entered upon record, and so entered upon
+record in consequence of the inquiries ordered by the
+Company, his refusal and rejection of inquiry into it
+is a presumption of his guilt.</p>
+
+<p>He is full of his idea of dignity. It is right for
+every man to preserve his dignity. There is a dignity
+of station, which a man has in trust to preserve;
+there is a dignity of personal character, which every
+man by being made man is bound to preserve. But
+you see Mr. Hastings's idea of dignity has no connection
+with integrity; it has no connection with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">{223}</a></span>
+honest fame; it has no connection with the reputation
+which he is bound to preserve. What, my
+Lords, did he owe nothing to the Company that had
+appointed him? Did he owe nothing to the legislature,&mdash;did
+he owe nothing to your Lordships, and
+to the House of Commons, who had appointed him?
+Did he owe nothing to himself? to the country that
+bore him? Did he owe nothing to the world, as to
+its opinion, to which every public man owes a reputation?
+What an example was here held out to the
+Company's servants!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings says, "This may come into a court
+of justice; it will come into a court of justice: I reserve
+my defence on the occasion till it comes into a
+court of justice, and here I make no opposition to it."
+To this I answer, that the Company did not order
+him so to reserve himself, but ordered him to be an
+inquirer into those things. Is it a lesson to be taught
+to the inferior servants of the Company, that, provided
+they can escape out of a court of justice by the
+back-doors and sally-ports of the law, by artifice of
+pleading, by those strict and rigorous rules of evidence
+which have been established for the protection
+of innocence, but which by them might be turned to
+the protection and support of guilt, that such an escape
+is enough for them? that an Old Bailey acquittal
+is enough to establish a fitness for trust? and if a
+man shall go acquitted out of such a court, because
+the judges are bound to acquit him against the conviction
+of their own opinion, when every man in the
+market-place knows that he is guilty, that he is fit
+for a trust? Is it a lesson to be held out to the servants
+of the Company, that, upon the first inquiry
+which is made into corruption, and that in the high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">{224}</a></span>est
+trust, by the persons authorized to inquire into it,
+he uses all the powers of that trust to quash it,&mdash;vilifying
+his colleagues, vilifying his accuser, abusing
+everybody, but never denying the charge? His associates
+and colleagues, astonished at this conduct,
+so wholly unlike everything that had ever appeared
+of innocence, request him to consider a little better.
+They declare they are not his accusers; they tell him
+they are not his judges; that they, under the orders
+of the Company, are making an inquiry which he
+ought to make. He declares he will not make it.
+Being thus driven to the wall, he says, "Why do you
+not form yourselves into a committee? I won't suffer
+these proceedings to go on as long as I am present."
+Mr. Hastings plainly had in view, that, if the proceedings
+had been before a committee, there would
+have been a doubt of their authenticity, as not being
+before a regular board; and he contended that there
+could be no regular board without his own presence
+in it: a poor, miserable scheme for eluding this inquiry;
+partly by saying that it was carried on when he
+was not present, and partly by denying the authority
+of this board.</p>
+
+<p>I will have nothing to do with the great question
+that arose upon the Governor-General's resolution to
+dissolve a board, whether the board have a right to
+sit afterwards; it is enough that Mr. Hastings would
+not suffer them, as a Council, to examine into what,
+as a Council, they were bound to examine into. He
+absolutely declared the Council dissolved, when they
+did not accept his committee, for which they had
+many good reasons, as I shall show in reply, if necessary,
+and which he could have no one good reason
+for proposing;&mdash;he then declares the Council dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">{225}</a></span>solved.
+The Council, who did not think Mr. Hastings
+had a power to dissolve them while proceeding
+in the discharge of their duty, went on as a Council.
+They called in Nundcomar to support his charge: Mr.
+Hastings withdrew. Nundcomar was asked what he
+had to say further in support of his own evidence.
+Upon which he produces a letter from Munny Begum,
+the dancing-girl that I have spoken of, in which
+she gives him directions and instructions relative to
+his conduct in every part of those bribes; by which
+it appears that the corrupt agreement for her office
+was made with Mr. Hastings through Nundcomar,
+before he had quitted Calcutta. It points out the
+execution of it, and the manner in which every part
+of the sum was paid: one lac by herself in Calcutta;
+one lac, which she ordered Nundcomar to borrow,
+and which he did borrow; and a lac and a half which
+were given to him, Mr. Hastings, besides this purchase
+money, under color of an entertainment. This
+letter was produced, translated, examined, criticized,
+proved to be sealed with the seal of the Begum, acknowledged
+to have no marks but those of authenticity
+upon it, and as such was entered upon the
+Company's records, confirming and supporting the
+evidence of Nundcomar, part by part, and circumstance
+by circumstance. And I am to remark, that,
+since this document, so delivered in, has never been
+litigated or controverted in the truth of it, from that
+day to this, by Mr. Hastings, so, if there was no
+more testimony, here is enough, upon this business.
+Your Lordships will remark that this charge consisted
+of two parts: two lacs that were given explicitly
+for the corrupt purchase of the office; and
+one lac and a half given in reality for the same pur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">{226}</a></span>pose,
+but under the color of what is called an entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Now in the course of these proceedings it was
+thought necessary that Mr. Hastings's banian, Cantoo
+Baboo, (a name your Lordships will be well acquainted
+with, and who was the minister in this and all the
+other transactions of Mr. Hastings,) should be called
+before the board to explain some circumstances in
+the proceedings. Mr. Hastings ordered his banian,
+a native, not to attend the sovereign board appointed
+by Parliament for the government of that country,
+and directed to inquire into transactions of this nature.
+He thus taught the natives not only to disobey
+the orders of the Court of Directors, enforced by an
+act of Parliament, but he taught his own servant to
+disobey, and ordered him not to appear before the
+board. Quarrels, duels, and other mischiefs arose.
+In short, Mr. Hastings raised every power of heaven
+and of hell upon this subject: but in vain: the inquiry
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings does not meet Nundcomar: he was
+afraid of him. But he was not negligent of his own
+defence; for he flies to the Supreme Court of Justice.
+He there prosecuted an inquiry against Nundcomar
+for a conspiracy. Failing in that, he made other attempts,
+and disabled Nundcomar from appearing before
+the board by having him imprisoned, and thus
+utterly crippled that part of the prosecution against
+him. But as guilt is never able thoroughly to escape,
+it did so happen, that the Council, finding monstrous
+deficiencies in the Begum's affairs, finding the Nabob's
+allowance totally squandered, that the most sacred
+pensions were left unpaid, that nothing but disorder
+and confusion reigned in all his affairs, that the Na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">{227}</a></span>bob's
+education was neglected, that he could scarcely
+read or write, that there was scarcely any mark of a
+man left in him except those which Nature had at
+first imprinted,&mdash;I say, all these abuses being produced
+in a body before them, they thought it necessary
+to send up to inquire into them; and a considerable
+deficiency or embezzlement appearing in the Munny
+Begum's account of the young Nabob's stipend, she
+voluntarily declared, by a writing under her seal, that
+she had given 15,000<i>l.</i> to Mr. Hastings for an entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, finding that the charge must come
+fully against him, contrived a plan which your Lordships
+will see the effects of presently, and this was,
+to confound this lac and an half, or 15,000<i>l.</i>, with the
+two lacs given directly and specifically as a bribe,&mdash;intending
+to avail himself of this finesse whenever
+any payment was to be proved of the two lacs, which
+he knew would be proved against him, and which he
+never did deny; and accordingly your Lordships will
+find some confusion in the proofs of the payment of
+those sums. The receipt of two lacs is proved by
+Nundcomar, proved with all the means of detection
+which I have stated; the receipt of the lac and a half
+is proved by Munny Begum's letter, the authenticity
+of which was established, and never denied by Mr.
+Hastings. In addition to these proofs, Rajah Gourdas,
+who had the management of the Nabob's treasury,
+verbally gave an account perfectly corresponding
+with that of Nundcomar and the Munny Begum's
+letter; and he afterwards gave in writing an attestation,
+which in every point agrees correctly with the
+others. So that there are three witnesses upon this
+business. And he shall not disqualify Rajah Gour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">{228}</a></span>das,
+because, whatever character he thought fit to
+give Nundcomar, he has given the best of characters
+to Rajah Gourdas, who was employed by Mr. Hastings
+in occupations of trust, and therefore any objections
+to his competency cannot exist. Having got
+thus far, the only thing that remained was to examine
+the records of the public offices, and see whether
+any trace of these transactions was to be found there.
+These offices had been thrown into confusion in the
+manner you will hear; but, upon strict inquiry, there
+was a <i>shomaster</i>, or office paper, produced, from which
+it appears that the officer of the treasury, having
+brought to the Nabob an account of one lac and a
+half which he said had been given to Mr. Hastings,
+desired to know from him under what head of expense
+it should be entered, and that he, the Nabob, desired
+him to put it under the head of expenses for entertaining
+Mr. Hastings. If there had been a head of
+entertainment established as a regular affair, the officer
+would never have gone to the Nabob and asked
+under what name to enter it; but he found an irregular
+affair, and he did not know what head to put it
+under. And from the whole of the proceedings it appears
+that three lacs and a half were paid: two lac
+by way of bribe, one lac and a half under the color of
+an entertainment. Mr. Hastings endeavors to invalidate
+the first obliquely, not directly, for he never directly
+denied it; and he partly admits the second, in
+hopes that all the proof of payment of the first charge
+should be merged and confounded in the second.
+And therefore your Lordships will see from the beginning
+of that business till it came into the hands of
+Mr. Smith, his agent, then appearing in the name and
+character of agent and solicitor to the Company, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">{229}</a></span>
+this was done to give some appearance and color to it
+by a false representation, as your Lordships will see,
+of every part of the transaction.</p>
+
+<p>The proof, then, of the two lacs rests upon the evidence
+of Nundcomar, the letter of Munny Begum,
+and the evidence of Rajah Gourdas. The evidence
+of the lac and a half, by way of entertainment, was at
+first the same; and afterwards begins a series of proofs
+to which Mr. Hastings has himself helped us. For, in
+the first place, he produces this office paper in support
+of his attempt to establish the confusion between
+the payment of the two lacs and of the lac and a half.
+He did not himself deny that he received a lac and a
+half, because with respect to that lac and a half he had
+founded some principle of justification. Accordingly
+this office paper asserts and proves this lac and a half
+to have been given, in addition to the other proofs.
+Then Munny Begum herself is inquired of. There is
+a commission appointed to go up to her residence;
+and the fact is proved to the satisfaction of Mr. Goring,
+the commissioner. The Begum had put a paper
+of accounts, through her son, into his hands, which
+shall be given at your Lordships' bar, in which she
+expressly said that she gave Mr. Hastings a lac and a
+half for entertainment. But Mr. Hastings objects to
+Mr. Goring's evidence upon this occasion. He wanted
+to supersede Mr. Goring in the inquiry; and he
+accordingly appoints, with the consent of the Council,
+two creatures of his own to go and assist in that
+inquiry. The question which he directs these commissioners
+to put to Munny Begum is this:&mdash;"Was
+the sum of money charged by you to be given to Mr.
+Hastings given under an idea of entertainment customary,
+or upon what other ground, or for what other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">{230}</a></span>
+reason?" He also desires the following questions
+may be proposed to the Begum:&mdash;"Was any application
+made to you for the account which you have
+delivered of three lacs and a half of rupees said to
+have been paid to the Governor and Mr. Middleton?
+or did you deliver the account of your own free will,
+and unsolicited?" My Lords, you see that with regard
+to the whole three lacs and a half of rupees the
+Begum had given an account which tended to confirm
+the payment of them; but Mr. Hastings wanted to invalidate
+that account by supposing she gave it under
+restraint. The second question is,&mdash;"In what manner
+was the application made to you, and by whom?"
+But the principal question is this:&mdash;"On what account
+was the one lac and a half given to the Governor-General
+which you have laid to his account?
+Was it in consequence of any requisition from him,
+or of any previous agreement, or of any established
+usage?" When a man asks concerning a sum of
+money, charged to be given to him by another person,
+on what account it was given, he does indirectly
+admit that that money actually was paid, and wants
+to derive a justification from the mode of the payment
+of it; and accordingly that inference was drawn
+from the question so sent up, and it served as an
+instruction to Munny Begum; and her answer was,
+that it was given to him, as an ancient usage and
+custom, for an entertainment. So that the fact of
+the gift of the money is ascertained by the question
+put by Mr. Hastings to her, and her answer.
+And thus at last comes his accomplice in this business,
+and gives the fullest testimony to the lac and
+a half.</p>
+
+<p>I must beg leave, before I go further, to state the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">{231}</a></span>
+circumstances of the several witnesses examined upon
+this business. They were of two kinds: voluntary
+witnesses, and accomplices forced by inquiry and examination
+to discover their own guilt. Of the first
+kind were Nundcomar and Rajah Gourdas: these
+were the only two that can be said to be voluntary
+in the business, and who gave their information without
+much fear, though the last unwillingly, and with
+a full sense of the danger of doing it. The other
+was the evidence of his accomplice, Munny Begum,
+wrung from her by the force of truth, in which she
+confessed that she gave the lac and a half, and justifies
+it upon the ground of its being a customary entertainment.
+Besides this, there is the evidence of Chittendur,
+who was one of Mr. Hastings's instruments,
+and one of the Begum's servants. He, being prepared
+to confound the two lacs with the one lac and
+a half, says, upon his examination, that a lac and a
+half was given; but upon examining into the particulars
+of it, he proves that the sum he gave was two
+lacs, and not a lac and a half: for he says that there
+was a dispute about the other half lac; Nundcomar
+demanded interest, which the Begum was unwilling
+to allow, and consequently that half lac remained
+unpaid. Now this half lac can be no part of the lac
+and a half, which is admitted on all hands, and proved
+by the whole body of concurrent testimony, to have
+been given to Mr. Hastings in one lumping sum.
+When Chittendur endeavors to confound it with the
+lac and a half, he clearly establishes the fact that it
+was a parcel of the two lacs, and thus bears evidence,
+in attempting to prevaricate in favor of Mr. Hastings,
+that one lac and a half was paid, which Mr. Hastings
+is willing to allow; but when he enters into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">{232}</a></span>
+particulars of it, he proves by the subdivision of the
+payment, and by the non-payment of part of it, that
+it accords with the two lacs, and not with the lac and
+a half.</p>
+
+<p>There are other circumstances in these accounts
+highly auxiliary to this evidence. The lac and a half
+was not only attested by Rajah Gourdas, by the Begum,
+by Chittendur, by the Begum again upon Mr.
+Hastings's own question, indirectly admitted by Mr.
+Hastings, proved by the orders for it to be written off
+to expense, (such a body of proof as perhaps never
+existed,) but there is one proof still remaining, namely,
+a paper, which was produced before the Committee,
+and which we shall produce to your Lordships.
+It is an authentic paper, delivered in favor of Mr.
+Hastings by Major Scott, who acted at that time as
+Mr. Hastings's agent, to a committee of the House
+of Commons, and authenticated to come from Munny
+Begum herself. All this body of evidence we mean
+to produce; and we shall prove, first, that he received
+the two lacs,&mdash;and, secondly, that he received one lac
+and a half under the name of entertainment. With
+regard to the lac and a half, Mr. Hastings is so far
+from controverting it, even indirectly, that he is
+obliged to establish it by testimonies produced by himself,
+in order to sink in that, if he can, the two lacs,
+which he thinks he is not able to justify, but which he
+fears will be proved against him. The lac and a half,
+I do believe, he will not be advised to contest; but
+whether he is or no, we shall load him with it, we
+shall prove it beyond all doubt. But there are
+other circumstances further auxiliary in this business,
+which, from the very attempts to conceal it,
+prove beyond doubt the fraudulent and wicked na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">{233}</a></span>ture
+of the transaction. In the account given by the
+Begum, a lac, which is for Mr. Hastings's entertainment,
+is entered in a suspicious neighborhood; for
+there is there entered a lac of rupees paid for the
+subahdarry sunnuds to the Mogul through the Rajah
+Shitab Roy. Upon looking into the account, and comparing
+it with another paper produced, the first thing
+we find is, that this woman charges the sum paid to
+be a sum due; and then she charges this one lac to
+have been paid when the Mogul was in the hands of
+the Mahrattas, when all communication with him was
+stopped, and when Rajah Shitab Roy, who is supposed
+to have paid it, was under confinement in the hands
+of Mr. Hastings. Thus she endeavors to conceal the
+lac of rupees paid to Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>In order to make this transaction, which, though
+not in itself intricate, is in some degree made so by
+Mr. Hastings, clear to your Lordships, we pledge ourselves
+to give to your Lordships, what must be a great
+advantage to the culprit himself, a syllabus, the heads
+of all this charge, and of the proofs themselves, with
+their references, to show how far the proof goes to
+the two lacs, and then to the one lac and a half singly.
+This we shall put in writing, that you may not
+depend upon the fugitive memory of a thing not so
+well, perhaps, or powerfully expressed as it ought to
+be, and in order to give every advantage to the defendant,
+and to give every facility to your Lordships'
+judgment: and this will, I believe, be thought a clear
+and fair way of proceeding. Your Lordships will
+then judge whether Mr. Hastings's conduct at the
+time, his resisting an inquiry, preventing his servant
+appearing as an evidence, discountenancing and discouraging
+his colleagues, raising every obstruction to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">{234}</a></span>
+the prosecution, dissolving the Council, preventing
+evidence and destroying it as far as lay in his power
+by collateral means, be not also such presumptive
+proofs as give double force to all the positive
+proof we produce against him.</p>
+
+<p>The lac and a half, I know, he means to support
+upon the custom of entertainment; and your Lordships
+will judge whether or not a man who was ordered
+and had covenanted never to take more than
+400<i>l.</i> could take 16,000<i>l.</i> under color of an entertainment.
+That which he intends to produce as a
+justification we charge, and your Lordships and the
+world will think, to be the heaviest aggravation of his
+crime. And after explaining to your Lordships the
+circumstances under which this justification is made,
+and leaving a just impression of them upon your
+minds, I shall beg your Lordships' indulgence to finish
+this member of the business to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>It is stated and entered in the account, that an
+entertainment was provided for Mr. Hastings at the
+rate of 200<i>l.</i> a day. He stayed at Moorshedabad for
+near three months; and thus you see that visits from
+Mr. Hastings are pretty expensive things: it is at the
+rate of 73,000<i>l.</i> a year for his entertainment. We
+find that Mr. Middleton, an English gentleman who
+was with him, received likewise (whether under the
+same pretence I know not, and it does not signify)
+another sum equal to it; and if these two gentlemen
+had stayed in that country a year, their several allowances
+would have been 146,000<i>l.</i> out of the Nabob's
+allowance of 160,000<i>l.</i> a year: they would have eat
+up nearly the whole of it. And do you wonder, my
+Lords, that such guests and such hosts are difficult to
+be divided? Do you wonder that such visits, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">{235}</a></span>
+so well paid for and well provided for, were naturally
+long? There is hardly a prince in Europe who would
+give to another prince of Europe from his royal hospitality
+what was given upon this occasion to Mr.
+Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now see what was Mr. Hastings's business
+during this long protracted visit. First, he tells you
+that he came there to reduce all the state and dignity
+of the Nabob. He tells you that he felt no compunction
+in reducing that state; that the elephants, the
+menagerie, the stables, all went without mercy, and
+consequently all the persons concerned in them were
+dismissed also. When he came to the abolition of the
+pensions, he says,&mdash;"I proceeded with great pain,
+from the reflection that I was the instrument in depriving
+whole families, all at once, of their bread, and
+reducing them to a state of penury: convinced of the
+necessity of the measure, I endeavored to execute it
+with great impartiality." Here he states the work
+he was employed in, when he took this two hundred
+pounds a day for his own pay. "It was necessary to
+begin with reforming the useless servants of the court,
+and retrenching the idle parade of elephants, menageries,
+&amp;c., which loaded the civil list. This cost
+little regret in performing; but the Resident, who
+took upon himself the chief share in this business,
+acknowledges that he suffered considerably in his
+feelings, when he came to touch on the pension list.
+Some hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of
+the country, excluded, under our government, from
+almost all employments, civil or military, had, ever
+since the revolution, depended on the bounty of the
+Nabob; and near ten lacs were bestowed that way.
+It is not that the distribution was always made with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">{236}</a></span>
+judgment or impartial, and much room was left for a
+reform; but when the question was to cut off entirely
+the greatest part, it could not fail to be accompanied
+with circumstances of real distress. The Resident
+declares, that, even with some of the highest rank,
+he could not avoid discovering, under all the pride
+of Eastern manners, the manifest marks of penury
+and want. There was, however, no room left for hesitation:
+to confine the Nabob's expenses within the
+limited sum, it was necessary that pensions should
+be set aside."</p>
+
+<p>Here, my Lords, is a man sent to execute one of the
+most dreadful offices that was ever executed by man,&mdash;to
+cut off, as he says himself, with a bleeding heart,
+the only remaining allowance made for hundreds of
+the decayed nobility and gentry of a great kingdom,
+driven by our government from the offices upon which
+they existed. In this moment of anxiety and affliction,
+when he says he felt pain and was cut to the heart to
+do it,&mdash;at this very moment, when he was turning
+over fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and
+gentry of this country to downright want of bread,&mdash;just
+at that moment, while he was doing this act, and
+feeling this act in this manner, from the collected
+morsels forced from the mouths of that indigent and
+famished nobility he gorged his own ravenous maw
+with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for
+his entertainment. As we see him in this business,
+this man is unlike any other: he is also never corrupt
+but he is cruel; he never dines without creating a
+famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity
+of standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent,
+the oppressed, and ruined; he takes to himself double
+what would maintain them. His is unlike the gen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">{237}</a></span>erous
+rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a
+living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like
+that of the ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed,
+the sickly, the dying, and the dead, and only
+anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.
+His cruelty is beyond his corruption: but there is
+something in his hypocrisy which is more terrible
+than his cruelty; for, at the very time when with
+double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription,
+and sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility
+and gentry of a great country, his eyes overflow
+with tears, and he turns the precious balm that
+bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine,
+into fatal, rancorous, mortal poison to the human
+race.</p>
+
+<p>You have seen, that, when he takes two hundred
+pounds a day for his entertainment, he tells you that
+in this very act he is starving fourteen hundred of the
+ancient nobility and gentry. My Lords, you have the
+blood of nobles,&mdash;if not, you have the blood of men
+in your veins: you feel as nobles, you feel as men.
+What would you say to a cruel Mogul exactor, by
+whom after having been driven from your estates, driven
+from the noble offices, civil and military, which
+you hold, driven from your bishoprics, driven from
+your places at court, driven from your offices as
+judges, and, after having been reduced to a miserable
+flock of pensioners, your very pensions were at
+last wrested from your mouths, and who, though at
+the very time when those pensions were wrested from
+you he declares them to have been the only bread of a
+miserable decayed nobility, takes himself two hundred
+pounds a day for his entertainment, and continues
+it till it amounts to sixteen thousand pounds? I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">{238}</a></span>
+do think, that, of all the corruptions which he has not
+owned, but has not denied, or of those which he does
+in effect own, and of which he brings forward the
+evidence himself, the taking and claiming under color
+of an entertainment is ten times the most nefarious.</p>
+
+<p>I shall this day only further trouble your Lordships
+to observe that he has never directly denied this transaction.
+I have tumbled over the records, I have
+looked at every part, to see whether he denies it.
+He did not deny it at the time, he did not deny it
+to the Court of Directors: on the contrary, he did
+in effect acknowledge it, when, without directly acknowledging
+it, he promised them a full and liberal
+explanation of the whole transaction. He never did
+give that explanation. Parliament took up the business;
+this matter was reported at the end of the
+Eleventh Report; but though the House of Commons
+had thus reported it, and made that public which before
+was upon the Company's records, he took no notice
+of it. Then another occasion arises: he comes
+before the House of Commons; he knows he is about
+to be prosecuted for those very corruptions; he well
+knows these charges exist against him; he makes his
+defence (if he will allow it to be his defence); but,
+though thus driven, he did not there deny it, because
+he knew, that, if he had denied it, it could be proved
+against him. I desire your Lordships will look at
+that paper which we have given in evidence, and see
+if you find a word of denial of it: there is much discourse,
+much folly, much insolence, but not one word
+of denial. Then, at last, it came before this tribunal
+against him. I desire to refer your Lordships to that
+part of his defence to the article in which this bribe is
+specifically charged: he does not deny it there; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">{239}</a></span>
+only thing which looks like a denial is one sweeping
+clause inserted, (in order to put us upon the proof,)
+that all the charges are to be conceived as denied;
+but a specific denial to this specific charge in no stage
+of the business, from beginning to end, has he once
+made.</p>
+
+<p>And therefore here I close that part of the charge
+which relates to the business of Nundcomar. Your
+Lordships will see such a body of presumptive proof
+and positive proof as never was given yet of any
+secret corrupt act of bribery; and there I leave it
+with your Lordships' justice. I beg pardon for
+having detained you so long; but your Lordships
+will be so good as to observe that no business ever
+was covered with more folds of iniquitous artifice
+than this which is now brought before you.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">{240}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="SECOND_DAY_SATURDAY_APRIL_25_1789" id="SECOND_DAY_SATURDAY_APRIL_25_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;When I last had the honor of addressing
+your Lordships, I endeavored to state
+with as much perspicuity as the nature of an intricate
+affair would admit, and as largely as in so intricate
+an affair was consistent with the brevity which I
+endeavored to preserve, the proofs which had been
+adduced against Warren Hastings upon an inquiry
+instituted by an order of the Court of Directors into
+the corruption and peculation of persons in authority
+in India. My Lords, I have endeavored to
+show you by anterior presumptive proofs, drawn from
+the nature and circumstances of the acts themselves
+inferring guilt, that such actions and such conduct
+could be referable only to one cause, namely, <i>corruption</i>;
+I endeavored to show you afterwards, my Lords,
+what the specific nature and extent of the corruption
+was, as far as it could be fully proved; and lastly,
+the great satisfactory presumption which attended
+the inquiry with regard to Mr. Hastings,&mdash;namely,
+that, contrary to law, contrary to his duty, contrary
+to what is owed by innocence to itself, Mr. Hastings
+resisted that inquiry, and employed all the power of
+his office to prevent the exercise of it, either in himself
+or in others. These presumptions and these proofs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">{241}</a></span>
+will be brought before your Lordships, distinctly and
+in order, at the end of this opening.</p>
+
+<p>The next point on which I thought it necessary to
+proceed was relative to the presumptions which his
+subsequent conduct gave with regard to his guilt:
+because, my Lords, his uniform tenor of conduct, such
+as must attend guilt, both in the act, at the time of
+the inquiry, and subsequent to it, will form such a
+body of satisfactory evidence as I believe the human
+mind is not made to resist.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, there is another reason why I choose to
+enter into the presumptions drawn from his conduct
+and the fact, taking his conduct in two parts, if it
+may be so expressed, <i>omission</i> and <i>commission</i>, in order
+that your Lordships should more fully enter into
+the consequences of this system of bribery. But before
+I say anything upon that, I wish your Lordships
+to be apprised, that the Commons, in bringing this
+bribe of three lac and a half before your Lordships, do
+not wish by any means to have it understood that this
+is the whole of the bribe that was received by Mr.
+Hastings in consequence of delivering up the whole
+management of the government of the country to
+that improper person whom he nominated for it. My
+Lords, from the proofs that will be adduced before
+you, there is great probability that he received very
+nearly a hundred thousand pounds; there is positive
+proof of his receiving fifty; and we have chosen
+only to charge him with that of which there is
+such an accumulated body of proof as to leave no
+doubt upon the minds of your Lordships. All this I
+say, because we are perfectly apprised of the sentiments
+of the public upon this point: when they hear
+of the enormity of Indian peculation, when they see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">{242}</a></span>
+the acts done, and compare them with the bribes received,
+the acts seem so enormous and the bribes comparatively
+so small, that they can hardly be got to
+attribute them to that motive. What I mean to state
+is this: that, from a collective view of the subject,
+your Lordships will be able to judge that enormous
+offences have been committed, and that the bribe
+which we have given in proof is a specimen of the
+nature and extent of those enormous bribes which extend
+to much greater sums than we are able to prove
+before you in the manner your Lordships would like
+and expect.</p>
+
+<p>I have already remarked to your Lordships, that,
+after this charge was brought and recorded before
+the Council in spite of the resistance made by Mr.
+Hastings, in which he employed all the power and
+authority of his station, and the whole body of his partisans
+and associates in iniquity, dispersed through
+every part of these provinces,&mdash;after he had taken
+all these steps, finding himself pressed by the proof
+and pressed by the presumption of his resistance to
+the inquiry, he did think it necessary to make something
+like a defence. Accordingly he has made what
+he calls a justification, which did not consist in the
+denial of that fact, or any explanation of it. The
+mode he took for his defence was abuse of his colleagues,
+abuse of the witnesses, and of every person
+who in the execution of his duty was inquiring into
+the fact, and charging them with things which, if
+true, were by no means sufficient to support him,
+either in defending the acts themselves, or in the
+criminal means he used to prevent inquiry into them.
+His design was to mislead their minds, and to carry
+them from the accusation and the proof of it. With<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">{243}</a></span>
+respect to the passion, violence, and intemperate heat
+with which he charged them, they were proceeding in
+an orderly, regular manner; and if on any occasion
+they seem to break out into warmth, it was in consequence
+of that resistance which he made to them, in
+what your Lordships, I believe, will agree with them
+in thinking was one of the most important parts of
+their functions. If they had been intemperate in their
+conduct, if they had been violent, passionate, prejudiced
+against him, it afforded him only a better means
+of making his defence; because, though in a rational
+and judicious mind the intemperate conduct of the
+accuser certainly proves nothing with regard to the
+truth or falsehood of his accusation, yet we do know
+that the minds of men are so constituted that an improper
+mode of conducting a right thing does form
+some degree of prejudice against it. Mr. Hastings,
+therefore, unable to defend himself upon principle, has
+resorted as much as he possibly could to prejudice.
+And at the same time that there is not one word of
+denial, or the least attempt at a refutation of the
+charge, he has loaded the records with all manner of
+minutes, proceedings, and letters relative to everything
+but the fact itself. The great aim of his policy, both
+then, before, and ever since, has been to divert the
+mind of the auditory, or the persons to whom he addressed
+himself, from the nature of his cause, to some
+collateral circumstance relative to it,&mdash;a policy to
+which he has always had recourse; but that trick,
+the last resource of despairing guilt, I trust will now
+completely fail him.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, however, began to be pretty sensible
+that this way of proceeding had a very unpromising
+and untoward look; for which reason he next declared<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">{244}</a></span>
+that he reserved his defence for fear of a legal prosecution,
+and that some time or other he would give a
+large and liberal explanation to the Court of Directors,
+to whom he was answerable for his conduct, of his
+refusing to suffer the inquiry to proceed, of his omitting
+to give them satisfaction at the time, of his omitting
+to take any one natural step that an innocent
+man would have taken upon such an occasion. Under
+this promise he has remained from that time to the
+time you see him at your bar, and he has neither
+denied, exculpated, explained, or apologized for his
+conduct in any one single instance.</p>
+
+<p>While he accuses the intemperance of his adversaries,
+he shows a degree of temperance in himself
+which always attends guilt in despair: for struggling
+guilt may be warm, but guilt that is desperate has
+nothing to do but to submit to the consequences of it,
+to bear the infamy annexed to its situation, and to try
+to find some consolation in the effects of guilt with regard
+to private fortune for the scandal it brings them
+into in public reputation. After the business had
+ended in India, the causes why he should have given
+the explanation grew stronger and stronger: for not
+only the charges exhibited against him were weighty,
+but the manner in which he was called upon to inquire
+into them was such as would undoubtedly tend to stir
+the mind of a man of character, to rouse him to some
+consideration of himself, and to a sense of the necessity
+of his defence. He was goaded to make this
+defence by the words I shall read to your Lordships
+from Sir John Clavering.</p>
+
+<p>"In the late proceedings of the Revenue Board it
+will appear that there is no species of peculation from
+which the Honorable Governor-General has thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">{245}</a></span>
+it reasonable to abstain." He further says, in answer
+to Mr. Hastings, "The malicious view with which this
+innuendo" (an innuendo of Mr. Hastings) "is thrown
+out is only worthy of a man who, having disgraced
+himself in the eyes of every man of honor both in
+Asia and in Europe, and having no imputation to
+lay to our charge, has dared to attempt in the dark
+what malice itself could not find grounds to aim at
+openly."</p>
+
+<p>These are the charges which were made upon him,&mdash;not
+loosely, in the heat of conversation, but deliberately,
+in writing, entered upon record, and sent to his
+employers, the Court of Directors, those whom the
+law had set over him, and to whose judgment and
+opinion he was responsible. Do your Lordships believe
+that it was conscious innocence that made him
+endure such reproaches, so recorded, from his own
+colleague? Was it conscious innocence that made
+him abandon his defence, renounce his explanation,
+and bear all this calumny, (if it was calumny,) in such
+a manner, without making any one attempt to refute
+it? Your Lordships will see by this, and by other
+minutes with which the books are filled, that Mr.
+Hastings is charged quite to the brim with corruptions
+of all sorts, and covered with every mode of possible
+disgrace. For there is something so base and contemptible
+in the crimes of peculation and bribery, that,
+when they come to be urged home and strongly against
+a man, as here they are urged, nothing but a consciousness
+of guilt can possibly make a person so charged
+support himself under them. Mr. Hastings considered
+himself, as he has stated, to be under the necessity
+of bearing them. What is that necessity? Guilt.
+Could he say that Sir John Clavering (for I say noth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">{246}</a></span>ing
+now of Colonel Monson and Mr. Francis, who were
+joined with him) was a man weak and contemptible?
+I believe there are those among your Lordships who
+remember that Sir John Clavering was known before
+he went abroad, and better known by his conduct
+after, to be a man of the most distinguished honor
+that ever served his Majesty; he served his Majesty
+in a military situation for many years, and afterwards
+in that high civil situation in India. It is known
+that through every step and gradation of a high military
+service, until he arrived at the highest of all,
+there never was the least blot upon him, or doubt or
+suspicion of his character; that his temper for the
+most part, and his manners, were fully answerable to
+his virtues, and a noble ornament to them; that he
+was one of the best natured, best bred men, as well as
+one of the highest principled men to be found in his
+Majesty's service; that he had passed the middle
+time of life, and come to an age which makes men
+wise in general; so that he could be warmed by
+nothing but that noble indignation at guilt which is
+the last thing that ever was or will be extinguished
+in a virtuous mind. He was a man whose voice was
+not to be despised; but if his character had been
+personally as contemptible as it was meritorious and
+honorable in every respect, yet his situation as a
+commissioner named by an act of Parliament for the
+express purpose of reforming India gave him a weight
+and consequence that could not suffer Mr. Hastings,
+without a general and strong presumption of
+his guilt, to acquiesce in such recorded minutes from
+him. But if he had been a weak, if he had been an
+intemperate man, (in reality he was as cool, steady,
+temperate, judicious a man as ever was born,) the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">{247}</a></span>
+Court of Directors, to whom Mr. Hastings was responsible
+by every tie and every principle, and was
+made responsible at last by a positive act of Parliament
+obliging him to yield obedience to their commands
+as the general rule of his duty,&mdash;the Court
+of Directors, I say, perfectly approved of every part
+of General Clavering's, Colonel Monson's, and Mr.
+Francis's conduct; they approved of this inquiry
+which Mr. Hastings rejected; and they have declared,
+"that the powers and instructions vested in and
+given to General Clavering and the other gentlemen
+were such as fully authorized them in every inquiry
+that seems to have been their object ...
+Europeans."<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now after the supreme authority, to which they
+were to appeal in all their disputes, had passed this
+judgment upon this very inquiry, the matter no longer
+depended upon Mr. Hastings's opinion; nor could he
+be longer justified in attributing that to evil motives
+either of malice or passion in his colleagues. When
+the judges who were finally to determine who was
+malicious, who was passionate, who was or was not
+justified either in setting on foot the inquiry or resisting
+it, had passed that judgment, then Mr. Hastings
+was called upon by all the feelings of a man, and by
+his duty in Council, to give satisfaction to his masters,
+the Directors, who approved of the zeal and diligence
+shown in that very inquiry, the passion of
+which he only reprobated, and upon which he grounded
+his justification.</p>
+
+<p>If anything but conscious guilt could have possibly
+influenced him to such more than patience under this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">{248}</a></span>
+accusation, let us see what was his conduct when
+the scene was changed. General Clavering, fatigued
+and broken down by the miseries of his situation,
+soon afterwards lost a very able and affectionate colleague,
+Colonel Monson, (whom Mr. Hastings states
+to be one of the bitterest of his accusers,) a man one
+of the most loved and honored of his time, a person
+of your Lordships' noble blood, and a person who did
+honor to it, and if he had been of the family of a
+commoner, well deserved to be raised to your distinction.
+When that man died,&mdash;died of a broken heart,
+to say nothing else,&mdash;and General Clavering felt
+himself in a manner without help, except what he
+derived from the firmness, assiduity, and patience of
+Mr. Francis, sinking like himself under the exertion
+of his own virtues, he was resolved to resign his employment.
+The Court of Directors were so alarmed
+at this attempt of his to resign his employment, that
+they wrote thus: "When you conceived the design of
+quitting our service, we imagine you could not have
+heard of the resignation of Mr. Hastings ...
+your zeal and ability."<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in this struggle, and before he could
+resign finally, another kind of resignation, the resignation
+of Nature, took place, and Sir John Clavering
+died. The character that was given Sir John
+Clavering at that time is a seal to the whole of his
+proceedings, and the use that I shall make of it your
+Lordships will see presently. "The abilities of General
+Clavering, the comprehensive knowledge he had
+attained of our affairs ...
+to the East India Company."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[4]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">{249}</a></span></p><p>And never had it a greater loss. There is the concluding
+funeral oration made by his masters, upon a
+strict, though by no means partial, view of his conduct.
+My Lords, here is the man who is the great
+accuser of Mr. Hastings, as he says. What is he? a
+slight man, a man of mean situation, a man of mean
+talents, a man of mean character? No: of the highest
+character. Was he a person whose conduct was
+disapproved by their common superiors? No: it was
+approved when living, and ratified when dead. This
+was the man, a man equal to him in every respect,
+upon the supposed evil motives of whom alone was
+founded the sole justification of Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>But be it, then, that Sir John Clavering, Colonel
+Monson, and Mr. Francis were all of them the evil-minded
+persons that he describes them to be, and
+that from dislike to them, from a kind of manly
+resentment, if you please, against such persons, an
+hatred against malicious proceedings, and a defiance
+of them, he did not think proper, as he states, to
+make his defence during that period of time, and
+while oppressed by that combination,&mdash;yet, when he
+got rid of the two former persons, and when Mr.
+Francis was nothing, when the whole majority was
+in his hand, and he was in full power, there was a
+large, open, full field for inquiry; and he was bound
+to re-institute that inquiry, and to clear his character
+before his judges and before his masters. Mr. Hastings
+says, "No: they have threatened me with a prosecution,
+and I reserve myself for a court of justice."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings has now at length taken a ground, as
+you will see from all his writings, which makes all
+explanation of his conduct in this business absolutely
+impossible. For, in the first place, he says, "As a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">{250}</a></span>
+prosecution is meditated against me, I will say nothing
+in explanation of my conduct, because I might
+disclose my defence, and by that means do myself a
+prejudice." On the other hand, when the prosecution
+is dropped, as we all know it was dropped in this
+case, then he has a direct contrary reason, but it
+serves him just as well: "Why, as no prosecution
+is intended, no defence need be made." So that,
+whether a prosecution is intended or a prosecution
+dropped, there is always cause why Mr. Hastings
+should not give the Court of Directors the least satisfaction
+concerning his conduct, notwithstanding, as
+we shall prove, he has reiteratedly promised, and
+promised it in the most ample and liberal manner.
+But let us see if there be any presumption in his
+favor to rebut the presumption which he knew was
+irresistible, and which, by making no defence for his
+conduct, and stopping the inquiry, must necessarily
+lie upon him. He reserves his defence, but he promises
+both defence and explanation.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will remark that there is nowhere
+a clear and positive denial of the fact. Promising
+a defence, I will admit, does not directly and <i>ex vi
+termini</i> suppose that a man may not deny the fact,
+because it is just compatible with the defence; but it
+does by no means exclude the admission of the fact,
+because the admission of the fact may be attended
+with a justification: but when a man says that he
+will explain his conduct with regard to a fact, then
+he admits that fact, because there can be no explanation
+of a fact which has no existence. Therefore Mr.
+Hastings admits the fact by promising an explanation,
+and he shows he has no explanation nor justification
+to give by never having given it. Goaded,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">{251}</a></span>
+provoked, and called upon for it, in the manner I
+have mentioned, he chooses to have a feast of disgrace,
+(if I may say so,) to have a riot of infamy,
+served up to him day by day for a course of years, in
+every species of reproach that could be given by his
+colleagues, and by the Court of Directors, "from
+whom," he says, "I received nothing but opprobrious
+and disgraceful epithets," and he says "that his predecessors
+possessed more of their confidence than he
+had." Yet for years he lay down in that sty of disgrace,
+fattening in it, feeding upon that offal of disgrace
+and excrement, upon everything that could be
+disgustful to the human mind, rather than deny the
+fact and put himself upon a civil justification. Infamy
+was never incurred for nothing. We know very
+well what was said formerly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noindent">And never did a man submit to infamy for anything
+but its true reward, <i>money</i>. Money he received; the
+infamy he received along with it: he was glad to
+take his wife with all her goods; he took her with
+her full portion, with every species of infamy that
+belonged to her; and your Lordships cannot resist
+the opinion that he would not have suffered himself
+to be disgraced with the Court of Directors, disgraced
+with his colleagues, disgraced with the world, disgraced
+upon an eternal record, unless he was absolutely
+guilty of the fact that was charged upon him.</p>
+
+<p>He frequently expresses that he reserves himself
+for a court of justice. Does he, my Lords? I am
+sorry that Mr. Hastings should show that he always
+mistakes his situation; he has totally mistaken it:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">{252}</a></span>
+he was a servant, bound to give a satisfactory account
+of his conduct to his masters, and, instead of that, he
+considers himself and the Court of Directors as litigant
+parties,&mdash;them as the accusers, and himself as
+the culprit. What would your Lordships, in private
+life, conceive of a steward who was accused of embezzling
+the rents, robbing and oppressing the tenants,
+and committing a thousand misdeeds in his stewardship,
+and who, upon your wishing to make inquiry
+into his conduct, and asking an explanation of it,
+should answer, "I will give no reply: you may intend
+to prosecute me and convict me as a cheat, and
+therefore I will not give you any satisfaction": what
+would you think of that steward? You could have
+no doubt that such a steward was a person not fit to
+be a steward, nor fit to live.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings reserves himself for a court of justice:
+that single circumstance, my Lords, proves that
+he was guilty. It may appear very odd that his
+guilt should be inferred from his desire of trial in
+a court in which he could be acquitted or condemned.
+But I shall prove to you from that circumstance
+that Mr. Hastings, in desiring to be tried
+in a court of justice, convicts himself of presumptive
+guilt.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Hastings went to Bengal in the year
+1772, he had a direction exactly similar to this which
+he has resisted in his own case: it was to inquire
+into grievances and abuses. In consequence of this
+direction, he proposes a plan for the regulation of the
+Company's service, and one part of that plan was just
+what you would expect from him,&mdash;that is, the power
+of destroying every Company's servant without the
+least possibility of his being heard in his own defence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">{253}</a></span>
+or taking any one step to justify himself, and of dismissing
+him at his own discretion: and the reason
+he gives for it is this. "I shall forbear to comment
+upon the above propositions: if just and proper, their
+utility will be self-apparent. One clause only in the
+last article may require some explanation, namely,
+the power proposed for the Governor of recalling any
+person from his station without assigning a reason
+for it. In the charge of oppression," (now here you
+will find the reason why Mr. Hastings wishes to appeal
+to a court of justice, rather than to give satisfaction
+to his employers,) "though supported by the
+cries of the people and the most authentic representations,
+it is yet impossible in most cases to obtain
+legal proofs of it; and unless the discretionary power
+which I have recommended be somewhere lodged,
+the assurance of impunity from any formal inquiry
+will baffle every order of the board, as, on the other
+hand, the fear of the consequence will restrain every
+man within the bounds of his duty, if he knows himself
+liable to suffer by the effects of a single control."
+You see Mr. Hastings himself is of opinion that the
+cries of oppression, though extorted from a whole
+people by the iron hand of severity,&mdash;that these
+cries of a whole people, attended even with authentic
+documents sufficient to satisfy the mind of any man,
+may be totally insufficient to convict the oppressor in
+a court; and yet to that court, whose competence he
+denies, to that very court, he appeals, in that he puts
+his trust, and upon that ground he refuses to perform
+the just promise he had given of any explanation to
+those who had employed him.</p>
+
+<p>Now I put this to your Lordships: if a man is of
+opinion that no public court can truly and properly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">{254}</a></span>
+bring him to any account for his conduct, that the
+forms observable in courts are totally adverse to it,
+that there is a general incompetency with regard to
+such a court, and yet shuns a tribunal capable and
+competent, and applies to that which he thinks is incapable
+and incompetent, does not that man plainly
+show that he has rejected what he thinks will
+prove his guilt, and that he has chosen what he
+thinks will be utterly insufficient to prove it? And
+if this be the case, as he asserts it to be, with an
+under servant, think what must be the case of the
+upper servant of all: for, if an inferior servant is not
+to be brought to justice, what must be the situation
+of a Governor-General? It is impossible not to see,
+that, as he had conceived that a court of justice had
+not sufficient means to bring his crimes to light and
+detection, nor sufficient to bring him to proper and
+adequate punishment, therefore he flew to a court of
+justice, not as a place to decide upon him, but as a
+sanctuary to secure his guilt. Most of your Lordships
+have travelled abroad, and have seen in the
+unreformed countries of Europe churches filled with
+persons who take sanctuary in them. You do not
+presume that a man is innocent because he is in a
+sanctuary: you know, that, so far from demonstrating
+his innocence, it demonstrates his guilt. And in
+this case, Mr. Hastings flies not to a court for trial,
+but as a sanctuary to secure him from it.</p>
+
+<p>Let us just review the whole of his conduct; let
+us hear how Mr. Hastings has proceeded with regard
+to this whole affair. The court of justice dropped;
+the prosecution in Bengal ended. With Sir Elijah
+Impey as chief-justice, who, as your Lordships have
+seen, had a most close and honorable connection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">{255}</a></span>
+with the Governor-General, (all the circumstances of
+which I need not detail to you, as it must be fresh
+in your Lordships' memory,) he had not much to
+fear from the impartiality of the court. He might
+be sure the forms of law would not be strained to do
+him mischief; therefore there was no great terror in
+it. But whatever terror there might be in it was
+overblown, because his colleagues refused to carry
+him into it, and therefore that opportunity of defence
+is gone. In Europe he was afraid of making any defence,
+but the prosecution here was also soon over;
+and in the House of Commons he takes this ground
+of justification for not giving any explanation, that
+the Court of Directors had received perfect satisfaction
+of his innocence; and he named persons of great
+and eminent character in the profession, whose names
+certainly cannot be mentioned without highly imposing
+upon the prejudices and weighing down almost
+the reason of mankind. He quotes their opinions in
+his favor, and argues that the exculpation which they
+give, or are supposed to give him, should excuse him
+from any further explanation.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I believe I need not say to great men of
+the profession, many of the first ornaments of which
+I see before me, that they are very little influenced
+in the seat of judgment by the opinions which they
+have given in the chamber, and they are perfectly in
+the right: because while in the chamber they hear
+but one part of the cause; it is generally brought
+before them in a very partial manner, and they have
+not the lights which they possess when they sit deliberately
+down upon the tribunal to examine into it;
+and for this reason they discharge their minds from
+every prejudice that may have arisen from a foregone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">{256}</a></span>
+partial opinion, and come uninfluenced by it as to
+a new cause. This, we know, is the glory of the
+great lawyers who have presided and do preside in
+the tribunals of this country; but we know, at the
+same time, that those opinions (which they in their
+own mind reject, unless supported afterwards by
+clear and authentic testimony) do weigh upon the
+rest of mankind at least: for it is impossible to separate
+the opinion of a great and learned man from
+some consideration of the person who has delivered
+that opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, being conscious of this, and not fearing
+the tribunal abroad for the reason that I gave
+you, namely, his belief that it was not very adverse
+to him, and also knowing that the prosecution there
+was dropped, had but one thing left for his consideration,
+which was, how he should conflict with the tribunal
+at home: and as the prosecution must originate
+from the Court of Directors, and be authorized
+by some great law opinions, the great point with him
+was, some way or other, by his party, I will not say
+by what means or circumstances, but by some party
+means, to secure a strong interest in the executive
+part of the India House. My Lords, was that interest
+used properly and fairly? I will not say that
+friendship and partiality imply injustice; they certainly
+do not; but they do not imply justice. The
+Court of Directors took up this affair with great
+warmth; they committed it to their solicitor, and the
+solicitor would naturally (as most solicitors do) draw
+up a case a little favorably for the persons that employed
+him; and if there was any leaning, which
+upon my word I do not approve in the management
+of any cause whatever, yet, if there was a leaning, it
+must be a leaning for the client.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">{257}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now the counsel did not give a decided opinion
+against the prosecution, but upon the face of the case
+they expressed great doubts upon it; for, with such
+a strange, disorderly, imperfect, and confused case as
+was laid before them, they could not advise a prosecution;
+and in my opinion they went no further.
+And, indeed, upon that case that went before them,
+I, who am authorized by the Commons to prosecute,
+do admit that a great doubt might lie upon the most
+deciding mind, whether, under the circumstances
+there stated, a prosecution could be or ought to be
+pursued. I do not say which way my mind would
+have turned, upon that very imperfect state of the
+case; but I still allow so much to their very great
+ability, great minds, and sound judgment, that I
+am not sure, if it was <i>res integra</i>, I would not have
+rather hesitated myself (who am now here an accuser)
+what judgment to give.</p>
+
+<p>It does happen that there are very singular circumstances
+in this business, to which your Lordships
+will advert; and you will consider what weight they
+ought to have upon your Lordships' minds. The
+person who is now the solicitor of the Company is a
+very respectable man in the profession,&mdash;Mr. Smith;
+he was at that time also the Company's solicitor, and
+he has since appeared in this cause as Mr. Hastings's
+solicitor. Now there is something particular in a
+man's being the solicitor to a party who was prosecuting
+another, and continuing afterwards in his
+office, and becoming the solicitor to the party prosecuted.
+It would be nearly as strange as if our solicitor
+were to be the solicitor of Mr. Hastings in this
+prosecution and trial before your Lordships. It is
+true, that we cannot make out, nor do we attempt to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">{258}</a></span>
+prove, that Mr. Smith was at that time actually Mr.
+Hastings's solicitor: all that we shall attempt to
+make out is, that the case he produced was just such
+a case as a solicitor anxious for the preservation of
+his client, and not anxious for the prosecution, would
+have made out.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have next to remark, that the opinion
+which the counsel gave in this case, namely, a very
+doubtful opinion, accompanied with strong censure of
+the manner in which the case was stated, was drawn
+from them by a case in which I charge that there
+were <i>misrepresentation</i>, <i>suppression</i>, and <i>falsification</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, in making this charge I am in a
+very awkward and unpleasant situation; but it is a
+situation in which, with all the disagreeable circumstances
+attending it, I must proceed. I am, in this
+business, obliged to name many men: I do not name
+them wantonly, but from the absolute necessity, as
+your Lordships will see, of the case. I do not mean
+to reflect upon this gentleman: I believe, at the time
+when he made this case, and especially the article
+which I state as a <i>falsification</i>, he must have trusted
+to some of the servants of the Company, who were
+but young in their service at that time. There was
+a very great error committed; but by whom, or how,
+your Lordships in the course of this inquiry will find.
+What I charge first is, that the case was improperly
+stated; secondly, that it was partially stated; and
+that afterwards a further report was made upon reference
+to the same officer in the committee. Now,
+my Lords, of the three charges which I have made,
+the two former, namely, the misrepresentation and
+suppression, were applicable to the case; but all the
+three, misrepresentation, suppression, and falsification,
+were applicable to the report.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">{259}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This I say in vindication of the opinions given,
+and for the satisfaction of the public, who may be
+imposed upon by them. I wish the word to be understood.
+When I say <i>imposed</i>, I always mean by it
+the weight and authority carried: a meaning which
+this word, perhaps, has not got yet thoroughly in the
+English language; but in a neighboring language <i>imposing</i>
+means, that it weighs upon men's minds with
+a sovereign authority. To say that the opinions of
+learned men, though even thus obtained, may not
+have weight with this court, or with any court, is
+a kind of compliment I cannot pay to them at the
+expense of that common nature in which I and all
+human beings are involved.</p>
+
+<p>He states in the case the covenants and the salary
+of Mr. Hastings, and his emoluments, very fairly.
+I do not object to any part of that. He then proceeds
+to state very partially the business upon which
+the Committee of Circuit went, and without opening
+whose conduct we cannot fully bring before you this
+charge of bribery. He then states, "that, an inquiry
+having been made by the present Supreme Council
+of Bengal respecting the conduct of the members of
+the last administration, several charges have been
+made, stating moneys very improperly received by
+Mr. Hastings during the time of the late administration:
+amongst these is one of his having received
+150,000 rupees of Munny Begum, the guardian of
+the Nabob, who is an infant."</p>
+
+<p>In this statement of the case everything is put
+out of its true place. Mr. Hastings was not charged
+with receiving a lac and a half of rupees from
+Munny Begum, the guardian of the Nabob,&mdash;for she
+was not then his guardian; but he was charged with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">{260}</a></span>
+receiving a lac and a half of rupees for removing
+the Nabob's own mother, who was his natural guardian,
+and substituting this step-mother, who was a
+prostitute, in her place; whereas here it supposes he
+found her a guardian, and that she had made him a
+present, which alters the whole nature of the case.
+The case, in the recital of the charge, sets out with
+what every one of your Lordships knows now not to
+be the truth of the fact, nor the thing that in itself
+implies the criminality: he ought to have stated that
+in the beginning of the business. The suppressions
+in the recital are amazing. He states an inquiry
+having been made by the Supreme Council of Bengal
+respecting the conduct of the members of the
+last administration. That inquiry was made in consequence
+of the charge, and not the charge brought
+forward, as they would have it believed, in consequence
+of the inquiry. There is no mention that
+that inquiry had been expressly ordered by the Court
+of Directors; but it is stated as though it was a
+voluntary inquiry. Now there is always something
+doubtful in voluntary inquiries with regard to the
+people concerned. He then supposes, upon this inquiry,
+that to be the charge which is not the charge
+at all. The crime, as I have stated, consisted of
+two distinct parts, but both inferring the same corruption:
+the first, two lac of rupees taken expressly
+for the nomination of this woman to this place; and
+the other, one lac and a half of rupees, in effect for
+the same purpose, but under the name and color of
+an entertainment. The drawer of the case, finding
+that in the one case, namely, the two lac of rupees,
+the evidence was more weak, but that no justification
+could be set up,&mdash;finding in the other, the lac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">{261}</a></span>
+and a half of rupees, the proof strong and not to be
+resisted, but that some justification was to be found
+for it, lays aside the charge of the two lac totally;
+and the evidence belonging to it, which was considered
+as rather weak, is applied to the other charge
+of a lac and a half, the proof of which upon its own
+evidence was irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>My speech I hope your Lordships consider as only
+pointing out to your attention these particulars.
+Your Lordships will see it exemplified throughout
+the whole, that, when there is evidence (for some
+evidence is brought) that does belong to the lac and
+a half, it is entirely passed by, the most material circumstances
+are weakened, the whole strength and
+force of them taken away. Every one knows how
+true it is of evidence, <i>juncta juvant</i>: but here everything
+is broken and smashed to pieces, and nothing
+but disorder appears through the whole. For your
+Lordships will observe that the proof that belongs
+to one thing is put as belonging to another, and the
+proof of the other brought in a weak and imperfect
+manner in the rear of the first, and with every kind
+of observation to rebut and weaken it; and when
+this evidence is produced, which appears inapplicable
+almost in all the parts, in many doubtful, confused,
+and perplexed, and in some even contradictory,
+(which it will be when the evidence to one thing
+is brought to apply and bear upon another,) good
+hopes were entertained in consequence that that
+would happen which in part did happen, namely,
+that the counsel, distracted and confused, and finding
+no satisfaction in the case, could not advise a
+prosecution.</p>
+
+<p>But what is still more material and weighty, many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">{262}</a></span>
+particulars are suppressed in this case, and still more
+in the report; and turning from the case to the proceedings
+of the persons who are supposed to have the
+management of the inquiry, they bring forward, as
+an appendix to this case, Mr. Hastings's own invectives
+and charge against these persons, at the very
+same time that they suppress and do not bring forward,
+either in the charge or upon the report, what
+the other party have said in their own justification.
+The consequence of this management was, that a
+body of evidence which would have made this case
+the clearest in the world, and which I hope we shall
+make to appear so to your Lordships, was rendered
+for the most part inapplicable, and the whole puzzled
+and confused: I say, for the most part, for some
+parts did apply, but miserably applied, to the case.
+From their own state of the case they would have it
+inferred that the fault was not in their way of representing
+it, but in the infirmity, confusion, and disorder
+of the proofs themselves; but this, I trust we
+shall satisfy you, is by no means the case. I rest,
+however, upon the proof of partiality in this business,
+of the imposition upon the counsel, whether
+designed or not, and of the bias given by adding an
+appendix with Mr. Hastings's own remarks upon the
+case, without giving the reasons of the other parties
+for their conduct. Now, if there was nothing else
+than the fallacious recital, and afterwards the suppression,
+I believe any rational and sober man would
+see perfect, good, and sufficient ground for laying
+aside any authority that can be derived from the
+opinions of persons, though of the first character
+(and I am sure no man living does more homage to
+their learning, impartiality, and understanding than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">{263}</a></span>
+I do): first, because the statement of the case has
+thrown the whole into confusion; and secondly, as to
+the matter added as an appendix, which gives the
+representation of the delinquent and omits the representation
+of his prosecutors, it is observed very
+properly and very wisely by one of the great men
+before whom this evidence was laid, that "the evidence,
+as it is here stated, is still more defective, if
+the appendix is adopted by the Directors and meant
+to make a part of the case; for that throws discredit
+upon all the information so collected." Certainly it
+does; for, if the delinquent party, who is to be prosecuted,
+be heard with his own representation of the
+case, and that of his prosecutors be suppressed, he
+is master both of the lawyers and of the mind of
+mankind.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have here attempted to point out the
+extreme inconsistencies and defects of this proceeding;
+and I wish your Lordships to consider, with respect
+to these proceedings of the India House in
+their prosecutions, that it is in the power of some
+of their officers to make statements in the manner
+that I have described, then to obtain the names of
+great lawyers, and under their sanction to carry the
+accused through the world as acquitted.</p>
+
+<p>These are the material circumstances which will
+be submitted to your Lordships' sober consideration
+in the course of this inquiry. I have now stated
+them on these two accounts: first, to rebut the reason
+which Mr. Hastings has assigned for not giving
+any satisfaction to the Court of Directors, namely,
+because they did not want it, having dropped a prosecution
+upon great authorities and opinions; and
+next, to show your Lordships how a business begun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">{264}</a></span>
+in bribery is to be supported only by fraud, deceit,
+and collusion, and how the receiving of bribes by a
+Governor-General of Bengal tends to taint the whole
+service from beginning to end, both at home and
+abroad.</p>
+
+<p>But though upon the partial case that was presented
+to them these great lawyers did not advise
+a prosecution, and though even upon a full representation
+of a case a lawyer might think that a man
+ought not to be prosecuted, yet he may consider him
+to be the vilest man upon earth. We know men
+are acquitted in the great tribunals in which several
+Lords of this country have presided, and who
+perhaps ought not to have been brought there and
+prosecuted before them, and yet about whose delinquency
+there could be no doubt. But though we
+have here sufficient reason to justify the great lawyers
+whose names and authorities are produced, yet
+Mr. Hastings has extended that authority beyond the
+length of their opinions. For, being no longer under
+the terror of the law, which, he said, restrained
+him from making his defence, he was then bound to
+give that satisfaction to his masters and the world
+which every man in honor is bound to do, when a
+grave accusation is brought against him. But this
+business of the law I wish to sleep from this moment,
+till the time when it shall come before you;
+though I suspect, and have had reason (sitting in
+committees in the House of Commons) to believe,
+that there was in the India House a bond of iniquity,
+somewhere or other, which was able to impose
+in the first instance upon the solicitor, the guilt of
+which, being of another nature, I shall state hereafter,
+that your Lordships may be able to discover through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">{265}</a></span>
+whose means and whose fraud Mr. Hastings obtained
+these opinions.</p>
+
+<p>If, however, all the great lawyers had been unanimous
+upon that occasion, still it would have been
+necessary for Mr. Hastings to say, "I cannot, according
+to my opinion, be brought to give an account in
+a court of justice, and I have got great lawyers to
+declare, that, upon the case laid before them, they
+cannot advise a prosecution; but now is the time
+for me to come forward, and, being no longer in
+fear that my defence may be turned against me, I
+will produce my defence for the satisfaction of my
+masters and the vindication of my own character."
+But besides this doubtful opinion (for I believe your
+Lordships will find it no better than a doubtful opinion)
+given by persons for whom I have the highest
+honor, and given with a strong censure upon the
+state of the case, there were also some great lawyers,
+men of great authority in the kingdom, who gave a
+full and decided opinion that a prosecution ought to
+be instituted against him; but the Court of Directors
+decided otherwise, they overruled those opinions,
+and acted upon the opinions in favor of Mr. Hastings.
+When, therefore, he knew that the great men
+in the law were divided upon the propriety of a prosecution,
+but that the Directors had decided in his
+favor, he was the more strongly bound to enter into
+a justification of his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another great reason which should
+have induced him to do this. One great lawyer,
+known to many of your Lordships, Mr. Sayer, a very
+honest, intelligent man, who had long served the Company
+and well knew their affairs, had given an opinion
+concerning Mr. Hastings's conduct in stopping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">{266}</a></span>
+these prosecutions. There was an abstract question
+put to Mr. Sayer, and other great lawyers, separated
+from many of the circumstances of this business, concerning
+a point which incidentally arose; and this
+was, whether Mr. Hastings, as Governor-General, had
+a power so to dissolve the Council, that, if he declared
+it dissolved, they could not sit and do any legal and
+regular act. It was a great question with the lawyers
+at the time, and there was a difference of opinion on
+it. Mr. Sayer was one of those who were inclined to
+be of opinion that the Governor-General had a power
+of dissolving the Council, and that the Council could
+not legally sit after such dissolution. But what was
+his remark upon Mr. Hastings's conduct?&mdash;and you
+must suppose his remark of more weight, because,
+upon the abstract question, he had given his opinion
+in favor of Mr. Hastings's judgment. "The meeting
+of the Council depends on the pleasure of the Governor;
+and I think the duration of it must do so,
+too. But it was as great a crime to dissolve the
+Council upon base and sinister motives as it would
+be to assume the power of dissolving, if he had it not.
+I believe he is the first Governor that ever dissolved
+a Council inquiring into his behavior, when he was
+innocent. Before he could summon three Councils
+and dissolve them, he had time fully to consider what
+would be the result of such conduct, <i>to convince everybody,
+beyond a doubt, of his conscious guilt</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sayer, then, among other learned people, (and
+if he had not been the man that I have described, yet,
+from his intimate connection with the Company, his
+opinion must be supposed to have great weight,) having
+used expressions as strong as the persons who
+have ever criminated Mr. Hastings most for the worst<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">{267}</a></span>
+of his crimes have ever used to qualify and describe
+them, and having ascribed his conduct to base and
+sinister motives, he was bound upon that occasion to
+justify that strong conduct, allowed to be legal, and
+charged at the same time to be violent. Mr. Hastings
+was obliged then to produce something in his justification.
+He never did. Therefore, for all the reasons
+assigned by himself, drawn from the circumstances of
+prosecution and non-prosecution, and from opinions
+of lawyers and colleagues, the Court of Directors at
+the same time censuring his conduct, and strongly applauding
+the conduct of those who were adverse to
+him, Mr. Hastings was, I say, from those accumulated
+circumstances, bound to get rid of the infamy of
+a conduct which could be attributed to nothing but
+base and sinister motives, and which could have no
+effect but to convince men of his consciousness that
+he was guilty. From all these circumstances I infer
+that no man could have endured this load of infamy,
+and to this time have given no explanation of his conduct,
+unless for the reason which this learned counsel
+gives, and which your Lordships and the world will
+give, namely, his conscious guilt.</p>
+
+<p>After leaving upon your minds that presumption,
+not to operate without proof, but to operate along
+with the proof, (though, I take it, there are some presumptions
+that go the full length of proof,) I shall
+not press it to the length to which I think it would go,
+but use it only as auxiliary, assisting, and compurgatory
+of all the other evidences that go along with it.</p>
+
+<p>There is another circumstance which must come
+before your Lordships in this business. If you find
+that Mr. Hastings has received the two lac of rupees,
+then you will find that he was guilty, without color or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">{268}</a></span>
+pretext of any kind whatever, of acting in violation of
+his covenant, of acting in violation of the laws, and
+all the rules of honor and conscience. If you find
+that he has taken the lac and a half, which he admits,
+but which he justifies under the pretence of an entertainment,
+I shall beg to say something to your Lordships
+concerning that justification.</p>
+
+<p>The justification set up is, that he went up from
+Calcutta to Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three
+months, and that there an allowance was made to him
+of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an entertainment.
+Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine,
+if there was such a custom, whether or no his covenant
+justifies his conformity with it. I remember
+Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland, says
+it is no law, but a lewd custom. A governor is to
+conform himself to the laws of his own country, to
+the stipulations of those that employ him, and not to
+the lewd customs of any other country: those customs
+are more honored in the breach than in the observance.
+If Mr. Hastings was really feasted and entertained
+with the magnificence of the country, if there
+was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to
+amuse him in his leisure hours, if he was feasted with
+the hookah and every other luxury, there is something
+to be said for him, though I should not justify
+a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner.
+But in fact here was no entertainment that could
+amount to such a sum; and he has nowhere proved
+the existence of such a custom.</p>
+
+<p>But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is
+more honored in the breach than in the observance,
+that custom is capable of being abused to the grossest
+extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">{269}</a></span>
+Lordships' minds in such a manner that I hardly need
+detail the circumstances of it. What! two hundred
+pounds to be given to a man for one day's entertainment?
+If there is an end of it there, it ruins nobody,
+and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt
+anybody; but when that entertainment is renewed
+day after day for three months, it is no longer a compliment
+to the man, but a great pecuniary advantage,
+and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a
+grievous, an intolerable burden. It then becomes a
+matter of the most serious and dreadful extortion,
+tending to hinder the people who give it not only
+from giving entertainment, but from having bread to
+eat themselves. Therefore, if any such entertainment
+was customary, the custom was perverted by the
+abuse of its being continued for three months together.
+It was longer than Ahasuerus's feast. There is
+a feast of reason and a flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings's
+feast was a feast of avarice and a flow of money.
+No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table:
+he continued to sit at that table for three months.</p>
+
+<p>In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take
+any allowance above 400<i>l.</i>, and forbidden to take
+any allowance above 100<i>l.</i>, without the knowledge,
+consent, and approbation of the Council to which he
+belongs. Now he takes 16,000<i>l.</i>, not only without
+the consent of the Council, but without their knowledge,&mdash;without
+the knowledge of any other human
+being: it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret
+recesses of his own black agents and confidants, and
+those of Munny Begum. Why is it a secret? Hospitality,
+generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of
+display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them;
+they want to be shown to the world, not concealed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">{270}</a></span>
+The concealment of acts of charity is what makes
+them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to
+whom there can be no concealment; but acts of corruption
+are kept secret, not to keep them secret from
+the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the
+secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to
+keep them secret from the eyes of mankind, whose
+opinions he does fear, in the immediate effect of
+them, and in their future consequences. Therefore
+he had but one reason to keep this so dark and profound
+a secret, till it was dragged into day in spite
+of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret, but his
+knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the
+light. Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard
+of that derives from its retirement any part of its
+lustre; the others require to be spread abroad in the
+face of day. Such candles should not be hid under
+a bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light
+up when they mean to express great joy and great
+magnificence for a great event, their very splendor is
+a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light
+up this whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all
+the world to partake them. Mr. Hastings feasts in
+the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr. Hastings
+feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over
+the dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country,
+who drag their prey into the jungles. Nobody
+knows of it, till he is brought into judgment for the
+flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of
+Tantalus; it is an entertainment from which the sun
+hid his light.</p>
+
+<p>But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was
+Mr. Hastings upon a visit? No: he was executing
+a commission for the Company in a village in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">{271}</a></span>
+neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon
+a visit to the Nabob. On the contrary, he was upon
+something that might be more properly called a
+<i>visitation</i>. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine
+or a pestilence on a country; he came there to
+do the severest act in the world,&mdash;as he himself expresses,
+to take the bread, literally the bread, from
+above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to
+reduce them to a situation which no man can hear
+of without shuddering. When you consider, that,
+while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing
+fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry
+of the country, you will not conceive it to be any
+extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not upon
+a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could
+be executed, both to the persons who executed and
+the people who suffered from it.</p>
+
+<p>It is mentioned and supposed in the observations
+upon this case, though no circumstances relative to
+the persons or the nature of the visit are stated, that
+this expense was something which he might have
+charged to the Company and did not. It is first supposed
+by the learned counsel who made the observation,
+that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged
+thing; then, that he had not charged the
+Company anything for it. I have looked into that
+business. In the first place, I see no such custom;
+and if there was such a custom, there was the most
+abusive misemployment of it. I find that in that
+year there was paid from the Company's cash account
+to the Governor's travelling charges (and he
+had no other journey at that end of the year)
+thirty thousand rupees, which is about 3,000<i>l.</i>; and
+when we consider that he was in the receipt of near<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">{272}</a></span>
+30,000<i>l.</i>, besides the nuzzers, which amount to several
+thousand a year, and that he is allowed 3,000<i>l.</i>
+by the Company for his travelling expenses, is it
+right to charge upon the miserable people whom he
+was defrauding of their bread 16,000<i>l.</i> for his entertainment?</p>
+
+<p>I find that there are also other great sums relative
+to the expenses of the Committee of Circuit, which
+he was upon. How much of them is applicable to
+him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three
+thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not
+above a day or two's journey to Moorshedabad, and
+by his taking his road by Kishenagur he could not
+be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he
+must live somewhere; and he was actually paid three
+thousand pounds for travelling charges for three
+months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand
+pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.</p>
+
+<p>If you once admit that a man for an entertainment
+shall take sixteen thousand pounds, there never will
+be any bribe, any corruption, that may not be justified:
+the corrupt man has nothing to do but to make a
+visit, and then that very moment he may receive any
+sum under the name of this entertainment; that moment
+his covenants are annulled, his bonds and obligations
+destroyed, the act of Parliament repealed,
+and it is no longer bribery, it is no longer corruption,
+it is no longer peculation; it is nothing but thanks
+for obliging inquiries, and a compliment according to
+the mode of the country, by which he makes his fortune.</p>
+
+<p>What hinders him from renewing that visit? If
+you support this distinction, you will teach the Governor-General,
+instead of attending his business at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">{273}</a></span>
+the capital, to make journeys through the country,
+putting every great man of that country under the
+most ruinous contributions; and as this custom is in
+no manner confined to the Governor-General, but
+extends, as it must upon that principle, to every
+servant of the Company in any station whatever,
+then, if each of them were to receive an entertainment,
+I will venture to say that the greatest ravage
+of an hostile army could not, indeed, destroy the
+country more entirely than the Company's servants
+by such visits.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will see that there are grounds for
+suspicion, not supported with the same evidence, but
+with evidence of great probability, that there was another
+entertainment given at the expense of another
+lac of rupees; and there is also great probability that
+Mr. Hastings received two lac of rupees, and Mr.
+Middleton another lac. The whole of the Nabob's
+revenues would have been exhausted by these two
+men, if they had stayed there a whole year: and they
+stayed three months. Nothing will be secured from
+the Company's servants, so long as they can find,
+under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt
+custom of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt
+practice. The excuse is worse than the thing
+itself. I leave it, then, with your judgment to decide
+whether you will or not, if this justification comes
+before you, establish a principle which would put all
+Bengal in a worse situation than an hostile army could
+do, and ruin all the Company's servants by sending
+them from their duty to go round robbing the whole
+country under the name of entertainments.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have now done with this first part,&mdash;namely,
+the presumption arising from his refusal to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">{274}</a></span>
+make any defence, on pretence that the charge brought
+against him might be referred to a court of justice,
+and from the non-performance of his promise to give
+satisfaction to his employers,&mdash;and when that pretence
+was removed, still refusing to give that satisfaction,
+though suffering as he did under a load of infamy
+and obloquy, and though urged to give it by persons
+of the greatest character. I have stated this to your
+Lordships as the strongest presumption of guilt, and
+that this presumption is strengthened by the very
+excuse which he fabricated for a part of his bribes,
+when he knew that the proof of them was irresistible,
+and that this excuse is a high aggravation of his
+guilt,&mdash;that this excuse is not supported by law,
+that it is not supported by reason, that it does not
+stand with his covenant, but carries with it a manifest
+proof of corruption, and that it cannot be justified
+by any principle, custom, or usage whatever. My
+Lords, I say I have done with the presumption arising
+from his conduct as it regarded the fact specifically
+charged against him, and with respect to the relation
+he stood in to the Court of Directors, and from the
+attempt he made to justify that conduct. I believe
+your Lordships will think both one and the other
+strong presumptions of his criminality, and of his
+knowledge that the act he was doing was criminal.</p>
+
+<p>I have another fact to lay before your Lordships,
+which affords a further presumption of his guilt, and
+which will show the mischievous consequences of it;
+and I trust your Lordships will not blame me for
+going a little into it. Your Lordships know we
+charge that the appointment of such a woman as
+Munny Begum to the guardianship of the Nabob, to
+the superintendency of the civil justice of the coun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">{275}</a></span>try,
+and to the representation of the whole government,
+was made for no other purpose than that
+through this corrupt woman sixteen thousand pounds
+a year, the whole tattered remains of the Nabob's
+grandeur, might be a prey to Mr. Hastings: it could
+be for no other. Now your Lordships would imagine,
+that, after this, knowing he was already grievously suspected,
+he would have abstained from giving any further
+ground for suspicion by a repetition of the same
+acts through the same person; as no other reason
+could be furnished for such acts, done directly contrary
+to the order of his superiors, but that he was
+actuated by the influence of bribery. Your Lordships
+would imagine, that, when this Munny Begum
+was removed upon a charge of corruption, Mr. Hastings
+would have left her quiet in tranquil obscurity,
+and that he would no longer have attempted to elevate
+her into a situation which furnished against
+himself so much disgrace and obloquy to himself,
+and concerning which he stood charged with a direct
+and positive act of bribery. Your Lordships well
+know, that, upon the deposition of that great magistrate,
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, this woman was appointed
+to supply his place. The Governor-General and
+Council (the majority of them being then Sir John
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis) had
+made a provisional arrangement for the time, until
+they should be authorized to fill up the place in a
+proper manner. Soon after, there came from Europe
+a letter expressing the satisfaction which the Court
+of Directors had received in the acquittal of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, expressing a regard for his character, an
+high opinion of his abilities, and a great disposition
+to make him some recompense for his extreme suffer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">{276}</a></span>ings;
+and accordingly they ordered that he should be
+again employed. Having no exact ideas of the state
+of employments in that country, they made a mistake
+in the specific employment for which they
+named him; for, being a Mahometan, and the head
+of the Mahometans in that country, he was named to
+an office which must be held by a Gentoo. But the
+majority I have just named, who never endeavored
+by any base and delusive means to fly from their
+duty, or not to execute it at all, because they were
+desired to execute it in a way in which they could
+not execute it, followed the spirit of the order; and
+finding that Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, before his imprisonment
+and trial, had been in possession of another
+employment, they followed the spirit of the instructions
+of the Directors and replaced him in that employment:
+by which means there was an end put
+to the government of Munny Begum, the country
+reverted to its natural state, and men of the first
+rank in the country were placed in the first situations
+in it. The seat of judicature was filled with wisdom,
+gravity, and learning, and Munny Begum sunk into
+that situation into which a woman who had been
+engaged in the practices that she had been engaged
+in naturally would sink at her time of life. Mr.
+Hastings resisted this appointment. He trifled with
+the Company's orders on account of the letter of
+them, and endeavored to disobey the spirit of them.
+However, the majority overbore him; they put Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n into his former situation; and as
+a proof and seal to the honor and virtue of their
+character, there was not a breath of suspicion that
+they had any corrupt motive for this conduct. They
+were odious to many of the India House here; they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">{277}</a></span>
+were odious to that corrupt influence which had
+begun and was going on to ruin India; but in the
+face of all this odium, they gave the appointment to
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, because the act contained in
+itself its own justification. Mr. Hastings made a violent
+protest against it, and resisted it to the best
+of his power, always in favor of Munny Begum, as
+your Lordships will see. Mr. Hastings sent this protest
+to the Directors; but the Directors, as soon as
+the case came before them, acknowledged their error,
+and praised the majority of the Council, Sir John
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, for the
+wise and honorable part they had taken upon the occasion,
+by obeying the spirit and not the letter,&mdash;commended
+the act they had done,&mdash;confirmed Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n in his place,&mdash;and to prevent
+that great man from being any longer the sport of
+fortune, any longer the play of avarice between corrupt
+governors and dancing-girls, they gave him the
+pledged faith of the Company that he should remain
+in that office as long as his conduct deserved their
+protection: it was a good and an honorable tenure.
+My Lords, soon afterwards there happened two
+lamentable deaths,&mdash;first of Colonel Monson, afterwards
+of General Clavering. Thus Mr. Hastings
+was set loose: there was an inspection and a watch
+upon his conduct, and no more. He was then just
+in the same situation in which he had stood in 1772.
+What does he do? Even just what he did in 1772.
+He deposes Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, notwithstanding
+the Company's orders, notwithstanding their pledged
+faith; he turns him out, and makes a distribution of
+two lacs and a half of rupees, the salary of that great
+magistrate, in the manner I will now show your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">{278}</a></span>
+Lordships. He made an arrangement consisting of
+three main parts: the first was with regard to the
+women, the next with regard to the magistracy, the
+last with regard to the officers of state of the household.</p>
+
+<p>The first person that occurred to Mr. Hastings was
+Munny Begum; and he gave her, not out of that part
+of the Nabob's allowance which was to support the
+seraglio, but out of the allowance of this very magistrate,
+just as if such a thing had been done here out
+of the salary of a Lord Chancellor or a Lord Chief-Justice,&mdash;out
+of these two lacs and a half of rupees,
+that is, about twenty-four or twenty-five thousand
+pounds a year, he ordered an allowance to be made
+to Munny Begum of 72,000 rupees per annum, or
+7,200<i>l.</i> a year; for the Nabob's own mother, whom
+he thrust, as usual, into a subordinate situation, he
+made an allowance of 3,000<i>l.</i>; to the Sudder ul Huk
+Kh&acirc;n, which is, translated into English, the Lord
+Chief-Justice, he allowed the same sum that he did
+to the dancing-girl, (which was very liberal in him,
+and I am rather astonished to find it,) namely,
+7,200<i>l.</i> a year. And who do you think was the next
+public officer he appointed? It was the Rajah Gourdas,
+the son of Nundcomar, and whose testimony he
+has attempted both before and since this occasion to
+weaken. To him, however, he gave an employment
+of 6,000<i>l.</i> a year, as if to make through the son some
+compensation to the manes of the father. And in
+this manner he distributes, with a wild and liberal
+profusion, between magistrates and dancing-girls, the
+whole spoil of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, notwithstanding
+the Company's direct and positive assurance given
+to him. Everything was done, at the same time, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">{279}</a></span>
+put, as it was before, into the hands of this dancing-girl
+the miserable Nabob's whole family; and that
+the fund for corruption might be large enough, he
+did not take the money for this dancing-girl out of
+the Nabob's separate revenue, of which he and the
+dancing-girl had the private disposal between them.</p>
+
+<p>Now upon what pretence did he do all this? The
+Nabob had represented to Mr. Hastings that he was
+now of age,&mdash;that he was an independent, sovereign
+prince,&mdash;that, being independent and sovereign in
+his situation, and being of full age, he had a right to
+manage his own concerns himself; and therefore he
+desired to be admitted to that management. And,
+indeed, my Lords, ostensibly, and supposing him to
+have been this independent prince, and that the
+Company had no authority or had never exercised
+any authority over him through Mr. Hastings, there
+might be a good deal said in favor of this request.
+But what was the real state of the case? The Nabob
+was a puppet in the hands of Mr. Hastings and Munny
+Begum; and you will find, upon producing the
+correspondence, that he confesses that she was the
+ultimate object and end of this request.</p>
+
+<p>I think this correspondence, wherein a son is made
+to petition, in his own name, for the elevation of a
+dancing-girl, his step-mother, above himself and everybody
+else, will appear to your Lordships such a curiosity
+as, I believe, is not to be found in the state correspondence
+of the whole world. The Nabob begins
+thus:&mdash;"The excellency of that policy by which her
+Highness the Begum" (meaning Munny Begum)
+"(may her shadow be far extended!) formerly, during
+the time of her administration, transacted the
+affairs of the nizamut in the very best and most ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">{280}</a></span>vantageous
+manner, was, by means of the delusions of
+enemies disguised under the appearance of friends,
+hidden from me. Having lately seriously reflected
+on my own affairs, I am convinced that it was the
+effect of maternal affection, was highly proper, and
+for my interest,&mdash;and that, except the said Begum is
+again invested with the administration, the regulation
+and prosperity of this family, which is in fact her
+own, cannot be effected. For this cause, from the
+time of her suspension until now, I have passed my
+time, and do so still, in great trouble and uneasiness.
+As all affairs, and particularly the happiness and
+prosperity of this family, depend on your pleasure, I
+now trouble you, in hopes that you, likewise concurring
+in this point, will be so kind as to write in fit
+and proper terms to her Highness the Begum, that
+she will always, as formerly, employ her authority in
+the administration of the nizamut and the affairs of
+this family."</p>
+
+<p>This letter, my Lords, was received upon the 23d
+of August; and your Lordships may observe two
+things in it: first, that, some way or other, this Nabob
+had been (as the fact was) made to express his
+desire of being released from his subjection to the
+Munny Begum, but that now he has got new lights,
+all the mists are gone, and he now finds that Munny
+Begum is not only the fittest person to govern
+him, but the whole country. This young man, whose
+incapacity is stated, and never denied, by Mr. Hastings,
+and by Lord Cornwallis, and by all the rest
+of the world who know him, begins to be charmed
+with the excellency of the policy of Munny Begum.
+Such is his violent impatience, such the impossibility
+of his existing an hour but under the govern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">{281}</a></span>ment
+of Munny Begum, that he writes again on the
+25th of August, (he had really the impatience of a
+lover,) and within five days afterwards writes again,&mdash;so
+impatient, so anxious and jealous is this young
+man to be put under the government of an old dancing-woman.
+He is afraid lest Mr. Hastings should
+imagine that some sinister influence had prevailed
+upon him in so natural and proper a request. He
+says, "Knowing it for my interest and advantage
+that the administration of the affairs of the nizamut
+should be restored to her Highness the Munny Begum,
+I have already troubled you with my request,
+that, regarding my situation with an eye of favor,
+you will approve of this measure. I am credibly
+informed that some one of my enemies, from selfish
+views, has, for the purpose of oversetting this measure,
+written you that the said Begum procured from
+me by artifice the letter I wrote you on this subject.
+This causes me the greatest astonishment. Please to
+consider, that artifice and delusion are confined to
+cheats and impostors, and can never proceed from
+a person of such exalted rank, who is the head and
+patron of all the family of the deceased Nabob, my
+father,&mdash;and that to be deluded, being a proof of
+weakness and folly, can have no relation to me, except
+the inventor of this report considers me as void
+of understanding, and has represented me to the gentlemen
+as a blockhead and an idiot. God knows how
+harshly such expressions appear to me; but, as the
+truth or falsehood has not yet been fully ascertained,
+I have therefore suspended my demand of satisfaction.
+Should it be true, be so kind as to inform me
+of it, that the person may be made to answer for it."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is a very proper demand. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">{282}</a></span>
+Nabob is astonished at the suspicion, that such a
+woman as Munny Begum, whose trade in youth had
+been delusion, should be capable of deluding anybody.
+Astonishing it certainly was, that a woman who had
+been a deluder in youth should be suspected to be
+the same in old age, and that he, a young man,
+should be subject to her artifices. "They must suspect
+me to be a great blockhead," he says, "if a man
+of my rank is to be deluded." There he forgot
+that it is the unhappy privilege of great men to be
+cheated, to be deluded, much more than other persons;
+but he thought it so impossible in the case
+of Munny Begum, that he says, "Produce me the
+traitor that could suppose it possible for me to be deluded,
+when I call for this woman as the governor of
+the country. I demand satisfaction." I rather wonder
+that Mr. Hastings did not inform him who it was
+that had reported so gross and improbable a tale,
+and deliver him up to the fury of the Nabob.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings is absolutely besieged by him; for
+he receives another letter upon the 3d of September.
+Here are four letters following one another quick as
+post expresses with horns sounding before them. "Oh,
+I die, I perish, I sink, if Munny Begum is not put
+into the government of the country!&mdash;I therefore
+desire to have her put into the government of the
+country, and that you will not keep me longer in this
+painful suspense, but will be kindly pleased to write
+immediately to the Munny Begum, that she take on
+herself the administration of the affairs of the nizamut,
+which is, in fact, her own family, without the
+interference of any other person whatever: by this
+you will give me complete satisfaction." Here is a
+correspondence more like an amorous than a state<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">{283}</a></span>
+correspondence. What is this man so eager about,
+what in such a rage about, that he cannot endure
+the smallest delay of the post with common patience?
+Why, lest this old woman (who is not his mother, and
+with whom he had no other tie of blood) should not
+be made mistress of himself and the whole country!
+However, in a very few months afterwards he himself
+is appointed by Mr. Hastings to the government; and
+you may easily judge by the preceding letters who
+was to govern. It would be an affront to your Lordships'
+judgment to attempt to prove who was to govern,
+after he had desired to put the whole government
+of affairs into the hands of Munny Begum.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Munny Begum having obtained this salary,
+and being invested with this authority, and made in
+effect the total and entire governor of the country,
+as I have proved by the Nabob's letters, let us see
+the consequences of it; and then I desire to know
+whether your Lordships can believe that in all this
+haste, which, in fact, is Mr. Hastings's haste and impatience,
+(for we shall prove that the Nabob never did or
+could take a step but by his immediate orders and
+directions,)&mdash;whether your Lordships can believe that
+Mr. Hastings would incur all the odium attending
+such transactions, unless he had some corrupt consideration.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, very soon after these appointments were
+made, consisting of Munny Begum at the head of the
+affairs, the Lord Chief-Justice under her, and under
+her direction, and Rajah Gourdas as steward of the
+household, the first thing we hear is, just what your
+Lordships expect to hear upon such a case, that this
+unfortunate chief-justice, who was a man undoubtedly
+of but a poor, low disposition, but, I believe, a per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">{284}</a></span>fectly
+honest, perfectly well-intentioned man, found it
+absolutely impossible for him to execute his office under
+the direction of Munny Begum; and accordingly,
+in the month of September following, he sends a
+complaint to Mr. Hastings, "that certain bad men
+had gained an ascendency over the Nabob's temper, by
+whose instigation he acts." After complaining of the
+slights he receives from the Nabob, he adds, "Thus
+they cause the Nabob to treat me, sometimes with indignity,
+at others with kindness, just as they think
+proper to advise him: their view is, that, by compelling
+me to displeasure at such unworthy treatment,
+they may force me either to relinquish my station, or
+to join with them, and act by their advice, and appoint
+creatures of their recommendation to the different
+offices, from which they might draw profit to themselves."
+This is followed by another letter, in which
+he shows who those corrupt men were that had gained
+the ascendency over the Nabob's temper,&mdash;namely,
+the eunuchs of Munny Begum: one of them her
+direct instrument in bribery with Mr. Hastings.
+What you would expect from such a state of things
+accordingly happened. Everything in the course of
+justice was confounded; all official responsibility destroyed;
+and nothing but a scene of forgery, peculation,
+and knavery of every kind and description prevailed
+through the country, and totally disturbed all
+order and justice in it. He says, "The Begum's ministers,
+before my arrival, with the advice of their
+counsellors, caused the Nabob to sign a receipt, in
+consequence of which they received at two different
+times near fifty thousand rupees, in the name of the
+officers of the Adawlut, Foujdarry, &amp;c., from the
+Company's circar; and having drawn up an account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">{285}</a></span>-current
+in the manner they wished, they got the Nabob
+to sign it, and then sent it to me." In the same
+letter he asserts "that these people have the Nabob
+entirely in their power."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you see here Mr. Hastings enabling the
+corrupt eunuchs of this wicked old woman to draw
+upon the Company's treasury at their pleasure, under
+forged papers of the Nabob, for just such moneys as
+they please, under the name and pretence of giving
+it to the officers of justice, but which they distribute
+among themselves as they think fit. This complaint
+was soon followed by another, and they furnish, first,
+the strongest presumptive proof of the corrupt motives
+of Mr. Hastings; and, secondly, they show the horrible
+mischievous effects of his conduct upon the country.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of the first complaint, Mr. Hastings
+directs this independent Nabob not to concern himself
+any longer with the Foujdarry. The Nabob, who
+had before declared that the superintendence of all
+the offices belonged to him, and was to be executed
+by himself, or under his orders, instantly obeys
+Mr. Hastings, and declares he will not interfere in
+the business of the courts any more. Your Lordships
+will observe further that the complaint is not against
+the Nabob, but against the creatures and the menial
+servants of Munny Begum: and yet it is the Nabob
+he forbids to interfere in this business; of the others
+he takes no notice; and this is a strong proof of the
+corrupt dealings of Mr. Hastings with this woman.
+When the whole country was fallen into confusion
+under the administration of this woman, and under
+her corrupt ministers, men base-born and employed
+in the basest offices, (the men of the household train
+of the women of rank in that country are of that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">{286}</a></span>
+description,) he writes to the Nabob again, and himself
+confesses the mischiefs that had arisen from his
+corrupt arrangements.</p>
+
+<p>"At your Excellency's request, I sent Sudder ul
+Huk Kh&acirc;n to take on him the administration of the
+affairs of the Adawlut and Foujdarry, and hoped by
+that means not only to have given satisfaction to
+your Excellency, but that through his abilities and
+experience these affairs would have been conducted
+in such manner as to have secured the peace of the
+country and the happiness of the people; and it is
+with the greatest concern I learn that this measure is
+so far from being attended with the expected advantages,
+that the affairs both of the Foujdarry and Adawlut
+are in the greatest confusion imaginable, and daily
+robberies and murders are perpetrated throughout
+the country. This is evidently owing to the want of
+a proper authority in the person appointed to superintend
+them. I therefore addressed your Excellency
+on the importance and delicacy of the affairs in question,
+and of the necessity of lodging full power in
+the hands of the person chosen to administer them.
+In reply to which your Excellency expressed sentiments
+coincident with mine. Notwithstanding which,
+your dependants and people, actuated by selfish and
+avaricious views, have by their interference so impeded
+the business as to throw the whole country into a
+state of confusion, from which nothing can retrieve it
+but an unlimited power lodged in the hands of the
+superintendent. I therefore request that your Excellency
+will give the strictest injunctions to all your
+dependants not to interfere in any manner with any
+matter relative to the affairs of the Adawlut and
+Foujdarry, and that you will yourself relinquish all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">{287}</a></span>
+interference therein, and leave them entirely to the
+management of Sudder ul Huk Kh&acirc;n. This is absolutely
+necessary to restore the country to a state of
+tranquillity."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, what evidence do we produce to your
+Lordships of the consequences of Mr. Hastings's corrupt
+measures? His own. He here gives you the
+state into which the country was thrown by the criminal
+interference of the wicked woman whom he had
+established in power, totally superseding the regular
+judicial authority of the country, and throwing everything
+into confusion. As usual, there is such irregularity
+in his conduct, and his crimes are so multiplied,
+that all the contrivances of ingenuity are unable to
+cover them. Now and then he comes and betrays himself;
+and here he confesses you his own weakness, and
+the effects of his own corruption: he had appointed
+Munny Begum to this office of power, he dare not
+say a word to her upon her abuse of it, but he lays
+the whole upon the Nabob. When the Chief-Justice
+complains that these crimes were the consequence of
+Munny Begum's interference, and were committed
+by her creatures, why did he not say to the Nabob,
+"The Begum must not interfere; the Begum's eunuchs
+must not interfere"? He dared not: because
+that woman had concealed all the bribes but one from
+public notice to gratify him; she and Yatibar Ali
+Kh&acirc;n, her minister, who had the principal share in
+this destruction of justice and perversion of all the
+principal functions of government, had it in their
+power to discover the whole. Mr. Hastings was
+obliged, in consequence of that concealment, to support
+her and to support him. Every evil principle
+was at work. He bought a mercenary silence to pay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">{288}</a></span>
+the same back to them. It was a wicked silence, the
+concealment of their common guilt. There was at
+once a corrupt gratitude operating mutually by a corrupt
+influence on both, and a corrupt fear influencing
+the mind of Mr. Hastings, which did not permit him
+to put an end to this scene of disorder and confusion,
+bought at the expense of twenty-four thousand pounds
+a year to the Company. You will hereafter see what
+use he makes of the evidence of Yatibar Ali Kh&acirc;n,
+and of this woman, for concealing their guilt.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will observe that the virtuous majority,
+whose reign was but short, and two of whom
+died of grief and vexation under the impediments
+which they met with from the corruptions and oppositions
+of Mr. Hastings, (their indirect murderer,&mdash;for
+it is well known to the world that their hearts
+were thus broken,) put their conduct out of all suspicion.
+For they ordered an exact account to be
+kept by Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n,&mdash;though, certainly,
+if any person in the country could be trusted, he,
+upon his character, might; but they did not trust
+him, because they knew the Company did not suffer
+them to trust any man: they ordered an exact account
+to be kept by him of the Nabob's expenses,
+which finally must be the Company's expenses; they
+ordered the account to be sent down yearly, to be
+controlled, if necessary, whilst the means of control
+existed.&mdash;What was Mr. Hastings's conduct? He
+did not give the persons whom he appointed any
+order to produce any account, though their character
+and circumstances were such as made an account
+ten thousand times more necessary from them than
+from those from whom it had been in former times
+by the Company strictly exacted. So that his not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">{289}</a></span>
+ordering any account to be given of the money that
+was to be expended leaves no doubt that the appointment
+of Munny Begum was in pursuance of his old
+system of bribery, and that he maintained her in office,
+to the subversion of public justice, for the purpose
+of robbing, and of continuing in the practice of
+robbing, the country.</p>
+
+<p>But though this continued longer than was for the
+good of the country, yet it did not continue absolutely
+and relatively long; because the Court of Directors,
+as soon as they heard of this iniquitous appointment,
+which glared upon them in all the light of its infamy,
+immediately wrote the strongest, the most decided,
+and the most peremptory censure upon him, attributing
+his acts, every one of them, to the same causes to
+which I attribute them. As a proof that the Court
+of Directors saw the thing in the very light in which
+I represent it to your Lordships, and indeed in which
+every one must see it, you will find that they reprobate
+all his idle excuses,&mdash;that they reprobate all the
+actors in the scene,&mdash;that they consider everything
+to have been done, not by the Nabob, but by himself,&mdash;that
+the object of the appointment of Munny Begum
+was <i>money</i>, and that the consequence of that appointment
+was the robbery of the Nabob's treasury.
+"We by no means approve your late proceedings,
+on the application of the Nabob Mobarek ul Dowlah
+for the removal of the Naib Subahdar. The requisition
+of Mobarek ul Dowlah was improper and
+unfriendly; because he must have known that the
+late appointment of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to the office
+of Naib Subahdar had been marked with the
+Company's special approbation, and that the Court
+of Directors had assured him of their favor so long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">{290}</a></span>
+as a firm attachment to the Company's interest and a
+proper discharge of the duties of his station should
+render him worthy of their protection. We therefore
+repeat our declaration, that to require the dismission
+of a prime-minister thus circumstanced, without
+producing the smallest proof of his infidelity to
+the Company, or venturing to charge him with one
+instance of maladministration in the discharge of his
+public duty, was improper and inconsistent with the
+friendship subsisting between the Nabob of Bengal
+and the Company." And further on they say,&mdash;"The
+Nabob having intimated that he had repeatedly
+stated the trouble and uneasiness which he had suffered
+from the naibship of the nizamut being vested
+in Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, we observe one of the members
+of your board desired the Nabob's repeated letters
+on the subject might be read, but this reasonable
+request was overruled, on a plea of saving the board's
+time, which we can by no means admit as a sufficient
+objection. The Nabob's letters of the 25th and 30th
+August, of the 3d September and 17th November,
+leave us no doubt of the true design of this extraordinary
+business being to bring forward Munny Begum,
+and again to invest her with improper power and influence,
+notwithstanding our former declaration, that
+so great a part of the Nabob's allowance had been
+embezzled or misapplied under her superintendence."</p>
+
+<p>At present I do not think it necessary, because it
+would be doing more than enough, it would be slaying
+the slain, to show your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's
+motives were in acting against the sense of the
+East India Company, appointed by an act of Parliament
+to control him,&mdash;that he did it for a corrupt
+purpose, that all his pretences were false and fraudu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">{291}</a></span>lent,
+and that he had his own corrupt views in the
+whole of the proceeding. But in the statement which
+I have given of this matter, I beg your Lordships
+to observe the instruments with which Mr. Hastings
+acts. The great men of that country, and particularly
+the Subahdar himself, the Nabob, are and is in so
+equivocal a situation, that it afforded him two bolting-holes,
+by which he is enabled to resist the authority
+of the Company, and exercise an arbitrary authority
+of his own: for, though the Nabob has the titles of
+high sovereignty, he is the lowest of all dependants;
+he appears to be the master of the country,&mdash;he is a
+pensioner of the Company's government.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Hastings wants him to obey and answer
+his corrupt purposes, he finds him in the character of
+a pensioner: when he wants his authority to support
+him in opposition to the authority of the Company,
+immediately he invests him with high sovereign powers,
+and he dare not execute the orders of the Company
+for fear of doing some act that will make him
+odious in the eyes of God and man. We see how he
+appointed all officers for him, and forbade his interference
+in all affairs. When the Company see the impropriety
+and the guilt of these acts, and order him
+to rescind them, and appoint again Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n, he declares he will not, that he cannot do
+it in justice, but that he will consent to send him the
+order of the Company, but without backing it with
+any order of the board: which, supposing even there
+had been no private communication, was, in other
+words, commanding him to disobey it. So this poor
+man, who a short time before was at the feet of Mr.
+Hastings, whom Mr. Hastings declared to be a pageant,
+and swore in a court of justice that he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">{292}</a></span>
+but a pageant, and followed that affidavit with long
+declarations in Council that he was a pageant in sovereignty,
+and ought in policy ever to be held out as
+such,&mdash;this man he sets up in opposition to the
+Company, and refuses to appoint Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n to the office which was guarantied to him by
+the express faith of the Company, pledged to his support.
+Will any man tell me that this resistance,
+under such base, though plausible pretences, could
+spring from any other cause than a resolution of persisting
+systematically in his course of corruption and
+bribery through Munny Begum?</p>
+
+<p>But there is another circumstance that puts this in
+a stronger light. He opposes the Nabob's mock authority
+to the authority of the Company, and leaves
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n unemployed, because, as he
+says, he cannot in justice execute orders from the
+Company (though they are his undoubted masters)
+contrary to the rights of the Nabob. You see what
+the rights of the Nabob were: the rights of the Nabob
+were, to be governed by Munny Begum and her
+scandalous ministers. But, however, we now see
+him exalted to be an independent sovereign; he defies
+the Company at the head of their armies and
+their treasury; that name that makes all India shake
+was defied by one of its pensioners. My Lords, human
+greatness is an unstable thing. This man, so
+suddenly exalted, was as soon depressed; and the
+manner of his depression is as curious as that of his
+exaltation by Mr. Hastings, and will tend to show
+you the man most clearly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis, whose conduct all along was directed
+by no other principles than those which were in conformity
+with the plan adopted by himself and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">{293}</a></span>
+virtuous colleagues, namely, an entire obedience to
+the laws of his country, and who constantly had
+opposed Mr. Hastings, upon principles of honor, and
+principles of obedience to the authority of the Company
+under which he acted, had never contended for
+any one thing, in any way, or in any instance, but
+obedience to them, and had constantly asserted that
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n ought to be put into employment.
+Mr. Hastings as constantly opposed him; and
+the reason he gave for it was, that it was against
+the direct rights of the Nabob, and that they were
+rights so sacred that they could not be infringed
+even by the sovereign authority of the Company ordering
+him to do it. He had so great an aversion
+to the least subtraction of the Nabob's right, that,
+though expressly commanded by the Court of Directors,
+he would not suffer Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to be
+invested with his office under the Company's authority.
+The Nabob was too sovereign, too supreme, for
+him to do it. But such is the fate of human grandeur,
+that a whimsical event reduced the Nabob to his
+state of pageant again, and made him the mere subject
+of&mdash;you will see whom. Mr. Hastings found he
+was so embarrassed by his disobedience to the spirit
+of the orders of the Company, and by the various
+wild projects he had formed, as to make it necessary
+for him, even though he had a majority in the Council,
+to gain over at any price Mr. Francis. Mr.
+Francis, frightened by the same miserable situation
+of affairs, (for this happened at a most dangerous period,&mdash;the
+height of the Mahratta war,) was willing
+likewise to give up his opposition to Mr. Hastings, to
+suspend the execution of many rightful things, and to
+concede them to the public necessity. Accordingly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">{294}</a></span>
+he agreed to terms with Mr. Hastings. But what
+was the price of that concession? Any base purpose,
+any desertion of public duty? No: all that he desired
+of Mr. Hastings was, that he should obey the
+orders of the Company; and among other acts of
+the obedience required was this, that Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n should be put into his office.</p>
+
+<p>You have heard how Mr. Hastings opposed the
+order of the Company, and on what account he opposed
+it. On the 1st of September he sent an order
+to the Nabob, now become his subject, to give up
+this office to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n: an act which he
+had before represented as a dethroning of the Nabob.
+The order went on the 1st of September, and on the
+3d this great and mighty prince, whom all earth
+could not move from the assertion of his rights, gives
+them all up, and Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n is invested
+with them. So there all his pretences were gone.
+It is plain that what had been done before was for
+Munny Begum, and that what he now gave up was
+from necessity: and it shows that the Nabob was the
+meanest of his servants; for in truth he ate his daily
+bread out of the hands of Mr. Hastings, through
+Munny Begum.</p>
+
+<p>Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was now invested again with
+his office; but such was the treachery of Mr. Hastings,
+that, though he wrote to the Nabob that this
+was done in consequence of the orders of the Company,
+he did clandestinely, according to his usual
+mode, assure the Nabob that Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n
+should not hold the place longer than till he heard
+from England. He then wrote him another letter,
+that he should hold it no longer than while he submitted
+to his present necessity, (thus giving up to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">{295}</a></span>
+his colleague what he refused to the Company,) and
+engaged, privately, that he would dismiss Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n again. And accordingly, the moment he
+thought Mr. Francis was not in a condition to give
+him trouble any longer, that moment he again turned
+out Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n from that general superintendence
+of affairs which the Company gave him,
+and deposed him as a minister, leaving him only a
+very confined authority as a magistrate.</p>
+
+<p>All these changes, no less than four great revolutions,
+if I may so call them, were made by Mr. Hastings
+for his own corrupt purposes. This is the manner
+in which Mr. Hastings has played with the most
+sacred objects that man ever had a dealing with:
+with the government, with the justice, with the order,
+with the dignity, with the nobility of a great country:
+he played with them to satisfy his own wicked and
+corrupt purposes through the basest instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, I have done with these presumptions
+of corruption with Munny Begum, and have
+shown that it is not a slight crime, but that it is
+attended with a breach of public faith, with a breach
+of his orders, with a breach of the whole English government,
+and the destruction of the native government,
+of the police, the order, the safety, the security,
+and the justice of the country,&mdash;and that all these
+are much concerned in this cause. Therefore the
+Commons stand before the face of the world, and say,
+We have brought a cause, a great cause, a cause
+worthy the Commons of England to prosecute, and
+worthy the Lords to judge and determine upon.</p>
+
+<p>I have now nothing further to state than what the
+consequences are of Mr. Hastings taking bribes,&mdash;that
+Mr. Hastings's taking of bribes is not only his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">{296}</a></span>
+own corruption, but the incurable corruption of the
+whole service. I will show, first, that he was named
+in 1773 to put an end to that corruption. I will
+show that he did not,&mdash;that he knowingly and willingly
+connived at it,&mdash;and that that connivance was
+the principal cause of all the disorders that have hitherto
+prevailed in that country. I will show you that
+he positively refused to obey the Company's order
+to inquire into and to correct the corruptions that
+prevailed in that country; next, that he established
+an avowed system of connivance, in order to gain
+over everything that was corrupt in the country;
+and that, lastly, to secure it, he gave up all the
+prosecutions, and enervated and took away the sole
+arm left to the Company for the assertion of authority
+and the preservation of good morals and purity in
+their service.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is a letter, in the year 1773, in
+which the Court of Directors had, upon his own
+representation, approved some part of his conduct.
+He is charmed with their approbation; he promises
+the greatest things; but I believe your Lordships
+will see, from the manner in which he proceeds at
+that very instant, that a more deliberate system, for
+not only being corrupt himself, but supporting corruption
+in others, never was exhibited in any public
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>"While I indulge the pleasure which I receive
+from the past successes of my endeavors, I own I
+cannot refrain from looking back with a mixture of
+anxiety on the omissions by which I am sensible I
+may since have hazarded the diminution of your esteem.
+All my letters addressed to your Honorable
+Court, and to the Secret Committee, repeat the stron<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">{297}</a></span>gest
+promises of prosecuting the inquiries into the conduct
+of your servants which you had been pleased to
+commit particularly to my charge. You will readily
+perceive that I must have been sincere in those declarations;
+since it would have argued great indiscretion
+to have made them, had I foreseen my inability
+to perform them. I find myself now under the disagreeable
+necessity of avowing that inability; at the
+same time I will boldly take upon me to affirm,
+that, on whomsoever you might have delegated that
+charge, and by whatever powers it might have been
+accompanied, it would have been sufficient to occupy
+the entire attention of those who were intrusted with
+it, and, even with all the aids of leisure and authority,
+would have proved ineffectual. I dare appeal to the
+public records, to the testimony of those who have
+opportunities of knowing me, and even to the detail
+which the public voice can report of the past acts of
+this government, that my time has been neither idly
+nor uselessly employed: yet such are the cares and
+embarrassments of this various state, that, although
+much may be done, much more, even in matters of
+moment, must necessarily remain neglected. To select
+from the miscellaneous heap which each day's exigencies
+present to our choice those points on which
+the general welfare of your affairs most essentially
+depends, to provide expedients for future advantages
+and guard against probable evils, are all that your administration
+can faithfully promise to perform for your
+service with their united labors most diligently exerted.
+They cannot look back without sacrificing the
+objects of their immediate duty, which are those of
+your interests, to endless researches, which can produce
+no real good, and may expose your affairs to all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">{298}</a></span>
+the ruinous consequences of personal malevolence,
+both here and at home."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, this is the first man, I believe, that ever
+took credit for his sincerity from his breach of his
+promises. "I could not," he says, "have made these
+promises, if I had not thought that I could perform
+them. Now I find I cannot perform them, and you
+have in that non-performance and in that profession
+a security for my sincerity when I promised them."
+Upon this principle, any man who makes a promise
+has nothing to do afterwards, but to say that he finds
+himself (without assigning any particular cause for
+it) unable to perform it,&mdash;not only to justify himself
+for his non-performance, but to justify himself
+and claim credit for sincerity in his original profession.
+The charge was given him specially, and he
+promised obedience, over and over, upon the spot,
+and in the country, in which he was no novice, for
+he had been bred in it: it was his native country in
+one sense, it was the place of his renewed nativity
+and regeneration. Yet this very man, as if he was a
+novice in it, now says, "I promised you what I now
+find I cannot perform." Nay, what is worse, he
+declares no man could perform it, if he gave up his
+whole time to it. And lastly, he says, that the inquiry
+into these corruptions, even if you succeeded
+in it, would do more harm than good. Now was
+there ever an instance of a man so basely deserting
+a duty, and giving so base a reason for it? His duty
+was to put an end to corruption in every channel of
+government. It cannot be done. Why? Because
+it would expose our affairs to malignity and enmity,
+and end, perhaps, to our disadvantage. Not only
+will he connive himself, but he advises the Company<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">{299}</a></span>
+to do it. For fear of what? For fear that their
+service was so abandoned and corrupt, that the display
+of the evil would tend more to their disreputation
+than all their attempts to reform it would tend
+to their service.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings should naturally have imagined that
+the law was a resource in this desperate case of bribery.
+He tells you, that in "that charge of oppression,
+though they were supported by the cries of the
+people and the most authentic representations, it is
+yet impossible in most cases to obtain legal proofs."
+Here is a system of total despair upon the business,
+which I hope and believe is not a desperate one,
+and has not proved a desperate one, whenever a
+rational attempt has been made to pursue it. Here
+you find him corrupt, and you find, in consequence
+of that corruption, that he screens the whole body of
+corruption in India, and states an absolute despair of
+any possibility, by any art or address, of putting an
+end to it. Nay, he tells you, that, if corruption did
+not exist, if it was not connived at, that the India
+Company could not exist. Whether that be a truth
+or not I cannot tell; but this I know, that it is the
+most horrible picture that ever was made of any
+country. It might be said that these were excuses
+for omissions,&mdash;sins of omission he calls them. I
+will show that they were systematic, that Mr. Hastings
+did uniformly profess that he would connive at
+abuses, and contend that abuses ought to be connived
+at. When the whole mystery of the iniquity,
+in which he himself was deeply concerned, came to
+light,&mdash;when it appeared that all the Company's orders
+were contravened,&mdash;that contracts were given
+directly contrary to their orders, and upon principles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">{300}</a></span>
+subversive of their government, leading to all manner
+of oppression and ruin to the country,&mdash;what was
+Mr. Hastings's answer? "I must here remark, that
+the majority ... I had not the power of
+establishing it."<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[5]</a> Then he goes on and states other
+cases of corruption, at every one of which he winks.
+Here he states another reason for his connivance.
+"Suppose again," (for he puts another supposition,
+and these suppositions are not hypotheses laid down
+for argument, but real facts then existing before
+the Council examining into grievances,)&mdash;"suppose
+again, that any person had benefited himself ...
+unprofitable discussion."<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[6]</a></p>
+
+<p>Here is a direct avowal of his refusing to examine
+into the conduct of persons in the Council, even in
+the highest departments of government, and the best
+paid, for fear he should dissatisfy them, and should
+lose their votes, by discovering those peculations and
+corruptions, though he perfectly knew them. Was
+there ever, since the world began, any man who
+would dare to avow such sentiments, until driven
+to the wall? If he could show that he himself abhorred
+bribes, and kept at a distance from them, then
+he might say, "I connive at the bribes of others";
+but when he acknowledges that he takes bribes, how
+can you doubt that he buys a corrupt confederacy,
+and puts an end to any hope through him of reformation
+of the abuses at Bengal? But your Lordships
+will see that he not only connived at abuse, but patronized
+it and supported it for his own political purposes;
+since he here confesses, that, if inquiry into it
+created him ill-humor, and produced him an opposi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">{301}</a></span>tion
+in Council, he sacrificed it to the power of the
+Company, and the constitution of their government.
+Did he so? The Company ordered him to prosecute
+those people, and their constitution required that
+they should be prosecuted. "No," says Mr. Hastings,
+"the conniving at it procures a majority of
+votes." The very thing that he bought was not
+worth half the price he paid for it. He was sent
+to reform corruptions, and, in order that he might
+reform corruptions, he winked at, countenanced, and
+patronized them, to get a majority of votes; and
+what was, in fact, a sacrifice to his own interest,
+ambition, and corruption, he calls a sacrifice to the
+Company. He puts, then, this alternative: "Either
+give everything into my hand, suffer me to go on,
+and have no control, or else I wink at every species
+of corruption." It is a remarkable and stupendous
+thing, that, when all the world was alarmed at the
+disorders of the Company, when that alarm occasioned
+his being sent out, and when, in consequence
+of that alarm, Parliament suspended the constitution
+of the Company, and appointed another government,
+Mr. Hastings should tell that Company that Parliament
+had done wrong, and that the person put at
+the head of that government was to wink at those
+abuses. Nay, what is more, not only does Mr. Hastings
+declare, upon general principles, that it was
+impossible to pursue all the delinquencies of India,
+and that, if possible to pursue them, mischief would
+happen from it, but your Lordships will observe that
+Mr. Hastings, in this business, during the whole period
+of the administration of that body which was
+sent out to inquire into and reform the corruptions
+of India, did not call one person to an account; nor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">{302}</a></span>
+except Mr. Hastings, this day, has any one been
+called to an account, or punished for delinquency.
+Whether he will be punished or no, time will show.
+I have no doubt of your Lordships' justice, and of the
+goodness of our cause.</p>
+
+<p>The table of the House of Commons groaned under
+complaints of the evils growing in India under this
+systematic connivance of Mr. Hastings. The Directors
+had set on foot prosecutions, to be conducted
+God knows how; but, such as they were, they were
+their only remedy; and they began to consider at last
+that these prosecutions had taken a long oblivious
+nap of many years; and at last, knowing that they
+were likely, in the year 1782, to be called to a strict
+account about their own conduct, the Court of Directors
+began to rouse themselves, and they write thus:
+"Having in several of our letters to you very attentively
+perused all the proceedings referred to in these
+paragraphs, relative to the various forgeries on the
+Company's treasuries, we lament exceedingly that
+the parties should have been so long in confinement
+without being brought to trial."</p>
+
+<p>Here, my Lords, after justice had been asleep
+awhile, it revived. They directed two things: first,
+that those suits should be pursued; but whether
+pursued or not, that an account of the state of them
+should be given, that they might give orders concerning
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see the orders of the Company. Did
+they not want to pursue and to revive those dormant
+prosecutions? They want to have a state of them,
+that they may know how to direct the future conduct
+of them with more effect and vigor than they had yet
+been pursued with. You will naturally imagine that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">{303}</a></span>
+Mr. Hastings did not obey their orders, or obeyed
+them languidly. No, he took another part. He says,
+"Having attentively read and weighed the arguments
+... for withdrawing them."<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus he begins with the general principle of connivance;
+he directly avows he does it for a political
+purpose; and when the Company directs he shall proceed
+in the suits, instead of deferring to their judgment,
+he takes the judgment on himself, and says
+theirs is untenable; he directly discharges the prosecutions
+of the Company, supersedes the authority of
+his masters, and gives a general release to all the persons
+who were still suffering by the feeble footsteps
+of justice in that country. He gave them an act of
+indemnity, and that was the last of his acts.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery,
+the presumptions that arise from his own bribes, his
+attention to secure others from the punishment of
+theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his discharging
+it,&mdash;when we see all this, can we avoid judging
+and forming our opinions upon two grand points:
+first, that no man would proceed in that universal patronage
+of guilt, unless he was guilty himself; next,
+that, by a universal connivance for fourteen years, he
+is himself the cause and mainspring of all the evils,
+calamities, extortion, and bribery, that have prevailed
+and ravaged that country for so long a time? There
+is, indeed, no doubt either of his guilt, or of the consequences
+of it, by which he has extinguished the last
+expiring hope and glimpse that remained of procuring
+a remedy for India of the evils that exist in it.</p>
+
+<p>I would mention, that, as a sort of postscript, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">{304}</a></span>
+he could no longer put the government into the hands
+of that infamous woman, Munny Begum, he sent an
+amorous, sentimental letter to the Company, describing
+her miserable situation, and advising the Company
+to give her a pension of seventy-two thousand
+rupees a year, to maintain her. He describes her
+situation in such a moving way as must melt every
+heart. He supposes her to be reduced to want by
+the cruel orders of the Company, who retain from her
+money which they were never obliged to give her.
+This representation, which he makes with as much
+fairness as he represents himself to be in a state of
+the most miserable poverty and distress, he alone
+made to the Company, because his colleagues would
+not countenance him in it; and we find, upon looking
+over Lord Cornwallis's last examination into the
+whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman
+was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty
+thousand pounds. Mr. Hastings, however, could not
+avoid making this representation; because he knew,
+that, if he quitted the country without securing that
+woman, by giving her a hope that she could procure
+by his credit here that money which by his authority
+he had before procured for her, she might then make
+a discovery of all the corruption that had been carried
+on between them; and therefore he squanders away
+the treasures of the Company, in order to secure himself
+from any such detection, and to procure for himself
+<i>razinamas</i> and all those fine things. He knew
+that Munny Begum, that the whole seraglio, that all
+the country, whom he had put under the dominion of
+Sir John D'Oyly, that all those people might have
+made a discovery of all his corrupt proceedings; he
+therefore gets the Nabob to appoint Sir John D'Oyly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">{305}</a></span>
+his agent here, with a view of stopping his mouth,
+and by the hope of another 160,000<i>l.</i> a year to prevent
+his giving an account of the dilapidation and
+robbery that was made of the 160,000<i>l.</i> which had
+been left him.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I have now finished what I proposed to say relative
+to his great fund of bribery, in the first instance
+of it,&mdash;namely, the administration of justice in the
+country. There is another system of bribery which I
+shall state before my friends produce the evidence.
+He put up all the great offices of the country to sale;
+he makes use of the trust he had of the revenues in
+order to destroy the whole system of those revenues,
+and to bind them and make them subservient to his
+system of bribery: and this will make it necessary
+for your Lordships to couple the consideration of the
+charge of the revenues, in some instances, with that
+of bribery.</p>
+
+<p>The next day your Lordships meet (when I hope
+I shall not detain you so long) I mean to open the
+second stage of his bribery, the period of discovery:
+for the first stage was the period of concealment.
+When he found his bribes could no longer be concealed,
+he next took upon him to discover them himself,
+and to take merit from them.</p>
+
+<p>When I shall have opened the second scene of his
+peculation, and his new principles of it, when you
+see him either treading in old corruptions, and excelling
+the examples he imitated, or exhibiting new ones
+of his own, in which of the two his conduct is the
+most iniquitous, and attended with most evil to the
+Company, I must leave your Lordships to judge.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">{306}</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="THIRD_DAY_TUESDAY_MAY_5_1789" id="THIRD_DAY_TUESDAY_MAY_5_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;Agreeably to your Lordships'
+proclamation, which I have just heard, and
+the duty enjoined me by the House of Commons, I
+come forward to make good their charge of high
+crimes and misdemeanors against Warren Hastings,
+Esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal, and now
+a prisoner at your bar.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, since I had last the honor of standing
+in this place before your Lordships, an event has happened
+upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible
+to be silent. My Lords, I have been disavowed
+by those who sent me here to represent them. My
+Lords, I have been disavowed in a material part
+of that engagement which I had pledged myself to
+this House to perform. My Lords, that disavowal
+has been followed by a censure. And yet, my Lords,
+so censured and so disavowed, and by such an authority,
+I am sent here again, to this the place of
+my offence, under the same commission, by the same
+authority, to make good the same charge, against the
+same delinquent.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, the situation is new and awful: the
+situation is such as, I believe, and I am sure, has
+nothing like it on the records of Parliament, nor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">{307}</a></span>
+probably, in the history of mankind. My Lords, it is
+not only new and singular, but, I believe, to many persons,
+who do not look into the true interior nature of
+affairs, it may appear that it would be to me as mortifying
+as it is unprecedented. But, my Lords, I have
+in this situation, and upon the consideration of all the
+circumstances, something more to feed my mind with
+than mere consolation; because, my Lords, I look upon
+the whole of these circumstances, considered together,
+as the strongest, the most decisive, and the
+least equivocal proof which the Commons of Great
+Britain can give of their sincerity and their zeal in
+this prosecution. My Lords, is it from a mistaken
+tenderness or a blind partiality to me, that, thus censured,
+they have sent me to this place? No, my
+Lords, it is because they feel, and recognize in their
+own breasts, that active principle of justice, that zeal
+for the relief of the people of India, that zeal for the
+honor of Great Britain, which characterizes me and
+my excellent associates, that, in spite of any defects,
+in consequence of that zeal which they applaud, and
+while they censure its mistakes, and, because they
+censure its mistakes, do but more applaud, they have
+sent me to this place, instructed, but not dismayed,
+to pursue this prosecution against Warren Hastings,
+Esquire. Your Lordships will therefore be pleased
+to consider this, as I consider it, not as a thing honorable
+to me, in the first place, but as honorable to
+the Commons of Great Britain, in whose honor the
+national glory is deeply concerned; and I shall suffer
+myself with pleasure to be sacrificed, perhaps, in what
+is dearer to me than my life, my reputation, rather
+than let it be supposed that the Commons should for
+one moment have faltered in their duty. I, my Lords,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">{308}</a></span>
+on the one hand, feeling myself supported and encouraged,
+feeling protection and countenance from
+this admonition and warning which has been given to
+me, will show myself, on the other hand, not unworthy
+so great and distinguished a mark of the favor of
+the Commons,&mdash;a mark of favor not the consequence
+of flattery, but of opinion. I shall feel animated and
+encouraged by so noble a reward as I shall always consider
+the confidence of the Commons to be: the only
+reward, but a rich reward, which I have received for
+the toils and labors of a long life.</p>
+
+<p>The Commons, then, thus vindicated, and myself
+thus encouraged, I shall proceed to make good the
+charge in which the honor of the Commons, that is,
+the national honor, is so deeply concerned. For,
+my Lords, if any circumstance of weakness, if any
+feebleness of nerve, if any yielding to weak and popular
+opinions and delusions were to shake us, consider
+what the situation of this country would be. This
+prosecution, if weakly conceived, ill digested, or
+intemperately pursued, ought never to have been
+brought to your Lordships' bar: but being brought
+to your Lordships' bar, the nation is committed to it,
+and the least appearance of uncertainty in our minds
+would disgrace us forever. <i>Esto perpetua</i>, has been
+said. To the glory of this nation, much more be it
+said, <i>Esto perpetua</i>; and I will say, that, as we have
+raised and exhibited a theatre of justice which has
+excited the admiration of all Europe, there would be
+a sort of lustre in our infamy, and a splendor in the
+disgrace that we should bring upon ourselves, if we
+should, just at that moment, turn that theatre of
+our glory into a spectacle of dishonor beyond what
+has ever happened to any country of the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">{309}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Commons of Great Britain, whilst willing to
+keep a strong and firm hand over all those who represent
+them in any business, do at the same time encourage
+them in the prosecution of it, by allowing
+them a just discretion and latitude wherever their
+own orders have not marked a distinction. I shall
+therefore go on with the more cheerful confidence,
+not only for the reasons that I have stated, but for
+another and material reason. I know and am satisfied,
+that, in the nobleness of your judgment, you
+will always make a distinction between the person
+that gives the order and the organ that is to execute
+it. The House of Commons know no such thing as
+indiscretion, imprudence, or impropriety: it is otherwise
+with their instruments. Your Lordships very
+well know, that, if you hear anything that shall appear
+to you to be regular, apt to bring forward the
+charge, just, prudent, cogent, you are to give it
+to the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled;
+if you should hear from me (and it must
+be from me alone, and not from any other member
+of the Committee) anything that is unworthy of that
+situation, that comes feeble, weak, indigested, or ill-prepared,
+you are to attribute that to the instrument.
+Your Lordships' judgment would do this without my
+saying it. But whilst I claim it on the part of the
+Commons for their dignity, I claim for myself the
+necessary indulgence that must be given to all weakness.
+Your Lordships, then, will impute it where
+you would have imputed it without my desire. It
+is a distinction you would naturally have made, and
+the rather because what is alleged by us at the bar
+is not the ground upon which you are to give judgment.
+If not only I, but the whole body of mana<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">{310}</a></span>gers,
+had made use of any such expressions as I
+made use of,&mdash;even if the Commons of Great Britain
+in Parliament assembled, if the collective body
+of Parliament, if the voice of Europe, had used
+them,&mdash;if we had spoken with the tongues of men
+and angels, you, in the seat of judicature, are not to
+regard what we say, but what we prove; you are to
+consider whether the charge is well substantiated,
+and proof brought out by legal inference and argument.
+You know, and I am sure the habits of judging
+which your Lordships have acquired by sitting
+in judgment must better inform you than any other
+men, that the duties of life, in order to be well performed,
+must be methodized, separated, arranged, and
+harmonized in such a manner that they shall not
+clash with one another, but each have a department
+assigned and separated to itself. My Lords, in that
+manner it is that we, the prosecutors, have nothing
+to do with the principles which are to guide the judgment,
+that we have nothing to do with the defence
+of the prisoner. Your Lordships well know, that,
+when we come before you, you hear a party; that,
+when the accused come before you, you hear a party:
+that it is for you to doubt, and wait till you come
+to the close, before you decide; that it is for us, the
+prosecutors, to have decided before we came here.
+To act as prosecutors, we ought to have no doubt
+or hesitation, nothing trembling or quivering in our
+minds upon the occasion. We ought to be fully
+convinced of guilt, before we come to you. It is,
+then, our business to bring forward the proofs,&mdash;to
+enforce them with all the clearness, illustration,
+example, that we can bring forward,&mdash;that we are
+to show the circumstances that can aggravate the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">{311}</a></span>
+guilt,&mdash;that we are to go further, show the mischievous
+consequences and tendency of those crimes
+to society,&mdash;and that we are, if able so to do, to
+arouse and awaken in the minds of all that hear us
+those generous and noble sympathies which Providence
+has planted in the breasts of all men, to be the true
+guardians of the common rights of humanity. Your
+Lordships know that this is the duty of the prosecutors,
+and that therefore we are not to consider the
+defence of the party, which is wisely and properly
+left to himself; but we are to press the accusation
+with all the energy of which it is capable, and to
+come with minds perfectly convinced before an august
+and awful tribunal which at once tries the accuser
+and the accused.</p>
+
+<p>Having stated thus much with respect to the Commons,
+I am to read to your Lordships the resolution
+which the Commons have come to upon this great
+occasion, and upon which I shall take the liberty to
+say a very few words.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, the Commons have resolved last night,
+and I did not see the resolution till this morning,
+"that no direction or authority was given by this
+House to the committee appointed to manage the
+impeachment against Warren Hastings, Esquire, to
+make any charge or allegation against the said Warren
+Hastings respecting the condemnation or execution
+of Nundcomar; and that the words spoken by
+the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, one of the said
+managers, <i>videlicet</i>, that he (meaning Mr. Hastings)
+murdered that man (meaning Nundcomar) by the
+hands of Sir Elijah Impey, ought not to have been
+spoken."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, this is the resolution of the House of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">{312}</a></span>
+Commons. Your Lordships well know and remember
+my having used such or similar words, and the end
+and purpose for which I used them. I owe a few
+words of explanation to the Commons of Great Britain,
+who attend in a committee of the whole House to
+be the observers and spectators of my conduct. I owe
+it to your Lordships, I owe it to this great auditory,
+I owe it to the present times and to posterity, to make
+some apology for a proceeding which has drawn upon
+me the disavowal of the House which I represent.
+Your Lordships will remember that this charge
+which I have opened to your Lordships is primarily a
+charge founded upon the evidence of the Rajah Nundcomar;
+and consequently I thought myself obliged,
+I thought it a part of my duty, to support the credit
+of that person, who is the principal evidence to support
+the direct charge that is brought before your
+Lordships. I knew that Mr. Hastings, in his anticipated
+defence before the House of Commons, had
+attempted to shake the credit of that witness. I
+therefore thought myself justified in informing your
+Lordships, and in warning him, that, if he did attempt
+to shake the credit of an important witness against
+him by an allegation of his having been condemned
+and executed for a forgery, I would endeavor to support
+his credit by attacking that very prosecution
+which brought on that condemnation and that execution;
+and that I did consider it, and would lay
+grounds before your Lordships to prove it, to be a
+murder committed, instead of a justification set up,
+or that ought to be set up.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, I am ordered by the Commons no
+longer to persist in that declaration; and I, who know
+nothing in this place, and ought to know nothing in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">{313}</a></span>
+this place, but obedience to the Commons, do mean,
+when Mr. Hastings makes that objection (if he shall
+be advised to make it) against the credit of Rajah
+Nundcomar, not thus to support that credit; and
+therefore that objection to the credit of the witness
+must go unrefuted by me. My Lords, I must admit,
+perhaps against my private judgment, (but that
+is of no consideration for your Lordships, when opposed
+to the judgment of the House of Commons,)
+or, at least, not contest, that a first minister of state,
+in a great kingdom, who had the benefit of the administration,
+and of the entire and absolute command of
+a revenue of fifteen hundred thousand pounds a year,
+had been guilty of a paltry forgery in Calcutta; that
+this man, who had been guilty of this paltry forgery,
+had waited for his sentence and his punishment, till a
+body of English judges, armed with an English statute,
+came to Calcutta; and that this happened at the
+very happy nick and moment when he was accusing
+Mr. Hastings of the bribery with which we now in
+the name of the Commons charge him; that it was
+owing to an entirely fortuitous concurrence of circumstances,
+in which Mr. Hastings had no share, or that
+it was owing to something beyond this, something that
+is rather pious than fortuitous, namely, that, as Mr.
+Hastings tells you himself, "all persuasions of men
+were impressed with a superstitious belief that a fortunate
+influence directed all my actions to their destined
+ends." I, not being at that time infected with
+the superstition, and considering what I thought Mr.
+Hastings's guilt to be, and what I must prove it to be
+as well as I can, did not believe that Providence did
+watch over Mr. Hastings, so as in the nick of time,
+like a god in a machine, to come down to save him in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">{314}</a></span>
+the moment of his imminent peril and distress: I did
+not think so, but I must not say so.</p>
+
+<p>But now, to show that it was not weakly, loosely,
+or idly, that I took up this business, or that I anticipated
+a defence which it was not probable for Mr.
+Hastings to make, (and I wish to speak to your
+Lordships in the first instance, but to the Commons
+in the next,) I will read part of Mr. Hastings's defence
+before the House of Commons: it is in evidence
+before your Lordships. He says,&mdash;"My accuser"
+(meaning myself, then acting as a private
+member of Parliament) "charges me with 'the receipt
+of large sums of money, corruptly taken before
+the promulgation of the Regulating Act of 1773,
+contrary to my covenants with the Company, and
+with the receipt of very large sums taken since, in
+defiance of that law, and contrary to my declared
+sense of its provisions.' And he ushers in this
+charge in the following pompous diction: 'That
+in March, 1775, the late Rajah Nundcomar, a native
+Hindoo of the highest caste in his religion, and of
+the highest rank in society, by the offices which he
+had held under the country government, did lay
+before the Council an account of various sums of
+money,' &amp;c. It would naturally strike every person
+ignorant of the character of Nundcomar, that an accusation
+made by a person of the highest caste in
+his religion and of the highest rank by his offices
+demanded particular notice, and acquired a considerable
+degree of credit, from a prevalent association
+of ideas that a nice sense of honor is connected with
+an elevated rank of life: but when this honorable
+House is informed that my accuser knew (though he
+suppressed the facts) that this person, of high rank<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">{315}</a></span>
+and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to
+honor, veracity, and credit,&mdash;that there are facts
+recorded on the very Proceedings which my accuser
+partially quotes, proving this man to have been
+guilty of a most flagrant forgery of letters from
+Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah,
+(independent of the forgery for which he suffered
+death,) of the most deliberate treachery to the state,
+for which he was confined, by the orders of the
+Court of Directors, to the limits of the town of
+Calcutta, in order to prevent his dangerous intrigues,
+and of having violated every principle of
+common honesty in private life,&mdash;I say, when this
+honorable House is acquainted it is from mutilated
+and garbled assertions, founded on the testimony of
+such an evidence, without the whole matter being
+fairly stated, I do hope and trust it will be sufficient
+for them to reject <i>now</i> these vague and unsupported
+charges, in like manner as they were <i>before</i> rejected
+by the Court of Directors and his Majesty's ministers,
+when they were first made by General Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis.&mdash;I must here
+interrupt the course of my defence to explain on
+what grounds I employed or had any connection
+with a man of so flagitious a character as Nundcomar."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I hope this was a good and reasonable
+ground for me to anticipate the defence which Mr.
+Hastings would make in this House,&mdash;namely, on
+the known, recognized, infamous character of Nundcomar,
+with regard to certain proceedings there
+charged at large, with regard to one forgery for
+which he suffered and two other forgeries with
+which Mr. Hastings charged him. I, who found that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">{316}</a></span>
+the Commons of Great Britain had received that very
+identical charge of Nundcomar, and given it to me
+in trust to make it good, did naturally, I hope excusably,
+(for that is the only ground upon which I
+stand,) endeavor to support that credit upon which
+the House acted. I hope I did so; and I hope that
+the goodness of that intention may excuse me, if I
+went a little too far on that occasion. I would have
+endeavored to support that credit, which it was
+much Mr. Hastings's interest to shake, and which he
+had before attempted to shake.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will have the goodness to suppose
+me now making my apology, and by no manner of
+means intending to persist either in this, or in anything
+which the House of Commons shall desire me
+not to declare in their name. But the House of
+Commons has not denied me the liberty to make
+you this just apology: God forbid they should! for
+they would be guilty of great injustice, if they did.
+The House of Commons, whom I represent, will
+likewise excuse me, their representative, whilst I
+have been endeavoring to support their characters
+in the face of the world, and to make an apology,
+and only an humble apology, for my conduct, for
+having considered that act in the light that I represented
+it,&mdash;and which I did merely from my private
+opinion, without any formal instruction from
+the House. For there is no doubt that the House is
+perfectly right, inasmuch as the House did neither
+formally instruct me nor at all forbid my making
+use of such an argument; and therefore I have
+given your Lordships the reason why it was fit to
+make use of such argument,&mdash;if it was right to
+make use of it. I am in the memory of your Lord<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">{317}</a></span>ships
+that I did conceive it to be relevant, and it
+was by the poverty of the language I was led to
+express my private feelings under the name of a
+<i>murder</i>. For, if the language had furnished me,
+under the impression of those feelings, with a word
+sufficient to convey the complicated atrocity of that
+act, as I felt it in my mind, I would not have made
+use of the word <i>murder</i>. It was on account of the
+language furnishing me with no other I was obliged
+to use that word. Your Lordships do not imagine,
+I hope, that I used that word in any other than a
+moral and popular sense, or that I used it in the
+legal and technical sense of the word <i>murder</i>. Your
+Lordships know that I could not bring before this
+bar any commoner of Great Britain on a charge for
+murder. I am not so ignorant of the laws and
+constitution of my country. I expressed an act
+which I conceived to be of an atrocious and evil
+nature, and partaking of some of the moral evil
+consequences of that crime. What led me into that
+error? Nine years' meditation upon that subject.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, the prisoner at the bar in the year 1780
+sent a petition to the House of Commons complaining
+of that very chief-justice, Sir Elijah Impey. The
+House of Commons, who then had some trust in me,
+as they have some trust still, did order me, along with
+persons more wise and judicious than myself, several
+of whom stand near me, to make an inquiry into the
+state of the justice of that country. The consequence
+of that inquiry was, that we began to conceive a very
+bad opinion both of the complainant and defendant in
+that business,&mdash;that we found the English justice to
+be, as we thought it, and reported it to the House, a
+grievance, instead of a redress, to the people of India.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">{318}</a></span>
+I could bring before your Lordships, if I did not spare
+your patience, whole volumes of reports, whole bodies
+of evidence, which, in the progress we have made in
+the course of eight or nine years, brought to my mind
+such a conviction as will never be torn from my heart
+but with my life; and I should have no heart that
+was fit to lodge any honest sentiment, if I departed
+from my opinion upon that occasion. But when I
+declare my own firm opinion upon it,&mdash;when I declare
+the reasons that led me to it,&mdash;when I mention
+the long meditation that preceded my founding a
+judgment upon it, the strict inquiry, the many hours
+and days spent in consideration, collation, and comparison,&mdash;I
+trust that infirmity which could be actuated
+by no malice to one party or the other may
+be excused; I trust that I shall meet with this indulgence,
+when your Lordships consider, that, as far as
+you know me, as far as my public services for many
+years account for me, I am a man of a slow, laborious,
+inquisitive temper, that I do seldom leave a pursuit
+without leaving marks, perhaps of my weakness, but
+leaving marks of that labor, and that, in consequence
+of that labor, I made that affirmation, and thought the
+nature of the cause obliged me to support and substantiate
+it. It is true that those who sent me here
+have sagacity to decide upon the subject in a week;
+they can in one week discover the errors of my labors
+for nine years.</p>
+
+<p>Now that I have made this apology to you, I assure
+you, you shall never hear me, either in my own name
+here, much less in the name of the Commons, urge
+one thing to you in support of the credit of Nundcomar
+grounded upon that judgment, until the House
+shall instruct and order me otherwise; because I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">{319}</a></span>
+know, that, when I can discover their sentiments, I
+ought to know nothing here but what is in strict and
+literal obedience to them.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, another thing might make me, perhaps,
+a little willing to be admitted to the proof of what I
+advanced, and that is, the very answer of Mr. Hastings
+to this charge, which the House of Commons, however,
+have adopted, and therefore in some degree purified.
+"To the malicious part of this charge, which
+is the condemnation of Nundcomar for a forgery, I do
+declare, in the most solemn and unreserved manner,
+that I had no concern, either directly or indirectly, in
+the apprehending, prosecuting, or executing of Nundcomar.
+He suffered for a crime of forgery which he
+had committed in a private trust that was delegated
+to him, and for which he had been prosecuted in the
+dewanny courts of the country before the institution
+of the Supreme Court of Judicature. To adduce this
+circumstance, therefore, as a confirmation of what was
+before suspicious from his general depravity of character,
+is just as reasonable as to assert that the accusations
+of Empson and Dudley were confirmed because
+they suffered death for their atrocious acts."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, this was Mr. Hastings's defence before
+the House of Commons, and it is now in evidence
+before your Lordships. In this defence, he supposes
+the charge which was made originally before the Commons,
+and which the Commons voted, (though afterwards,
+for the convenience of shortening it, the affair
+was brought before your Lordships in the way in which
+it is,)&mdash;he supposes, I say, the whole to proceed from
+a malicious intention; and I hope your Lordships will
+not think, and I hope the Commons, reconsidering this
+matter, will not think, that, when such an imputation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">{320}</a></span>
+of malice was made for the purpose of repelling this
+corroborating argument which was used in the House
+of Commons to prove his guilt, I was wrong in attempting
+to support the House of Commons against his imputation
+of malice.</p>
+
+<p>I must observe where I am limited and where I am
+not. I am limited, strictly, fully, (and your Lordships
+and my country, who hear me, will judge how faithfully
+I shall adhere to that limitation,) not to support
+the credit of Nundcomar by any allegation against
+Mr. Hastings respecting his condemnation or execution;
+but I am not at all limited from endeavoring to
+support his credit against Mr. Hastings's charges of
+other forgeries, and from showing you, what I hope
+to show you clearly in a few words, that Nundcomar
+cannot be presumed guilty of forgery with more probability
+than Mr. Hastings is guilty of bringing forward
+a light and dangerous (for I use no other words than
+a light and dangerous) charge of forgery, when it
+serves his purpose. Mr. Hastings charges Nundcomar
+with two other forgeries. "These two forgeries,"
+he says, "are facts recorded in the very Proceedings
+which my accuser partially quotes, proving this man
+to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery of a
+letter from Munny Begum, and of a letter from the
+Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah"; and therefore he infers
+malice in those who impute anything improper to
+him, knowing that the proof stood so. Here he asserts
+that there are records before the House of Commons,
+and on the Company's Proceedings and Consultations,
+proving Nundcomar to have been guilty of these two
+forgeries. Turn over the next page of his printed
+defence, and you find a very extraordinary thing.
+You would have imagined that this forgery of a letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">{321}</a></span>
+from Munny Begum, which, he says, is recognized
+and proved on the Journals, was a forgery charged by
+Munny Begum herself, or by somebody on her part,
+or some person concerned in this business. There is
+no other charge of it whatever, but the charge of
+Warren Hastings himself. He wants you to discredit
+a man for forgery upon no evidence under heaven but
+that of his own, who thinks proper, without any sort
+of authority, without any sort of reference, without
+any sort of collateral evidence, to charge a man with
+that very direct forgery. "You are," he says, "well
+informed of the reasons which first induced me to give
+any share of my confidence to Nundcomar, with whose
+character I was acquainted by an experience of many
+years. The means which he himself took to acquire
+it were peculiar to himself. He sent a messenger to
+me at Madras, on the first news of my appointment
+to this Presidency, with pretended letters from Munny
+Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah, the brother
+of the Nabob Jaffier Ali Kh&acirc;n, filled with bitter
+invectives against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, and of as
+warm recommendations, as I recollect, of Nundcomar.
+I have been since informed by the Begum that the
+letter which bore her seal was a complete forgery,
+and that she was totally unacquainted with the use
+which had been made of her name till I informed her
+of it. Juggut Chund, Nundcomar's son-in-law, was
+sent to her expressly to entreat her not to divulge it.
+Mr. Middleton, whom she consulted on the occasion,
+can attest the truth of this story."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Middleton is dead, my Lords. This is not the
+Mr. Middleton whom your Lordships have heard and
+know well in this House, but a brother of that Mr.
+Middleton, who is since dead. Your Lordships find,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">{322}</a></span>
+when we refer to the records of the Company for the
+proof of this forgery, that there is no other than the
+unsupported assertion of Mr. Hastings himself that
+he was guilty of it. Now that was bad enough; but
+then hear the rest. Mr. Hastings has charged this
+unhappy man, whom we must not defend, with another
+forgery; he has charged him with a forgery of
+a letter from Yeteram ul Dowlah to Mr. Hastings.
+Now you would imagine that he would have given
+his own authority at least for that assertion, which he
+says was proved. He goes on and says, "I have not
+yet had the curiosity to inquire of the Nabob Yeteram
+ul Dowlah whether his letter was of the same stamp;
+but I cannot doubt it."</p>
+
+<p>Now here he begins, in this very defence which is
+before your Lordships, to charge a forgery upon the
+credit of Munny Begum, without supporting it even
+by his own testimony,&mdash;and another forgery in the
+name of Yeteram ul Dowlah, which he said he had
+not even the curiosity to inquire into, and yet desires
+you, at the same time, to believe it to be proved.
+Good God! in what condition do men of the first
+character and situation in that country stand, when
+we have here delivered to us, as a record of the Company,
+Mr. Hastings's own assertions, saying that these
+forgeries were proved, though you have for the first
+nothing but his own unsupported assertion, and for
+the second his declaration only that he had not the
+curiosity to inquire into it! I am not forbidden by
+the Commons to state how and on what slight grounds
+Warren Hastings charges the natives of the country
+with forgery; neither am I forbidden to bring forward
+the accusation which Mr. Hastings made against
+Nundcomar for a conspiracy, nor the event of it, nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">{323}</a></span>
+any circumstance relative to it. I shall therefore proceed
+in the best manner I can. There was a period,
+among the revolutions of philosophy, when there
+was an opinion, that, if a man lost one limb or organ,
+the strength of that which was lost retired into
+what was left. My Lords, if we are straitened in
+this, then our vigor will be redoubled in the rest,
+and we shall use it with double force. If the top and
+point of the sword is broken off, we shall take the
+hilt in our hand, and fight with whatever remains
+of the weapon against bribery, corruption, and peculation;
+and we shall use double diligence under any
+restraint which the wisdom of the Commons may lay
+upon us, or your Lordships' wisdom may oblige us to
+submit to.</p>
+
+<p>Having gone through this business, and shown in
+what manner I am restrained, where I am not to repel
+Mr. Hastings's defence, and where I am left at
+large to do it, I shall submit to the strict injunction
+with the utmost possible humility, and enjoy the liberty
+which is left to me with vigor, with propriety, and
+with discretion, I trust.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Lords, when the circumstance happened which
+has given occasion to the long parenthesis by which
+my discourse has been interrupted, I remember I was
+beginning to open to your Lordships the second period
+of Mr. Hastings's scheme and system of bribery.
+My Lords, his bribery is so extensive, and has had
+such a variety in it, that it must be distinguished not
+only with regard to its kind, but must be likewise distinguished
+according to the periods of bribery and the
+epochas of peculation committed by him. In the first
+of those periods we shall prove to your Lordships, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">{324}</a></span>
+believe, without the aids that we hoped for, (your Lordships
+allowing, as I trust you will do, a good deal for
+our situation,)&mdash;we shall be able, I say, to prove that
+Mr. Hastings took, as a bribe for appointing Munny
+Begum, three lac and an half of rupees; we shall prove
+the taking at the same time the Rajeshaye bribes.
+Mr. Hastings at that time followed bribery in a natural
+manner: he took a bribe; he took it as large as he
+could; he concealed it as well as he could; and he got
+out of it by artifice or boldness, by use of trick or use
+of power, just as he was enabled: he acted like a wild,
+natural man, void of instruction, discipline, and art.</p>
+
+<p>The second period opened another system of bribery.
+About this time he began to think (from what communication
+your Lordships may guess) of other means
+by which, when he could no longer conceal any bribe
+that he had received, he not only might exempt himself
+from the charge and the punishment of guilt, but
+might convert it into a kind of merit, and, instead of
+a breaker of laws, a violator of his trust, a receiver of
+scandalous bribes, a peculator of the first magnitude,
+might make himself to be considered as a great, distinguishing,
+eminent financier, a collector of revenue
+in new and extraordinary ways, and that we should
+thus at once praise his diligence, industry, and ingenuity.
+The scheme he set on foot was this: he pretended
+that the Company could not exist upon principles
+of strict justice, (for so he expresses it,) and
+that their affairs, in many cases, could not be so well
+accommodated by a regular revenue as by privately
+taking money, which was to be applied to their service
+by the person who took it, at his discretion. This
+was the principle he laid down. It would hardly be
+believed, I imagine, unless strong proof appeared, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">{325}</a></span>
+any man could be so daring as to hold up such a resource
+to a regular government, which had three million
+of known, avowed, a great part of it territorial,
+revenue. But it is necessary, it seems, to piece out
+the lion's skin with a fox's tail,&mdash;to tack on a little
+piece of bribery and a little piece of peculation, in
+order to help out the resources of a great and flourishing
+state; that they should have in the knavery of
+their servants, in the breach of their laws, and in the
+entire defiance of their covenants, a real resource applicable
+to their necessities, of which they were not
+to judge, but the persons who were to take the bribes;
+and that the bribes thus taken were, by a mental
+reservation, a private intention in the mind of the
+taker, unknown to the giver, to be some time or other,
+in some way or other, applied to the public service.
+The taking such bribes was to become a justifiable
+act, in consequence of that reservation in the mind
+of the person who took them; and he was not to be
+called to account for them in any other way than as
+he thought fit.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, an act of Parliament passed in the year
+1773, the whole drift of which, I may say, was to prevent
+bribery, peculation, and extortion in the Company's
+servants; and the act was penned, I think, with
+as much strictness and rigor as ever act was penned.
+The 24th clause of Chap. 63, 13 Geo. III., has the
+following enactment: "And be it further enacted
+by the authority aforesaid, that, from and after the
+first day of August, 1774, no person holding or exercising
+any civil or military office under the crown, or
+the said United Company, in the East Indies, shall accept,
+receive, or take, directly or indirectly, by himself,
+or any other person or persons on his behalf, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">{326}</a></span>
+for his use or benefit, of and from any of the Indian
+princes or powers, or their ministers or agents, or
+any of the natives of Asia, any present, gift, donation,
+gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise, upon any
+account, or on any pretence whatsoever, or any promise
+or engagement for any present, gift, donation, gratuity,
+or reward: and if any person, holding or exercising
+any such civil or military office, shall be guilty
+of any such offence, and shall be thereof legally convicted,"
+&amp;c., &amp;c. It then imposes the penalties: and
+your Lordships see that human wisdom cannot pen
+an act more strongly directed against taking bribes
+upon any pretence whatever.</p>
+
+<p>This act of Parliament was in affirmance of the covenant
+entered into by the servants of the Company,
+and of the explicit orders of the Company, which forbid
+any person whatever in trust, "directly or indirectly,
+to accept, take, or receive, or agree to accept, take,
+or receive, any gift, reward, gratuity, allowance, donation,
+or compensation, in money, effects, jewels, <i>or
+otherwise howsoever</i>, from any of the Indian princes,
+sovereigns, subahs, or nabobs, or any of their ministers,
+servants, or agents, exceeding the value of four thousand
+rupees, &amp;c., &amp;c. And that he, the said Warren
+Hastings, shall and will convey, assign, and make over
+to the said United Company, for their sole and proper
+use and benefit, all and every such gifts, rewards, gratuities,
+allowances, donations, or compensations whatsoever,
+which, contrary to the true intent and meaning
+of these presents, shall come into the hands, possession,
+or power of the said Warren Hastings, or any other
+person or persons in trust for him or for his use."</p>
+
+<p>The nature of the covenant, the act of Parliament,
+and the Company's orders are clear. First,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">{327}</a></span>
+they have not forbidden their Governor-General, nor
+any of their Governors, to take and accept from the
+princes of the country, openly and publicly, for their
+use, any territories, lands, sums of money, or other
+donations, which may be offered in consequence of
+treaty or otherwise. It was necessary to distinguish
+this from every other species of acceptance, because
+many occasions occurred in which fines were paid
+to the Company in consequence of treaties; and it
+was necessary to authorize the receipt of the same
+in the Company's treasury, as an open and known
+proceeding. It was never dreamed that this should
+justify the taking of bribes, privately and clandestinely,
+by the Governor, or any other servant of the
+Company, for the purpose of its future application
+to the Company's use. It is declared that all such
+bribes and money received should be the property of
+the Company. And why? As a means of recovering
+them out of the corrupt hands that had taken
+them. And therefore this was not a license for
+bribery, but a prohibitory and penal clause, providing
+the means of coercion, and making the prohibition
+stronger. Now Mr. Hastings has found out that this
+very coercive clause, which was made in order to enable
+his superiors to get at him and punish him for
+bribery, is a license for him to receive bribes. He
+is not only a practitioner of bribery, but a professor,
+a doctor upon the subject. His opinion is, that he
+might take presents or bribes to himself; he considers
+the penal clause which the Company attached to
+their prohibition, and by which all such bribes are
+constructively declared to be theirs, in order to recover
+them out of his hands, as a license to receive
+bribes, to extort money; and he goes with the very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">{328}</a></span>
+prohibition in his hand, the very means by which he
+was to be restrained, to exercise an unlimited bribery,
+peculation, and extortion over the unhappy natives
+of the country.</p>
+
+<p>The moment he finds that the Company has got a
+scent of any one of his bribes, he comes forward and
+says, "To be sure, I took it as a bribe; I admit the
+party gave me it as a bribe: I concealed it for a time,
+because I thought it was for the interest of the
+Company to conceal it; but I had a secret intention,
+in my own mind, of applying it to their service: you
+shall have it; but you shall have it as I please, and
+when I please; and this bribe becomes sanctified the
+moment I think fit to apply it to your service." Now
+can it be supposed that the India Company, or that
+the act of Parliament, meant, by declaring that the
+property taken by a corrupt servant, contrary to the
+true intent of his covenant, was theirs, to give a license
+to take such property,&mdash;and that one mode
+of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very
+covenants which were meant to prevent extortion,
+peculation, and corruption? What sort of body is
+the India Company, which, coming to the verge of
+bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards
+to subsist upon the alms of peculation and bribery,
+to have its strength recruited by the violation
+of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? It
+is an odd sort of body to be so fed and so supported.
+This new constitution of revenue that he has made is
+indeed a very singular contrivance. It is a revenue
+to be collected by any officer of the Company, (for
+they are all alike forbidden, and all alike permitted,)&mdash;to
+be collected by any person, from any person, at
+any time, in any proportion, by any means, and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">{329}</a></span>
+any way he pleases; and to be accounted for, or not
+to be accounted for, at the pleasure of the collector,
+and, if applied to their use, to be applied at his discretion,
+and not at the discretion of his employers.
+I will venture to say that such a system of revenue
+never was before thought of. The next part is an
+exchequer, which he has formed, corresponding with
+it. You will find the board of exchequer made up
+of officers ostensibly in the Company's service, of
+their public accountant and public treasurer, whom
+Mr. Hastings uses as an accountant and treasurer of
+bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to himself,
+acting in no public manner, and never acting
+but upon his requisition, concealing all his frauds
+and artifices to prevent detection and discovery. In
+short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may be permitted
+to repeat the words I made use of on a
+former occasion, extortion is the assessor, in which
+fraud is the treasurer, confusion the accountant, oblivion
+the remembrancer. That these are not mere
+words, I will exemplify as I go through the detail: I
+will show you that every one of the things I have
+stated are truths, in fact, and that these men are
+bound by the condition of their recognized fidelity to
+Mr. Hastings to keep back his secrets, to change the
+accounts, to alter the items, to make him debtor or
+creditor at pleasure, and by that means to throw the
+whole system of the Company's accounts into confusion.</p>
+
+<p>I have shown the impossibility of the Company's
+having intended to authorize such a revenue, much
+less such a constitution of it as Mr. Hastings has
+drawn from the very prohibitions of bribery, and such
+an exchequer as he has formed upon the principles I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">{330}</a></span>
+have stated. You will not dishonor the legislature
+or the Company, be it what it may, by thinking that
+either of them could give any sanction to it. Indeed,
+you will not think that such a device could ever enter
+into the head of any rational man. You are, then,
+to judge whether it is not a device to cover guilt, to
+prevent detection by destroying the means of it; and
+at the same time your Lordships will judge whether
+the evidence we bring you to prove that revenue is a
+mere pretext be not stronger than the strange, absurd
+reasons which he has produced for forming this new
+plan of an exchequer of bribery.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I am now going to read to you a letter
+in which Mr. Hastings declares his opinion upon the
+operation of the act, which he now has found the
+means, as he thinks, of evading. My Lords, I will
+tell you, to save you a good deal of reading, that
+there was certain prize-money given by Sujah ul
+Dowlah to a body of the Company's troops serving in
+the field,&mdash;that this prize-money was to be distributed
+among them; but upon application being made
+to Mr. Hastings for his opinion and sanction in the
+distribution, Mr. Hastings at first seemed inclined to
+give way to it, but afterwards, upon reading and considering
+the act of Parliament, before he allowed the
+soldiery to receive this public donation, he thus describes
+his opinion of the operation of the act.</p>
+
+
+<h3><i>Extract of a Letter from Mr. Hastings to Colonel
+Champion, 31 August, 1774.</i></h3>
+
+<p>"Upon a reference to the new act of Parliament,
+I was much disappointed and sorry to find that our
+intentions were entirely defeated by a clause in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">{331}</a></span>
+act, (to be in force after the 1st of August, 1774,)
+which divests us of the power to grant, and expressly
+prohibits the army to receive, the Nabob's intended
+donation. Agreeable to the positive sense of this
+clause, notwithstanding it is expressed individually,
+there is not a doubt but the army is included with all
+other persons in the prohibition from receiving presents
+or donations; a confirmation of which is, that in
+the clause of exceptions, wherein 'counsellors-at-law,
+physicians, surgeons, and chaplains are permitted to
+receive the fees annexed to their profession,' no mention
+whatever is made of any latitude given to the
+army, or any circumstances wherein it would be allowable
+for them to receive presents.... This
+unlucky discovery of an exclusion by act of Parliament,
+which admits of no abatement or evasion wherever
+its authority extends, renders a revisal of our
+proceedings necessary, and leaves no option to our
+decision. It is not like the ordinances of the Court
+of Directors, where a favorable construction may be
+put, and some room is left for the interposition of the
+authority vested in ourselves,&mdash;but positive and decisive,
+admitting neither of refinement nor misconstruction.
+I should be happy, if in this instance a
+method could be devised of setting the act aside,
+which I should most willingly embrace; but, in my
+opinion, an opposition would be to incur the penalty."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings considered this
+act to be a most unlucky discovery: indeed, as long
+as it remained in force, it would have been unlucky
+for him, because it would have destroyed one of the
+principal sources of his illegal profits. Why does he
+consider it unlucky? Because it admits of no reser<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">{332}</a></span>vation,
+no exception, no refinement whatever, but is
+clear, positive, decisive. Now in what case was it
+that Mr. Hastings made this determination? In the
+case of a donation publicly offered to an army serving
+in the field by a prince then independent of the Company.
+If ever there was a circumstance in which
+any refinement, any favorable construction of the act
+could be used, it was in favor of a body of men serving
+in the field, fighting for their country, spilling
+their blood for it, suffering all the inconveniences of
+that climate. It was undoubtedly voluntarily offered
+to them by the party, in the height of victory, and
+enriched by the plunder of whole provinces. I believe
+your Lordships will agree with me, that, if any
+relaxation, any evasion, of an act of Parliament
+could be allowed, if the intention of the legislature
+could for a moment be trifled with, or supposed for
+a moment doubtful, it was in this instance; and yet,
+upon the rigor of the act, Mr. Hastings refuses that
+army the price of their blood, money won solely almost
+by their arms for a prince who had acquired
+millions by their bravery, fidelity, and sufferings.
+This was the case in which Mr. Hastings refused a
+public donation to the army; and from that day to
+this they have never received it.</p>
+
+<p>If the receipt of this public donation could be thus
+forbidden, whence has Mr. Hastings since learned
+that he may privately take money, and take it not
+only from princes, and persons in power, and abounding
+in wealth, but, as we shall prove, from persons
+in a comparative degree of penury and distress? that
+he could take it from persons in office and trust,
+whose power gave them the means of ruining the
+people for the purpose of enabling themselves to pay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">{333}</a></span>
+it? Consider in what a situation the Company must
+be, if the Governor-General can form such a secret
+exchequer of direct bribes, given <i>eo nomine</i> as bribes,
+and accepted as such, by the parties concerned in the
+transaction, to be discovered only by himself, and
+with only the inward reservation that I have spoken
+of.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, if Mr. Hastings should die without
+having made a discovery of all his bribes, or
+if any other servant of the Company should imitate
+his example without his heroic good intentions in
+doing such villanous acts, how is the Company to recover
+the bribe-money? The receivers need not divulge
+it till they think fit; and the moment an informer
+comes, that informer is ruined. He comes,
+for instance, to the Governor-General and Council,
+and charges, say, not Mr. Hastings, but the head of
+the Board of Revenue, with receiving a bribe. "Receive
+a bribe? So I did; but it was with an intention
+of applying it to the Company's service. There
+I nick the informer: I am beforehand with him: the
+bribe is sanctified by my inward jesuitical intention.
+I will make a merit of it with the Company. I have
+received 40,000<i>l.</i> as a bribe; there it is for you: I
+am acquitted; I am a meritorious servant: let the
+informer go and seek his remedy as he can." Now,
+if an informer is once instructed that a person who
+receives bribes can turn them into merit, and take
+away his action from him, do you think that you
+ever will or can discover any one bribe? But what
+is still worse, by this method disclose but one bribe,
+and you secure all the rest that you possibly can receive
+upon any occasion. For instance, strong report
+prevails that a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> has been given,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">{334}</a></span>
+and the receiver expects that information will be laid
+against him. He acknowledges that he has received
+a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i>, but says that it was for the service
+of the Company, and that it is carried to their
+account. And thus, by stating that he has taken
+some money which he has accounted for, but concealing
+from whom that money came, which is exactly
+Mr. Hastings's case, if at last an information should
+be laid before the Company of a specific bribe having
+been received of 40,000<i>l.</i>, it is said by the receiver,
+"Lord! this is the 40,000<i>l.</i> I told you of: it is
+broken into fragments, paid by instalments; and you
+have taken it and put it into your own coffers."</p>
+
+<p>Again, suppose him to take it through the hand
+of an agent, such as Gunga Govind Sing, and that
+this agent, who, as we have lately discovered, out of
+a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i>, which Mr. Hastings was to have
+received, kept back half of it, falls into their debt
+like him: I desire to know what the Company can
+do in such a case. Gunga Govind Sing has entered
+into no covenants with the Company. There is no
+trace of his having this money, except what Mr.
+Hastings chooses to tell. If he is called upon to
+refund it to the Company, he may say he never received
+it, that he was never ordered to extort this
+money from the people; or if he was under any
+covenant not to take money, he may set up this defence:
+"I am forbidden to receive money; and I
+will not make a declaration which will subject me
+to penalties": or he may say in India, before the
+Supreme Court, "I have paid the bribe all to Mr.
+Hastings"; and then there must be a bill and suit
+there, a bill and suit here, and by that means, having
+one party on one side the water and the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">{335}</a></span>
+party on the other, the Company may never come
+to a discovery of it. And that in fact this is the
+way in which one of his great bribe-agents has acted
+I shall prove to your Lordships by evidence.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings had squeezed out of a miserable
+country a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i>, of which he was enabled
+to bring to the account of the Company only 20,000<i>l.</i>,
+and of which we should not even have known the
+existence, if the inquiries pursued with great diligence
+by the House of Commons had not extorted
+the discovery: and even now that we know the fact,
+we can never get at the money; the Company can
+never receive it; and before the House had squeezed
+out of him that some such money had been received,
+he never once told the Court of Directors that his
+black bribe-agent, whom he recommended to their
+service, had cheated both them and him of 20,000<i>l.</i>
+out of the fund of the bribe-revenue. If it be asked,
+Where is the record of this? Record there is none.
+In what office is it entered? It is entered in no
+office; it is mentioned as privately received for the
+Company's benefit: and you shall now further see
+what a charming office of receipt and account this
+new exchequer of Mr. Hastings's is.</p>
+
+<p>For there is another and a more serious circumstance
+attending this business. Every one knows,
+that, by the law of this, and, I believe, of every country,
+any money which is taken illegally from any
+person, as every bribe or sum of money extorted
+or paid without consideration is, belongs to the person
+who paid it, and he may bring his action for it,
+and recover it. Then see how the Company stands.
+The Company receives a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> by Mr.
+Hastings; it is carried to its account; it turns brib<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">{336}</a></span>ery
+into a revenue; it sanctifies it. In the mean
+time, the man from whom this money is illegally
+taken sues Mr. Hastings. Must not he recover of
+Mr. Hastings? Then, if so, must not Mr. Hastings
+recover it again from the Company? The Company
+undoubtedly is answerable for it. And here is a
+revenue which every man who has paid it may drag
+out of the treasury again. Mr. Hastings's donations
+of his bribes to the treasury are liable to be torn
+from it at pleasure by every man who gives the
+money. First it may be torn from him who receives
+it; and then he may recover it from the treasury, to
+which he has given it.</p>
+
+<p>But admitting that the taking of bribes can be
+sanctified by their becoming the property of the
+Company, it may still be asked, For what end and
+purpose has the Company covenanted with Mr. Hastings
+that money taken extorsively shall belong to
+the Company? Is it that satisfaction and reparation
+may be awarded against the said Warren Hastings
+to the said Company for their own benefit? No:
+it is for the benefit of the injured persons; and it
+is to be carried to the Company's account, "but in
+trust, nevertheless, and to the intent that the said
+Company may and do render and pay over the moneys
+received or recovered by them to the parties
+injured or defrauded, which the said Company accordingly
+hereby agree and covenant to do." Now
+here is a revenue to be received by Mr. Hastings for
+the Company's use, applied at his discretion to that
+use, and which the Company has previously covenanted
+to restore to the persons that are injured
+and damaged. This is a revenue which is to be torn
+away by the action of any person,&mdash;a revenue which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">{337}</a></span>
+they must return back to the person complaining,
+as they in justice ought to do: for no nation ever
+avowed making a revenue out of bribery and peculation.
+They are, then, to restore it back again.
+But how can they restore it? Mr. Hastings has
+applied it: he has given it in presents to princes,&mdash;laid
+it out in budgeros,&mdash;in pen, ink, and wax,&mdash;in
+salaries to secretaries: he has laid it out just in
+any way he pleased: and the India Company, who
+have covenanted to restore all this money to the persons
+from whom it came, are deprived of all means of
+performing so just a duty. Therefore I dismiss the
+idea that any man so acting could have had a good
+intention in his mind: the supposition is too weak,
+senseless, and absurd. It was only in a desperate
+cause that he made a desperate attempt: for we shall
+prove that he never made a disclosure without thinking
+that a discovery had been previously made or
+was likely to be made, together with an exposure
+of all the circumstances of his wicked and abominable
+concealment.</p>
+
+<p>You will see the history of this new scheme of
+bribery, by which Mr. Hastings contrived by avowing
+some bribes to cover others, attempted to outface
+his delinquency, and, if possible, to reconcile a weak
+breach of the laws with a sort of spirited observance
+of them, and to become infamous for the good of his
+country.</p>
+
+<p>The first appearance of this practice of bribery
+was in a letter of the 29th of November, 1780. The
+cause which led to the discovery was a dispute between
+him and Mr. Francis at the board, in consequence
+of a very handsome offer made by Mr. Hastings
+to the board relative to a measure proposed by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">{338}</a></span>
+him, to which he found one objection to be the money
+that it would cost. He made the most generous and
+handsome offer, as it stands upon record, that perhaps
+any man ever made,&mdash;namely, that he would defray
+the expense out of his own private cash, and that he
+had deposited with the treasurer two lac of rupees.
+This was in June, 1780, and Mr. Francis soon after
+returned to Europe. I need not inform your Lordships,
+that Mr. Hastings had before this time been
+charged with bribery and peculation by General Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis. He suspected
+that Mr. Francis, then going to Europe, would
+confirm this charge by the suspicious nature and circumstances
+of this generous offer; and this suspicion
+was increased by the connection which he supposed,
+and which we can prove he thought, Mr. Francis had
+with Cheyt Sing. Apprehending, therefore, that he
+might discover and bring the bribe to light some way
+or other, he resolved to anticipate any such discovery
+by declaring, upon the 29th of November, that this
+money was not his own. I will mention to your Lordships
+hereafter the circumstances of this money. He
+says, "My present reason for adverting to my conduct,"
+(that is, his offer of two lac of rupees out of
+his own private cash for the Company's service, upon
+the 26th of June, 1780,) "on the occasion I have mentioned,
+is to obviate the false conclusions or purposed
+misrepresentations which may be made of it, either as
+an artifice of ostentation or as the effect of corrupt
+influence, by assuring you that the money, by whatever
+means it came into your possession, was not my
+own,&mdash;that I had myself no right to it, nor would
+or could have received it, but for the occasion, which
+prompted me to avail myself of the accidental means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">{339}</a></span>
+which were at that instant afforded me of accepting
+and converting it to the property and use of the Company:
+and with this brief apology I shall dismiss the
+subject."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you see what an account Mr. Hastings
+has given of some obscure transaction by which he
+contradicts the record. For, on the 26th of June, he
+generously, nobly, full of enthusiasm for their service,
+offers to the Company money of his own. On the
+29th of November he tells the Court of Directors that
+the money he offered on the former day was not his
+own,&mdash;that his assertion was totally false,&mdash;that the
+money was not his,&mdash;that he had no right to receive
+it,&mdash;and that he would not have received it, but for
+the occasion, which prompted him to avail himself of
+the accidental means which at that instant offered.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the account sent by their Governor in India,
+acting as an accountant, to the Company,&mdash;a
+company with whom everything is matter of account.
+He tells them, indeed, that the sum he had offered
+was not his own,&mdash;that he had no right to it,&mdash;and
+that he would not have taken it, if he had not been
+greatly tempted by the occasion; but he never tells
+them by what means he came at it, the person from
+whom he received it, the occasion upon which he
+received it, (whether justifiable or not,) or any one
+circumstance under heaven relative to it. This is
+a very extraordinary account to give to the public of
+a sum which we find to be somewhere above twenty
+thousand pounds, taken by Mr. Hastings in some way
+or other. He set the Company blindly groping in
+the dark by the very pretended light, the ignis-fatuus,
+which he held out to them: for at that time all was
+in the dark, and in a cloud: and this is what Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">{340}</a></span>
+Hastings calls <i>information</i> communicated to the Company
+on the subject of these bribes.</p>
+
+<p>You have heard of obscurity illustrated by a further
+obscurity,&mdash;<i>obscurum per obscurius</i>. He continues
+to tell them,&mdash;"Something of affinity to this
+anecdote may appear in the first aspect of another
+transaction, which I shall proceed to relate, and of
+which it is more immediately my duty to inform
+you." He then tells them that he had contrived to
+give a sum of money to the Rajah of Berar, and the
+account he gives of that proceeding is this. "We
+had neither money to spare, nor, in the apparent state
+of that government in its relation to ours, would it
+have been either prudent or consistent with our public
+credit to have afforded it. It was, nevertheless,
+my decided opinion that some aid should be given,
+not less as a necessary relief than as an indication of
+confidence, and a return for the many instances of
+substantial kindness which we had within the course
+of the two last years experienced from the government
+of Berar. I had an assurance that such a proposal
+would receive the acquiescence of the board;
+but I knew that it would not pass without opposition,
+and it would have become public, which might have
+defeated its purpose. Convinced of the necessity of
+the expedient, and assured of the sincerity of the government
+of Berar, from evidences of stronger proof to
+me than I could make them appear to the other members
+of the board, I resolved to adopt it and take the
+entire responsibility of it upon myself. In this mode
+a less considerable sum would suffice. I accordingly
+caused three lac of rupees to be delivered to the
+minister of the Rajah of Berar resident in Calcutta.
+He has transmitted it to Cuttack. Two thirds of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">{341}</a></span>
+sum I have raised by my own credit, and shall charge
+it in my official accounts; the other third I have
+supplied from the cash in my hands belonging to the
+Honorable Company."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see in this business another mode
+which he has of accounting with the Company, and
+informing them of his bribe. He begins his account
+of this transaction by saying that it has something of
+affinity to the last anecdote,&mdash;meaning the account
+of the first bribe. An anecdote is made a head of
+an account; and this, I believe, is what none of your
+Lordships ever have heard of before,&mdash;and I believe
+it is yet to be learned in this commercial nation, a nation
+of accurate commercial account. The account
+he gives of the first is an anecdote; and what is his
+account of the second? A relation of an anecdote:
+not a near relation, but something of affinity,&mdash;a remote
+relation, cousin three or four times removed, of
+the half-blood, or something of that kind, to this anecdote:
+and he never tells them any circumstance of
+it whatever of any kind, but that it has some affinity
+to the former anecdote. But, my Lords, the thing
+which comes to some degree of clearness is this, that
+he did give money to the Rajah of Berar. And your
+Lordships will be so good as to advert carefully to the
+proportions in which he gave it. He did give him
+two lac of rupees of money raised by his own credit,
+his own money; and the third he advanced out of
+the Company's money in his hands. He might have
+taken the Company's money undoubtedly, fairly,
+openly, and held it in his hands, for a hundred purposes;
+and therefore he does not tell them that even
+that third was money he had obtained by bribery and
+corruption. No: he says it is money of the Com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">{342}</a></span>pany's,
+which he had in his hand. So that you must
+get through a long train of construction before you
+ascertain that this sum was what it turns out to be,
+a bribe, which he retained for the Company. Your
+Lordships will please to observe, as I proceed, the nature
+of this pretended generosity in Mr. Hastings.
+He is always generous in the same way. As he offered
+the whole of his first bribe as his own money,
+and afterward acknowledged that no part of it was
+his own, so he is now generous again in this latter
+transaction,&mdash;in which, however, he shows that he is
+neither generous nor just. He took the first money
+without right, and he did not apply it to the very
+service for which it was pretended to be taken. He
+then tells you of another anecdote, which, he says,
+has an affinity to that anecdote, and here he is generous
+again. In the first he appears to be generous
+and just, because he appears to give his own money,
+which he had a right to dispose of; then he tells you
+he is neither generous nor just, for he had taken money
+he had no right to, and did not apply it to the service
+for which he pretended to have received it. And
+now he is generous again, because he gives two lac
+of his own money,&mdash;and just, because he gives one
+lac which belonged to the Company; but there is not
+an idea suggested from whom he took it.</p>
+
+<p>But to proceed, my Lords. In this letter he tells
+you he had given two thirds his own money and one
+third the Company's money. So it stood upon the
+29th of November, 1780. On the 5th of January following
+we see the business take a totally different
+turn; and then Mr. Hastings calls for three Company's
+bonds, upon two different securities, antedated
+to the 1st and 2d of October, for the three lac, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">{343}</a></span>
+he before told them was two thirds his own money
+and one third the Company's. He now declares the
+whole of it to be his own, and he thus applies by letter
+to the board, of which he himself was a majority.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Honorable Sir and Sirs,&mdash;Having had occasion to
+disburse the sum of three lacs of sicca rupees on account
+of secret services, which having been advanced
+from my own private cash, I request that the same
+may be repaid to me in the following manner.</p>
+
+<p>"A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the
+second loan, bearing date from 1st October, for one
+lac of sicca rupees.</p>
+
+<p>"A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the
+first loan, bearing date from 1st October, for one lac
+of sicca rupees."</p>
+
+<p>"A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the
+first loan, bearing date from the 2d October, for one
+lac of sicca rupees."</p></div>
+
+<p>Here are two accounts, one of which must be directly
+and flatly false: for he could not have given
+two thirds his own, and have supplied the other third
+from money of the Company's, and at the same time
+have advanced the whole as his own. He here goes
+the full length of the fraud: he declares that it is all
+his own,&mdash;so much his own that he does not trust
+the Company with it, and actually takes their bonds
+as a security for it, bearing an interest to be paid to
+him when he thinks proper.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it remained from the 5th of January, 1781,
+till 16th December, 1782, when this business takes
+another turn, and in a letter of his to the Company
+these bonds become all their own. All the money ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">{344}</a></span>vanced
+is now, all of it, the Company's money. First
+he says two thirds were his own; next, that the whole
+is his own; and the third account is, that the whole
+is the Company's, and he will account to them for it.</p>
+
+<p>Now he has accompanied this account with another
+very curious one. For when you come to look into
+the particulars of it, you will find there are three
+bonds declared to be the Company's bonds, and which
+refer to the former transactions, namely, the money
+for which he had taken the bonds; but when you
+come to look at the numbers of them, you will find
+that one of the three bonds which he had taken as
+his own disappears, and another bond, of another date,
+and for a much larger sum, is substituted in its place,
+of which he had never mentioned anything whatever.
+So that, taking his first account, that two thirds is his
+own money, then that it is all his own, in the third
+that it is all the Company's money, by a fourth account,
+given in a paper describing the three bonds,
+you will find that there is one lac which he does not
+account for, but substitutes in its place a bond before
+taken as his own. He sinks and suppresses one bond,
+he gives two bonds to the Company, and to supply
+the want of the third, which he suppresses, he brings
+forward a bond for another sum, of another date,
+which he had never mentioned before. Here, then,
+you have four different accounts: if any one of them
+is true, every one of the other three is totally false.
+Such a system of cogging, such a system of fraud, such
+a system of prevarication, such a system of falsehood,
+never was, I believe, before exhibited in the world.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, why did he take bonds at all from
+the Company for the money that was their own? I
+must be cautious how I charge a legal crime. I will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">{345}</a></span>
+not charge it to be forgery, to take a bond from the
+Company for money which was their own. He was
+employed to make out bonds for the Company, to
+raise money on their credit. He pretends he lent
+them a sum of money, which was not his to lend:
+but he gives their own money to them as his own,
+and takes a security for it. I will not say that it is
+a forgery, but I am sure it is an offence as grievous,
+because it is as much a cheat as a forgery, with this
+addition to it, that the person so cheating is in a
+trust; he violates that trust, and in so doing he defrauds
+and falsifies the whole system of the Company's
+accounts.</p>
+
+<p>I have only to show what his own explanation of
+all these actions was, because it supersedes all observation
+of mine. Hear what prevaricating guilt says
+for the falsehood and delusion which had been used to
+cover it; and see how he plunges deeper and deeper
+upon every occasion. This explanation arose out
+of another memorable bribe, which I must now beg
+leave to state to your Lordships.</p>
+
+<p>About the time of the receipt of the former bribes,
+good fortune, as good things seldom come singly, is
+kind to him; and when he went up and had nearly
+ruined the Company's affairs in Oude and Benares,
+he received a present of 100,000<i>l.</i> sterling, or thereabouts.
+He received bills for it in September, 1781,
+and he gives the Company an account of it in January,
+1782. Remark in what manner the account of
+this money was given, and the purposes for which
+he intends to apply it. He says, in this letter, "I received
+the offer of a considerable sum of money, both
+on the Nabob's part and that of his ministers, as a
+present to myself, not to the Company: I accepted it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">{346}</a></span>
+without hesitation, and gladly, being entirely destitute
+both of means and credit, whether for your service or
+the relief of my own necessities." My Lords, upon
+this you shall hear a comment, made by some abler
+persons than me. This donation was not made in
+species, but in bills upon the house of Gopaul Doss,
+who was then a prisoner in the hands of Cheyt Sing.
+After mentioning that he took this present for the
+Company, and for their exigencies, and partly for his
+own necessities, and in consequence of the distress of
+both, he desires the Company, in the moment of this
+their greatest distress, to award it to him, and therefore
+he ends, "If you should adjudge the deposit to
+me, I shall consider it as the most honorable approbation
+and reward of my labors: and I wish to owe
+my fortune to your bounty. I am now in the fiftieth
+year of my life: I have passed thirty-one years in the
+service of the Company, and the greatest part of that
+time in employments of the highest trust. My conscience
+allows me boldly to claim the merit of zeal
+and integrity; nor has fortune been unpropitious to
+their exertions. To these qualities I bound my pretensions.
+I shall not repine, if you shall deem otherwise
+of my services; nor ought your decision, however
+it may disappoint my hope of a retreat adequate
+to the consequence and elevation of the office which I
+now possess, to lessen my gratitude for having been
+so long permitted to hold it, since it has at least enabled
+me to lay up a provision with which I can be
+contented in a more humble station."</p>
+
+<p>And here your Lordships will be pleased incidentally
+to remark the circumstance of his condition of
+life and his fortune, to which he appeals, and upon account
+of which he desires this money. Your Lord<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">{347}</a></span>ships
+will remember that in 1773 he said, (and this I
+stated to you from himself,) that, if he held his then
+office for a very few years, he should be enabled to
+lay by an ample provision for his retreat. About
+nine years after that time, namely, in the month
+of January, 1782, he finds himself rather pinched
+with want, but, however, not in so bad a way but
+that the holding of his office had enabled him to lay
+up a provision with which he could be contented in a
+more humble station. He wishes to have affluence;
+he wishes to have dignity; he wishes to have consequence
+and rank: but he allows that he has competence.
+Your Lordships will see afterwards how miserably
+his hopes were disappointed: for the Court of
+Directors, receiving this letter from Mr. Hastings,
+did declare, that they could not give it to him, because
+the act had ordered that "no fees of office,
+perquisites, emoluments, or advantages whatsoever,
+should be accepted, received, or taken by such Governor-General
+and Council, or any of them, in any
+manner or on any account or pretence whatsoever";
+"and as the same act further directs, 'that no Governor-General,
+or any of the Council, shall directly
+take, accept, or receive, of or from any person or
+persons, in any manner or on any account whatsoever,
+any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,
+pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement
+for any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,'
+we cannot, were we so inclined, decree the
+amount of this present to the Governor-General.
+And it is further enacted, 'that any such present,
+gift, gratuity, donation, or reward, accepted, taken,
+or received, shall be deemed and construed to have
+been received to and for the sole use of the Com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">{348}</a></span>pany.'"
+And therefore they resolved, most unjustly
+and most wickedly, to keep it to themselves. The
+act made it in the first instance the property of the
+Company, and they would not give it him. And one
+should think this, with his own former construction
+of the act, would have made him cautious of taking
+bribes. You have seen what weight it had with him
+to stop the course of bribes which he was in such a
+career of taking in every place and with both hands.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships have now before you this hundred
+thousand pounds, disclosed in a letter from Patna,
+dated the 20th January, 1782. You find mystery
+and concealment in every one of Mr. Hastings's discoveries.
+For (which is a curious part of it) this letter
+was not sent to the Court of Directors in their
+packet regularly, but transmitted by Major Fairfax,
+one of his agents, to Major Scott, another of his
+agents, to be delivered to the Company. Why was
+this done? Your Lordships will judge, from that circuitous
+mode of transmission, whether he did not
+thereby intend to leave some discretion in his agent
+to divulge it or not. We are told he did not; but
+your Lordships will believe that or not, according to
+the nature of the fact. If he had been anxious to
+make this discovery to the Directors, the regular way
+would have been to send his letter to the Directors
+immediately in the packet: but he sent it in a box to
+an agent; and that agent, upon due discretion, conveyed
+it to the Court of Directors. Here, however,
+he tells you nothing about the persons from whom
+he received this money, any more than he had done
+respecting the two former sums.</p>
+
+<p>On the 2d of May following the date of this Patna
+letter he came down to Calcutta with a mind, as he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">{349}</a></span>
+himself describes it, greatly agitated. All his hope
+of plundering Benares had totally failed. The produce
+of the robbing of the Begums, in the manner
+your Lordships have heard, was all dissipated to pay
+the arrears of the armies: there was no fund left.
+He felt himself agitated and full of dread, knowing
+that he had been threatened with having his place
+taken from him several times, and that he might be
+called home to render an account. He had heard
+that inquiries had begun in a menacing form in Parliament;
+and though at that time Bengal was not
+struck at, there was a charge of bribery and peculation
+brought against the Governor of Madras. With
+this dread, with a mind full of anxiety and perturbation,
+he writes a letter, as he pretends, on the 22d of
+May, 1782. Your Lordships will remark, that, when
+he came down to Calcutta from his expedition up
+the country, he did not till the 22d of May give any
+account whatever of these transactions,&mdash;and that
+this letter, or pretended letter, of the 22d of May was
+not sent till the 16th of December following. We
+shall clearly prove that he had abundant means of
+sending it, and by various ways, before the 16th of
+December, 1782, when he inclosed in another letter
+that of the 22d of May. This is the letter of discovery;
+this is the letter by which his breast was to be
+laid open to his employers, and all the obscurity of
+his transactions to be elucidated. Here are indeed
+new discoveries, but they are like many new-discovered
+lands, exceedingly inhospitable, very thinly inhabited,
+and producing nothing to gratify the curiosity
+of the human mind.</p>
+
+<p>This letter is addressed to the Honorable the
+Court of Directors, dated Fort William, 22d May,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">{350}</a></span>
+1782. He tells them he had promised to account
+for the ten lacs of rupees which he had received, and
+this promise, he says, he now performs, and that he
+takes that opportunity of accounting with them likewise
+for several other sums which he had received.
+His words are,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This promise I now perform, and, deeming it
+consistent with the spirit of it, I have added such
+other sums as have been occasionally converted to
+the Company's property through my means, in consequence
+of the like original destination. Of the second
+of these sums you have already been advised
+in a letter which I had the honor to address the
+Honorable Court of Directors, dated 29th November,
+1780. Both this and the third article were paid immediately
+to the treasury, by my order to the sub-treasurer
+to receive them on the Company's account,
+but never passed through my hands. The three
+sums for which bonds were granted were in like
+manner paid to the Company's treasury, without
+passing through my hands, but their <i>application</i> was
+not specified. The sum of 50,000 current rupees
+was received while I was on my journey to Benares,
+and applied as expressed in the account.</p>
+
+<p>"As to the manner in which these sums have been
+expended, the reference which I have made of it in
+the accompanying account, to the several accounts in
+which they are credited, renders any other specification
+of it unnecessary,&mdash;<i>besides</i> that these accounts
+either have or will have received a much stronger authentication
+than any that I could give to mine."</p>
+
+<p>I wish your Lordships to attend to the next paragraph,
+which is meant by him to explain why he took
+bribes at all,&mdash;why he took bonds for some of them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">{351}</a></span>
+as moneys of his own, and not moneys of the
+Company,&mdash;why he entered some upon the Company's accounts,
+and why of the others he renders no account at
+all. Light, however, will beam upon you as we proceed.</p>
+
+<p>"Why these sums were taken by me,&mdash;why they
+were, except the second, quietly transferred to the
+Company's use,&mdash;why bonds were taken for the first,
+and not for the rest,&mdash;might, were this matter exposed
+to the view of the public, furnish a variety of
+conjectures, to which it would be of little use to reply.
+Were your Honorable Court to question me on these
+points, I would answer, that the sums were taken for
+the Company's benefit, at times when the Company
+very much needed them,&mdash;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 could at this
+distance of time verify, and that I did not think it
+worth my care to observe the same means with the
+rest. I trust, Honorable Sirs, to your breasts for a
+candid interpretation of my actions,&mdash;and assume
+the freedom to add, that I think myself, on such a
+subject, on such <i>an occasion</i>, entitled to it."</p>
+
+<p>Lofty, my Lords! You see, that, after the Directors
+had expected an explanation for so long a time,
+he says, "Why these sums were taken by me, and,
+except the second, quietly transferred to the Company's
+use, I cannot tell; why bonds were taken for
+the first, and not for the rest, I cannot tell: if this
+matter were exposed to view, it would furnish a variety
+of conjectures." Here is an account which is
+to explain the most obscure, the most mysterious,
+the most evidently fraudulent transactions. When
+asked how he came to take these bonds, how he came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">{352}</a></span>
+to use these frauds, he tells you he really does not
+know,&mdash;that he might have this motive for it, that he
+might have another motive for it,&mdash;that he wished
+to conceal it from public curiosity,&mdash;but, which is the
+most extraordinary, he is not quite sure that he
+had any motive for it at all, which his memory can
+trace. The whole of this is a period of a year and a
+half; and here is a man who keeps his account upon
+principles of whim and vagary. One would imagine
+he was guessing at some motive of a stranger. Why
+he came to take bonds for money not due to him, and
+why he enters some and not others,&mdash;he knows nothing
+of these things: he begs them not to ask about it,
+because it will be of no use. "You foolish Court of
+Directors may conjecture and conjecture on. You
+are asking me why I took bonds to myself for money
+of yours, why I have cheated you, why I have falsified
+my account in such a manner. I will not tell
+you."</p>
+
+<p>In the satisfaction which he had promised to give
+them he neither mentions the persons, the times, the
+occasions, or motives for any of his actions. He adds,
+"I did not think it worth my care to observe the
+same means with the rest." For some purposes, he
+thought it necessary to use the most complicated and
+artful concealments; for some, he could not tell what
+his motives were; and for others, that it was mere
+carelessness. Here is the exchequer of bribery!&mdash;have
+I falsified any part of my original stating of it?&mdash;an
+exchequer in which the man who ought to pay
+receives, the man who ought to give security takes
+it, the man who ought to keep an account says he
+has forgotten; an exchequer in which oblivion was
+the remembrancer; and, to sum up the whole, an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">{353}</a></span>
+exchequer into the accounts of which it was useless
+to inquire. This is the manner in which the account
+of near two hundred thousand pounds is given to the
+Court of Directors. You can learn nothing in this
+business that is any way distinct, except a premeditated
+design of a concealment of his transactions.
+That is avowed.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a more serious thing behind. Who
+were the instruments of his concealment? No other,
+my Lords, than the Company's public accountant.
+That very accountant takes the money, knowing
+it to be the Company's, and that it was only
+pretended to be advanced by Mr. Hastings for the
+Company's use. He sees Mr. Hastings make out
+bonds to himself for it, and Mr. Hastings makes him
+enter him as creditor, when in fact he was debtor.
+Thus he debauches the Company's accountant, and
+makes him his confederate. These fraudulent and
+corrupt acts, covered by false representations, are
+proved to be false not by collation with anything
+else, but false by a collation with themselves. This,
+then, is the account, and his explanation of it; and
+in this insolent, saucy, careless, negligent manner,
+a public accountant like Mr. Hastings, a man bred
+up a book-keeper in the Company's service, who
+ought to be exact, physically exact, in his account,
+has not only been vicious in his own account, but
+made the public accounts vicious and of no value.</p>
+
+<p>But there is in this account another curious circumstance
+with regard to the deposit of this sum of
+money, to which he referred in his first paragraph
+of his letter of the 29th of November, 1780. He
+states that this deposit was made and passed into the
+hands of Mr. Larkins on the 1st of June. It did so;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">{354}</a></span>
+but it is not entered in the Company's accounts till
+November following. Now in all that intermediate
+space where was it? what account was there
+of it? It was entirely a secret between Mr. Larkins
+and Mr. Hastings, without a possibility of any one
+discovering any particular relative to it. Here is
+an account of two hundred thousand pounds received,
+juggled between the accountant and him, without a
+trace of it appearing in the Company's books. Some
+of those committees, to whom, for their diligence at
+least, I must say the public have some obligation, and
+in return for which they ought to meet with some
+indulgence, examining into all these circumstances,
+and having heard that Mr. Hastings had deposited a
+sum of money in the hands of the Company's sub-treasurer
+in the month of June, sent for the Company's
+books. They looked over those books, but they
+did not find the least trace of any such sum of money,
+and not any account of it: nor could there be,
+because it was not paid to the Company's account
+till the November following. The accountant had received
+the money, but never entered it from June
+till November. Then, at last, have we an account
+of it. But was it even then entered regularly upon
+the Company's accounts? No such thing: it is a
+deposit carried to the Governor-General's credit.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>[<i>The entry of the several species in which this deposit
+was made was here read from the Company's General
+Journal of 1780 and 1781.</i>]</p></div>
+
+<p>My Lords, when this account appears at last,
+when this money does emerge in the public accounts,
+whose is it? Is it the Company's? No: Mr. Hast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">{355}</a></span>ings's.
+And thus, if, notwithstanding this obscure account
+in November, the Directors had claimed and
+called for this affinity to an anecdote,&mdash;if they had
+called for this anecdote and examined the account,&mdash;if
+they had said, "We observe here entered two lac
+and upwards; come, Mr. Hastings, let us see where
+this money is,"&mdash;they would find that it is Mr.
+Hastings's money, not the Company's; they would
+find that it is carried to his credit. In this manner
+he hands over this sum, telling them, on the 22d
+of May, 1782, that not only the bonds were a fraud,
+but the deposit was a fraud, and that neither bonds
+nor deposit did in reality belong to him. Why did
+he enter it at all? Then, afterwards, why did he
+not enter it as the Company's? Why make a false
+entry, to enter it as his own? And how came he,
+two years after, when he does tell you that it was
+the Company's and not his own, to alter the public
+accounts? But why did he not tell them at that
+time, when he pretends to be opening his breast to
+the Directors, from whom he received it, or say
+anything to give light to the Company respecting
+it? who, supposing they had the power of dispensing
+with an act of Parliament, or licensing bribery at
+their pleasure, might have been thereby enabled to
+say, "Here you ought to have received it,&mdash;there
+it might be oppressive and of dreadful example."</p>
+
+<p>I have only to state, that, in this letter, which was
+pretended to be written on the 22d of May, 1782,
+your Lordships will observe that he thinks it his
+absolute duty (and I wish to press this upon your
+Lordships, because it will be necessary in a comparison
+which I shall have hereafter to make) to lay
+open all their affairs to them, to give them a full<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">{356}</a></span>
+and candid explanation of his conduct, which he afterwards
+confesses he is not able to do. The paragraph
+has been just read to you. It amounts to
+this: "I have taken many bribes,&mdash;have falsified
+your accounts,&mdash;have reversed the principle of them
+in my own favor; I now discover to you all these my
+frauds, and think myself entitled to your confidence
+upon this occasion." Now all the principles of diffidence,
+all the principles of distrust, nay, more, all
+the principles upon which a man may be convicted
+of premeditated fraud, and deserve the severest punishment,
+are to be found in this case, in which he
+says he holds himself to be entitled to their confidence
+and trust. If any of your Lordships had a
+steward who told you he had lent you your own
+money, and had taken bonds from you for it, and if
+he afterwards told you that that money was neither
+yours nor his, but extorted from your tenants
+by some scandalous means, I should be glad to know
+what your Lordships would think of such a steward,
+who should say, "I will take the freedom to add, that
+I think myself, on such a subject, on such an occasion,
+entitled to your confidence and trust." You
+will observe his cavalier mode of expression. Instead
+of his exhibiting the rigor and severity of an
+accountant and a book-keeper, you would think that
+he had been a reader of sentimental letters; there
+is such an air of a novel running through the whole,
+that it adds to the ridicule and nausea of it: it is an
+oxymel of squills; there is something to strike you
+with horror for the villany of it, something to strike
+you with contempt for the fraud of it, and something
+to strike you with utter disgust for the vile and bad
+taste with which all these base ingredients are assorted.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">{357}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will see, when the account which
+is subjoined to this unaccountable letter comes before
+you, that, though the Company had desired to know
+the channels through which he got those sums, there
+is not (except by a reference that appears in another
+place to one of the articles) one single syllable of
+explanation given from one end to the other, there is
+not the least glimpse of light thrown upon these transactions.
+But we have since discovered from whom
+he got these bribes; and your Lordships will be struck
+with horror, when you hear it.</p>
+
+<p>I have already remarked to you, that, though this
+letter is dated upon the 22d of May, it was not dispatched
+for Europe till December following; and he
+gets Mr. Larkins, who was his agent and instrument
+in falsifying the Company's accounts, to swear that
+this letter was written upon the 22d of May, and that
+he had no opportunity to send it, but by the "Lively"
+in December. On the 16th of that month he writes
+to the Directors, and tells them that he is quite
+shocked to find he had no earlier opportunity of making
+this discovery, which he thought himself bound to
+make; though this discovery, respecting some articles
+of it, had now been delayed nearly two years, and
+though it since appears that there were many opportunities,
+and particularly by the "Resolution," of
+sending it. He was much distressed, and found himself
+in an awkward situation, from an apprehension
+that the Parliamentary inquiry, which he knew was
+at this time in progress, might have forced from him
+this notable discovery. He says, "I do not fear the
+consequences of any Parliamentary process." Indeed,
+he needed not to fear any Parliamentary inquiry, if it
+produced no further discovery than that which your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">{358}</a></span>
+Lordships have in the letter of the 22d of May, and in
+the accounts subjoined to it. He says, that "the delay
+is of no public consequence; but it has produced a
+situation which, with respect to myself, I regard as
+unfortunate, because it exposes me to the meanest
+imputation, from the occasion which the late Parliamentary
+inquiries have since furnished."</p>
+
+<p>Now here is a very curious letter, that I wish to
+have read for some other reasons, which will afterwards
+appear, but principally at present for the purpose
+of showing you that he held it to be his duty
+and thought it to the last degree dishonorable not to
+give the Company an account of those secret bribes:
+he thought it would reflect upon him, and ruin his
+character forever, if this account did not come voluntarily
+from him, but was extorted by terror of Parliamentary
+inquiry. In this letter of the 16th December,
+1782, he thus writes.</p>
+
+<p>"The delay is of no public consequence, but it has
+produced a situation which, with respect to myself,
+I regard as unfortunate; because it exposes me to
+the meanest imputation, from the occasion which the
+late Parliamentary inquiries have since furnished, but
+which were unknown when my letter was written,
+and written in the necessary consequence of a promise
+made to that effect in a former letter to your Honorable
+Committee, dated 20th January last. However, to
+preclude the possibility of such reflections from affecting
+me, I have desired Mr. Larkins, who was privy to
+the whole transaction, to affix to the letter his affidavit
+of the date in which it was written. I own I feel
+most sensibly the mortification of being reduced to
+the necessity of using such precautions to guard my
+reputation from dishonor. If I had at any time pos<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">{359}</a></span>sessed
+that degree of confidence from my immediate
+employers which they never withheld from the meanest
+of my predecessors, I should have disdained to use
+these attentions. How I have drawn on me a different
+treatment I know not; it is sufficient that I have
+not merited it. And in the course of a service of
+thirty-two years, and ten of these employed in maintaining
+the powers and discharging the duties of the
+first office of the British government in India, that
+honorable court ought to know whether I possess the
+integrity and honor which are the first requisites of
+such a station. If I wanted these, they have afforded
+me but too powerful incentives to suppress the information
+which I now convey to them through you, and
+to appropriate to my own use the sums which I have
+already passed to their credit, by the unworthy and,
+pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which they
+have passed upon me for the first communication of
+this kind: and your own experience will suggest to
+you, that there are persons who would profit by such
+a warning.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the whole of these transactions, which to
+you, who are accustomed to view business in an official
+and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not
+improper, I have but a few short remarks to suggest
+to your consideration.</p>
+
+<p>"If I appear in any unfavorable light by these transactions,
+I resign the common and legal security of
+those who commit crimes or errors. I am ready to
+answer every particular question that may be put
+against myself, upon honor or upon oath.</p>
+
+<p>"The sources from which these reliefs to the public
+service have come would never have yielded them
+to the Company publicly; and the exigencies of your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">{360}</a></span>
+service (exigencies created by the exposition of your
+affairs, and faction in your councils) required those
+supplies.</p>
+
+<p>"I could have concealed them, had I had a wrong
+motive, from yours and the public eye forever; and I
+know that the difficulties to which a spirit of injustice
+may subject me for my candor and avowal are greater
+than any possible inconvenience that could have attended
+the concealment, except the dissatisfaction of my
+own mind. These difficulties are but a few of those
+which I have suffered in your service. The applause
+of my own breast is my surest reward, and was the
+support of my mind in meeting them. Your applause,
+and that of my country, are my next wish in life."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will observe at the end of this
+letter, that this man declares his first applause to be
+from his own breast, and that he next wishes to have
+the applause of his employers. But reversing this,
+and taking their applause first, let us see on what
+does he ground his hope of their applause? Was it
+on his former conduct? No: for he says that conduct
+had repeatedly met with their disapprobation.
+Was it upon the confidence which he knew they had
+in him? No: for he says they gave more of their
+confidence to the meanest of his predecessors. Observe,
+my Lords, the style of insolence he constantly
+uses with regard to all mankind. Lord Clive was
+his predecessor, Governor Cartier was his predecessor,
+Governor Verelst was his predecessor: every man of
+them as good as himself: and yet he says the Directors
+had given "more of their confidence to the <i>meanest</i>
+of his predecessors." But what was to entitle
+him to their applause? A clear and full explanation
+of the bribes he had taken. Bribes was to be the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">{361}</a></span>
+foundation of their confidence in him, and the clear
+explanation of them was to entitle him to their applause!
+Strange grounds to build confidence upon!&mdash;the
+rotten ground of corruption, accompanied with
+the infamy of its avowal! Strange ground to expect
+applause!&mdash;a discovery which was no discovery at
+all! Your Lordships have heard this discovery,
+which I have not taken upon me to state, but have
+read his own letter on the occasion. Has there, at
+this moment, any light broken in upon you concerning
+this matter?</p>
+
+<p>But what does he say to the Directors? He says,
+"Upon the whole of these transactions, which to you,
+who are accustomed to view business in an official
+and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not
+improper, I have but a few short remarks to suggest
+to your consideration." He looks upon them and
+treats them as a set of low mechanical men, a set of
+low-born book-keepers, as base souls, who in an account
+call for explanation and precision. If there is
+no precision in accounts, there is nothing of worth
+in them. You see he himself is an eccentric accountant,
+a Pindaric book-keeper, an arithmetician in the
+clouds. "I know," he says, "what the Directors
+desire: but they are mean people; they are not of
+elevated sentiments; they are modest; they avoid
+ostentation in taking of bribes: I therefore am playing
+cups and balls with them, letting them see a little
+glimpse of the bribes, then carrying them fairly
+away." Upon this he founds the applause of his own
+breast.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noindent">That private <i>ipse plaudo</i> he may have in this busi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">{362}</a></span>ness,
+which is a business of money; but the applause
+of no other human creature will he have for giving
+such an account as he admits this to be,&mdash;irregular,
+uncertain, problematical, and of which no one can
+make either head or tail. He despises us also, who
+are representatives of the people, and have amongst
+us all the regular officers of finance, for expecting
+anything like a regular account from him. He is
+hurt at it; he considers it as a cruel treatment of
+him; he says, "Have I deserved this treatment?"
+Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment,
+if treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of
+which he complains. The Court of Directors had,
+however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and pusillanimous,
+begged of him, as if they were his dependants,
+and not his masters, to give them some light into the
+account; they desire a receiver of money to tell from
+whom he received it, and how he applied it. He answers,
+They may be hanged for a parcel of mean,
+contemptible book-keepers, and that he will give them
+no account at all. He says, "If you sue me"&mdash;There
+is the point: he always takes security in a court
+of law. He considers his being called upon by these
+people, to whom he ought as a faithful servant to give
+an account, and to do which he was bound by an act
+of Parliament specially intrusting him with the administration
+of the revenues, as a gross affront. He
+adds, that he is ready to resign his defence, and to
+answer upon honor or upon oath. Answering upon
+honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your
+Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But
+he forgets, that, being the Company's servant, the
+Company may bring a bill in Chancery against him,
+and force him upon oath to give an account. He has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">{363}</a></span>
+not, however, given them light enough or afforded
+them sufficient ground for a fishing bill in Chancery.
+Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a Chancery way,
+or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms,
+and give you some account." In consequence of this
+the Company did demand from him an account, regularly,
+and as fully and formally as if they had demanded
+it in a court of justice. He positively refused
+to give them any account whatever; and they have
+never, to this very day in which we speak, had any
+account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your
+Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of
+fraud, falsification, iniquity, and prevarication, that,
+in defiance of his promise, which promise they quote
+upon him over and over again, he has never given
+them any account of this matter.</p>
+
+<p>He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming)
+that by calling him to account they may provoke
+him&mdash;to what? "To appropriate," he says, "to
+my own use the sums which I have already passed to
+your credit, by the unworthy and, pardon me, if I
+add, dangerous, reflections which you have passed
+upon me for the first communication of this kind."
+They passed no reflections: they said they would
+neither praise nor blame him, but pressed him for
+an account of a matter which they could not understand:
+and I believe your Lordships understand it no
+more than they, for it is not in the compass of human
+understanding to conceive or comprehend it. Instead
+of an account of it, he dares to threaten them: "I
+may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be
+an honest man,&mdash;to falsify your account a second
+time, and to reclaim those sums which I have passed
+to your credit,&mdash;to alter the account again, by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">{364}</a></span>
+assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration
+is this of his dominion over the public accounts,
+and of his power of altering them! a declaration,
+that, having first falsified those accounts in order to
+deceive them, and afterwards having told them of
+this falsification in order to gain credit with them, if
+they provoke him, he shall take back the money he
+had carried to their account, and make them his
+debtors for it! He fairly avows the dominion he has
+over the Company's accounts; and therefore, when he
+shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able
+to rebut that evidence, and say, "The Company's
+accounts are corrupted by you, through your agent,
+Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them, because
+you not only told the Company you could do so, but
+we can prove that you have actually done it." What
+a strange medley of evasion, pretended discovery, real
+concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears in every
+part of this letter!</p>
+
+<p>But admitting this letter to have been written upon
+the 22d of May, and kept back to the 16th of
+December, you would imagine that during all that
+interval of time he would have prepared himself to
+give some light, some illustration of these dark and
+mysterious transactions, which carried fraud upon
+the very face of them. Did he do so? Not at all.
+Upon the 16th of December, instead of giving them
+some such clear accounts as might have been expected,
+he falls into a violent passion for their expecting
+them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he
+tells them they knew who had profited by these
+transactions: thus, in order to strike terror into
+their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had
+practised or protected. What weight this may have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">{365}</a></span>
+had with them I know not; but your Lordships will
+expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after giving four
+accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three
+must necessarily be false,&mdash;after having thrown the
+Company's accounts into confusion, and being unable
+to tell, as he says himself, why he did so,&mdash;will
+at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who
+continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints
+that he ought to do it.&mdash;You have heard nothing yet
+but the consequences of their refusing to give him the
+present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had
+taken from the Nabob. They did right to refuse it to
+him; they did wrong to take it to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges,
+in September, 1784,&mdash;that Ganges whose purifying
+water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and
+which, one would think, would have washed Mr.
+Hastings's hands a little clean of bribery, and would
+have rolled down its golden sands like another Pactolus.
+Here we find him discovering another of his
+bribes. This was a bribe taken upon totally a different
+principle, according to his own avowal: it is a
+bribe not pretended to be received for the use of the
+Company,&mdash;a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself.
+He tells them that he had taken between thirty
+and forty thousand pounds. This bribe, which, like
+the former, he had taken without right, he tells them
+that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he
+insists upon their sanction for so doing. He says,
+he had in vain, upon a former occasion, appealed to
+their honor, liberality, and generosity,&mdash;that he now
+appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing
+this bribe&mdash;which he had taken without telling
+them from whom, where, or on what account&mdash;to
+his own use.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">{366}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which
+he wrote from Patna, on the 20th of January, 1782,
+he there states that he was in tolerable good circumstances,
+and that this had arisen from his having
+continued long in their service. Now, he has continued
+two years longer in their service, and he is
+reduced to beggary! "This," he says, "is a single
+example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores
+for your benefit, and doomed in its close to suffer the
+extremity of private want, and to sink in obscurity."</p>
+
+<p>So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could
+save an exceeding good fortune out of his place. In
+1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has made a
+decent private competency; but in two years after
+he sunk to the extremity of private want. And how
+does he seek to relieve that want? By taking a
+bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the
+Company's service, but for his own. He takes the
+bribe with an express intention of keeping it for his
+own use, and he calls upon the Company for their
+sanction. If the money was taken without right,
+no claim of his could justify its being appropriated
+to himself: nor could the Company so appropriate
+it; for no man has a right to be generous out of
+another's goods. When he calls upon their justice
+and generosity, they might answer, "If you have a
+just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we will
+pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state
+your merits, and we will consider them." "But I
+have paid myself by a bribe; I have taken another
+man's money; and I call upon your justice&mdash;to do
+what? to restore it to its owner? no&mdash;to allow
+me to keep it myself." Think, my Lords, in what
+a situation the Company stands! "I have done a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">{367}</a></span>
+great deal for you; this is the jackal's portion; you
+have been the lion; I have been endeavoring to prog
+for you; I am your bribe-pander, your factor of
+corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn
+and ignominy, to insults even from you. I have
+been preying and plundering for you; I have gone
+through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness,
+wading through every species of dirt and corruption,
+for your advantage. I am now sinking into the
+extremity of private want; do give me this&mdash;what?
+money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me
+this bribe; vote me&mdash;what? money of your own?
+that would be generous: money you owe me? that
+would be just: no, money which I have extorted
+from another man; and I call upon your justice to
+give it me." This is his idea of justice. He says,
+"I am compelled to depart from that liberal plan
+which I originally adopted, and to claim from your
+justice (for you have forbid me to appeal to your
+generosity) the discharge of a debt which I can with
+the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due,
+and which I cannot sustain." Now, if any of the
+Company's servants may say, "I have been extravagant,
+profuse,&mdash;it was all meant for your good,&mdash;let
+me prey upon the country at my pleasure,&mdash;license
+my bribes, frauds, and peculations, and then
+you do me justice,"&mdash;what country are we in, where
+these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?</p>
+
+<p>It might naturally be expected that in this letter
+he would have given some account of the person from
+whom he had taken this bribe. But here, as in the
+other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the
+Ganges, like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw
+in Mr. Middleton; they recollect nothing, they know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">{368}</a></span>
+nothing. He has not stated, from that day to this,
+from whom he took that money. But we have made
+the discovery. And such is the use of Parliamentary
+inquiries, such, too, both to the present age and posterity,
+will be their use, that, if we pursue them with
+the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon
+us demands, and if your Lordships do firmly administer
+justice upon this man's frauds, you will at once
+put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever.
+Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry,
+it is the diligence of the House of Commons, which
+he has the audacity to call <i>malice</i>, that has discovered
+and brought to light the frauds which we shall be
+able to prove against him.</p>
+
+<p>I will now read to your Lordships an extract from
+that stuff, called a defence, which he has either written
+himself or somebody else has written for him, and
+which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases, when,
+under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment,
+he discovered at length from whom he got this
+last bribe.</p>
+
+<p>"The last part of the charge states, that, in my
+letter to the Court of Directors of the 21st February,
+1784, I have confessed to have received another
+sum of money, the amount of which is not declared,
+but which, from the application of it, could not be
+less than thirty-four thousand pounds sterling, &amp;c.
+In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a
+sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the
+Company not having at that time sufficient cash in
+their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed three lacs
+of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta,
+whom I desired to call upon me with a bond
+properly filled up. He did so; but at the time I was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">{369}</a></span>
+going to execute it he entreated I would rather accept
+the money than execute the bond. I neither
+accepted the offer nor refused it; and my determination
+upon it remained suspended between the alternative
+of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid,
+and of taking it, and applying it, as I had done
+other sums, to the Company's use. And there the
+matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow,
+when I determined to accept the money for the
+Company's use; and these were my motives. Having
+made disbursements from my own cash for services,
+which, though required to enable me to execute
+the duties of my station, I had hitherto omitted to enter
+into my public accounts, I resolved to reimburse
+myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the
+Company's affairs, by charging these disbursements
+in my durbar accounts of the present year, and crediting
+them by a sum privately received, which was
+this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company
+were not founded in justice, and <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> due, my
+acceptance of three lacs of rupees from Nobkissin
+by no means precludes them from recovering that
+sum from me. No member of this Honorable House
+suspects me, I hope, of the meanness and guilt of
+presenting false accounts."</p>
+
+<p>We do not <i>suspect</i> him of presenting false accounts:
+we can prove, we are now radically proving,
+that he presents false accounts. We suspect no
+man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse
+no man who has not given ground for accusation;
+and we do not attempt to bring before a court
+of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively
+to prove. This will put an end to all idle
+prattle of malice, of groundless suspicions of guilt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">{370}</a></span>
+and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring
+the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to
+the test, between the Commons of Great Britain and
+this East India delinquent. In his letter of the 21st
+of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited
+himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse
+for taking this bribe from Nobkissin, which he did
+not discover at the time, but many years afterwards,
+at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that
+he wanted to apply it to the contingent account for
+his expenses, that is, for what he pretended to have
+laid out for the Company, during a great number of
+years. He proceeds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If it should be objected, that the allowance of
+these demands would furnish a precedent for others
+of the like kind, I have to remark, that in their whole
+amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent
+account of twelve years; and if it were to become the
+practice of those who have passed their prime of life
+in your service, and filled, as I have filled it, the first
+office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts
+all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy
+or indifference hath overlooked, your interests
+would suffer infinitely less by the precedent than by
+a single example of a life spent in the accumulation
+of crores for your benefit and doomed in its close to
+suffer the extremity of private want and to sink in
+obscurity."</p>
+
+<p>Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the
+House of Commons that he never made up any contingent
+accounts; and yet, as a set-off against this
+bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended
+to apply to the current use of the Company,
+he feigns and invents a claim upon them, namely,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">{371}</a></span>
+that he had, without any authority of the Company,
+squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and
+other idle services, a sum amounting to 34,000<i>l.</i>
+But was it for the Company's service? Is this language
+to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit
+to expend I have expended for the Company's service.
+I intended, indeed, at that time, to have been
+generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have
+paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I
+was then in the prime of my life, flowing in money,
+and had great expectations: I am now old; I cannot
+afford to be generous: I will look back into all my
+former accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I
+generously or prodigally spent as my own humor
+might suggest; and though, at the same time, I
+know you have given me a noble allowance, I now
+make a charge upon you for this sum of money, and
+intend to take a bribe in discharge of it." Now suppose
+Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope
+will long, and honorably and worthily, fill the seat,
+which that gentleman possessed,&mdash;suppose Lord
+Cornwallis, after never having complained of the
+insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two
+years ago said he had saved a sufficient competency
+out of it, should now tell you that 30,00<i>l.</i> a year
+was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into
+want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged
+want taking a bribe, and then make out a bill
+of contingent expenses to cover it, would your Lordships
+bear this?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow
+money for his own use, and that he applied to
+Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it upon
+him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">{372}</a></span>
+will be astonished to hear of generosity in a banian;
+there never was a banian and generosity united together:
+but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at
+once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings's face
+beams upon him. "Here," says Mr. Hastings, "I
+have prepared bonds for you." "Astonishing! how
+can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call
+upon me to lend you 34,000<i>l.</i>, and propose bonds?
+No, you shall have it: you are the Governor-General,
+who have a large and ample salary; but I know
+you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity:
+I give you all this money." Nobkissin was
+quite shocked at Mr. Hastings's offering him a bond.
+My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower,
+a little more penurious, a little more exacting, a little
+more cunning, a little more money-making, than
+a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner of
+Duke's Place in London that is so crafty, so much a
+usurer, so skilful how to turn money to profit, and so
+resolved not to give any money but for profit, as a
+Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned. But this
+man, however, at once grows generous, and will not
+suffer a bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings,
+accordingly, is thrown into very great distress. You
+see sentiment always prevailing in Mr. Hastings.
+The sentimental dialogue which must have passed
+between him and a Gentoo broker would have
+charmed every one that has a taste for pathos and
+sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the
+money as a gift. He really does not know what to
+do: whether to insist upon giving a bond or not,&mdash;whether
+he shall take the money for his own use, or
+whether he shall take it for the Company's use. But
+it may be said of man as it is said of woman: the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">{373}</a></span>
+woman who deliberates is lost: the man that deliberates
+about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he
+deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is
+lost, the walls shake, down it comes,&mdash;and at the
+same moment enters Nobkissin into the citadel of his
+honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums
+beating, and Mr. Hastings's garrison goes out, very
+handsomely indeed, with the honors of war, all for the
+benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings consents to
+take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the
+money, and is perfectly satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it
+to the Company's service. How? To pay his own
+contingent bills. "Everything that I do," says he,
+"and all the money I squander, is all for the Company's
+benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look
+into them; they are given you upon honor. Let me
+take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be just or
+generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it." But
+in every transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have
+got a name, there we have got a crime. Nobkissin
+gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I
+believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately
+afterwards enters upon the stewardship or management
+of one of the most considerable districts in Bengal.
+We know very well, and shall prove to your
+Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts,
+and exact from the inhabitants the money to
+repay themselves for the bribes which had been taken
+from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence
+of the Company's service, but sooner or later they fall
+upon the Company's treasury. And we shall prove
+that Nobkissin, within a year from the time when he
+gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Compa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">{374}</a></span>ny,
+as their steward, to the amount of a sum the very
+interest of which, according to the rate of interest in
+that country, amounted to more than this bribe, taken,
+as was pretended, for the Company's service. Such
+are the consequences of a banian's generosity, and of
+Mr. Hastings's gratitude, so far as the interest of the
+country is concerned; and this is a good way to pay
+Mr. Hastings's contingent accounts. But this is not
+all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country
+to take the management of it, and the fortunes of
+all the great families in it are given entirely into his
+power. This is the way by which the Company are to
+keep their own servants from falling into "the extremity
+of private want." And the Company itself,
+in this pretended saving to their treasury by the taking
+of bribes, lose more than the amount of the bribes
+received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand,
+there is a balance accruing on the other. No man,
+who had any share in the management of the Company's
+revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not either
+extort the full amount of it from the country, or else
+fall in balance to the Company to that amount, and
+frequently both. In short, Mr. Hastings never was
+guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did not
+follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for
+their benefit, but the Company's treasury was proportionably
+exhausted by it.</p>
+
+<p>And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic
+in bribes brought to light by the Court of Directors?
+No: we got it in the House of Commons. These
+bribes appear to have been taken at various times and
+upon various occasions; and it was not till his return
+from Patna, in February, 1782, that the first communication
+of any of them was made to the Court of Di<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">{375}</a></span>rectors.
+Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of
+Directors wrote back to him, requiring some further
+explanation upon the subject. No explanation was
+given, but a communication of other bribes was made
+in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year,
+but not dispatched to Europe till the December following.
+This produced another requisition from the
+Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships
+are to observe that this correspondence is never in the
+way of letters written and answers given; but he and
+the Directors are perpetually playing at hide-and-seek
+with each other, and writing to each other at random:
+Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the
+Directors requiring an explanation the next; Mr.
+Hastings giving an account of another bribe on the
+third day, without giving any explanation of the former.
+Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their
+chase. But it was not till they learned that the committees
+of the House of Commons (for committees of
+the House of Commons had then some weight) were
+frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings,
+that at last some honest men in the Direction
+were permitted to have some ascendency, and that a
+proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your
+Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact
+account of all the bribes that he had received, and
+painting to him, in colors as strong at least as those
+I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations,&mdash;and
+what does them great honor for that moment, they
+particularly direct that the money which was taken
+from the Nabob of Oude should be carried to his account.
+These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee
+of Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved
+by the Court of Directors, but never were sent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">{376}</a></span>
+out to India. However, something was sent, but
+miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings
+never answered it, or gave them any explanation
+whatever. He now, being prepared for his departure
+from Calcutta, and having finished all his other business,
+went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now
+we cannot follow him. He returned in great disgust
+to Calcutta, and soon after set sail for England, without
+ever giving the Directors one word of the explanation
+which he had so often promised, and they had
+repeatedly asked.</p>
+
+<p>We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where
+you will suppose some satisfactory account of all
+these matters would be obtained from him. One
+would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he
+would have been a little quickened by a menace, as
+he expresses it, which had been thrown out against
+him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would
+be made into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive
+of the same thing, thought it good gently
+to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom and
+how we do not know, that he ought to give some explanation
+of these accounts. This produced a letter
+which I believe in the business of the whole world
+cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his
+parallel in this. Never did inventive folly, working
+upon conscious guilt, and throwing each other totally
+in confusion, ever produce such a false, fraudulent,
+prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given
+to you.</p>
+
+<p>You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the
+country, on the Ganges: now you see him at the
+waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his letter
+from that place to comprehend the substance of all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">{377}</a></span>
+his former letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity,
+fraud, and nonsense contained in the whole of them.
+Here it is, and your Lordships will suffer it to be read.
+I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that
+it has been the most difficult of all things to explain,
+but much more difficult to make pleasant and
+not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued through all
+its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most
+painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication,
+so there is nothing that more calls for the attention,
+the patience, the vigilance, and the scrutiny
+of an exact court of justice. But as you have already
+had almost the whole of the man, do not think
+it too much to hear the rest in this letter from Cheltenham.
+It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of July,
+1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire;<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor" title=" See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth
+Charges, Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.">[8]</a> and
+it begins thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Sir,&mdash;The Honorable Court of Directors, in their
+general letter to Bengal by the 'Surprise,' dated the
+16th of March, 1784, were pleased to express their
+desire that I should inform them of the periods when
+each sum of the presents mentioned in my address
+of the 22d May, 1782, was received,&mdash;what were
+my motives for withholding the several receipts from
+the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of
+Directors,&mdash;and what were my reasons for taking
+bonds for part of these sums, and for paying other
+sums into the treasury as deposits, on my own account."</p>
+
+<p>I wish your Lordships to pause a moment. Here
+is a letter written in July, 1785. You see that from
+the 29th of December [November?], 1780, till that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">{378}</a></span>
+time, during which interval, though convinced in his
+own conscience and though he had declared his own
+opinion of the necessity of giving a full explanation
+of these money transactions, he had been imposing
+upon the Directors false and prevaricating accounts
+of them, they were never able to obtain a full disclosure
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>He goes on:&mdash;"I have been kindly apprised that
+the information required as above is yet expected
+from me. I hope that the circumstances of my past
+situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for
+having thus long withheld it. The fact is, that I
+was not at the Presidency when the 'Surprise' arrived;
+and when I returned to it, my time and attention
+were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my
+final departure from it, by a variety of other more
+important occupations, of which, Sir, I may safely
+appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion
+contributed by myself of the volumes which
+compose our Consultations of that period,"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>These Consultations, my Lords, to which he appeals,
+form matter of one of the charges that the
+Commons have brought against Mr. Hastings,&mdash;namely,
+a fraudulent attempt to ruin certain persons
+employed in subordinate situations under him, for
+the purpose, by intruding himself into their place,
+of secretly carrying on his own transactions. These
+volumes of Consultations were written to justify that
+act.</p>
+
+<p>He next says,&mdash;"The submission which my respect
+would have enjoined me to pay to the command
+imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps
+from the stronger impression which the first and
+distant perusal of it had left on my mind, that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">{379}</a></span>
+was rather intended as a reprehension for something
+which had given offence in my report of the original
+transaction than an expression of any want of a further
+elucidation of it."</p>
+
+<p>Permit me to make a few remarks upon this extraordinary
+passage. A letter is written to him, containing
+a repetition of the request which had been
+made a thousand times before, and with which he
+had as often promised to comply. And here he says,
+"It was lost to my recollection." Observe his memory:
+he can forget the command, but he has an
+obscure recollection that he thought it a reprehension
+rather than a demand! Now a reprehension
+is a stronger mode of demand. When I say to a
+servant, "Why have you not given me the account
+which I have so often asked for?" is he to answer,
+"The reason I have not given it is because I thought
+you were railing at and abusing me"?</p>
+
+<p>He goes on:&mdash;"I will now endeavor to reply to the
+different questions which have been stated to me, in
+as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information
+as I can give the Honorable Court is fully
+entitled; and where that shall prove defective, I will
+point out the only means by which it may be rendered
+more complete."</p>
+
+<p>In order that your Lordships may thoroughly enter
+into the spirit of this letter, I must request that
+you will observe how handsomely and kindly these
+tools of Directors have expressed themselves to him,
+and that even their baseness and subserviency to him
+were not able to draw from him anything that could
+be satisfactory to his enemies: for as to these his
+friends, he cares but little about satisfying them,
+though they call upon him in consequence of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">{380}</a></span>
+own promise; and this he calls a reprehension. They
+thus express themselves:&mdash;"Although it is not our
+intention to express any doubt of the integrity of the
+Governor-General,&mdash;on the contrary, after having
+received the presents, we cannot avoid expressing
+our approbation of his conduct in bringing them to
+the credit of the Company,&mdash;yet we must confess
+the statement of those transactions appears to us in
+many points so unintelligible, that we feel ourselves
+under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General
+for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily
+made to us. We therefore desire to be informed
+of the different periods when each sum was
+received, and what were the Governor-General's motives
+for withholding the several receipts from the
+knowledge of the Council and of the Court of Directors,
+and what were his reasons for taking bonds for
+part of these sums and paying other sums into the
+treasury as deposits upon his own account." Such
+is their demand, and this is what his memory furnishes
+as nothing but a reprehension.</p>
+
+<p>He then proceeds:&mdash;"First, I believe I can affirm
+with certainty that the several sums mentioned in the
+account transmitted with my letter above mentioned
+were received at or within a very few days of the
+dates which are affixed to them in the account. But
+as this contains only the gross sums, and each of
+these was received in different payments, though at
+no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign
+a great degree of accuracy to the account."&mdash;Your
+Lordships see, that, after all, he declares he cannot
+make his account accurate. He further adds, "Perhaps
+the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient"&mdash;that
+is, this explanation, namely, that he can give<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">{381}</a></span>
+none&mdash;"for any purpose to which their inquiry was
+directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave
+to refer, for a more minute information, and for the
+means of making any investigation which they may
+think it proper to direct, respecting the particulars
+of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your accountant-general,
+who was privy to every process of it, and
+possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained
+the only account that I ever kept of it."</p>
+
+<p>Here is a man who of his bribe accounts cannot
+give an account in the country where they are carried
+on. When you call upon him in Bengal, he
+cannot give the account, because he is in Bengal;
+when he comes to England, he cannot give the account
+here, because his accounts are left in Bengal.
+Again, he keeps no accounts himself, but his accounts
+are in Bengal, in the hands of somebody
+else: to him he refers, and we shall see what that
+reference produced.</p>
+
+<p>"In this, each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically
+inserted, with the name of the person by whom
+it was made; and I shall write to him to desire that
+he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still
+in being and in his hands, or with whatever he can
+distinctly recollect concerning it."&mdash;Here are accounts
+kept for the Company, and yet he does not
+know whether they are in existence anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;namely, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">{382}</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in
+the banian language, a <i>painche</i>, in English, a <i>screw</i>.
+It is a puzzled and studied involution of a period,
+framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and
+the detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better
+exemplified than in this sentence: "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." Observe, that he says, not <i>facts stated</i>,
+but <i>facts implied in the report</i>. And of what was
+this to be a report? Of things which the Directors
+declared they did not understand. And then the inferences
+which are to follow these implied facts are
+to follow them&mdash;But how? <i>With a strong probability</i>.
+If you have a mind to study this Oriental
+figure of rhetoric, the <i>painche</i>, here it is for you in
+its most complete perfection. No rhetorician ever
+gave an example of any figure of oratory that can
+match this.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">{383}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage.
+First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had
+forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's
+accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the
+report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such
+inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability
+follow them. And if I understand it at all, which
+God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote
+did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers
+of which he said it made him run mad to attempt
+to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do
+you call upon me for accounts now, three years after
+the time when I could not give you them? I
+cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating
+to them, I do not know whether they exist; and
+if they do, perhaps you may learn something from
+them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr. Larkins
+for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing
+this with his other accounts, you will see what a
+monstrous scheme he has laid of fraud and concealment
+to cover his peculation. He tells them,&mdash;"I
+have said that the three first sums of the account were
+paid into the Company's treasury without passing
+through my hands. The second of these was forced
+into notice by its destination and application to the
+expense of a detachment which was formed and employed
+against Mahdajee Sindia, under the command
+of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised
+the Court of Directors in my letter of the
+29th December [November?], 1780." He does not
+yet tell the Directors from whom he received it: we
+have found it out by other collateral means.&mdash;"The
+other two were certainly not intended, when I received
+them, to be made public, though intended for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">{384}</a></span>
+public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies
+of government were at that time my own,
+and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight
+upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable
+means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized
+them."&mdash;Allowable means of receiving bribes! for
+such I shall prove them to be in the particular instances.&mdash;"But
+neither could it occur to me as necessary
+to state on our Proceedings every little aid
+that I could thus procure; nor do I know how I could
+have stated it without appearing to court favor by
+an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the
+chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by
+the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated
+merit, derived from the influence of my station,
+to which they might have had an equal claim."</p>
+
+<p>Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for
+many years, he does find out his motive, which he
+could not verify at the time,&mdash;namely, that, if he let
+his colleagues know that he was receiving bribes, and
+gaining the glory of receiving them, they might take
+it into their heads likewise to have their share in the
+same glory, as they were joined in the same commission,
+enjoyed the same powers, and were subject to
+the same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous
+in Mr. Hastings, not behaving like a good, fair colleague
+in office, not to let them know that he was
+going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive
+them of their share in the glory of it: but they
+were grovelling creatures, who thought that keeping
+clean hands was some virtue.&mdash;"Well, but you have
+applied some of these bribes to your own benefit:
+why did you give no account of those bribes?" "I
+did not," he says, "because it might have excited the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">{385}</a></span>
+envy of my colleagues." To be sure, if he was receiving
+bribes for his own benefit, and they not receiving
+such bribes, and if they had a liking to that
+kind of traffic, it is a good ground of envy, that a
+matter which ought to be in common among them
+should be confined to Mr. Hastings, and he therefore
+did well to conceal it; and on the other hand, if we
+suppose him to have taken them, as he pretends, for
+the Company's use, in order not to excite a jealousy
+in his colleagues for being left out of this meritorious
+service, to which they had an equal claim, he did
+well to take bonds for what ought to be brought to
+the Company's account. These are reasons applicable
+to his colleagues, who sat with him at the same
+board,&mdash;Mr. Macpherson, Mr. Stables, Mr. Wheler,
+General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis:
+he was afraid of exciting their envy or their jealousy.</p>
+
+<p>You will next see another reason, and an extraordinary
+one it is, which he gives for concealing these
+bribes from his inferiors. But I must first tell your
+Lordships, what, till the proof is brought before you,
+you will take on credit,&mdash;indeed, it is on his credit,&mdash;that,
+when he formed the Committee of Revenue,
+he bound them by a solemn oath, "not, under any
+name or pretence whatever, to take from any zemindar,
+farmer, person concerned in the revenue, or any
+other, any gift, gratuity, allowance, or reward whatever,
+or anything beyond their salary"; and this is
+the oath to which he alludes. Now his reason for
+concealing his bribes from his inferiors, this Committee,
+under these false and fraudulent bonds, he
+states thus:&mdash;"I should have deemed it particularly
+dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered
+by men of a certain class, from whom I had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">{386}</a></span>
+interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors,
+and bound them by oath not to receive them: I was
+therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the
+suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to
+light upon me, had I suffered the money to be
+brought to my own house, or that of any person
+known to be in trust for me."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that
+he knew the practice of taking money from these people
+was a thing dishonorable in itself. "I should
+have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive
+for my own use money tendered by men of a certain
+class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of
+presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not
+to receive them." He held it particularly dishonorable
+to receive them; he had bound others by an oath
+not to receive them: but he received them himself;
+and why does he conceal it? "Why, because," says
+he, "if the suspicion came upon me, the dishonor
+would fall upon my pate." Why did he, by an oath,
+bind his inferiors not to take these bribes? "Why,
+because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and
+because it would be mischievous and ruinous to the
+Company's affairs to suffer them to take bribes."
+Why, then, did he take them himself? It was ten
+times more ruinous, that he, who was at the head of
+the Company's government, and had bound up others
+so strictly, should practise the same himself; and
+"therefore," says he, "I was more than ordinarily
+cautious." What! to avoid it? "No; to carry it
+on in so clandestine and private a manner as might
+secure me from the suspicion of that which I know
+to be detestable, and bound others up from practising."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">{387}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We shall prove that the kind of men from whom
+he interdicted his Committee to receive bribes were
+the identical men from whom he received them himself.
+If it was good for him, it was good for them
+to be permitted these means of extorting; and if it
+ought at all to be practised, they ought to be admitted
+to extort for the good of the Company. Rajah
+Nobkissin was one of the men from whom he interdicted
+them to receive bribes, and from whom he received
+a bribe for his own use. But he says he concealed
+it from them, because he thought great mischief
+might happen even from their suspicion of it,
+and lest they should thereby be inclined themselves
+to practise it, and to break their oaths.</p>
+
+<p>You take it, then, for granted that he really concealed
+it from them? No such thing. His principal
+confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr. Croftes,
+who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue,
+and whom he had made to swear not to take bribes:
+he is the confidant, and the very receiver, as we shall
+prove to your Lordships. What will your Lordships
+think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood,
+that he did it to conceal it from these men,
+when one of them was his principal confidant and
+agent in the transaction? What will you think of
+his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the
+suspicion of it? He ought to have avoided the
+crime, and the suspicion would take care of itself.</p>
+
+<p>"For these reasons," he says, "I caused it to be
+transported immediately to the treasury. There I
+well knew, Sir, it could not be received, without
+being passed to some credit; and this could only be
+done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The
+first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">{388}</a></span>
+I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second
+sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant.
+Possibly it was done without any special direction
+from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode
+of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction
+itself did not require concealment, having been already
+avowed."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false
+or groundless: it is completely fallacious in every
+part. The first sum, he says, was entered as a loan,
+the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because,
+when you enter moneys of this kind, you must
+enter them under some name, some head of account;
+"and I entered them," he says, "under these, because
+otherwise there was no entering them at all."
+Is this true? Will he stick to this? I shall desire to
+know from his learned counsel, some time or other,
+whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your
+Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which
+he brought under a regular official head, namely,
+<i>durbar charges</i>; and there is no reason why he should
+not have brought these under the same head. Therefore
+what he says, that there is no other way of entering
+them but as loans and deposits, is not true.
+He next says, that in the second sum there was no
+reason for concealment, because it was avowed.
+But that false deposit was as much concealment as
+the false loan, for he entered that money as his
+own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any
+money to the Company's account, he knew how to
+do it, for he had been accustomed to enter it under
+a general name, called durbar charges,&mdash;a name
+which, in its extent at least, was very much his
+own invention, and which, as he gives no account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">{389}</a></span>
+of those charges, is as large and sufficient to cover
+any fraudulent expenditure in the account as, one
+would think, any person could wish. You see him,
+then, first guessing one thing, then another,&mdash;first
+giving this reason, then another; at last, however,
+he seems to be satisfied that he has hit upon the
+true reason of his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us open the next paragraph, and see what
+it is.&mdash;"Although I am firmly persuaded that these
+were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm
+that they were. Though I feel their impression
+as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on
+my memory, I am not certain that they may not
+have been produced by subsequent reflection on the
+principal fact, combining with it the probable motives
+of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my
+design originally to have concealed the receipt of all
+the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge
+of the Court of Directors. They had answered
+my purpose of public utility, and I had almost dismissed
+them from my remembrance."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing
+account which he gives here, that several of these
+sums he meant to conceal forever, even from the
+knowledge of the Directors. Look back to his letter
+of 22d May, 1782, and his letter of the 16th of
+December, and in them he tells you that he might
+have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to
+conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable
+so to do; that his conscience would have been
+wounded, if he had done it; and that he was afraid
+it would be thought that this discovery was brought
+from him in consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries.
+Here he says of a discovery which he values<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">{390}</a></span>
+himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it
+should be attributed to arise from motives of fear.
+Now, at last, he tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time
+when he had just cause to dread the strict account to
+which he is called this day, first, that he cannot tell
+whether any one motive which he assigns, either in
+this letter or in the former, were his real motive or
+not; that he does not know whether he has not invented
+them since, in consequence of a train of meditation
+upon what he might have done or might
+have said; and, lastly, he says, contrary to all his
+former declarations, "that he had never meant nor
+could give the Directors the least notice of them at
+all, as they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed
+them from his remembrance." "I intended,"
+he says, "always to keep them secret, though I
+have declared to you solemnly, over and over again,
+that I did not. I do not care how you discovered
+them; I have forgotten them; I have dismissed them
+from my remembrance." Is this the way in which
+money is to be received and accounted for?</p>
+
+<p>He then proceeds thus:&mdash;"But when fortune threw
+a sum of money in my way of a magnitude which
+could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of
+my situation at the time I received it made me more
+circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprise my
+employers of it, which I did hastily and generally:
+hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity
+of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew
+not the exact amount of which I was in the receipt,
+but not in the full possession. I promised to acquaint
+them with the result as soon as I should be
+in possession of it; and, in the performance of my
+promise, I thought it consistent with it to add to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">{391}</a></span>
+the amount all the former appropriations of the same
+kind: my good genius then suggesting to me, with
+a spirit of caution which might have spared me the
+trouble of this apology, had I universally attended
+to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were
+afterwards known, I might be asked what were my
+motives for withholding a part of these receipts from
+the knowledge of the Court of Directors and informing
+them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up
+every doubt."</p>
+
+<p>I am almost ashamed to remark upon the tergiversations
+and prevarications perpetually ringing the
+changes in this declaration. He would not have discovered
+this hundred thousand pounds, if he could
+have concealed it: he would have discovered it, lest
+malicious persons should be telling tales of it. He
+has a system of concealment: he never discovers
+anything, but when he thinks it can be forced from
+him. He says, indeed, "I could conceal these things
+forever, but my conscience would not give me leave":
+but it is guilt, and not honesty of conscience, that
+always prompts him. At one time it is the malice
+of people and the fear of misrepresentation which induced
+him to make the disclosure; and he values
+himself on the precaution which this fear had suggested
+to him. At another time it is the magnitude
+of the sum which produced this effect: nothing but
+the impossibility of concealing it could possibly have
+made him discover it. This hundred thousand pounds
+he declares he would have concealed, if he could; and
+yet he values himself upon the discovery of it. Oh,
+my Lords, I am afraid that sums of much greater magnitude
+have not been discovered at all! Your Lordships
+now see some of the artifices of this letter. You<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">{392}</a></span>
+see the variety of styles he adopts, and how he turns
+himself into every shape and every form. But, after
+all, do you find any clear discovery? do you find any
+satisfactory answer to the Directors' letter? does he
+once tell you from whom he received the money? does
+he tell you for what he received it, what the circumstances
+of the persons giving it were, or any explanation
+whatever of his mode of accounting for it?
+No: and here, at last, after so many years' litigation,
+he is called to account for his prevaricating, false accounts
+in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.</p>
+
+<p>His explanation of his conduct relative to the bonds
+now only remains for your Lordships' consideration.
+Before he left Calcutta, in July, 1784 [1781?], he
+says, when he was going upon a service which he
+thought a service of danger, he indorsed the false
+bonds which he had taken from the Company, declaring
+them to be none of his. You will observe
+that these bonds had been in his hands from the 9th
+or 15th of January (I am not quite sure of the exact
+date) to the day when he went upon this service, some
+time in the month of July, 1784 [1781?]. This service
+he had formerly declared he did not apprehend
+to be a service of danger; but he found it to be so
+after: it was in anticipation of that danger that he
+made this attestation and certificate upon the bonds.
+But who ever saw them? Mr. Larkins saw them, says
+he: "I gave them Mr. Larkins." We will show you
+hereafter that Mr. Larkins deserves no credit in this
+business,&mdash;that honor binds him not to discover the
+secrets of Mr. Hastings. But why did he not deliver
+them up entirely, when he was going upon that
+service? for all pretence of concealment in the business
+was now at an end, as we shall prove. Why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">{393}</a></span>
+did he not cancel these bonds? Why keep them at
+all? Why not enter truly the state of the account
+in the Company's records? "But I indorsed them,"
+he says. "Did you deliver them so indorsed into
+the treasury?" "No, I delivered them indorsed into
+the hands of my bribe-broker and agent." "But
+why not destroy them, or give them up to the Company,
+and say you were paid, which would have been
+the only truth in this transaction? Why did you
+not indorse them before? Why not, during the long
+period of so many years, cancel them?" No, he
+kept them to the very day when he was going from
+Calcutta, and had made a declaration that they were
+not his. Never before, upon any account, had they
+appeared; and though the Committee of the House
+of Commons, in the Eleventh Report, had remarked
+upon all these scandalous proceedings and prevarications,
+yet he was not stimulated, even then, to give
+up these bonds. He held them in his hands till the
+time when he was preparing for his departure from
+Calcutta, in spite of the Directors, in spite of the
+Parliament, in spite of the cries of his own conscience,
+in a matter which was now grown public,
+and would knock doubly upon his reputation and
+conduct. He then declares they are not for his own
+use, but for the Company's service. But were they
+then cancelled? I do not find a trace of their being
+cancelled. In this letter of the 17th of January,
+1785, he says with regard to these bonds, "The following
+sums were paid into the treasury, and bonds
+granted for the same in the name of the Governor-General,
+in whose possession the bonds remain, with
+a declaration upon each, indorsed and signed by him,
+that he has no claim on the Company for the amount<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">{394}</a></span>
+either of principal or interest, no part of the latter
+having been received."</p>
+
+<p>To the account of the 22d of May, of the indorsement,
+is added the declaration upon oath. But why
+any man need to declare upon oath that the money
+which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from
+another person is not his is the most extraordinary
+thing in the world. If he had a mind to have it
+placed to his credit as his own, then an oath would
+be necessary; but in this case any one would believe
+him upon his word. He comes, however, and says,
+"This is indorsed upon oath." Oath! before what
+magistrate? In whose possession were the bonds?
+Were they given up? There is no trace of that upon
+the record, and it stands for him to prove that they
+were ever given up, and in any hands but Mr. Larkins's
+and his own. So here are the bonds, begun in
+obscurity and ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust
+to dust, corruption to corruption, and fraud to fraud.
+This is all we see of these bonds, till Mr. Larkins, to
+whom he writes some letter concerning them which
+does not appear, is called to read a funeral sermon
+over them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Lords, I am come now near the period of this
+class of Mr. Hastings's bribes. I am a little exhausted.
+There are many circumstances that might
+make me wish not to delay this business by taking
+up another day at your Lordships' bar, in order to
+go through this long, intricate scene of corruption.
+But my strength now fails me. I hope within a very
+short time, to-morrow or the next court-day, to finish
+it, and to go directly into evidence, as I long much to
+do, to substantiate the charge; but it was necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">{395}</a></span>
+that the evidence should be explained. You have
+heard as much of the drama as I could go through:
+bear with my weakness a little: Mr. Larkins's letter
+will be the epilogue to it. I have already incurred
+the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by
+bringing home to him the proof of his crimes, and to
+display them in all their force and turpitude. It is
+my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to
+my heart.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth
+Charges, Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.</p></div>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">{396}</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="FOURTH_DAY_THURSDAY_MAY_7_1789" id="FOURTH_DAY_THURSDAY_MAY_7_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;When I had the honor last to
+address you from this place, I endeavored to
+press this position upon your minds, and to fortify it
+by the example of the proceedings of Mr. Hastings,&mdash;that
+obscurity and inaccuracies in a matter of
+account constituted a just presumption of fraud. I
+showed, from his own letters, that his accounts were
+confused and inaccurate. I am ready, my Lords, to
+admit that there are situations in which a minister
+in high office may use concealment: it may be his duty
+to use concealment from the enemies of his masters;
+it may be prudent to use concealment from his
+inferiors in the service. It will always be suspicious
+to use concealment from his colleagues and co&ouml;rdinates
+in office; but when, in a money transaction,
+any man uses concealment with regard to them to
+whom the money belongs, he is guilty of a fraud.
+My Lords, I have shown you that Mr. Hastings kept
+no account, by his own confession, of the moneys that
+he had privately taken, as he pretends, for the Company's
+service, and we have but too much reason to
+presume for his own. We have shown you, my
+Lords, that he has not only no accounts, but no
+memory; we have shown that he does not even un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">{397}</a></span>derstand
+his own motives; that, when called upon to
+recollect them, he begs to guess at them; and that as
+his memory is to be supplied by his guess, so he has
+no confidence in his guesses. He at first finds, after
+a lapse of about a year and a half, or somewhat less,
+that he cannot recollect what his motives were to
+certain actions which upon the very face of them appeared
+fraudulent. He is called to an account some
+years after, to explain what they were, and he makes
+a just reflection upon it,&mdash;namely, that, as his memory
+did not enable him to find out his own motive at
+the former time, it is not to be expected that it would
+be clearer a year after. Your Lordships will, however,
+recollect, that in the Cheltenham letter, which
+is made of no perishable stuff, he begins again to
+guess; but after he has guessed and guessed again,
+and after he has gone through all the motives he can
+possibly assign for the action, he tells you he does
+not know whether those were his real motives, or
+whether he has not invented them since.</p>
+
+<p>In that situation the accounts of the Company were
+left with regard to very great sums which passed
+through Mr. Hastings's hands, and for which he, instead
+of giving his masters credit, took credit to himself,
+and, being their debtor, as he confesses himself
+to be at that time, took a security for that debt as if
+he had been their creditor. This required explanation.
+Explanation he was called upon for, over and
+over again; explanation he did not give, and declared
+he could not give. He was called upon for
+it when in India: he had not leisure to attend to it
+there. He was called upon for it when in Europe:
+he then says he must send for it to India. With much
+prevarication, and much insolence too, he confesses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">{398}</a></span>
+himself guilty of falsifying the Company's accounts
+by making himself their creditor when he was their
+debtor, and giving false accounts of this false transaction.
+The Court of Directors was slow to believe
+him guilty; Parliament expressed a strong suspicion
+of his guilt, and wished for further information. Mr.
+Hastings about this time began to imagine his conscience
+to be a faithful and true monitor,&mdash;which it
+were well he had attended to upon many occasions, as
+it would have saved him his appearance here,&mdash;and
+it told him that he was in great danger from the Parliamentary
+inquiries that were going on. It was now
+to be expected that he would have been in haste to
+fulfil the promise which he had made in the Patna
+letter of the 20th of January, 1782; and accordingly
+we find that about this time his first agent, Major
+Fairfax, was sent over to Europe, which agent entered
+himself at the India House, and appeared before
+the Committee of the House of Commons, as an
+agent expressly sent over to explain whatever might
+appear doubtful in his conduct. Major Fairfax, notwithstanding
+the character in which Mr. Hastings
+employed him, appeared to be but a letter-carrier:
+he had nothing to say: he gave them no information
+in the India House at all: to the Committee (I can
+speak with the clearness of a witness) he gave no
+satisfaction whatever. However, this agent vanished
+in a moment, in order to make way for another, more
+substantial, more efficient agent,&mdash;an agent perfectly
+known in this country,&mdash;an agent known by the name
+given to him by Mr. Hastings, who, like the princes
+of the East, gives titles: he calls him an incomparable
+agent; and by that name he is very well known
+to your Lordships and the world. This agent, Major<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">{399}</a></span>
+Scott, who I believe was here prior to the time of
+Major Fairfax's arrival in the character of an agent,
+and for the very same purposes, was called before the
+Committee, and examined, point by point, article by
+article, upon all that obscure enumeration of bribes
+which the Court of Directors declare they did not
+understand; but he declared that he could speak
+nothing with regard to any of these transactions, and
+that he had got no instructions to explain any part
+of them. There was but one circumstance which in
+the course of his examination we drew from him,&mdash;namely,
+that one of these articles, entered in the account
+of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received
+from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing.
+He produced an extract of a letter relative to it, which
+your Lordships in the course of this trial may see, and
+which will lead us into a further and more minute
+inquiry on that head; but when that committee made
+their report in 1783, not one single article had been
+explained to Parliament, not one explained to the
+Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr.
+Hastings had never thought proper to communicate
+to the East India Company, either by himself, nor,
+as far as we could find out, by his agent; nor was
+it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn
+out from him by a long examination in the Committee
+of the House of Commons. And thus, notwithstanding
+the letters he had written and the agents he employed,
+he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to
+give his employers no satisfaction at all. What is
+curious in this proceeding is, that Mr. Hastings, all
+the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the
+credit of a discovery. Your Lordships have seen
+what his discovery is; but Mr. Hastings, among his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">{400}</a></span>
+other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an
+effectual method of concealment through discovery.
+I will venture to say, that, whatever suspicions there
+might have been of Mr. Hastings's bribes, there was
+more effectual concealment in regard to every circumstance
+respecting them in that discovery than if he
+had kept a total silence. Other means of discovery
+might have been found, but this, standing in the way,
+prevented the employment of those means.</p>
+
+<p>Things continued in this state till the time of the
+letter from Cheltenham. The Cheltenham letter declared
+that Mr. Hastings knew nothing of the matter,&mdash;that
+he had brought with him no accounts to
+England upon the subject; and though it appears by
+this very letter that he had with him at Cheltenham
+(if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a great deal
+of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of
+the 22d of May with him, yet any account that could
+elucidate that letter he declared that he had not; but
+he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India, whom your
+Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly
+apprised of all that transaction. Your Lordships will
+observe that Mr. Hastings has all his faculties, some
+way or other, in deposit: one person can speak to his
+motives; another knows his fortune better than himself;
+to others he commits the sentimental parts of
+his defence; to Mr. Larkins he commits his memory.
+We shall see what a trustee of memory Mr. Larkins is,
+and how far he answers the purpose which might be
+expected, when appealed to by a man who has no memory
+himself, or who has left it on the other side of the
+water, and who leaves it to another to explain for him
+accounts which he ought to have kept himself, and
+circumstances which ought to be deposited in his own
+memory.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">{401}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This Cheltenham letter, I believe, originally became
+known, as far as I can recollect, to the House
+of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Hastings's own
+agent: I do not like to be positive upon that point,
+but I think that was the first appearance of it. It
+appeared likewise in public: for it was thought so
+extraordinary and laborious a performance, by the
+writer or his friends, (as indeed it is,) that it might
+serve to open a new source of eloquence in the kingdom,
+and consequently was printed, I believe, at the
+desire of the parties themselves. But however it became
+known, it raised an extreme curiosity in the public
+to hear, when Mr. Hastings could say nothing, after
+so many years, of his own concerns and his own
+affairs, what satisfaction Mr. Larkins at last would
+give concerning them. This letter was directed to
+Mr. Devaynes, Chairman of the Court of Directors.
+It does not appear that the Court of Directors wrote
+anything to India in consequence of it, or that they directed
+this satisfactory account of the business should
+be given them; but some private communications
+passed between Mr. Hastings, or his agents, and Mr.
+Larkins. There was a general expectation upon this
+occasion, I believe, in the House of Commons and in
+the nation at large, to know what would become of
+the portentous inquiry. Mr. Hastings has always contrived
+to have half the globe between question and
+answer: when he was in India, the question went to
+him, and then he adjourned his answer till he came
+to England; and when he came to England, it was
+necessary his answer should arrive from India; so
+that there is no manner of doubt that all time was
+given for digesting, comparing, collating, and making
+up a perfect memory upon the occasion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">{402}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, Mr. Larkins, who has in custody
+Mr. Hastings's memory, no small part of his conscience,
+and all his accounts, did, at last, in compliance
+with Mr. Hastings's desire, think proper to send
+an account. Then, at last, we may expect light.
+Where are we to look for accounts, but from an
+accountant-general? Where are they to be met with,
+unless from him? And accordingly, in that night of
+perplexity into which Mr. Hastings's correspondence
+had plunged them, men looked up to the dawning of
+the day which was to follow that star, the little Lucifer,
+which with his lamp was to dispel the shades
+of night, and give us some sort of light into this
+dark, mysterious transaction. At last the little lamp
+appeared, and was laid on the table of this House of
+Commons, on the motion of Mr. Hastings's friends: for
+we did not know of its arrival. It arrives, with all
+the intelligence, all the memory, accuracy, and clearness
+which Mr. Larkins can furnish for Mr. Hastings
+upon a business that before was nothing but mystery
+and confusion. The account is called,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>"Copy of the particulars of the dates on which the
+component parts of sundry sums included in the account
+of sums received on the account of the Honorable
+Company by the Governor-General, or paid to
+their Treasury by his order, and applied to their service,
+were received for Mr. Hastings, and paid to the
+Sub-Treasurer."</i></p>
+
+<p>The letter from Mr. Larkins consisted of two parts:
+first, what was so much wanted, an account; next,
+what was wanted most of all to such an account as
+he sent, a comment and explanation. The account
+consisted of two members: one gave an account of several
+detached bribes that Mr. Hastings had received<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">{403}</a></span>
+within the course of about a year and a half; and the
+other, of a great bribe which he had received in one
+gross sum of one hundred thousand pounds from the
+Nabob of Oude. It appeared to us, upon looking into
+these accounts, that there was some geography, a little
+bad chronology, but nothing else in the first: neither
+the persons who took the money, nor the persons
+from whom it was taken, nor the ends for which it
+was given, nor any other circumstances are mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing we saw was <i>Dinagepore</i>. I believe
+you know this piece of geography,&mdash;that it is one of
+the provinces of the kingdom of Bengal. We then
+have a long series of months, with a number of sums
+added to them; and in the end it is said, that on
+the 18th and 19th of Asin, (meaning part of September
+and part of October,) were paid to Mr. Croftes
+two lac of rupees; and then remains one lac, which
+was taken from a sum of three lac six thousand nine
+hundred and seventy-three rupees. After we had
+waited for Mr. Hastings's own account, after it had
+been pursued through a series of correspondence in
+vain, after his agents had come to England to explain
+it, this is the explanation that your Lordships have got
+of this first article, Dinagepore. Not the person paid
+to, not the person paying, are mentioned, nor any
+other circumstance, except the signature, <i>G.G.S.</i>:
+this might serve for <i>George Gilbert Sanders</i>, or any
+other name you please; and seeing <i>Croftes</i> above
+it, you might imagine it was an Englishman. And
+this, which I call a geographical and a chronological
+account, is the only account we have. Mr. Larkins,
+upon the mere face of the account, sadly disappoints
+us; and I will venture to say that in matters of ac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">{404}</a></span>count
+Bengal book-keeping is as remote from good
+book-keeping as the Bengal <i>painches</i> are remote from
+all the rules of good composition. We have, however,
+got some light: namely, that one G.G.S. has
+paid some money to Mr. Croftes for some purpose,
+but from whom we know not, nor where; that there
+is a place called Dinagepore; and that Mr. Hastings
+received some money from somebody in Dinagepore.</p>
+
+<p>The next article is <i>Patna</i>. Your Lordships are
+not so ill acquainted with the geography of India as
+not to know that there is such a place as Patna, nor
+so ill acquainted with the chronology of it as not to
+know that there are three months called Baisakh,
+Asin, Chait. Here was paid to Mr. Croftes two lac
+of rupees, and there was left a balance of about
+two more. But though you learn with regard to the
+province of Dinagepore that there is a balance to be
+discharged by G.G.S., yet with regard to Patna
+we have not even a G.G.S.: we have no sort of
+light whatever to know through whose hands the
+money passed, nor any glimpse of light whatever respecting
+it.</p>
+
+<p>You may expect to be made amends in the other
+province, called <i>Nuddea</i>, where Mr. Hastings had
+received a considerable sum of money. There is
+the very same darkness: not a word from whom
+received, by whom received, or any other circumstance,
+but that it was paid into the hands of Mr.
+Hastings's <i>white banian</i>, as he was commonly called
+in that country, into the hands of Mr. Croftes, who
+is his white agent in receiving bribes: for he was
+very far from having but one.</p>
+
+<p>After all this inquiry, after so many severe animadversions
+from the House of Commons, after all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">{405}</a></span>
+those reiterated letters from the Directors, after an
+application to Mr. Hastings himself, when you are
+hunting to get at some explanation of the proceedings
+mentioned in the letter of the month of May,
+1782, you receive here by Mr. Larkins's letter, which
+is dated the 5th of August, 1786, this account,
+which, to be sure, gives an amazing light into this
+business: it is a letter for which it was worth sending
+to Bengal, worth waiting for with all that anxious
+expectation with which men wait for great
+events. Upon the face of the account there is not
+one single word which can tend to illustrate the
+matter: he sums up the whole, and makes out that
+there was received five lac and fifty thousand rupees,
+that is to say, 55,000<i>l.</i>, out of the sum of nine lac
+and fifty thousand engaged to be paid: namely,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class='ctr'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>From Dinagepore</td><td align='right'>4,00,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>From Nuddea</td><td align='right'>1,50,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And from Patna</td><td align='right'>4,00,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right' class="bt bb">9,50,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>Or</td><td align='right' class="bb">&pound;95,000</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>Now you have got full light! <i>Cabooleat</i> signifies a
+contract, or an agreement; and this agreement was,
+to pay Mr. Hastings, as one should think, certain sums
+of money,&mdash;it does not say from whom, but only that
+such a sum of money was paid, and that there remains
+such a balance. When you come and compare the
+money received by Mr. Croftes with these cabooleats,
+you find that the cabooleats amount to 95,000<i>l.</i>, and
+that the receipt has been about 55,000<i>l.</i>, and that upon
+the face of this account there is 40,000<i>l.</i> somewhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">{406}</a></span>
+or other unaccounted for. There never was such a
+mode of account-keeping, except in the new system of
+this bribe exchequer.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will now see, from this luminous,
+satisfactory, and clear account, which could come from
+no other than a great accountant and a great financier,
+establishing some new system of finance, and recommending
+it to the world as superior to those old-fashioned
+foolish establishments, the Exchequer and Bank
+of England, what lights are received from Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>However, it does so happen that from these obscure
+hints we have been able to institute examinations
+which have discovered such a mass of fraud, guilt,
+corruption, and oppression as probably never before
+existed since the beginning of the world; and in that
+darkness we hope and trust the diligence and zeal of
+the House of Commons will find light sufficient to
+make a full discovery of his base crimes. We hope
+and trust, that, after all his concealments, and though
+he appear resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication,
+all his artifices will not be able to secure him
+from the siege which the diligence of the House of
+Commons has laid to his corruptions.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will remark, in a paragraph, which,
+though it stands last, is the first in principle, in Mr. Larkins's
+letter, that, having before given his comment, he
+perorates, as is natural upon such an occasion. This
+peroration, as is usual in perorations, is in favor of the
+parties speaking it, and <i>ad conciliandum auditorem</i>.
+"Conscious," he says, "that the concern which I have
+had in these transactions needs neither an apology nor
+an excuse,"&mdash;that is rather extraordinary, too!&mdash;"and
+that I have in no action of my life sacrificed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">{407}</a></span>
+duty and fidelity which I owed to my honorable employers
+either to the regard which I felt for another
+or to the advancement of my own fortune, I shall conclude
+this address, firmly relying upon the candor of
+those before whom it may be submitted for its being
+deemed a satisfactory as well as a circumstantial compliance
+with the requisition in conformity to which the
+information it affords has been furnished,"&mdash;meaning,
+as your Lordships will see in the whole course of the
+letter, that he had written it in compliance with the
+requisition and in conformity to the information he
+had been furnished with by Mr. Hastings,&mdash;"without
+which it would have been as base as dishonorable for
+me spontaneously to have afforded it: for, though the
+duty which every man owes to himself should render
+him incapable of making an assertion not strictly true,
+no man actuated either by virtuous or honorable sentiments
+could mistakenly apprehend, that, unless he
+betrayed the confidence reposed in him by another, he
+might be deemed deficient in fidelity to his employers."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is, in my opinion, a discovery very
+well worthy your Lordships' attention; here is the
+accountant-general of the Company, who declares, and
+fixes it as a point of honor, that he would not have
+made a discovery so important to them, if Mr. Hastings
+himself had not authorized him to make it: a
+point to which he considers himself bound by his honor
+to adhere. Let us see what becomes of us, when
+the principle of honor is so debauched and perverted.
+A principle of honor, as long as it is connected with
+virtue, adds no small efficacy to its operation, and no
+small brilliancy and lustre to its appearance: but honor,
+the moment that it becomes unconnected with the
+duties of official function, with the relations of life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">{408}</a></span>
+and the eternal and immutable rules of morality, and
+appears in its substance alien to them, changes its nature,
+and, instead of justifying a breach of duty, aggravates
+all its mischiefs to an almost infinite degree;
+by the apparent lustre of the surface, it hides from
+you the baseness and deformity of the ground. Here
+is Mr. Hastings's agent, Mr. Larkins, the Company's
+general accountant, prefers his attachment to Mr.
+Hastings to his duty to the Company. Instead of the
+account which he ought to give to them in consequence
+of the trust reposed in him, he thinks himself bound
+by honor to Mr. Hastings, if Mr. Hastings had not
+called for that explanation, not to have given it: so
+that, whatever obscurity is in this explanation, it is because
+Mr. Hastings did not authorize or require him
+to give a clearer. Here is a principle of treacherous
+fidelity, of perfidious honor, of the faith of conspirators
+against their masters, the faith of robbers against the
+public, held up against the duty of an officer in a
+public situation. You see how they are bound to one
+another, and how they give their fidelity to keep the
+secrets of one another, to prevent the Directors having
+a true knowledge of their affairs; and I am sure, if
+you do not destroy this honor of conspirators and this
+faith of robbers, that there will be no other honor and
+no other fidelity among the servants in India. Mr.
+Larkins, your Lordships see, adheres to the principle
+of secrecy.</p>
+
+<p>You will next remark that Mr. Hastings had as
+many bribe-factors as bribes. There was confidence
+to be reposed in each of them, and not one of these
+men appears to be in the confidence of another.
+You will find in this letter the policy, the frame,
+and constitution of this new exchequer. Mr. Croftes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">{409}</a></span>
+seems to have known things which Mr. Larkins did
+not; Mr. Larkins knew things which Gunga Govind
+Sing did not; Gunga Govind Sing knew things which
+none of the rest of the confederates knew. Cantoo
+Baboo, who appears in this letter as a principal actor,
+was in a secret which Mr. Larkins did not know; it
+appears likewise, that there was a Persian moonshee
+in a secret of which Cantoo Baboo was ignorant; and
+it appears that Mr. Palmer was in the secret of a transaction
+not intrusted to any of the rest. Such is the
+labyrinth of this practical <i>painche</i>, or screw, that, if,
+for instance, you were endeavoring to trace backwards
+some transaction through Major Palmer, you would
+be stopped there, and must go back again; for it had
+begun with Cantoo Baboo. If in another you were
+to penetrate into the dark recess of the black breast
+of Cantoo Baboo, you could not go further; for it began
+with Gunga Govind Sing. If you pierce the breast
+of Gunga Govind Sing, you are again stopped; a Persian
+moonshee was the confidential agent. If you get
+beyond this, you find Mr. Larkins knew something
+which the others did not; and at last you find Mr.
+Hastings did not put entire confidence in any of them.
+You will see, by this letter, that he kept his accounts
+in all colors, black, white, and mezzotinto; that he
+kept them in all languages,&mdash;in Persian, in Bengalee,
+and in a language which, I believe, is neither Persian
+nor Bengalee, nor any other known in the world, but
+a language in which Mr. Hastings found it proper to
+keep his accounts and to transact his business. The
+persons carrying on the accounts are Mr. Larkins, an
+Englishman, Cantoo Baboo, a Gentoo, and a Persian
+moonshee, probably a Mahometan. So all languages,
+all religions, all descriptions of men are to keep the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">{410}</a></span>
+account of these bribes, and to make out this valuable
+account which Mr. Larkins gave you!</p>
+
+<p>Let us now see how far the memory, observation,
+and knowledge of the persons referred to can supply
+the want of them in Mr. Hastings. These accounts
+come at last, though late, from Mr. Larkins, who, I
+will venture to say, let the banians boast what they
+will, has skill perhaps equal to the best of them: he
+begins by explaining to you something concerning the
+present of the ten lac. I wish your Lordships always
+to take Mr. Hastings's word, where it can be had,&mdash;or
+Mr. Larkins's, who was the representative of and
+memory-keeper to Mr. Hastings; and then I may
+perhaps take the liberty of making some observations
+upon it.</p>
+
+
+<h3><i>Extract of a Letter from William Larkins, Accountant-General
+of Bengal, to the Chairman of the East India
+Company, dated 5th August, 1786.</i></h3>
+
+<p>"Mr. Hastings returned from Benares to Calcutta
+on the 5th February, 1782. At that time I was wholly
+ignorant of the letter which on the 20th January he
+wrote from Patna to the Secret Committee of the Honorable
+the Court of Directors. The rough draught of
+this letter, in the handwriting of Major Palmer, is
+now in my possession. Soon after his arrival at the
+Presidency, he requested me to form the account of
+his receipts and disbursements, which you will find
+journalized in the 280th, &amp;c., and 307th pages of
+the Honorable Company's general books of the year
+1781-2. My official situation as accountant-general
+had previously convinced me that Mr. Hastings could
+not have made the issues which were acknowledged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">{411}</a></span>
+as received from him by some of the paymasters of
+the army, unless he had obtained some such supply as
+that which he afterwards, viz., on the 22d May, 1782,
+made known to me, when I immediately suggested to
+him the necessity of his transmitting that account
+which accompanied his letter of that date, till when
+the promise contained in his letter of 20th January
+had entirely escaped his recollection."</p>
+
+<p>The first thing I would remark on this (and I believe
+your Lordships have rather gone before me in
+the remark) is, that Mr. Hastings came down to Calcutta
+on the 5th of February; that then, or a few
+days after, he calls to him his confidential and faithful
+friend, (not his official secretary, for he trusted none
+of his regular secretaries with these transactions,)&mdash;he
+calls him to help him to make out his accounts
+during his absence. You would imagine that at that
+time he trusted this man with his account. No such
+thing: he goes on with the accountant-general, accounting
+with him for money expended, without ever
+explaining to that accountant-general how that money
+came into his hands. Here, then, we have the
+accountant making out the account, and the person
+accounting. The accountant does not in any manner
+make an objection, and say, "Here you are giving
+me an account by which it appears that you have
+expended money, but you have not told me where
+you received it: how shall I make out a fair account
+of debtor and creditor between you and the Company?"
+He does no such thing. There lies a suspicion
+in his breast that Mr. Hastings must have
+taken some money in some irregular way, or he could
+not have made those payments. Mr. Larkins begins
+to suspect him. "Where did you lose this bodkin?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">{412}</a></span>
+said one lady to another, upon a certain occasion.
+"Pray, Madam, where did you find it?" Mr. Hastings,
+at the very moment of his life when confidence
+was required, even when making up his accounts
+with his accountant, never told him one word of the
+matter. You see he had no confidence in Mr. Larkins.
+This makes out one of the propositions I want
+to impress upon your Lordships' minds, that no one
+man did he let into every part of his transactions: a
+material circumstance, which will help to lead your
+Lordships' judgment in forming your opinion upon
+many parts of this cause.</p>
+
+<p>You see that Mr. Larkins suspected him. Probably
+in consequence of those suspicions, or from some
+other cause, he at last told him, upon the 22d of May,
+1782, (but why at that time, rather than at any other
+time, does not appear; and this we shall find very
+difficult to be accounted for,)&mdash;he told him that he
+had received a bribe from the Nabob of Oude, of
+100,000<i>l.</i> He informs him of this on the 22d of May,
+which, when the accounts were making up, he conceals
+from him. And he communicates to him the
+rough draught of his letter to the Court of Directors,
+informing them that this business was not transacted
+by any known secretary of the Company, nor with
+the intervention of any interpreter of the Company,
+nor passed through any official channel whatever, but
+through a gentleman much in his confidence, his military
+secretary; and, as if receiving bribes, and receiving
+letters concerning them, and carrying on correspondence
+relative to them, was a part of military
+duty, the rough draught of this letter was in the
+hands of this military secretary. Upon the communication
+of the letter, it rushes all at once into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">{413}</a></span>
+mind of Mr.Larkins, who knows Mr. Hastings's recollection,
+who knows what does and what does not escape
+it, and who had a memory ready to explode at
+Mr. Hastings's desire, "Good God!" says he, "you
+have promised the Directors an account of this business!"&mdash;a
+promise which Mr. Larkins assures the
+Directors, upon his word, had entirely escaped Mr.
+Hastings's recollection. Mr. Hastings, it seems, had
+totally forgotten the promise relative to the paltry sum
+of 100,000<i>l.</i> which he had made to the Court of Directors
+in the January before; he never once thought
+of it, no, not even when he was making up his accounts
+of that very identical sum, till the 22d of
+May. So that these persons answer for one another's
+bad memory: and you will see they have good reason.
+Mr. Hastings's want of recollection appears in things
+of some moment. However lightly he may regard
+the sum of 100,000<i>l.</i>, which, considering the enormous
+sums he has received, I dare say he does,&mdash;for
+he totally forgot it, he knew nothing about it,&mdash;observe
+what sort of memory this registrar and accountant
+of such sums as 100,000<i>l.</i> has. In what confusion
+of millions must it be, that such sums can be lost
+to Mr. Hastings's recollection! However, at last it
+was brought to his recollection, and he thought that
+it was necessary to give some account of it. And
+who is the accountant whom he produces? His own
+memory is no accountant. He had dismissed the matter
+(as he happily expresses it in the Cheltenham
+letter) from his memory. Major Palmer is not the accountant.
+One is astonished that a man who had had
+100,000<i>l.</i> in his hands, and laid it out, as he pretends,
+in the public service, has not a scrap of paper to show
+for it. No ordinary or extraordinary account is given<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">{414}</a></span>
+of it. Well, what is to be done in such circumstances?
+He sends for a person whose name you have
+heard and will often hear of, the faithful Cantoo Baboo.
+This man comes to Mr. Larkins, and he reads
+to him (be so good as to remark the words) from a
+Bengal paper the account of the detached bribes.
+Your Lordships will observe that I have stated the
+receipt of a number of detached bribes, and a bribe
+in one great body: one, the great <i>corps d'arm&eacute;e</i>; the
+other, flying scouting bodies, which were only to be
+collected together by a skilful man who knew how
+to manage them, and regulate the motions of those
+wild and disorderly troops. When No. 2 was to be
+explained, Cantoo Baboo failed him; he was not
+worth a farthing as to any transaction that happened
+when Mr. Hastings was in the Upper Provinces, where
+though he was his faithful and constant attendant
+through the whole, yet he could give no account of
+it. Mr. Hastings's moonshee then reads three lines
+from a paper to Mr. Larkins. Now it is no way even
+insinuated that both the Bengal and Persian papers
+did not contain the account of other immense sums;
+and, indeed, from the circumstance of only three lines
+being read from the Persian paper, your Lordships
+will be able, in your own minds, to form some judgment
+upon this business.</p>
+
+<p>I shall now proceed with his letter of explanation.
+"The particulars," he goes on to say, "of the paper
+No. 1 were read to me from a Bengal paper by Mr.
+Hastings's banian, Cantoo Baboo; and if I am not mistaken,
+the three first lines of that No. 2 were read
+over to me from a Persian paper by his moonshee.
+The translation of these particulars, made by me, was,
+as I verily believe, the first complete memorandum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">{415}</a></span>
+that he ever possessed of them in the English language;
+and I am confident, that, if I had not suggested
+to him the necessity of his taking this precaution,
+he would at this moment have been unable to have
+afforded any such information concerning them."</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, if he had not got, on the intimation
+of Mr. Larkins, some scraps of paper, your
+Lordships might have at this day wanted that valuable
+information which Mr. Larkins has laid before
+you. These, however, contain, Mr. Larkins says,
+"the first complete"&mdash;what?&mdash;account, do you
+imagine?&mdash;no, "the first complete <i>memorandum</i>."
+You would imagine that he would himself, for his
+own use, have notched down, somewhere or other,
+in short-hand, in Persian characters, short without
+vowels, or in some other way, <i>memorandums</i>. But
+he had not himself even a memorandum of this
+business; and consequently, when he was at Cheltenham,
+and even here at your bar, he could never
+have had any account of a sum of 200,000<i>l.</i>, but by
+this account of Mr. Larkins, taken, as people read
+them, from detached pieces of paper.</p>
+
+<p>One would have expected that Mr. Larkins, being
+warned that day, and cautioned by the strange memory
+of Mr. Hastings, and the dangerous situation,
+therefore, in which he himself stood, would at least
+have been very guarded and cautious. Hear what he
+next says upon this subject. "As neither of the
+other sums passed through his hands, these" (meaning
+the scraps) "contained no such specification, and
+consequently could not enable him to afford the information
+with which he has requested me to furnish
+you; and it is more than probable, that, if the affidavit
+which I took on the 16th December, 1782, had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">{416}</a></span>
+not exposed my character to the suspicion of my
+being capable of committing one of the basest trespasses
+upon the confidence of mankind, I should, at
+this distance of time, have been equally unable to
+have complied with this request: but after I became
+acquainted with the insinuation suggested in the
+Eleventh Report of the Select Committee of the
+House of Commons, I thought it but too probable,
+that, unless I was possessed of the original memorandum
+which I had made of these transactions, I
+might not at some distant period be able to prove
+that I had not descended to commit so base an action.
+I have therefore always most carefully preserved
+every paper which I possessed regarding these
+transactions."</p>
+
+<p>You see that Mr. Hastings had no memorandums
+of his accounts; you see, that, after Mr. Larkins had
+made his memorandums of them, he had no design
+of guarding or keeping them; and you will commend
+those wicked and malicious committees who
+by their reports have told an accountant-general and
+first public officer of revenue, that, in order to guard
+his character from their suspicions, it was necessary
+that he should keep some paper or other of an
+account. We have heard of the base, wicked, and
+mercenary license that has been used by these gentlemen
+of India towards the House of Commons:
+a license to libel and traduce the diligence of the
+House of Commons, the purity of their motives, and
+the fidelity of their actions, by which the very means
+of informing the people are attempted to be used for
+the purpose of leaving them in darkness and delusion.
+But, my Lords, when the accountant-general
+declares, that, if the House of Commons had not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">{417}</a></span>
+expressed, as they ought to express, much diffidence
+and distrust respecting these transactions, and even
+suspected him of perjury, this very day that man
+would not have produced a scrap of those papers to
+you, but might have turned them to the basest and
+most infamous of uses. If, I say, we have saved
+these valuable fragments by suspecting his integrity,
+your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use:
+and I hope the world will learn that punishment will
+be of use, too, in preventing such transactions.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships have seen that no two persons
+knew anything of these transactions; you see that
+even memorandums of transactions of very great
+moment, some of which had passed in the year 1779,
+were not even so much as put in the shape of complete
+memoranda until May, 1782; you see that Mr.
+Hastings never kept them: and there is no reason to
+imagine that a black banian and a Persian moonshee
+would have been careful of what Mr. Hastings himself,
+who did not seem to stimulate his accountants
+to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity,
+was negligent. You see that Mr. Larkins, our last,
+our only hope, if he had not been suspected by the
+House of Commons, probably would never have kept
+these papers; and that you could not have had this
+valuable cargo, such as it is, if it had not been for
+the circumstance Mr. Larkins thinks proper to mention.</p>
+
+<p>From the specimen which we have given of Mr.
+Hastings's mode of accounts, of its vouchers, checks,
+and counter-checks, your Lordships will have observed
+that the mode itself is past describing, and
+that the checks and counter-checks, instead of being
+put upon one another to prevent abuse, are put upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">{418}</a></span>
+each other to prevent discovery and to fortify abuse.
+When you hear that one man has an account of receipt,
+another of expenditure, another of control, you
+say that office is well constituted: but here is an
+office constituted by different persons without the
+smallest connection with each other; for the only purpose
+which they have ever answered is the purpose
+of base concealment.</p>
+
+<p>We shall now proceed a little further with Mr.
+Larkins. The first of the papers from which he took
+the memoranda was a paper of Cantoo Baboo. It
+contained detached payments, amounting in the
+whole, with the cabooleat, or agreement, to about
+95,000<i>l.</i> sterling, and of which it appears that there
+was received by Mr. Croftes 55,000<i>l.</i>, and no more.</p>
+
+<p>Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest
+in your memory what sort of an exchequer this is,
+even with regard to its receipts? As your Lordships
+have seen the economy and constitution of this office,
+so now see the receipt. It appears that in the month
+of May, 1782, out of the sums beginning to be received
+in the month of Shawal, that is in July,
+1779, there was, during that interval, 40,000<i>l.</i> out
+of 95,000<i>l.</i> sunk somewhere, in some of the turnings
+over upon the gridiron, through some of those agents
+and panders of corruption which Mr. Hastings uses.
+Here is the <i>valuable</i> revenue of the Company, <i>which
+is to supply them in their exigencies, which is to come
+from sources which otherwise never would have yielded
+it</i>,&mdash;which, though small in proportion to the other
+revenue, yet is a diamond, something that by its value
+makes amends for its want of bulk,&mdash;falling short by
+40,000<i>l.</i> out of 95,000<i>l.</i> Here is a system made for
+fraud, and producing all the effects of it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">{419}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Upon the face of this account, the agreement was
+to yield to Mr. Hastings, some way or other, to be
+paid to Mr. Croftes, 95,000<i>l.</i>, and there was a deficiency
+of 40,000<i>l.</i> Would any man, even with no
+more sense than Mr. Hastings, who wants all the faculties
+of the human mind, who has neither memory
+nor judgment, any man who was that poor half-idiot
+creature that Mr. Hastings pretends to be, engage in a
+dealing that was to extort from some one or other an
+agreement to pay 95,000<i>l.</i> which was not to produce
+more than 55,000<i>l.</i>? What, then, is become of it?
+Is it in the hands of Mr. Hastings's wicked bribe-brokers,
+or in his own hands? Is it in arrear? Do you
+know anything about it? Whom are you to apply
+to for information? Why, to G.G.S.&mdash;G.G.S. I
+find to be, what indeed I suspected him to be, a person
+that I have mentioned frequently to your Lordships,
+and that you will often hear of, commonly
+called Gunga Govind Sing,&mdash;in a short word, the
+wickedest of the whole race of banians: the consolidated
+wickedness of the whole body is to be found in
+this man.</p>
+
+<p>Of the deficiency which appears in this agreement
+with somebody or other on the part of Mr. Hastings
+through Gunga Govind Sing you will expect to hear
+some explanation. Of the first sum, which is said to
+have been paid through Gunga Govind Sing, amounting
+on the cabooleat to four lac, and of which no more
+than two lac was actually received,&mdash;that is to say,
+half of it was sunk,&mdash;we have this memorandum
+only: "Although Mr. Hastings was extremely dissatisfied
+with the excuses Gunga Govind Sing assigned
+for not paying Mr. Croftes the sum stated by the
+paper No. 1 to be in his charge, he never could ob<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">{420}</a></span>tain
+from him any further payments on this account."
+Mr. Hastings is exceedingly dissatisfied with those
+excuses, and this is the whole account of the transaction.
+This is the only thing said of Gunga Govind
+Sing in the account: he neither states how he came
+to be employed, or for what he was employed. It
+appears, however, from the transaction, as far as we
+can make our way through this darkness, that he had
+actually received 10,000<i>l.</i> of the money, which he did
+not account for, and that he pretended that there
+was an arrear of the rest. So here Mr. Hastings's
+bribe-agent admits that he had received 10,000<i>l.</i>, but
+he will not account for it; he says there is an arrear
+of another 10,000<i>l.</i>; and thus it appears that he was
+enabled to take from somebody at Dinagepore, by a
+cabooleat, 40,000<i>l.</i>, of which Mr. Hastings can get but
+20,000<i>l.</i>: there is cent per cent loss upon it. Mr.
+Hastings was so exceedingly dissatisfied with this
+conduct of Gunga Govind Sing, that you would imagine
+a breach would have immediately ensued between
+them. I shall not anticipate what some of my
+honorable friends will bring before your Lordships;
+but I tell you, that, so far from quarrelling with Gunga
+Govind Sing, or being really angry with him, it is
+only a little pettish love quarrel with Gunga Govind
+Sing: <i>amantium ir&aelig; amoris integratio est</i>. For Gunga
+Govind Sing, without having paid him one shilling
+of this money, attended him to the Ganges; and one
+of the last acts of Mr. Hastings's government was to
+represent this man, who was unfaithful even to fraud,
+who did not keep the common faith of thieves and
+robbers, this very man he recommends to the Company
+as a person who ought to be rewarded, as one
+of their best and most faithful servants. And how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">{421}</a></span>
+does he recommend him to be rewarded? By giving
+him the estate of another person,&mdash;the way in which
+Mr. Hastings desires to be always rewarded himself:
+for, in calling upon the Company's justice to give
+him some money for expenses with which he never
+charged them, he desires them to assign him the
+money upon some person of the country. So here
+Mr. Hastings recommends Gunga Govind Sing not
+only to trust, confidence, and employment, which he
+does very fully, but to a reward taken out of the substance
+of other people. This is what Mr. Hastings
+has done with Gunga Govind Sing; and if such are
+the effects of his anger, what must be the effect of
+his pleasure and satisfaction? Now I say that Mr.
+Hastings, who, in fact, saw this man amongst the
+very last with whom he had any communication in
+India, could not have so recommended him after this
+known fraud, in one business only, of 20,000<i>l.</i>,&mdash;he
+could not so have supported him, he could not so
+have caressed him, he could not so have employed
+him, he could not have done all this, unless he had
+paid to Mr. Hastings privately that sum of money
+which never was brought into any even of these miserable
+accounts, without some payment or other with
+which Mr. Hastings was and ought to be satisfied, or
+unless Gunga Govind Sing had some dishonorable secret
+to tell of him which he did not dare to provoke
+him to give a just account of, or, lastly, unless the
+original agreement was that half or a third of the
+bribe should go to Gunga Govind Sing.</p>
+
+<p>Such is this patriotic scheme of bribery, this public-spirited
+corruption which Mr. Hastings has invented
+upon this occasion, and by which he thinks out of
+the vices of mankind to draw a better revenue than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">{422}</a></span>
+out of any legal source whatever; and therefore he
+has resolved to become the most corrupt of all Governors-General,
+in order to be the most useful servant
+to the finances of the Company.</p>
+
+<p>So much as to the first article of Dinagepore
+peshcush. All you have is, that G.G.S is Gunga
+Govind Sing; that he has cheated the public of half
+of it; that Mr. Hastings was angry with him, and
+yet went away from Bengal, rewarding, praising, and
+caressing him. Are these things to pass as matters
+of course? They cannot so pass with your Lordships'
+sagacity: I will venture to say that no court,
+even of <i>pie-poudre</i>, could help finding him guilty
+upon such a matter, if such a court had to inquire
+into it.</p>
+
+<p>The next article is <i>Patna</i>. Here, too, he was to
+receive 40,000<i>l.</i>; but from whom this deponent saith
+not. At this circumstance Mr. Larkins, who is a
+famous deponent, never hints once. You may look
+through his whole letter, which is a pretty long one,
+(and which I will save your Lordships the trouble of
+hearing read at length now, because you will have it
+before you when you come to the Patna business,)
+and you will only find that somebody had engaged to
+pay him 40,000<i>l.</i>, and that but half of this sum was
+received. You want an explanation of this. You
+have seen the kind of explanation given in the former
+case, a conjectural explanation of G.G.S. But
+when you come to the present case, who the person
+paying was, why the money was not paid, what the
+cause of failure was, you are not told: you only
+learn that there was that sum deficient; and Mr.
+Larkins, who is our last resort and final hope of
+elucidation in this transaction, throws not the small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">{423}</a></span>est
+glimpse of light upon it. We of the House of
+Commons have been reduced to form the best legitimate
+conjectures we could upon this business, and
+those conjectures have led us to further evidence,
+which will enable us to fix one of the most scandalous
+and most mischievous bribes, in all the circumstances
+of it, upon Mr. Hastings, that was ever
+known. If he extorted 40,000<i>l.</i> under pretence of
+the Company's service, here is again another failure
+of half the money. Oh, my Lords, you will find that
+even the remaining part was purchased with the loss
+of one of the best revenues in India, and with the
+grievous distress of a country that deserved well your
+protection, instead of being robbed to give 20,000<i>l.</i>
+to the Company, and another 20,000<i>l.</i> to some robber
+or other, black or white. When I say, given to some
+other robber, black or white, I do not suppose that
+either generosity, friendship, or even communion,
+can exist in that country between white men and
+black: no, their colors are not more adverse than
+their characters and tempers. There is not that
+<i>idem velle et idem nolle</i>, there are none of those
+habits of life, nothing, that can bind men together
+even in the most ordinary society: the mutual means
+of such an union do not exist between them. It is a
+money-dealing, and a money-dealing only, which can
+exist between them; and when you hear that a black
+man is favored, and that 20,000<i>l.</i> is pretended to be
+left in his hands, do not believe it: indeed, you cannot
+believe it; for we will bring evidence to show
+that there is no friendship between those people,&mdash;and
+that, when black men give money to a white
+man, it is a bribe,&mdash;and that, when money is given
+to a black man, he is only a sharer with the white man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">{424}</a></span>
+in their infamous profits. We find, however, somebody,
+anonymous, with 20,000<i>l.</i> left in his hands; and
+when we come to discover who the man is, and the final
+balance which appears against him in his account
+with the Company, we find that for this 20,000<i>l.</i>,
+which was received for the Company, they paid such
+a compound interest as was never before paid for
+money advanced: the most violently griping usurer,
+in dealing with the most extravagant heir, never
+made such a bargain as Mr. Hastings has made for
+the Company by this bribe. Therefore it could be
+nothing but fraud that could have got him to have
+undertaken such a revenue. This evidently shows
+the whole to be a pretence to cover fraud, and not
+a weak attempt to raise a revenue,&mdash;and that Mr.
+Hastings was not that idiot he represents himself to
+be, a man forgetting all his offices, all his duties, all
+his own affairs, and all the public affairs. He does
+not, however, forget how to make a bargain to get
+money; but when the money is to be recovered for
+the Company, (as he says,) he forgets to recover it:
+so that the accuracy with which he begins a bribe,
+<i>acribus initiis et soporos&acirc; fine</i>, and the carelessness
+with which he ends it, are things that characterize,
+not weakness and stupidity, but fraud.</p>
+
+<p>The next article we proceed to is <i>Nuddea</i>. Here
+we have more light; but does Mr. Larkins anywhere
+tell you anything about Nuddea? No it appears
+as if the account had been paid up, and that the cabooleat
+and the payments answer and tally with each
+other; yet, when we come to produce the evidence
+upon these parts, you will see most abundant reason
+to be assured that there is much more concealed
+than is given in this account,&mdash;that it is an account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">{425}</a></span>
+current, and not an account closed,&mdash;and that the
+agreement was for some other and greater sum than
+appears. It might be expected that the Company
+would inquire of Mr. Hastings, and ask, "From whom
+did he get it? Who has received it? Who is to answer
+for it?" But he knew that they were not likely
+to make any inquiry at all,&mdash;they are not that kind
+of people. You would imagine that a mercantile body
+would have some of the mercantile excellencies, and
+even you would allow them perhaps some of the mercantile
+faults. But they have, like Mr. Hastings, forgotten
+totally the mercantile character; and, accordingly,
+neither accuracy nor fidelity of account do
+they ever require of Mr. Hastings. They have too
+much confidence in him; and he, accordingly, acts
+like a man in whom such confidence, without reason,
+is reposed.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships may perhaps suppose that the payment
+of this money was an act of friendship and generosity
+in the people of the country. No: we have
+found out, and shall prove, from whom he got it;
+at least we shall produce such a conjecture upon it
+as your Lordships will think us bound to do, when
+we have such an account before us. Here on the
+face of the account there is no deficiency; but when
+we look into it, we find skulking in a corner a person
+called Nundulol, from whom there is received
+58,000 rupees. You will find that he, who appears
+to have paid up this money, and which Mr. Hastings
+spent as he pleased in his journey to Benares, and
+who consequently must have had some trust reposed
+in him, was the wickedest of men, next to those I
+have mentioned,&mdash;always giving the first rank to
+Gunga Govind Sing, <i>primus inter pares</i>, the second<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">{426}</a></span>
+to Debi Sing, the third to Cantoo Baboo: this man
+is fit to be one next on a par with them. Mr. Larkins,
+when he comes to explain this article, says, "I
+believe it is for a part of the Dinagepore peshcush,
+which would reduce the balance to about 5,000<i>l.</i>":
+but he does not pretend to know what it is given
+for; he gives several guesses at it; "but," he says,
+"as I do not know, I shall not pretend to give more
+than my conjecture upon it." He is in the right;
+because we shall prove Nundulol never did have any
+thing to do with the Dinagepore peshcush. These
+are very extraordinary proceedings. It is my business
+simply to state them to your Lordships now;
+we will give them in afterwards in evidence, and I
+will leave that evidence to be confirmed and fortified
+by further observations.</p>
+
+<p>One of the objects of Mr. Larkins's letter is to
+illustrate the bonds. He says, "The two first stated
+sums" (namely, Dinagepore and Patna, in the paper
+marked No. 1, I suppose, for he seems to explain
+it to be such) "are sums for a part of which Mr.
+Hastings took two bonds: viz., No. 1539, dated 1st
+October, 1780, and No. 1540, dated 2d October, 1780,
+each for the sum of current rupees 1,16,000, or sicca
+rupees one lac. The remainder of that amount
+was carried to the credit of the head, <i>Four per Cent
+Remittance Loan:</i> Mr. Hastings having taken a bond
+for it, (No. 89,) which has been since completely
+liquidated, conformable to the law." But before I
+proceed with the bonds, I will beg leave to recall
+to your Lordships' recollection that Mr. Larkins
+states in his letter that these sums were received
+in November. How does this agree with another
+state of the transaction given by Mr. Hastings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">{427}</a></span>
+namely, that the time of his taking the bonds was
+the 1st and 2d of October? Mr. Larkins, therefore,
+who has thought proper to say that the money was
+received in the month of November, has here given
+as extraordinary an instance either of fraudulent accuracy
+or shameful official inaccuracy as was ever
+perhaps discovered. The first sums are asserted to
+be paid to Mr. Croftes on the 18th and 19th of Asin,
+1187. The month of Asin corresponds with the
+month of September and part of October, and not
+with November; and it is the more extraordinary
+that Mr. Larkins should mistake this, because he is
+in an office which requires monthly payments, and
+consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual
+transfer from one month to another: we cannot
+suppose any accountant in England can be more
+accurately acquainted with the succession of months
+than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative
+state of Bengal and English months. How are
+we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you
+have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a
+moralist inaccurate, you know that these are cases
+which, from the narrow bounds of our weak faculties,
+do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what
+is an inaccurate <i>accountant</i> good for? "Silly man,
+that dost not know thy own silly trade!" was once
+well said: but the trade here is not silly. You do
+not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because
+you have thousands of them; but you justly
+blame a public accountant who is guilty of a gross
+inaccuracy. But what end could his being inaccurate
+answer? Why not name October as well as
+November? I know no reason for it; but here is
+certainly a gross mistake: and from the nature of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">{428}</a></span>
+the thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be
+a mere mistake. But take it that it is a mistake,
+and to have nothing of fraud, but mere carelessness;
+this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very
+punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the bonds. We find a bond taken
+in the month of Shawal, 1186, or 1779, but the receipt
+is said to be in Asin, 1780: that is to say,
+there was a year and about three months between
+the collection and the receipt; and during all that
+period of time an enormous sum of money had lain
+in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed
+when Mr. Hastings should think fit. He employed
+it, he says, for the Mahratta expedition. Now he
+began that letter on the 29th of November by telling
+you that the bribe would not have been taken from
+Cheyt Sing, if it had not been at the instigation of an
+exigency which it seems required a supply of money,
+to be procured lawfully or unlawfully. But in fact
+there was no exigency for it before the Berar army
+came upon the borders of the country,&mdash;that army
+which he invited by his careless conduct towards the
+Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to
+buy off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was
+taken from Cheyt Sing long before he had this occasion
+for it. The fund lay in Gunga Govind Sing's hands;
+and he afterwards applied to that purpose a part of
+this fund, which he must have taken without any
+view whatever to the Company's interest. This pretence
+of the exigency of the Company's affairs is the
+more extraordinary, because the first receipt of these
+moneys was some time in the year 1779 (I have not
+got the exact date of the agreement); and it was
+but a year before that the Company was so far from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">{429}</a></span>
+being in distress, that he declared he should have, at
+very nearly the period when this bribe became payable,
+a very large sum (I do not recollect the precise
+amount) in their treasury. I cannot certainly tell
+when the cabooleat, or agreement, was made; yet I
+shall lay open something very extraordinary upon
+that subject, and will lead you, step by step, to the
+bloody scenes of Debi Sing. Whilst, therefore, Mr.
+Hastings was carrying on these transactions, he was
+carrying them on without any reference to the pretended
+object to which he afterwards applied them.
+It was an old, premeditated plan; and the money to
+be received could not have been designed for an exigency,
+because it was to be paid by monthly instalments.
+The case is the same with respect to the
+other cabooleats: it could not have been any momentary
+exigence which he had to provide for by
+these sums of money; they were paid regularly, period
+by period, as a constant, uniform income, to Mr.
+Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>You find, then, Mr. Hastings first leaving this sum
+of money for a year and three months in the hands
+of Gunga Govind Sing; you find, that, when an exigence
+pressed him by the Mahrattas suddenly invading
+Bengal, and he was obliged to refer to his bribe-fund,
+he finds that fund empty, and that, in supplying
+money for this exigence, he takes a bond for two
+thirds of his own money and one third of the Company's.
+For, as I stated before, Mr. Larkins proves
+of one of these accounts, that he took, in the month
+of January, for this bribe-money, which, according to
+the principles he lays down, was the Company's money,
+three bonds as for money advanced from his own
+cash. Now this sum of three lacs, instead of being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">{430}</a></span>
+all his own, as it should appear to be in the month of
+January, when he took the bonds, or two thirds his
+own and one third the Company's, as he said in his
+letter of the 29th of November, turns out, by Mr. Larkins's
+account, paragraph 9, which I wish to mark to
+your Lordships, to be two thirds the Company's money
+and one third his own; and yet it is all confounded
+under bonds, as if the money had been his own.
+What can you say to this heroic sharper disguised
+under the name of a patriot, when you find him to be
+nothing but a downright cheat, first taking money
+under the Company's name, then taking their securities
+to him for their own money, and afterwards entering
+a false account of them, contradicting that by
+another account?&mdash;and God knows whether the third
+be true or false. These are not things that I am to
+make out by any conclusion of mine; here they are,
+made out by himself and Mr. Larkins, and, comparing
+them with his letter of the 27th, you find a gross
+fraud covered by a direct falsehood.</p>
+
+<p>We have now done with Mr. Larkins's account of
+the bonds, and are come to the other species of Mr.
+Hastings's frauds, (for there is a great variety in
+them,) and first to Cheyt Sing's bribe. Mr. Larkins
+came to the knowledge of the bond-money through
+Gunga Govind Sing and through Cantoo Baboo. Of
+this bribe he was not in the secret originally, but was
+afterwards made a confidant in it; it was carried to
+him; and the account he gives of it I will state to
+your Lordships.</p>
+
+<p>"The fourth sum stated in Mr. Hastings's account
+was the produce of sundry payments made to me by
+Sadamund, Cheyt Sing's buckshee, who either brought
+or sent the gold mohurs to my house, from whence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">{431}</a></span>
+they were taken by me to Mr. Croftes, either on the
+same night or early in the morning after: they were
+made at different times, and I well remember that the
+same people never came twice. On the 21st June,
+1780, Mr. Hastings sent for me, and desired that I
+would take charge of a present that had been offered
+to him by Cheyt Sing's buckshee, under the plea of
+atoning for the opposition which he had made towards
+the payment of the extra subsidy for defraying part
+of the expenses of the war, but really in the hope
+of its inducing Mr. Hastings to give up that claim;
+with which view the present had first been offered.
+Mr. Hastings declared, that, although he would not
+take this for his own use, he would apply it to that of
+the Company, in removing Mr. Francis's objections to
+the want of a fund for defraying the extra expenses
+of Colonel Camac's detachment. On my return to
+the office, I wrote down the substance of what Mr.
+Hastings had said to me, and requested Mr. James
+Miller, my deputy, to seal it up with his own seal,
+and write upon it, that he had then done so at my
+request. He was no further informed of my motive
+for this than merely that it contained the substance
+of a conversation which had passed between me and
+another gentleman, which, in case that conversation
+should hereafter become the subject of inquiry, I
+wished to be able to adduce the memorandum then
+made of it, in corroboration of my own testimony;
+and although that paper has remained unopened to
+this hour, and notwithstanding that I kept no memorandum
+whatever of the substance thereof, yet, as I
+have wrote this representation under the most scrupulous
+adherence to what I conceived to be truth,
+should it ever become necessary to refer to this paper,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">{432}</a></span>
+I am confident that it will not be found to differ materially
+from the substance of this representation."</p>
+
+<p>I forgot to mention, that, besides these two bonds,
+which Mr. Hastings declared to be the Company's,
+and one bond his own, that he slipped into the place
+of the bond of his own a much better, namely, a bond
+of November, which he never mentioned to the Company
+till the 22d of May; and this bond for current
+rupees 1,74,000, or sicca rupees 1,50,000, was taken
+for the payment stated in the paper No. 1 to have
+been made to Mr. Croftes on the 11th Aghan, 1187,
+which corresponds to the 23d of November, 1780.
+This is the Nuddea money, and this is all that you
+know of it; you know that this money, for which
+he had taken this other bond from the Company, was
+not his own neither, but bribes taken from the other
+provinces.</p>
+
+<p>I am ashamed to be troublesome to your Lordships
+in this dry affair, but the detection of fraud requires
+a good deal of patience and assiduity, and we cannot
+wander into anything that can relieve the mind: if it
+was in my power to do it, I would do it. I wish,
+however, to call your Lordships' attention to this last
+bribe before I quit these bonds. Such is the confusion,
+so complicated, so intricate are these bribe accounts,
+that there is always something left behind,
+glean never so much from the paragraphs of Mr.
+Hastings and Mr. Larkins. "I could not bring them
+to account," says Mr. Larkins. "They were received
+before the 1st and 2d of October." Why does not the
+running treasury account give an account of them?
+The Committee of the House of Commons examined
+whether the running treasury account had any such
+account of sums deposited. No such thing. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">{433}</a></span>
+are said by Mr. Hastings to be deposited in June:
+they were not deposited in October, nor any account
+of them given till the January following. "These
+bonds," says he, "I could not enter as regular money,
+to be entered on the Company's account, or in
+any public way, until I had had an order of the Governor-General
+and Council." But why had not you
+an order of the Governor-General and Council? We
+are not calling on you, Mr. Larkins, for an account
+of your conduct: we are calling upon Mr. Hastings
+for an account of his conduct, and which he refers to
+you to explain. Why did not Mr. Hastings order you
+to carry them to the public account? "Because,"
+says he, "there was no other way." Every one who
+knows anything of a treasury or public banking-place
+knows, that if any person brings money as belonging
+to the public, that the public accountant is bound, no
+doubt, to receive it and enter it as such. "But,"
+says he, "I could not do it until the account could
+be settled, as between debtor and creditor: I did not
+do it till I could put on one side durbar charges, secret
+service, to such an amount, and balance that
+again with bonds to Mr. Hastings." That is, he
+could not make an entry regularly in the Company's
+books until Mr. Hastings had enabled him to commit
+one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public
+trust that ever was committed, by ordering that money
+of the Company's to be considered as his own, and
+a bond to be taken as a security for it from the Company,
+as if it was his own.</p>
+
+<p>But to proceed with this deposit. What is the
+substance of Mr. Larkins's explanation of it? The
+substance of this explanation is, that here was a bribe
+received by Mr. Hastings from Cheyt Sing, guarded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">{434}</a></span>
+with such scrupulous secrecy, that it was not carried
+to the house of Mr. Croftes, who was to receive it
+finally, but to the house of Mr. Larkins, as a less suspected
+place; and that it was conveyed in various
+sums, no two people ever returning twice with the various
+payments which made up that sum of 23,000<i>l.</i>
+or thereabouts. Now do you want an instance of
+prevarication and trickery in an account? If any
+person should inquire whether 23,000<i>l.</i> had been paid
+by Cheyt Sing to Mr. Hastings, there was not any
+one man living, or any person concerned in the
+transaction, except Mr.Larkins, who received it, that
+could give an account of how much he received, or
+who brought it. As no two people are ever his
+confidants in the same transaction in Mr. Hastings's
+accounts, so here no two people are permitted to have
+any share whatever in bringing the several fragments
+that make up this sum. This bribe, you might
+imagine, would have been entered by Mr. Larkins
+to some public account, at least to the fraudulent
+account of Mr. Hastings. No such thing. It was
+never entered till the November following. It was
+not entered till Mr. Francis had left Calcutta. All
+these corrupt transactions were carried on privately
+by Mr. Hastings alone, without any signification to
+his colleagues of his carrying on this patriotic traffic,
+as he called it. Your Lordships will also consider
+both the person who employs such a fraudulent
+accountant, and his ideas of his duty in his office.
+These are matters for your Lordships' grave determination;
+but I appeal to you, upon the face of these
+accounts, whether you ever saw anything so gross,&mdash;and
+whether any man could be daring enough to
+attempt to impose upon the credulity of the weakest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">{435}</a></span>
+of mankind, much more to impose upon such a court
+as this, such accounts as these are.</p>
+
+<p>If the Company had a mind to inquire what is
+become of all the debts due to them, and where is
+the cabooleat, he refers them to Gunga Govind Sing.
+"Give us," say they, "an account of this balance
+that remains in your hands." "I know," says he,
+"of no balance." "Why, is there not a cabooleat?"
+"Where is it? What are the date and circumstances
+of it? There is no such cabooleat existing." This
+is the case even where you have the name of the person
+through whose hands the money passed. But
+suppose the inquiry went to the payments of the
+Patna cabooleat. "Here," they say, "we find half
+the money due: out of forty thousand pounds there
+is only twenty thousand received: give us some
+account of it." Who is to give an account of it?
+Here there is no mention made of the name of
+the person who had the cabooleat: whom can they
+call upon? Mr. Hastings does not remember; Mr.
+Larkins does not tell; they can learn nothing about
+it. If the Directors had a disposition, and were
+honest enough to the Proprietors and the nation to
+inquire into it, there is not a hint given, by either
+of those persons, who received the Nuddea, who
+received the Patna, who received the Dinagepore
+peshcush.</p>
+
+<p>But in what court can a suit be instituted, and
+against whom, for the recovery of this balance of
+40,000<i>l.</i> out of 95,000<i>l.</i>? I wish your Lordships to
+examine strictly this account,&mdash;to examine strictly
+every part, both of the account itself, and Mr. Larkins's
+explanation: compare them together, and divine,
+if you can, what remedy the Company could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">{436}</a></span>
+have for their loss. Can your Lordships believe that
+this can be any other than a systematical, deliberate
+fraud, grossly conducted? I will not allow
+Mr. Hastings to be the man he represents himself
+to be: he was supposed to be a man of parts; I
+will only suppose him to be a man of mere common
+sense. Are these the accounts we should expect
+from such a man? And yet he and Mr. Larkins
+are to be magnified to heaven for great financiers;
+and this is to be called book-keeping! This is the
+Bengal account saved so miraculously on the 22d of
+May.</p>
+
+<p>Next comes the Persian account. You have heard
+of a present to which it refers. It has been already
+stated, but it must be a good deal farther explained.
+Mr. Larkins states that this account was taken from
+a paper, of which three lines, and only three lines,
+were read to him by a Persian moonshee; and it is
+not pretended that this was the whole of it. The
+three lines read are as follows.</p>
+
+<div class='ctr'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>"From the Nabob" (meaning the Nabob of Oude) "to the Governor-General,
+six lac</td><td align='right'>&pound;60,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>From Hussein Reza Kh&acirc;n and Hyder Beg Kh&acirc;n to ditto, three lac</td><td align='right'>30,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And ditto to Mrs. Hastings, one lac</td><td align='right'>10,000.</td><td align='left'>"</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>Here, I say, are the three lines that were read by a
+Persian moonshee. Is he a man you can call to account
+for these particulars? No: he is an anonymous
+moonshee; his name is not so much as mentioned
+by Mr. Larkins, nor hinted at by Mr. Hastings;
+and you find these sums, which Mr. Hastings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">{437}</a></span>
+mentions as a sum in gross given to himself, are not
+so. They were given by three persons: one, six lacs,
+was given by the Nabob to the Governor; another,
+of three lacs more, by Hussein Reza Kh&acirc;n [and Hyder
+Beg Kh&acirc;n?]; and a third, one lac, by both of them
+clubbing, as a present to Mrs. Hastings. This is the
+first discovery that appears of Mrs. Hastings having
+been concerned in receiving presents for the Governor-General
+and others, in addition to Gunga Govind
+Sing, Cantoo Baboo, and Mr. Croftes. Now, if this
+money was not received for the Company, is it proper
+and right to take it from Mrs. Hastings? Is there
+honor and justice in taking from a lady a gratuitous
+present made to her? Yet Mr. Hastings says he has
+applied it all to the Company's service. He has done
+ill, in suffering it to be received at all, if she has
+not justly and properly received it. Whether, in fact,
+she ever received this money at all, she not being
+upon the spot, as I can find, at the time, (though, to
+be sure, a present might be sent her,) I neither affirm
+nor deny, farther than that, as Mr. Larkins says,
+there was a sum of 10,000<i>l.</i> from these ministers to
+Mrs. Hastings. Whether she ever received any other
+money than this, I also neither affirm nor deny.
+But in whatever manner Mrs. Hastings received this
+or any other money, I must say, in this grave place
+in which I stand, that, if the wives of Governors-General,
+the wives of Presidents of Council, the wives
+of the principal officers of the India Company, through
+all the various departments, can receive presents,
+there is an end of the covenants, there is an end of
+the act of Parliament, there is an end to every power
+of restraint. Let a man be but married, and if his
+wife may take presents, that moment the acts of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">{438}</a></span>
+Parliament, the covenants, and all the rest expire.
+There is something, too, in the manners of the East
+that makes this a much more dangerous practice.
+The people of the East, it is well known, have their
+zenanah, the apartment for their wives, as a sanctuary
+which nobody can enter,&mdash;a kind of holy of holies,
+a consecrated place, safe from the rage of war, safe
+from the fury of tyranny. The rapacity of man has
+here its bounds: here you shall come, and no farther.
+But if English ladies can go into these zenanahs and
+there receive presents, the natives of Hindostan cannot
+be said to have anything left of their own. Every
+one knows that in the wisest and best time of the
+Commonwealth of Rome, towards the latter end of it,
+(I do not mean the best time for morals, but the
+best for its knowledge how to correct evil government,
+and to choose the proper means for it,) it was
+an established rule, that no governor of a province
+should take his wife along with him into his province,&mdash;wives
+not being subject to the laws in the
+same manner as their husbands; and though I do
+not impute to any one any criminality here, I should
+think myself guilty of a scandalous dereliction of my
+duty, if I did not mention the fact to your Lordships.
+But I press it no further: here are the
+accounts, delivered in by Mr. Larkins at Mr. Hastings's
+own requisition.</p>
+
+<p>The three lines which were read out of a Persian
+paper are followed by a long account of the several
+species in which this present was received, and
+converted by exchange into one common standard.
+Now, as these three lines of paper, which are said
+to have been read out of a Persian paper, contain
+an account of bribes to the amount of 100,000<i>l.</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">{439}</a></span>
+and as it is not even insinuated that this was the
+whole of the paper, but rather the contrary indirectly
+implied, I shall leave it for your Lordships, in
+your serious consideration, to judge what mines of
+bribery that paper might contain. For why did not
+Mr. Larkins get the whole of that paper read and
+translated? The moment any man stops in the
+midst of an account, he is stopping in the midst of
+a fraud.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have one farther remark to make upon
+these accounts. The cabooleats, or agreements for
+the payments of these bribes, amount, in the three
+specified provinces, to 95,000<i>l.</i> Do you believe that
+these provinces were thus particularly favored? Do
+you think that they were chosen as a little demesne
+for Mr. Hastings? that they were the only provinces
+honored with his protection, so far as to take bribes
+from them? Do you perceive anything in their
+local situation that should distinguish them from other
+provinces of Bengal? What is the reason why
+Dinagepore, Patna, Nuddea, should have the post of
+honor assigned them? What reason can be given for
+not taking bribes also from Burdwan, from Bissunpore,
+in short, from all the sixty-eight collections
+which comprise the revenues of Bengal, and for selecting
+only three? How came he, I say, to be so
+wicked a servant, that, out of sixty-eight divisions,
+he chose only three to supply the exigencies of the
+Company? He did not do his duty in making this
+distinction, if he thought that bribery was the best
+way of supplying the Company's treasury, and that
+it formed the most useful and effectual resource for
+them,&mdash;which he has declared over and over again.
+Was it right to lay the whole weight of bribery, ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">{440}</a></span>tortion,
+and oppression upon those three provinces,
+and neglect the rest? No: you know, and must
+know, that he who extorts from three provinces will
+extort from twenty, if there are twenty. You have
+a standard, a measure of extortion, and that is all: <i>ex
+pede Herculem</i>: guess from thence what was extorted
+from all Bengal. Do you believe he could be so cruel
+to these provinces, so partial to the rest, as to charge
+them with that load, with 95,000<i>l.</i>, knowing the
+heavy oppression they were sinking under, and leave
+all the rest untouched? You will judge of what
+is concealed from us by what we have discovered
+through various means that have occurred, in consequence
+both of the guilty conscience of the person
+who confesses the fact with respect to these provinces,
+and of the vigor, perseverance and sagacity
+of those who have forced from him that discovery.
+It is not, therefore, for me to say that the 100,000<i>l.</i>
+and 95,000<i>l.</i> only were taken. Where the circumstances
+entitle me to go on, I must not be stopped,
+but at the boundary where human nature has fixed
+a barrier.</p>
+
+<p>You have now before you the true reason why he
+did not choose that this affair should come before a
+court of justice. Rather than this exposure should
+be made, he to-day would call for the mountains to
+cover him: he would prefer an inquiry into the business
+of the three seals, into anything foreign to the
+subject I am now discussing, in order to keep you
+from the discovery of that gross bribery, that shameful
+peculation, that abandoned prostitution and corruption,
+which he has practised with indemnity and
+impunity to this day, from one end of India to the
+other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">{441}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At the head of the only account we have of these
+transactions stands Dinagepore; and it now only remains
+for me to make some observations upon Mr.
+Hastings's proceedings in that province. Its name,
+then, and that money was taken from it, is all that
+appears; but from whom, by what hands, by what
+means, under what pretence it was taken, he has not
+told you, he has not told his employers. I believe,
+however, I can tell from whom it was taken, and I
+believe it will appear to your Lordships that it must
+have been taken from the unhappy Rajah of Dinagepore;
+and I shall in a very few words state the circumstances
+attending, and the service performed for
+it: from these you will be able to form a just opinion
+concerning this bribe.</p>
+
+<p>Dinagepore, a large province, was possessed by
+an ancient family, the last of which, about the year
+1184 of their era, the Rajah Bija Naut, had no legitimate
+issue. When he was at the point of death, he
+wished to exclude from the succession to the zemindary
+his half-brother, Cantoo Naut, with whom he
+had lived upon ill terms for many years, by adopting
+a son. Such an adoption, when a person has a half-brother,
+as he had, in my poor judgment is not countenanced
+by the Gentoo laws. But Gunga Govind
+Sing, who was placed, by the office he held, at the
+head of the registry, where the records were kept
+by which the rules of succession according to the
+custom of the country are ascertained, became master
+of these Gentoo laws; and through his means
+Mr. Hastings decreed in favor of the adoption. We
+find that immediately after this decree Gunga Govind
+Sing received a cabooleat on Dinagepore for the
+sum of 40,000<i>l.</i>, of which it appears that he has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">{442}</a></span>
+actually exacted 30,000<i>l.</i>, though he has paid to Mr.
+Hastings only 20,000<i>l.</i> We find, before the young
+Rajah had been in possession a year, his natural
+guardians and relations, on one pretence or another,
+all turned out of their offices. The peshcush, or
+fixed annual rent, payable to the Company for his
+zemindary, fell into arrear, as might naturally be
+expected, from the Rajah's inability to pay both his
+rent and this exorbitant bribe, extorted from a ruined
+family. Instantly, under pretext of this arrearage,
+Gunga Govind Sing, and the fictitious Committee
+which Mr. Hastings had made for his wicked
+purposes, composed of Mr. Anderson, Mr. Shore, and
+Mr. Croftes, who were but the tools, as they tell us
+themselves, of Gunga Govind Sing, gave that monster
+of iniquity, Debi Sing, the government of this
+family. They put this noble infant, this miserable
+Rajah, together with the management of the provinces
+of Dinagepore and Rungpore, into his wicked
+and abominable hands, where the ravages he committed
+excited what was called a rebellion, that
+forced him to fly from the country, and into which I
+do not wonder he should be desirous that a political
+and not a juridical inquiry should be made. The savage
+barbarities which were there perpetrated I have
+already, in the execution of my duty, brought before
+this House and my country; and it will be seen,
+when we come to the proof, whether what I have
+asserted was the effect either of a deluded judgment
+or disordered imagination, and whether the facts I
+state cannot be substantiated by authentic reports,
+and were none of my invention, and, lastly, whether
+the means that were taken to discredit them do not
+infinitely aggravate the guilt of the offenders. Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">{443}</a></span>
+Hastings wanted to fly from judicial inquiry; he
+wanted to put Debi Sing anywhere but in a court
+of justice. A court of justice, where a direct assertion
+is brought forward, and a direct proof applied
+to it, is an element in which he cannot live for a
+moment. He would seek refuge anywhere, even in
+the very sanctuary of his accusers, rather than abide
+a trial with him in a court of justice. But the House
+of Commons was too just not to send him to this
+tribunal, whose justice they cannot doubt, whose
+penetration he cannot elude, and whose decision will
+justify those managers whose characters he attempted
+to defame.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. We find, that, after the cruel
+sale of this infant, who was properly and directly
+under the guardianship of the Company, (for the
+Company acts as steward and dewan of the province,
+which office has the guardianship of minors,) after
+he had been robbed of 40,000<i>l.</i> by the hands of
+Gunga Govind Sing, and afterwards, under pretence
+of his being in debt to the Company, delivered into
+the hands of that monster, Debi Sing, Mr. Hastings,
+by way of anticipation of these charges, and in answer
+to them, has thought proper to produce the
+certificate from this unfortunate boy which I will
+now again read to you.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"I, Radanaut, Zemindar of Purgunnah Havelly
+Punjera, commonly called Dinagepore:&mdash;As it has
+been learnt by me, the mutsuddies, and the respectable
+officers of my zemindary, that the ministers
+of England are displeased with the late Governor,
+Warren Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that
+he oppressed us, took money from us by deceit and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">{444}</a></span>
+force, and ruined the country; therefore we, upon
+the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent
+on and necessary for us to abide by, following
+the rules laid down in giving evidence, declare
+the particulars of the acts and deeds of Warren Hastings,
+Esquire, full of circumspection and caution,
+civility and justice, superior to the caution of the
+most learned, and, by representing what is fact, wipe
+away the doubts that have possessed the minds of
+the ministers of England: that Mr. Hastings is possessed
+of fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection
+to us; that he is clear of the contamination of
+mistrust and wrong, and his mind is free of covetousness
+or avarice. During the time of his administration,
+no one saw other conduct than that of protection
+to the husbandmen, and justice; no inhabitant
+ever experienced afflictions, no one ever felt oppression
+from him. Our reputations have always been
+guarded from attacks by his prudence, and our families
+have always been protected by his justice. He
+never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards
+us, but healed the wounds of despair with the
+salve of consolation, by means of his benevolent and
+kind behavior, never permitting one of us to sink
+in the pit of despondence. He supported every one
+by his goodness, overset the designs of evil-minded
+men by his authority, tied the hands of oppression
+with the strong bandage of justice, and by these means
+expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness and
+joy over us. He re&euml;stablished justice and impartiality.
+We were, during his government, in the enjoyment
+of perfect happiness and ease, and many of
+us are thankful and satisfied. As Mr. Hastings was
+well acquainted with our manners and customs, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">{445}</a></span>
+was always desirous, in every respect, of doing
+whatever would preserve our religious rites, and
+guard them against every kind of accident and injury,
+and at all times protected us. Whatever we
+have experienced from him, and whatever happened
+from him, we have written without deceit or exaggeration."</p></div>
+
+<p>My Lords, this Radanaut, zemindar of the purgunnah,
+who, as your Lordships hear, bears evidence upon
+oath to all the great and good qualities of the Governor,
+and particularly to his absolute freedom from covetousness,&mdash;this
+person, to whom Mr. Hastings appeals,
+was, as the Committee state, a boy between five and
+six years old at the time when he was given into the
+hands of Debi Sing, and when Mr. Hastings left Bengal,
+which was in 1786 [1785?], was between eleven
+and twelve years old. This is the sort of testimony
+that Mr. Hastings produces, to prove that he was clear
+from all sort of extortion, oppression, and covetousness,
+in this very zemindary of Dinagepore. This boy, who
+is so observant, who is so penetrating, who is so accurate
+in his knowledge of the whole government of Mr.
+Hastings, was, I say, when he left his government, at
+the utmost, but eleven years and a half old. Now to
+what an extremity is this unhappy man at your bar
+driven, when, oppressed by this accumulative load of
+corruption charged upon him, and seeing his bribery,
+his prevarication, his fraudulent bonds brought before
+you, he gives the testimony of this child, who for the
+greatest part of his time lived three hundred miles
+from the seat of Mr. Hastings's government! Consider
+the miserable situation of this poor, unfortunate
+boy, made to swear, with all the solemnities of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">{446}</a></span>
+religion, that Mr. Hastings was never guilty in his
+province of any act of rapacity! Such are the testimonies,
+which are there called <i>razinamas</i>, in favor
+of Mr. Hastings, with which all India is said to
+sound. Do we attempt to conceal them from your
+Lordships? No, we bring them forth, to show you
+the wickedness of the man, who, after he has robbed
+innocence, after he has divided the spoil between Gunga
+Govind Sing and himself, gets the party robbed to
+perjure himself for his sake,&mdash;if such a creature is
+capable of being guilty of perjury. We have another
+razinama sent from Nuddea, by a person nearly
+under the same circumstances with Radanaut, namely,
+Maha Rajah Dirauje Seo Chund Behadre, only
+made to differ in some expressions from the former,
+that it might not appear to originate from the same
+hand. These miserable razinamas he delivers to
+you as the collected voice of the country, to show
+how ill-founded the impressions are which committees
+of the House of Commons (for to them they allude,
+I suppose) have taken concerning this man, during
+their inquiries into the management of the affairs of
+the Company in India.</p>
+
+<p>Before I quit this subject, I have only to give you
+the opinion of Sir Elijah Impey, a name consecrated
+to respect forever, (your Lordships know him in this
+House as well as I do,) respecting these petitions and
+certificates of good behavior.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>"From the reasons and sentiments that they contain,"
+&amp;c.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor" title=" This document cannot be found">[9]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<p>The moment an Englishman appears, as this gentleman
+does, in the province of Dinagepore, to collect<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">{447}</a></span>
+certificates for Mr. Hastings, it is a command for them,
+the people, to say what he pleases.</p>
+
+<p>And here, my Lords, I would wish to say something
+of the miserable situation of the people of that country;
+but it is not in my commission, and I must be
+silent, and shall only request your Lordships to observe
+how this crime of bribery grows in its magnitude.
+First, the bribe is taken, through Gunga Govind Sing,
+from this infant, for his succession to the zemindary.
+Next follows the removal from their offices, and consequent
+ruin, of all his nearest natural relations.
+Then the delivery of the province to Debi Sing, upon
+the pretence of the arrears due to the Company, with
+all the subsequent horrors committed under the management
+of that atrocious villain. And lastly, the
+gross subornation of perjury, in making this wretched
+minor, under twelve years of age, bear testimony
+upon oath to the good qualities of Mr. Hastings
+and of his government,&mdash;this minor, I say, who
+lived three hundred miles from the seat of his government,
+and who, if he knew anything at all of his
+own affairs, must have known that Mr. Hastings was
+the cause of all his sufferings.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Lords, I have now gone through the whole of
+what I have in charge. I have laid before you the
+covenants by which the Company have thought fit to
+guard against the avarice and rapacity of their Governors.
+I have shown that they positively forbid the
+taking of all sorts of bribes and presents; and I have
+stated the means adopted by them for preventing the
+evasion of their orders, by directing, in all money
+transactions, the publicity of them. I have farther
+shown, that, in order to remove every temptation to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">{448}</a></span>
+a breach of their orders, the next step was the framing
+a legal fiction, by which presents and money, under
+whatever pretence taken, were made the legal
+property of the Company, in order to enable them to
+recover them out of any rapacious hands that might
+violate the new act of Parliament. I have also
+stated this act of Parliament. I have stated Mr.
+Hastings's sense of it. I have stated the violation
+of it by his taking bribes from all quarters. I have
+stated the fraudulent bonds by which he claimed
+a security for money as his own which belonged to
+the Company. I have stated the series of frauds,
+prevarications, concealments, and all that mystery
+of iniquity, which I waded through with pain to
+myself, I am sure, and with infinite pain, I fear, to
+your Lordships. I have shown your Lordships that
+his evasions of the clear words of his covenant and
+the clear words of an act of Parliament were such
+as did not arise from an erroneous judgment, but
+from a corrupt intention; and I believe you will
+find that his attempt to evade the law aggravates infinitely
+his guilt in breaking it. In all this I have
+only <i>opened</i> to you the package of this business; I
+have opened it to ventilate it, and give air to it; I
+have opened it, that a quarantine might be performed,&mdash;that
+the sweet air of heaven, which is
+polluted by the poison it contains, might be let
+loose upon it, and that it may be aired and ventilated
+before your Lordships touch it. Those who
+follow me will endeavor to explain to your Lordships
+what Mr. Hastings has endeavored to involve in mystery,
+by bringing proof after proof that every bribe
+that was here concealed was taken with corrupt purposes
+and followed with the most pernicious <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">{449}</a></span>consequences.
+These are things which will be brought
+to you in proof. I have only regarded the system
+of bribery; I have endeavored to show that it is a
+system of mystery and concealment, and consequently
+a system of fraud.</p>
+
+<p>You now see some of the means by which fortunes
+have been made by certain persons in India;
+you see the confederacies they have formed with one
+another for their mutual concealment and mutual
+support; you will see how they reply to their own
+deceitful inquiries by fraudulent answers; you will
+see that Cheltenham calls upon Calcutta, as one
+deep calls upon another, and that the call which
+is made for explanation is answered in mystery; in
+short, you will see the very constitution of their
+minds here developed.</p>
+
+<p>And now, my Lords, in what a situation are we
+all placed! This prosecution of the Commons, I
+wish to have it understood, and I am sure I shall
+not be disclaimed in it, is a prosecution not only
+for the punishing a delinquent, a prosecution not
+merely for preventing this and that offence, but it
+is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose of
+preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that
+characterize the people of England. The situation
+in which we stand is dreadful. These people pour
+in upon us every day. They not only bring with
+them the wealth which they have acquired, but they
+bring with them into our country the vices by which
+it was acquired. Formerly the people of England
+were censured, and perhaps properly, with being a
+sullen, unsocial, cold, unpleasant race of men, and as
+inconstant as the climate in which they are born.
+These are the vices which the enemies of the king<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">{450}</a></span>dom
+charged them with: and people are seldom
+charged with vices of which they do not in some
+measure partake. But nobody refused them the
+character of being an open-hearted, candid, liberal,
+plain, sincere people,&mdash;qualities which would cancel
+a thousand faults, if they had them. But if, by conniving
+at these frauds, you once teach the people
+of England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded
+conduct,&mdash;if you teach them qualities directly
+the contrary to those by which they have hitherto
+been distinguished,&mdash;if you make them a nation
+of concealers, a nation of dissemblers, a nation of
+liars, a nation of forgers,&mdash;my Lords, if you, in
+one word, turn them into a people of <i>banians</i>, the
+character of England, that character which, more
+than our arms, and more than our commerce, has
+made us a great nation, the character of England
+will be gone and lost.</p>
+
+<p>Our liberty is as much in danger as our honor
+and our national character. We, who here appear
+representing the Commons of England, are not wild
+enough not to tremble both for ourselves and for our
+constituents at the effect of riches. <i>Opum metuenda
+potestas.</i> We dread the operation of money. Do
+we not know that there are many men who wait, and
+who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution,
+to let loose all the corrupt wealth of India, acquired
+by the oppression of that country, for the corruption
+of all the liberties of this, and to fill the Parliament
+with men who are now the object of its indignation?
+To-day the Commons of Great Britain prosecute the
+delinquents of India: to-morrow the delinquents of
+India may be the Commons of Great Britain. We
+know, I say, and feel the force of money; and we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">{451}</a></span>
+now call upon your Lordships for justice in this cause
+of money. We call upon you for the preservation of
+our manners, of our virtues. We call upon you
+for our national character. We call upon you for
+our liberties; and hope that the freedom of the Commons
+will be preserved by the justice of the Lords.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> This document cannot be found</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>END OF VOL. X.</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable
+Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund
+Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12)
+
+Author: Edmund Burke
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2006 [EBook #18192]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF THE RIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Susan Skinner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
+http://gallica.bnf.fr)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 reestablished 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 Khan. He shall not blow hot and cold. In what
+respect was Mr. Hastings better than Mahomed Reza Khan, 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 Khan 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 Khan, 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 Khan's
+salary as a spoil.
+
+When the orders of the Court to restore Mahomed Reza Khan, 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 Khan, 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 Khan
+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 Khan Jehan Khan, 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 praesumitur 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 columbae_,--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 Khan, 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
+Khan, 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 reexamine 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
+Khan, 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 accompanying _durkhausts_, or petitions, for grants
+of lands lying in different districts, the total _jumma_, or rent, of
+which amount to Rupees 2,38,061. 12. 1."
+
+Your Lordships recollect that Mr. Larkins was one of the bribe-agents of
+Mr. Hastings,--one, I mean, of a corporation, but not corporate in their
+acts. My Lords, Mr. Larkins has told you, he has told us, and he has
+told the Court of Directors, that Mr. Hastings parted in a quarrel with
+Gunga Govind Sing, because he had not faithfully kept his engagement
+with regard to his bribe, and that, instead of 40,000_l._ from
+Dinagepore, he had only paid him 30,000_l._ My Lords, that iniquitous
+men will defraud one another I can conceive; but you will perceive by
+Mr. Hastings's behavior at parting, that he either had in fact received
+this money from Gunga Govind Sing, or in some way or other had abundant
+reason to be satisfied,--that he totally forgot his anger upon this
+occasion, and that at parting his last act was to ratify _grants of
+lands_ (so described by Mr. Hastings) to Gunga Govind Sing. Your
+Lordships will recollect the tender and forgiving temper of Mr.
+Hastings. Whatever little bickerings there might have been between them
+about their small money concerns, the purifying waters of the Ganges had
+washed away all sins, enmities, and discontent. By some of those arts
+which Gunga Govind Sing knows how to practise, (I mean conciliatory,
+honest arts,) he had fairly wiped away all resentment out of Mr.
+Hastings's mind; and he, who so long remembered the affront offered him
+by Cheyt Sing, totally forgets Gunga Govind Sing's fraud of 10,000_l._,
+and attempts to make others the instruments of giving him what he calls
+his reward.
+
+Mr. Hastings states, among Gunga Govind's merits, that he had, from the
+time of its institution, and with a very short intermission, served the
+office of dewan to the Calcutta Committee. That short intermission was
+when he was turned out of office upon proof of peculation and
+embezzlement of public money; but of this cause of the intermission in
+the political life and political merits of Gunga Govind Sing Mr.
+Hastings does not tell you.
+
+Your Lordships shall now hear what opinion a member of the Provincial
+Council at Calcutta, in which he had also served, had of him.
+
+"Who is Gunga Govind Sing?" The answer is, "He was, when I left Bengal,
+dewan to the Committee of Revenue.--What was his office and power during
+Mr. Hastings's administration since 1780?--He was formerly dewan to the
+Provincial Council stationed at Calcutta, of which I was a member. His
+conduct then was licentious and unwarrantable, oppressive and
+extortionary. He was stationed under us to be an humble and submissive
+servant, and to be of use to us in the discharge of our duty. His
+conduct was everything the reverse. We endeavored to correct the
+mischiefs he was guilty of as much as possible. In one attempt to
+release fifteen persons illegally confined by him, we were dismissed our
+offices: a different pretence was held out for our dismission, but it
+was only a pretence. Since his appointment as dewan to the present
+Committee of Revenue, his line of conduct has only been a continuance of
+what I have described, but upon a larger scale.--What was the general
+opinion of the natives of the use he made of his power? He was looked up
+to by the natives as the second person in the government, if not the
+first. He was considered as the only channel for obtaining favor and
+employment from the Governor. There is hardly a native family of rank or
+credit within the three provinces whom he has not some time or other
+distressed and afflicted; scarce a zemindary that he has not dismembered
+and plundered.--Were you in a situation to know this to be true?--I
+certainly was.--What was the general opinion, and your own, concerning
+his wealth?--It is almost impossible to form a competent judgment, his
+means of acquiring it have been so extensive. I had an account shown to
+me, about July, 1785, stating his acquisitions at three hundred and
+twenty lacs of rupees,--that is, 3,200,000_l._"
+
+My Lords, I have only to add, that, from the best inquiries I have been
+able to make, those who speak highest of his wealth are those who obtain
+the greatest credit. The estimate of any man's wealth is uncertain; but
+the enormity of his wealth is universally believed. Yet Mr. Hastings
+seemed to act as if he needed a reward; and it is therefore necessary to
+inquire what recommended him particularly to Mr. Hastings. Your
+Lordships have seen that he was on the point of being dismissed for
+misbehavior and oppression by that Calcutta Committee his services to
+which Mr. Hastings gives as one proof of his constant and uniform good
+behavior. "He had executed," he says, "the duties of his office with
+fidelity, diligence, and ability." These are his public merits; but he
+has private merits. "To myself," says he, "he has given proofs of
+constancy and attachment."
+
+Now we, who have been used to look very diligently over the Company's
+records, and to compare one part with another, ask what those services
+were, which have so strongly recommended him to Mr. Hastings, and
+induced him to speak so favorably of his public services. What those
+services are does not appear; we have searched the records for them,
+(and those records are very busy and loquacious,) about that period of
+time during which Mr. Hastings was laboring under an eclipse, and near
+the dragon's mouth, and all the drums of Bengal beating to free him from
+this dangerous eclipse. During this time there is nothing publicly done,
+there is nothing publicly said, by Gunga Govind Sing. There were, then,
+some services of Gunga Govind Sing that lie undiscovered, which he takes
+as proofs of attachment. What could they be? They were not public;
+nobody knows anything of them; they must, by reference to the time, as
+far as we can judge of them, be services of concealment: otherwise, in
+the course of this business, it will be necessary, and Mr. Hastings will
+find occasion, to show what those personal services of Gunga Govind
+Sing to him were. _His_ services to Gunga Govind Sing were pretty
+conspicuous: for, after he was turned out for peculation, Mr. Hastings
+restored him to his office; and when he had imprisoned fifteen persons
+illegally and oppressively, and when the Council were about to set them
+at liberty, they were set at liberty themselves, they were dismissed
+their offices. Your Lordships see, then, what his public services were.
+His private services are unknown: they must be, as we conceive from
+their being unknown, of a suspicious nature; and I do not go further
+than suspicion, because I never heard, and I have not been without
+attempts to make the discovery, what those services were that
+recommended him to Mr. Hastings.
+
+Having looked at his public services, which are well-known scenes of
+wickedness, barbarity, and corruption, we next come to see what his
+reward is. Your Lordships hear what reward he thought proper to secure
+for himself; and I believe a man who has power like Gunga Govind Sing,
+and a disposition like Gunga Govind Sing, can hardly want the means of
+rewarding himself; and if every virtue rewards itself, and virtue is
+said to be its own reward, the virtue of Gunga Govind Sing was in a good
+way of seeking its own reward. Mr. Hastings, however, thought it was not
+right that such a man should reward himself, but that it was necessary
+for the honor and justice of government to find him a reward. Then the
+next thing is, what that reward shall be. It is a grant of lands. Your
+Lordships will observe, that Mr. Hastings declares some of these lands
+to be unoccupied, others occupied, but not by the just owners. Now these
+were the very lands of the Rajah of Dinagepore from whence he had taken
+the bribe of 40,000_l._ My Lords, this was a monstrous thing. Mr.
+Hastings had the audacity, as his parting act, when he was coming to
+England, and ought to have expected (whatever he did expect) the
+responsibility of this day,--he was, I say, shameless enough not only to
+give this recommendation, but to perpetuate the mischiefs of his reign,
+as he has done, to his successors: for he has really done so, by making
+it impossible, almost, to know anything of the true state of that
+country; and he has thereby made them much less responsible and criminal
+than before in any ill acts they may have done since his time. But Mr.
+Hastings not only recommends and backs the petition of Gunga Govind Sing
+with his parting authority, which authority he made the people there
+believe would be greater in England than it was in India, but he is an
+evidence; he declares, that, "to his own knowledge, these lands are
+vacant, and confessedly, therefore, by the laws of this as well as of
+most other countries, in the absolute gift of government."
+
+My Lords, as I said, Mr. Hastings becomes a witness, and I believe in
+the course of the proceedings you will find a false witness, for Gunga
+Govind Sing. "To my own knowledge," says he, "they are vacant." Why, I
+cannot find that Mr. Hastings had ever been in Dinagepore; or if he had,
+it must have been only as a passenger. He had not the supervision of the
+district, in any other sense than with that kind of eagle eye which he
+must have had over all Bengal, and which he had for no other purposes
+than those for which eagles' eyes are commonly used. He becomes, you
+see, a witness for Gunga Govind Sing, and orders to be given him, as a
+recompense for all the iniquitous acts this man committed, the lands of
+that very Rajah who through the hands of Gunga Govind Sing had given an
+enormous bribe to Mr. Hastings. These lands were not without an
+ownership, but were lands in the hands of the Rajah, and were to be
+severed from the zemindary, and given to Gunga Govind Sing. The manner
+of obtaining them is something so shocking, and contains such a number
+of enormities completed in one act, that one can scarce imagine how such
+a compound could exist.
+
+This man, besides his office of dewan to the Calcutta Committee, which
+gave him the whole management and power of the revenue, was, as I have
+stated, at the head of all the registers in the kingdom, whose duty it
+was to be a control upon him as dewan. As Mr. Hastings destroyed every
+other constitutional settlement of the country, so the office which was
+to be a check upon Gunga Govind Sing, namely, the register of the
+country, had been superseded, and revived in another shape, and given to
+the own son of this very man. God forbid that a son should not be under
+a certain and reasonable subordination! But though in this country we
+know a son may possibly be free from the control of his father, yet the
+meanest slave is not in a more abject condition of slavery than a son is
+in that country to his father; for it extends to the power of a Roman
+parent. The office of register is to take care that a full and fair rent
+is secured to government; and above all, it is his business to take care
+of the body of laws, the _Rawaj-ul-Mulk_, or custom of the country, of
+which he is the guardian as the head of the law. It was his business to
+secure that fundamental law of the government, and fundamental law of
+the country, that a zemindary cannot be split, or any portion of it
+separated, without the consent of the government. This man betrayed his
+trust, and did privately, contrary to the duty of his office, get this
+minor Rajah, who was but an infant, who was but nine years old at the
+time, to make over to him a part of his zemindary, to a large amount,
+under color of a fraudulent and fictitious sale. By the laws of that
+country, by the common laws of Nature, the act of this child was void.
+The act was void as against the government, by giving a zemindary
+without the consent of the government to the very man who ought to have
+prevented such an act. He has the same sacred guardianship of minors
+that the Chancellor of England has. This man got to himself those lands
+by a fraudulent, and probably forged deed,--for that is charged too; but
+whether it was forged or not, this miserable minor was obliged to give
+the lands to him: he did not dare to quarrel with him upon such an
+article; because he who would purchase could take. The next step was to
+get one of his nearest relations to seem to give a consent; because
+taking it of the minor was too gross. The relation, who could no more
+consent by the law of that country than the law of this, gave apparently
+his consent. And these were the very lands that Mr. Hastings speaks of
+as "lands entirely at the disposal of government."
+
+All this came before the Council. The moment Mr. Hastings was gone,
+India seemed a little to respire; there was a vast, oppressive weight
+taken off it, there was a mountain removed from its breast; and persons
+did dare then, for the first time, to breathe their complaints. And
+accordingly, this minor Rajah got some person kind enough to tell him
+that he was a minor, that he could not part with his estate; and this,
+with the other shocking and illegal parts of the process, was stated by
+him to the Council, who had Mr. Hastings's recommendation of Gunga
+Govind Sing before them. The Council, shocked to see a minor attempted
+to be dispossessed in such a manner by him who was the natural guardian
+of all minors, shocked at such an enormous, daring piece of iniquity,
+began to inquire further, and to ask, "How came this his near relation
+to consent?" He was apparently partner in the fraud. Partner in the
+fraud he was, but not partner in the profit; for he was to do it without
+getting anything for it: the wickedness was in him, and the profit in
+Gunga Govind Sing. In consequence of this inquiry, the man comes down to
+account for his conduct, and declares another atrocious iniquity, that
+shows you the powers which Gunga Govind Sing possessed. "Gunga Govind
+Sing," says he, "is master of the country; he had made a great festival
+for the burial of his mother; all those of that caste ought to be
+invited to the funeral festival; he would have disgraced me forever, if
+I had not been invited to that funeral festival." These funeral
+festivals, you should know, are great things in that country, and
+celebrated in this manner, and, you may depend upon it, in a royal
+manner by him, upon burying his mother: any person left out was marked,
+despised, and disgraced. "But he had it in his power, and I was
+threatened to be deprived of my caste by his register, who had the caste
+in his absolute disposition." Says he, "I was under terror, I was under
+duress, and I did it."
+
+Gunga Govind Sing was fortified by the opinion, that the Governor,
+though departed, virtually resided in that country. God grant that his
+power may be extirpated out of it now! I doubt it; but, most assuredly,
+it was residing in its plenitude when he departed from thence; and there
+was not a man in India who was not of opinion, either that he was
+actually to return to govern India again, or that his power is such in
+England as that he might govern it here. And such were the hopes of
+those who had intentions against the estates of others. Gunga Govind
+Sing, therefore, being pressed to the wall by this declaration of the
+Rajah's relation, when he could say nothing against it, when it was
+clear and manifest, and there were only impudent barefaced denials, and
+asseverations against facts which carried truth with themselves, did not
+in his answer pretend to say that a zemindary might be parted without
+the consent of the government, that a minor might be deprived of it,
+that the next relation had a power of disposing of it. He did indeed
+say, but nobody believed him, that he had used no force upon this
+relation; but as every one knew the act would be void, he was driven to
+Mr. Hastings's great refuge,--he was driven to say, "The government in
+this country has arbitrary power; the power of government is everything,
+the right of the subject nothing; they have at all times separated
+zemindaries from their lawful proprietors. Give me what Mr. Hastings has
+constantly given to other people without any right, or shadow or
+semblance of right at all." God knows, it is well that I walk with my
+authority in my hand; for there are such crimes, such portentous,
+incredible crimes, to be brought before your Lordships, that it would
+hardly be believed, were it not that I am constantly, as I hope I shall
+constantly be, guarded with evidence, and that the strongest that can
+be, even the evidence of the parties themselves.
+
+"From your inquiry," Gunga Govind Sing says to the Council, "every
+circumstance will appear in its true colors. With respect to the
+alienation of parts of zemindaries, the extent and consequence of the
+great zemindars depend in a great measure on the favor and countenance
+of the ruling powers. By what means did this zemindar of Dinagepore get
+possession of Purgunnah Buttassim after the death of Rycobad Chowdry in
+1158, of Purgunnah Coolygong after the death of Sahebrance Chowderanne
+in the same year, notwithstanding his heirs existed, and of Purgunnah
+Suntoe, &c., during the lifetime of Sumboonant, the zemindar, in 1167,
+all without right, title, or pecuniary consideration? This has been the
+case with many purgunnahs in his zemindary, and indeed exists in many
+other zemindaries besides since the Company's accession. Ramkissen, in
+1172, got possession of Nurrulloor, the zemindary of Mahomed Ali. The
+purgunnah of Ichanguipore, &c., was in three divisions in 1173. The
+petition of Govind Deo Sheopersaud was made over to the son of Bousser
+Chowdry, possessor of the third share. Purgunnah Baharbund belonged to
+the zemindary of Ranny Bhowanny, and in 1180 was made over to Lucknaut
+Nundy. All these changes took place in the lifetime of the rightful
+possessors, without right, title, or purchase."
+
+Your Lordships have not heard before of Lucknaut Nundy. He was the son
+of a person of whom your Lordships have heard before, called Cantoo
+Baboo, the banian of Mr. Hastings. Mr. Hastings has proved in abundance
+of other cases that a grant to father and son is the same thing. The
+fathers generally take out grants in the names of their sons: and the
+Ranny Bhowanny, possessing the zemindary of Radshi, an old lady of the
+first rank and family in India, was stripped of part of her zemindary,
+and it was given to Lucknaut Nundy, the son of Mr. Hastings's banian;
+and then (you see the consequence of good examples) comes Gunga Govind
+Sing, and says, "I am as good a man as he; there is a zemindary given;
+then do as much for Gunga Govind Sing as you have done for Cantoo
+Baboo." Here is an argument drawn from the practice of Mr. Hastings. And
+this shows your Lordships the necessity of suppressing such iniquities
+by punishing the author of them. You will punish Mr. Hastings, and no
+man will hereafter dare to rob minors, no man will hereafter dare to rob
+widows, to give to the vilest of mankind, their own base instruments for
+their own nefarious purposes, the lands of others, without right, title,
+or purchase.
+
+My Lords, I will not after this state to you the false representation of
+the value of these lands which this man gave in to government. He
+represented it to be much less than it was, when he desired the grant of
+them,--as shall be stated, when it comes before your Lordships, at the
+proper time. But at present I am only touching upon principles, and
+bringing examples so far as they illustrate principles, and to show how
+precedents spread.
+
+I believe your Lordships will conceive better of the spirit of these
+transactions by my intermixing with them, as I shall endeavor to do, as
+much as possible of the grounds of them. I will venture to say, that no
+description that I can give, no painting, if I was either able or
+willing to paint, could make these transactions appear to your Lordships
+with the strength which they have in themselves; and your Lordships
+will be convinced of this, when you see, what nobody could hardly
+believe, that a man can say, "It was given to others without right,
+title, or purchase,--give it to me without right, title, or purchase;
+give me the estates of minors without right, title, or purchase, because
+Mr. Hastings gave the estates of widows without right, title, or
+purchase."
+
+Of this exemplary grant, of this pattern for future proceedings, I will
+show your Lordships the consequence. I will read to your Lordships part
+of the examination of a witness, taken from a report of a committee of
+the House of Commons.
+
+"Are you acquainted with the situation of the zemindary of
+Baharbund?--It lies to the eastward of Dinagepore and Rungpore. I was
+stationed in that neighborhood.--To whom did it originally belong?--I
+believe, to the zemindary of Radshi, belonging to Ranny Bhowanny.--For
+what reason was it taken from the Ranny of Radshi and given to Cantoo
+Baboo?--I do not exactly recollect: I believe, on some plea of
+incapacity or insufficiency in her to manage it, or some pretended
+decline in the revenue, owing to mismanagement.--On what terms was it
+granted to Cantoo Baboo or his son?--I believe it was a grant in
+perpetuity, at the revenue of Rupees 82,000 or 83,000 per annum.--What
+amount did he collect from the country?--I cannot tell. The year I was
+in that neighborhood, the settlement with his under-tenants was
+something above 3,53,000 rupees. The inhabitants of the country objected
+to it. They assembled in a body of about five thousand, and were
+proceeding to Calcutta to make known their grievances to the Committee
+of Revenue. They were stopped at Cossimbazar by Noor Sing Baboo, the
+brother of Cantoo Baboo, and there the matter was compromised,--in what
+manner I cannot say."
+
+Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings's banian got this zemindary belonging
+to this venerable lady; unable to protect herself; that it was granted
+to him without right, title, or purchase. To show you that Mr. Hastings
+had been in a constant course of such proceeding, here is a petition
+from a person called ---- for some favor from government which it is not
+necessary now to state. In order to make good his claim, he states what
+nobody denied, but which is universally known in fact. Says he, "I have
+never entertained any such intention or idea," that is, of seizing upon
+other people's zemindaries; "neither am I at all desirous of acquiring
+any other person's zemindary in this country," &c....
+
+    [_The document read here is wanting, ending_] "as several Calcutta
+    banians have done," &c.
+
+He states it as a kind of constant practice, by which the country had
+been robbed under Mr. Hastings, known and acknowledged to be so, to
+seize upon the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless. In this
+manner did Gunga Govind Sing govern himself, upon the direct precedent
+of Cantoo Baboo, the banian of Mr. Hastings; and this other instrument
+of his in like manner calls upon government for favor of some kind or
+other, upon the same principle and the same precedent.
+
+Your Lordships now see how necessary it was to say something about
+arbitrary power. For, first, the wicked people of that country (Mr.
+Hastings's instruments, I mean) pretend right, title, purchase, grant;
+and when their frauds in all these legal means are discovered, then they
+fly off, and have recourse to arbitrary power, and say, "It is true I
+can make out no right, title, grant, or purchase; the parties are
+minors; I am bound to take care of their right: but you have arbitrary
+power; you have exercised it upon other occasions; exercise it upon
+this; give me the rights of other people." This was the last act, and I
+hope will be the last act, of Mr. Hastings's wicked power, done by the
+wickedest man in favor of the wickedest man, and by the wickedest means,
+which failed upon his own testimony.
+
+To bring your Lordships to the end of this business, which I hope will
+lead me very near to the end of what I have to trouble your Lordships
+with, I will now state the conduct of the Council, and the resolution
+about Gunga Govind Sing. I am to inform your Lordships that there was a
+reference made by the Council to the Committee of Revenue, namely, to
+Gunga Govind Sing himself,--a reference with regard to the right, title,
+mode, and proceeding, and many other circumstances; upon which the
+Committee, being such as I have described, very naturally were silent.
+Gunga Govind Sing _loquitur solus_,--in the manner you have just heard;
+the Committee were the chorus,--they sometimes talk, fill up a vacant
+part,--but Gunga Govind Sing was the great actor, the sole one. The
+report of this Committee being laid before the Council, Mr. Stables, one
+of the board, entered the following minute on the 15th of May, 1785.
+
+"I have perused the several papers upon this subject, and am sorry to
+observe that the Committee of Revenue are totally silent on the most
+material points therein, and sending the petition to them has only been
+so much time thrown away: I mean, on the actual value of the lands in
+question, what the amount derived from them has been in the last year,
+and what advantages or disadvantages to government by the sale, and
+whether, in their opinion, the supposed sale was compulsive or not. But
+it is not necessary for the discussion of the question respecting the
+regularity or irregularity of the pretended sale of Salbarry to Gunga
+Govind Sing, the dewan, to enter into the particular assertions of each
+party.
+
+"The representations of the Rajah's agent, confirmed by the petitions of
+his principal, positively assert the sale to have been compulsive and
+violent; and the dewan as positively denies it, though the fears he
+expresses, 'that their common enemies would set aside the act before it
+was complete,' show clearly that they were sensible the act was
+unjustifiable, if they do not tend to falsify his denial.
+
+"But it is clearly established and admitted by the language and writings
+of both parties, that there has been a most unwarrantable collusion in
+endeavoring to alienate the rights of government, contrary to the most
+positive original laws of the constitution of these provinces, 'that no
+zemindar and other landholder, paying revenue to government, shall be
+permitted to alienate his lands without the express authority of that
+government.'
+
+"The defence set up by Gunga Govind Sing does not go to disavow the
+transaction; for, if it did, the deed of sale, &c., produced by himself,
+and the petition to the board for its confirmation, would detect him: on
+the contrary, he openly admits its existence, and only strives to show
+that it was a voluntary one on the part of the Ranny and the servants of
+the Rajah. Whether voluntary or not, it was equally criminal in Gunga
+Govind Sing, as the public officer of government: because diametrically
+opposite to the positive and repeated standing orders of that government
+for the rule of his conduct, as dewan, and native guardian of the public
+rights intrusted especially to his care; because it was his duty, not
+only not to be guilty of a breach of those rules himself, but, as dewan,
+and exercising the efficient office of _kanungo_, to prevent, detect,
+expose, and apprise his employers of every instance attempted to the
+contrary; because it was his duty to prevent the government being
+defrauded, and the Rajah, a child of nine years old, robbed of his
+hereditary possessions, as he would have been, if this transaction had
+not been detected: whereas, on the contrary, the dewan is himself the
+principal mover and sole instrument in that fraud and robbery, if I am
+rightly informed, to the amount of 42,474 rupees[1] in perpetuity, by
+which he alone was to benefit; and because he has even dared to stand
+forward in an attempt to obtain our sanction, and thereby make us
+parties to (in my opinion) a false deed and fraudulent transaction, as
+his own defence now shows the bill of sale and all its collateral papers
+to be.
+
+"If offences of this dark tendency and magnitude were not to be punished
+in a public manner, the high example here set the natives employed
+under the government by their first native officer would very soon
+render our authority contemptible, and operate to the destruction of the
+public revenues. I will not dwell further on the contradictions in these
+papers before us on this subject.
+
+"But I beg leave to point out how tenacious the government have been of
+insuring implicit obedience to their rules on this subject in
+particular, and in prohibiting conduct like that here exhibited against
+their public officer, and how sacredly they have viewed the public
+institutes on this subject, which have been violated and trampled on;
+and it will suffice to show their public orders on a similar instance
+which happened some time ago, and which the dewan, from his official
+situation, must have been a party in detecting.
+
+"I desire the board's letter to the Committee on this subject, dated the
+31st May, 1782, may be read, and a copy be annexed to this minute.
+
+"I therefore move the board that Gunga Govind Sing may be forthwith
+required to surrender the original deeds produced by him as a title to
+the grant of Salbarry, in order that they may be returned to the Rajah's
+agents, to be made null and void.
+
+"I further move the board, that the dewan, Gunga Govind Sing, together
+with his naib, Prawn Kishin Sing, his son, and all his dependants, be
+removed from their offices, and that the Roy Royan, Rajah Rajebullub,
+whose duty only Gunga Govind Sing virtually is to perform, be reinstated
+in the exercise of the duties of his department; and that Gunga Govind
+Sing be ordered to deliver up all official papers of the circar to the
+Committee of Revenue and the Roy Royan, and that they be ordered
+accordingly to take charge of them, and finally settle all accounts."
+
+This motion was overruled, and no final proceeding appears.
+
+My Lords, you have heard the proceedings of the court before which Gunga
+Govind Sing thought proper to appeal, in consequence of the power and
+protection of Mr. Hastings being understood to exist after he left
+India, and authenticated by his last parting deed. Your Lordships will
+judge by that last act of Mr. Hastings what the rest of his whole life
+was.
+
+My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than just to remind your
+Lordships of this, that Mr. Hastings's government was one whole system
+of oppression, of robbery of individuals, of destruction of the public,
+and of suppression of the whole system of the English government, in
+order to vest in the worst of the natives all the powers that could
+possibly exist in any government,--in order to defeat the ends which all
+governments ought in common to have in view. Thus, my Lords, I show you
+at one point of view what you are to expect from him in all the rest. I
+have, I think, made out as clear as can be to your Lordships, so far as
+it was necessary to go, that his bribery and peculation was not
+occasional, but habitual,--that it was not urged upon him at the moment,
+but was regular and systematic. I have shown to your Lordships the
+operation of such a system on the revenues.
+
+My Lords, Mr. Hastings pleads one constant merit to justify those
+acts,--namely, that they produce an increase of the public revenue; and
+accordingly he never sells to any of those wicked agents any trusts
+whatever in the country, that you do not hear that it will considerably
+tend to the increase of the revenue. Your Lordships will see, when he
+sold to wicked men the province of Bahar in the same way in which Debi
+Sing had this province of Dinagepore, that consequences of a horrid and
+atrocious nature, though not to so great an extent, followed from it. I
+will just beg leave to state to your Lordships, that the kingdom of
+Bahar is annexed to the kingdom of Bengal; that this kingdom was
+governed by another Provincial Council; that he turned out that
+Provincial Council, and sold that government to two wicked men: one of
+no fortune at all, and the other of a very suspicious fortune; one a
+total bankrupt, the other justly excommunicated for his wickedness in
+his country, and then in prison for misdemeanors in a subordinate
+situation of government. Mr. Hastings destroyed the Council that
+imprisoned him; and, instead of putting one of the best and most
+reputable of the natives to govern it, he takes out of prison this
+excommunicated wretch, hated by God and man,--this bankrupt, this man of
+evil and desperate character, this mismanager of the public revenue in
+an inferior station; and, as he had given Bengal to Gunga Govind Sing,
+he gave this province to Rajahs Kelleram and Cullian Sing. It was done
+upon this principle, that they would increase and very much better the
+revenue. These men seemed to be as strange instruments for improving a
+revenue as ever were chosen, I suppose, since the world began. Perhaps
+their merit was giving a bribe of 40,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings. How he
+disposed of it I don't know. He says, "I disposed of it to the public,
+and it was in a case of emergency." You will see in the course of this
+business the falsehood of that pretence; for you will see, though the
+obligation is given for it as a round sum of money, that the payment
+was not accomplished till a year after; that therefore it could not
+answer any immediate exigence of the Company. Did it answer in an
+increase of the revenue? The very reverse. Those persons who had given
+this bribe of 40,000_l._ at the end of that year were found 80,000_l._
+in debt to the Company. The Company always loses, when Mr. Hastings
+takes a bribe; and when he proposes an increase of the revenue, the
+Company loses often double. But I hope and trust your Lordships will
+consider this idea of a monstrous rise of rent, given by men of
+desperate fortunes and characters, to be one of the grievances instead
+of one of the advantages of this system.
+
+It has been necessary to lay these facts before you, (and I have stated
+them to your Lordships far short of their reality, partly through my
+infirmity, and partly on account of the odiousness of the task of going
+through things that disgrace human nature,) that you may be enabled
+fully to enter into the dreadful consequences which attend a system of
+bribery and corruption in a Governor-General. On a transient view,
+bribery is rather a subject of disgust than horror,--the sordid practice
+of a venal, mean, and abject mind; and the effect of the crime seems to
+end with the act. It looks to be no more than the corrupt transfer of
+property from one person to another,--at worst a theft. But it will
+appear in a very different light, when you regard the consideration for
+which the bribe is given,--namely, that a Governor-General, claiming an
+arbitrary power in himself, for that consideration delivers up the
+properties, the liberties, and the lives of an whole people to the
+arbitrary discretion of any wicked and rapacious person, who will be
+sure to make good from their blood the purchase he has paid for his
+power over them. It is possible that a man may pay a bribe merely to
+redeem himself from some evil. It is bad, however, to live under a power
+whose violence has no restraint except in its avarice. But no man ever
+paid a bribe for a power to charge and tax others, but with a view to
+oppress them. No man ever paid a bribe for the handling of the public
+money, but to peculate from it. When once such offices become thus
+privately and corruptly venal, the very worst men will be chosen (as Mr.
+Hastings has in fact constantly chosen the very worst); because none but
+those who do not scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently
+with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands of a severe public
+revenue and the private bribes of a rapacious chief magistrate. Not only
+the worst men will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no
+dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions. Their
+protection is sure. The authority that is to restrain, to control, to
+punish them is previously engaged; he has his retaining fee for the
+support of their crimes. Mr. Hastings never dared, because he could not,
+arrest oppression in its course, without drying up the source of his own
+corrupt emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the fact, to punish
+extortion in others, because he could not, without risking the discovery
+of bribery in himself. The same corruption, the same oppression, and the
+same impunity will reign through all the subordinate gradations.
+
+A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of wicked, violent, and
+unjust instruments. But when once the line of just and legal demand is
+transgressed, such instruments are of absolute necessity; and they
+comport themselves accordingly. When we know that men must be well paid
+(and they ought to be well paid) for the performance of honorable duty,
+can we think that men will be found to commit wicked, rapacious, and
+oppressive acts with fidelity and disinterestedness for the sole
+emolument of dishonest employers? No: they must have their full share of
+the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer and more
+necessary instruments of the general extortion. We must not, therefore,
+flatter ourselves, when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000_l._ in bribes for
+Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the people nothing more
+than 40,000_l._ is extorted. I speak within compass, four times forty
+must be levied on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent
+purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable tortures,
+imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general despair, general
+insurrection, the massacre of the officers of revenue by the people, the
+massacre of the people by the soldiery, and the total waste and
+destruction of the finest provinces in India, are things of course,--and
+all a necessary consequence involved in the very substance of Mr.
+Hastings's bribery.
+
+I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed, for private
+purposes, the whole system of government by the six Provincial Councils,
+which he had no right to destroy.
+
+I charge him with having delegated to others that power which the act of
+Parliament had directed him to preserve unalienably in himself.
+
+I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere instruments and
+tools, at the enormous expense of 62,000_l._ per annum.
+
+I charge him with having appointed a person their dewan to whom these
+Englishmen were to be subservient tools,--whose name, to his own
+knowledge, was, by the general voice of India, by the general recorded
+voice of the Company, by recorded official transactions, by everything
+that can make a man known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy;
+and with giving him the whole power which he had thus separated from the
+Council-General, and from the Provincial Councils.
+
+I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.
+
+I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which fidelity even
+in iniquity requires at the hands of the worst of men.
+
+I charge him with having robbed those people of whom he took the bribes.
+
+I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.
+
+I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, taken the
+lands of orphans, and given them to wicked persons under him.
+
+I charge him with having removed the natural guardians of a minor Rajah,
+and with having given that trust to a stranger, Debi Sing, whose
+wickedness was known to himself and all the world, and by whom the
+Rajah, his family, and dependants were cruelly oppressed.
+
+I charge him with having committed to the management of Debi Sing three
+great provinces; and thereby with having wasted the country, ruined the
+landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses,
+seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed
+the honor of the whole female race of that country.
+
+In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villany upon
+Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.
+
+My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national
+justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords? You have the cause of oppressed
+princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and
+of wasted kingdoms.
+
+Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever
+laid to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish
+any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left
+substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.
+
+My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons
+of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, that the sun,
+in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more
+glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the
+material bounds and barriers of Nature, united by the bond of a social
+and moral community,--all the Commons of England resenting, as their
+own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of
+India.
+
+Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the
+modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us
+with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the
+mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the crown, under whose authority you
+sit, and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority,
+what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent powers and
+protecting justice of his Majesty. We have here the heir-apparent to the
+crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England wish an
+heir-apparent of the crown to be. We have here all the branches of the
+royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the
+sovereign and the subject,--offering a pledge in that situation for the
+support of the rights of the crown and the liberties of the people, both
+which extremities they touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary
+peerage here,--those who have their own honor, the honor of their
+ancestors and of their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they
+have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which
+justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new
+nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves by various merits,--by
+great military services which have extended the fame of this country
+from the rising to the setting sun. We have those who, by various civil
+merits and various civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which
+they well deserve, and in which they will justify the favor of their
+sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and make them
+rejoice to see those virtuous characters that were the other day upon a
+level with them now exalted above them in rank, but feeling with them in
+sympathy what they felt in common with them before. We have persons
+exalted from the practice of the law, from the place in which they
+administered high, though subordinate, justice, to a seat here, to
+enlighten with their knowledge and to strengthen with their votes those
+principles which have distinguished the courts in which they have
+presided.
+
+My Lords, you have here also the lights of our religion, you have the
+bishops of England. My Lords, you have that true image of the primitive
+Church, in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from
+the superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will
+bring upon the best institutions. You have the representatives of that
+religion which says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit
+of their institution is charity,--a religion which so much hates
+oppression, that, when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, He
+did not appear in a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with
+the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling
+principle that their welfare was the object of all government, since the
+Person who was the Master of Nature chose to appear Himself in a
+subordinate situation. These are the considerations which influence
+them, which animate them, and will animate them, against all
+oppression,--knowing that He who is called first among them, and first
+among us all, both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it,
+made Himself "the servant of all."
+
+My Lords, these are the securities which we have in all the constituent
+parts of the body of this House. We know them, we reckon, we rest upon
+them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your
+hands. Therefore it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons,
+
+I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.
+
+I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament
+assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
+
+I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose
+national character he has dishonored.
+
+I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights,
+and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose
+country he has laid waste and desolate.
+
+I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice
+which he has violated.
+
+I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly
+outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank,
+situation, and condition of life.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Vakeel states Mofussil Jumma, of Salbarry, for 1,191
+
+    S* R*            96,229
+Purchase money       53,755
+                     ------
+Per annum, loss      42,474
+
+
+
+
+SPEECHES
+
+IN
+
+THE IMPEACHMENT
+
+OF
+
+WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,
+
+LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+April and May, 1789.
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+     After Mr. Burke had concluded the opening speeches, the first
+     article of the impeachment was brought forward, on the 22d of
+     February, 1788, by Mr. Fox, and supported by Mr. Grey on the 25th.
+     After the evidence upon this article had been adduced, it was
+     summed up and enforced by Mr. Anstruther, on the 11th day of April
+     following.
+
+     The next article with which the Commons proceeded was brought
+     forward on the 15th of April, 1788, by Mr. Adam, and supported by
+     Mr. Pelham; and the evidence, in part upon the second article of
+     charge, was summed up and enforced, on the 3d of June, by Mr.
+     Sheridan.
+
+     On the 21st of April, 1789, Mr. Burke opened the sixth charge,
+     bribery and corruption, in the following speech, which was
+     continued on the 25th of April, and on the 6th and 7th May, in the
+     same session.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--An event which had spread for a considerable time an
+universal grief and consternation through this kingdom, and which in its
+issue diffused as universal and transcendent a joy, has in the
+circumstances both of our depression and of our exaltation produced a
+considerable delay, if not a total suspension, of the most important
+functions of government.
+
+My Lords, we now resume our office,--and we resume it with new and
+redoubled alacrity, and, we trust, under not less propitious omens than
+when we left it, in this House, at the end of the preceding session. We
+come to this duty with a greater degree of earnestness and zeal, because
+we are urged to it by many and very peculiar circumstances. This day we
+come from an House where the last steps were taken (and I suppose
+something has happened similar in this) to prepare our way to attend
+with the utmost solemnity, in another place, a great national
+thanksgiving for having restored the sovereign to his Parliament and the
+Parliament to its sovereign.
+
+But, my Lords, it is not only in the house of prayer that we offer to
+the First Cause the acceptable homage of our rational nature,--my Lords,
+in this House, at this bar, in this place, in every place where His
+commands are obeyed, His worship is performed. And, my Lords, I must
+boldly say, (and I think I shall hardly be contradicted by your
+Lordships, or by any persons versed in the law which guides us all,)
+that the highest act of religion, and the highest homage which we can
+and ought to pay, is an imitation of the Divine perfections, as far as
+such a nature can imitate such perfections, and that by this means alone
+we can make our homage acceptable to Him.
+
+My Lords, in His temple we shall not forget that His most distinguished
+attribute is justice, and that the first link in the chain by which we
+are held to the Supreme Judge of All is justice; and that it is in this
+solemn temple of representative justice we may best give Him praise,
+because we can here best imitate His divine attributes. If ever there
+was a cause in which justice and mercy are not only combined and
+reconciled, but incorporated, it is in this cause of suffering nations,
+which we now bring before your Lordships this second session of
+Parliament, unwearied and unfatigued in our persevering pursuit; and we
+feel it to be a necessary preliminary, a necessary fact, a necessary
+attendant and concomitant of every public thanksgiving, that we should
+express our gratitude by our virtues, and not merely with our mouths,
+and that, when we are giving thanks for acts of mercy, we should render
+ourselves worthy of them by doing acts of mercy ourselves. My Lords,
+these considerations, independent of those which were our first movers
+in this business, strongly urge us at present to pursue with all zeal
+and perseverance the great cause we have now in hand. And we feel this
+to be the more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that light,
+unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious minds soon tire
+in any pursuit that requires strength, steadiness, and perseverance.
+Such persons, who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not
+resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say, How long is this
+business to continue? Our answer is, It is to continue till its ends are
+obtained.
+
+We know, that, by a mysterious dispensation of Providence, injury is
+quick and rapid, and justice slow; and we may say that those who have
+not patience and vigor of mind to attend the tardy pace of justice
+counteract the order of Providence, and are resolved not to be just at
+all. We, therefore, instead of bending the order of Nature to the laxity
+of our characters and tempers, must rather confirm ourselves by a manly
+fortitude and virtuous perseverance to continue within those forms, and
+to wrestle with injustice, until we have shown that those virtues which
+sometimes wickedness debauches into its cause, such as vigor, energy,
+activity, fortitude of spirit, are called back and brought to their true
+and natural service,--and that in the pursuit of wickedness, in the
+following it through all the winding recesses and mazes of its
+artifices, we shall show as much vigor, as much constancy, as much
+diligence, energy, and perseverance, as any others can do in endeavoring
+to elude the laws and triumph over the justice of their country. My
+Lords, we have thought it the more necessary to say this, because it has
+been given out that we might faint in this business. No: we follow, and
+trust we shall always follow, that great emblem of antiquity, in which
+the person who held out to the end of a long line of labors found the
+reward of all the eleven in the twelfth. Our labor, therefore, will be
+our reward; and we will go on, we will pursue with vigor and diligence,
+in a manner suitable to the Commons of Great Britain, every mode of
+corruption, till we have thoroughly eradicated it.
+
+I think it necessary to say a word, too, upon another circumstance, of
+which there is some complaint, as if some injustice had arisen from
+voluntary delay on our part.
+
+I have already alluded to, first, the melancholy, then the joyful
+occasion of this delay; and I shall now make one remark on another part
+of the complaint, which I understand was formally made to your Lordships
+soon after we had announced our resolution to proceed in this great
+cause of suffering nations before you. It has been alleged, that the
+length of the pursuit had already very much distressed the person who is
+the object of it,--that it leaned upon a fortune unequal to support
+it,--and that 30,000_l._ had been already spent in the preliminary
+preparations for the defence.
+
+My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and unadulterated justice
+considers with a certain degree of tenderness the person whom it is
+called to punish, and never oppresses those by the process who ought not
+to be oppressed but by the sentence of the court before which they are
+brought. The Commons have heard, indeed, with some degree of
+astonishment, that 30,000_l._ hath been laid out by Mr. Hastings in this
+business. We, who have some experience in the conduct of affairs of this
+nature, we, who profess to proceed with regard not to the economy so
+much as to the rigor of this prosecution, (and we are justified by our
+country in so doing,) upon a collation and comparison of the public
+expenses with those which the defendant is supposed to have incurred,
+are much surprised to hear it. We suppose that his solicitors can give a
+good account to him of those expenses,--that the thing is true,--and
+that he has actually, through them, incurred this expense. We have
+nothing to do with this: but we shall remove any degree of uneasiness
+from your Lordships' minds, and from our own, when we show you in the
+charge which we shall bring before you this day, that one bribe only
+received by Mr. Hastings, the smallest of his bribes, or nearly the
+smallest, the bribe received from Rajah Nobkissin, is alone more than
+equal to have paid all the charges Mr. Hastings is stated to have
+incurred; and if this be the case, your Lordships will not be made very
+uneasy in a case of bribery by finding that you press upon the sources
+of peculation.
+
+It has also been said that we weary out the public patience in this
+cause. The House of Commons do not call upon your Lordships to do
+anything of which they do not set the example. They have very lately sat
+in the Colchester Committee as many, within one or two, days
+successively as have been spent in this trial interruptedly in the
+course of two years. Every cause deserves that it should be tried
+according to its nature and circumstances; and in the case of the
+Colchester Committee, in the trial of paltry briberies of odd pounds,
+shillings, and pence, in the corruption of a returning officer, who is
+but a miller, they spent nearly the same number of days that we have
+been inquiring into the ruin of kingdoms by the peculation and bribery
+of the chief governor of the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa.
+Therefore God forbid that we should faint at thrice thirty days, if the
+proceedings should be drawn into such a length, when for a small crime
+as much time has been spent as has yet been spent in this great cause!
+
+Having now cleared the way with regard to the local and temporary
+circumstances of this case,--having shown your Lordships that too much
+time has not been spent in it,--having no reason to think, from the time
+which has hitherto been spent, that time will be unnecessarily spent in
+future,--I trust your Lordships will think that time ought neither to be
+spared nor squandered in this business: we will therefore proceed,
+article by article, as far as the discretion of the House of Commons
+shall think fit, for the justice of the case, to limit the inquiry, or
+to extend it.
+
+We are now going to bring before your Lordships the sixth article. It is
+an article of charge of bribery and corruption against Mr. Hastings; but
+yet we must confess that we feel some little difficulty _in limine_. We
+here appear in the name and character not only of representatives of the
+Commons of Great Britain, but representatives of the inhabitants of
+Bengal: and yet we have had lately come into our hands such ample
+certificates, such full testimonials, from every person in whose cause
+we complain, that we shall appear to be in the strangest situation in
+the world,--the situation of persons complaining, who are disavowed by
+the persons in whose name and character they complain. This would have
+been a very great difficulty in the beginning, especially as it is come
+before us in a flood-tide of panegyric. No encomium can be more exalted
+or more beautifully expressed. No language can more strongly paint the
+perfect satisfaction, the entire acquiescence, of all the nations of
+Bengal, and their wonderful admiration of the character of the person
+whom we have brought as a criminal to your bar upon their part. I do
+admit that it is a very awkward circumstance; but yet, at the same time,
+the same candor which has induced the House of Commons to bring before
+you the bosom friends and confidants of Mr. Hastings as their evidence
+will not suffer them to suppress or withhold for a moment from your
+Lordships this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation in Mr.
+Hastings's favor, and we shall produce it as a part of our evidence. Oh,
+my Lords, consider the situation of a people who are forced to mix their
+praises with their groans, who are forced to sign, with hands which have
+been in torture, and with the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an
+attestation in favor of the person from whom all their sufferings have
+been derived! When we prove to you the things that we shall prove, this
+will, I hope, give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory
+proof of the misery to which these people have been reduced. You will
+see before you, what is so well expressed by one of our poets as the
+homage of tyrants, "that homage with the mouth which the heart would
+fain deny, but dares not." Mr. Hastings has received that homage, and
+that homage we mean to present to your Lordships: we mean to present it,
+because it will show your Lordships clearly, that, after Mr. Hastings
+has ransacked Bengal from one end to the other, and has used all the
+power which he derives from having every friend and every dependant of
+his in every office from one end of that government to the other, he has
+not, in all those panegyrics, those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums,
+got one word of refutation or one word of evidence against any charge
+whatever which we produce against him. Every one knows, that, in the
+course of criminal trials, when no evidence of _alibi_ can be brought,
+when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted, the last thing
+produced is evidence to character. His cause, therefore, is gone, when,
+having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at
+length appeals to his character. In those little papers which are given
+us of our proceedings in our criminal courts, it is always an omen of
+what is to follow: after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or
+robbery, it ends in his character: "He has an admirable character; I
+have known him from a boy; he is wonderfully good; he is the best of
+men; I would trust him with untold gold": and immediately follows,
+"Guilty,--Death." This is the way in which, in our courts, character is
+generally followed by sentence. The practice is not modern. Undoubtedly
+Mr. Hastings has the example of criminals of high antiquity; for Caius
+Verres, Antonius, and every other man who has been famous for the
+pillage and destruction of provinces, never failed to bring before their
+judges the attestations of the injured to their character. Voltaire
+says, "_Les bons mots sont toujours redits_." A similar occasion has
+here produced a similar conduct. He has got just the same character as
+Caius Verres got in another cause; and the _laudationes_, which your
+Lordships know always followed, to save trouble, we mean ourselves to
+give your Lordships; we mean to give them with this strong presumption
+of guilt, that in all this panegyric there is not one word of defence to
+a single article of charge; they are mere lip-honors: but we think we
+derive from those panegyrics, which Mr. Hastings has had sent over as
+evidence to supply the total want of it, an indication of the
+impossibility of attaining it. Mr. Hastings has brought them here, and I
+must say we are under some difficulty about them, and the difficulty is
+this. We think we can produce before your Lordships proofs of barbarity
+and peculation by Mr. Hastings; we have the proofs of them in specific
+provinces, where those proofs may be met by contrary proofs, or may lose
+their weight from a variety of circumstances. We thought we had got the
+matter sure, that everything was settled, that he could not escape us,
+after he had himself confessed the bribes he had taken from the specific
+provinces. But in what condition are we now? We have from those specific
+provinces the strongest attestations that there is not any credit to be
+paid to his own acknowledgments. In short, we have the complaints,
+concerning these crimes of Mr. Hastings, of the injured persons
+themselves; we have his own confessions; we shall produce both to your
+Lordships. But these persons now declare, that not only their own
+complaints are totally unfounded, but that Mr. Hastings's confessions
+are not true, and not to be credited. These are circumstances which your
+Lordships will consider in the view you take of this wonderful body of
+attestation.
+
+It is a pleasant thing to see in these addresses the different character
+and modes of eloquence of different countries. In those that will be
+brought before your Lordships you will see the beauty of chaste European
+panegyric improved by degrees into high, Oriental, exaggerated, and
+inflated metaphor. You will see how the language is first written in
+English, then translated into Persian, and then retranslated into
+English. There may be something amusing to your Lordships in this, and
+the beauty of these styles may, in this heavy investigation, tend to
+give a little gayety and pleasure. We shall bring before you the
+European and Asiatic incense. You will have the perfume-shops of the two
+countries.
+
+One of the accusations which we mean to bring against Mr. Hastings is
+upon the part of the Zemindar Radanaut, of the country of Dinagepore.
+Now hear what the Zemindar says himself. "As it has been learned by me,
+the mutsuddies, and the respectable officers of my zemindary, that the
+ministers of England are displeased with the late Governor, Warren
+Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that he oppressed us, took money
+from us by deceit and force, and ruined the country, therefore we, upon
+the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent on and
+necessary for us to abide by, following the rules laid down in giving
+evidence, declare the particulars of the acts and deeds of Warren
+Hastings, Esquire, full of circumspection and caution, civility and
+justice, superior to the conduct of the most learned, and, by
+representing what is fact, wipe away the doubts that have possessed the
+minds of the ministers of England; that Mr. Hastings is possessed of
+fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to us; that he is clear
+of the contamination of mistrust and wrong, and his mind is free of
+covetousness or avarice. During the time of his administration no one
+saw other conduct than that of protection to the husbandman, and
+justice. No inhabitant ever experienced afflictions, no one ever felt
+oppression from him; our reputations have always been guarded from
+attacks by his prudence, and our families have always been protected by
+his justice. He never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards
+us, but healed the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation by
+means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never permitting one of us to
+sink in the pit of despondence. He supported every one by his goodness,
+overset the designs of evil-minded men by his authority, tied the hand
+of oppression with the strong bandage of justice, and by these means
+expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness and joy over us. He
+reestablished justice and impartiality. We were during his government in
+the enjoyment of perfect happiness and ease, and many of us are thankful
+and satisfied. As Mr. Hastings was well acquainted with our manners and
+customs, he was always desirous, in every respect, of doing whatever
+would preserve our religious rites, and guard them against every kind of
+accident and injury, and at all times protected us. Whatever we have
+experienced from him, and whatever happened from him, we have written
+without deceit or exaggeration."
+
+My Lords, here is a panegyric; and, directly contrary to the usual mode
+of other accusers, we begin by producing the panegyrics made upon the
+person whom we accuse. We shall produce along with the charge, and give
+as evidence, the panegyric and certificate of the persons whom we
+suppose to have suffered these wrongs. We suffer ourselves even to
+abandon, what might be our last resource, his own confession, by showing
+that one of the princes from whom he confesses that he took bribes has
+given a certificate of the direct contrary.
+
+All these things will have their weight upon your Lordships' minds; and
+when we have put ourselves under this disadvantage, (what disadvantage
+it is your Lordships will judge,) at least we shall stand acquitted of
+unfairness in charging him with crimes directly contrary to the
+panegyrics in this paper contained. Indeed, I will say this for him,
+that general charge and loose accusation may be answered by loose and
+general panegyric, and that, if ours were of that nature, this panegyric
+would be sufficient to overset our accusation. But we come before your
+Lordships in a different manner and upon different grounds. I am ordered
+by the Commons of Great Britain to support the charge that they have
+made, and persevere in making, against Warren Hastings, Esquire, late
+Governor-General of Bengal, and now a culprit at your bar: First, for
+having taken corruptly several bribes, and extorted by force, or under
+the power and color of his office, several sums of money from the
+unhappy natives of Bengal. The next article which we shall bring before
+you is, that he is not only personally corrupted, but that he has
+personally corrupted all the other servants of the Company,--those under
+him, whose corruptions he ought to have controlled, and those above him,
+whose business it was to control his corruptions.
+
+We purpose to make good to your Lordships the first of these, by
+submitting to you, that part of those sums which are specified in the
+charge were taken by him with his own hand and in his own person, but
+that much the greater part have been taken from the natives by the
+instrumentality of his black agents, banians, and other
+dependants,--whose confidential connection with him, and whose agency on
+his part in corrupt transactions, if his counsel should be bold enough
+to challenge us to the proof, we shall fully prove before you. The next
+part, and the second branch of his corruption, namely, what is commonly
+called his active corruption, distinguishing the personal under the name
+of passive, will appear from his having given, under color of contracts,
+a number of corrupt and lucrative advantages from a number of
+unauthorized and unreasonable grants, pensions, and allowances, by which
+he corrupted actively the whole service of the Company. And, lastly, we
+shall show, that, by establishing a universal connivance from one end of
+the service to the other, he has not only corrupted and contaminated it
+in all its parts, but bound it in a common league of iniquity to support
+mutually each other against the inquiry that should detect and the
+justice that should punish their offences. These two charges, namely, of
+his active and passive corruption, we shall bring one after the other,
+as strongly and clearly illustrating and as powerfully confirming each
+other.
+
+The first which we shall bring before you is his own passive
+corruption,--so we commonly call it. Bribes are so little known in this
+country that we can hardly get clear and specific technical names to
+distinguish them; but in future, I am afraid, the conduct of Mr.
+Hastings will improve our law vocabulary. The first, then, of these
+offences with which Mr. Hastings stands charged here is receiving bribes
+himself, or through his banians. Every one of these are overt acts of
+the general charge of bribery, and they are every one of them,
+separately taken, substantive crimes. But whatever the criminal nature
+of these acts was, (and the nature was very criminal, and the
+consequences to the country very dreadful,) yet we mean to prove to your
+Lordships that they were not single acts, that they were not acts
+committed as opportunity offered, or as necessity tempted or urged upon
+the occasion, but that they are parts of a general systematic plan of
+corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense of his integrity;
+that he has, for that purpose, not only taken the opportunity of his own
+power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and
+created complete revolutions in the country's government, for the
+purpose of making the power which ought to be subservient to legal
+government subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer
+cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice, he endeavored to justify
+them by principle. These artifices we mean to detect; these principles
+we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy,
+and subvert forever.
+
+My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of
+collusion, concealment, and deceit, your Lordships will, perhaps, not
+feel the same degree of interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had
+before you crimes of dignity: you have had before you the ruin and
+expulsion of great and illustrious families, the breach of solemn public
+treaties, the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses
+in Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination
+are not always the most pernicious in their effects: in these high,
+eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort
+of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on which they can be
+exercised are rare; the persons upon whom they can be exercised few; the
+persons who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many.
+These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged
+crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the
+distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in
+eminent station.
+
+But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect
+that high situation,--when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with
+fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery--when
+all these follow in one train,--when these vices, which gender and spawn
+in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime
+that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is
+much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable,
+but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the
+highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt
+government. They are reptile vices. There are situations in which the
+acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of
+little importance. In the other, the mischief of the example is
+infinite.
+
+My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives bribes, he gives a
+signal to universal pillage to all the inferior parts of the service.
+The bridles upon hard-mouthed passion are removed; they are taken away;
+they are broken. Fear and shame, the great guards to virtue next to
+conscience, are gone. Shame! how can it exist?--it will soon blush away
+its awkward sensibility. Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long, when it is
+seen that crimes which naturally bring disgrace are attended with all
+the outward symbols, characteristics, and rewards of honor and of
+virtue,--when it is seen that high station, great rank, general
+applause, vast wealth follow the commission of peculation and bribery.
+Is it to be believed that men can long be ashamed of that which they see
+to be the road to honor? As to fear, let a Governor-General once take
+bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service. What have they to
+fear? Is it the man whose example they follow that is to bring them
+before a tribunal for their punishment? Can he open any inquiry? He
+cannot: he that opens a channel of inquiry under these circumstances
+opens a high-road to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent
+it? None: for he can make no laws to restrain that practice without the
+breach of his own laws immediately in his own conduct. If we once can
+admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however
+defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence
+of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no
+hope left in the supreme justice of the country. We are sensible of all
+these difficulties; we have felt them; and perhaps it has required no
+small degree of exertion for us to get the better of these difficulties
+which are thrown in our way by a Governor-General accepting bribes, and
+thereby screening and protecting the whole service in such iniquitous
+proceedings.
+
+With regard to this matter, we are to state to your Lordships, in order
+to bring it fully and distinctly before you, what the nature of this
+distemper of bribery is in the Indian government. We are to state what
+the laws and rules are which have been opposed to prevent it, and the
+utter insufficiency of all that have been proposed: to state the
+grievance, the instructions of the Company and government, the acts of
+Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of Parliament. We are to
+state to your Lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are
+to state the trust the Company had in him for the prevention of all
+those evils; and then we are to prove that every evil, that all those
+grievances which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants
+to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to
+smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a
+special, direct, and immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your
+Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person collectively, has
+done more mischief than all those persons whose evil practices have
+produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own
+appointment.
+
+The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove
+in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical,
+endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company's affairs in India, from
+the time of their first establishment there. Very often there are no
+words nor any description which can adequately convey the state of a
+thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself: because the former
+might be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that which was
+really fact to be nothing but the coloring of the person that explained
+it; and therefore I think that it will be much better to give to your
+Lordships here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when the
+Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings entered into, and
+when they took those measures to prevent the very evils from persons
+placed in those very stations and in those very circumstances in which
+we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the offences we now bring
+before you.
+
+I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to read a consultation
+of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming
+the state of the Company, in order to show the magnitude of the
+pecuniary corruptions that prevailed in it.
+
+    "It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and profess to your
+    interests and to our own honor, that we think it indispensably
+    necessary to lay open to your view a series of transactions too
+    notoriously known to be suppressed, and too affecting to your
+    interest, to the national character, and to the existence of the
+    Company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured,--transactions
+    which seem to demonstrate that every spring of this government was
+    smeared with corruption, that principles of rapacity and oppression
+    universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment and public
+    spirit was lost and extinguished in the unbounded lust of unmerited
+    wealth.
+
+    "To illustrate these positions, we must exhibit to your view a most
+    unpleasing variety of complaints, inquiries, accusations, and
+    vindications, the particulars of which are entered in our
+    Proceedings and the Appendix,--assuring you that we undertake this
+    task with peculiar reluctance, from the personal regard we entertain
+    for some of the gentlemen whose characters will appear to be deeply
+    affected.
+
+    "At Fort St. George we received the first advices of the demise of
+    Mir Jaffier and of Sujah Dowlah's defeat. It was there firmly
+    imagined that no definite measures would be taken, either in respect
+    to a peace or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our
+    arrival,--as the 'Lapwing' arrived in the month of January with your
+    general letter, and the appointment of a committee with express
+    powers to that purpose, for the successful exertion of which the
+    happiest occasion now offered. However, a contrary resolution
+    prevailed in the Council. The opportunity of acquiring immense
+    fortunes was too inviting to be neglected, and the temptation too
+    powerful to be resisted. A treaty was hastily drawn up by the board,
+    or rather transcribed, with few unimportant additions, from that
+    concluded with Mir Jaffier,--and a deputation, consisting of Messrs.
+    Johnstone, senior, Middleton, and Leycester, appointed to raise the
+    natural son of the deceased Nabob to the subahdarry, in prejudice of
+    the claim of the grandson; and for this measure such reasons are
+    assigned as ought to have dictated a diametrically opposite
+    resolution. Meeran's son was a minor, which circumstance alone would
+    have naturally brought the whole administration into our hands, at a
+    juncture when it became indispensably necessary we should realize
+    that shadow of power and influence which, having no solid
+    foundation, was exposed to the danger of being annihilated by the
+    first stroke of adverse fortune. But this inconsistence was not
+    regarded; nor was it material to the views for precipitating the
+    treaty, which was pressed on the young Nabob at the first interview,
+    in so earnest and indelicate a manner as highly disgusted him and
+    chagrined his ministers; while not a single rupee was stipulated for
+    the Company, whose interests were sacrificed, that their servants
+    might revel in the spoils of a treasury before impoverished, but now
+    totally exhausted.
+
+    "This scene of corruption was first disclosed, at a visit the Nabob
+    was paid, to Lord Clive and the gentlemen of the Committee, a few
+    days after our arrival. He there delivered to his Lordship a letter
+    filled with bitter complaints of the insults and indignities he had
+    been exposed to, and the embezzlement of near twenty lacs of rupees,
+    issued from his treasury for purposes unknown, during the late
+    negotiations. So public a complaint could not be disregarded, and it
+    soon produced an inquiry. We referred the letter to the board, in
+    expectation of obtaining a satisfactory account of the application
+    of this money, and were answered only by a warm remonstrance entered
+    by Mr. Leycester against that very Nabob in whose elevation he
+    boasts of having been a principal agent.
+
+    "Mahomed Reza Khan, the Naib Subah, was then called upon to account
+    for this large disbursement from the treasury; and he soon delivered
+    to the Committee the very extraordinary narrative entered in our
+    Proceedings the 6th of June, wherein he specifies the several names
+    and sums, by whom paid, and to whom, whether in cash, bills, or
+    obligations. So precise, so accurate an account as this of money for
+    secret and venal services was never, we believe, before this period,
+    exhibited to the Honorable Court of Directors,--at least, never
+    vouched by such undeniable testimony and authentic documents: by
+    Juggut Seet, who himself was obliged to contribute largely to the
+    sums demanded; by Muley Ram, who was employed by Mr. Johnstone in
+    all those pecuniary transactions; by the Nabob and Mahomed Reza
+    Khan, who were the heaviest sufferers; and, lastly, by the
+    confession of the gentlemen themselves whose names are specified in
+    the distribution list.
+
+    "Juggut Seet expressly declared in his narrative, that the sum which
+    he agreed to pay the deputation, amounting to 125,000 rupees, was
+    extorted by menaces; and since the close of our inquiry, and the
+    opinions we delivered in the Proceedings of the 21st June, it fully
+    appears that the presents from the Nabob and Mahomed Reza Khan,
+    exceeding the immense sum of seventeen lacs, were not the voluntary
+    offerings of gratitude, but contributions levied on the weakness of
+    the government, and violently exacted from the dependent state and
+    timid disposition of the minister. The charge, indeed, is denied on
+    the one hand, as well as affirmed on the other. Your honorable board
+    must therefore determine how far the circumstance of extortion may
+    aggravate the crime of disobedience to your positive orders, the
+    exposing the government in a manner to sale, and receiving the
+    infamous wages of corruption from opposite parties and contending
+    interests. We speak with boldness, because we speak from conviction
+    founded upon indubitable facts, that, besides the above sums
+    specified in the distribution account to the amount of 228,125
+    pounds sterling, there was likewise to the value of several lacs of
+    rupees procured from Nundcomar and Roydullub, each of whom aspired
+    at and obtained a promise of that very employment it was
+    predetermined to bestow on Mahomed Reza Khan.
+
+    (Signed at the end)
+
+            "CLIVE.
+            W^M B. SUMNER.
+            JOHN CARNAC.
+            H. VERELST.
+            FRA^S SYKES."
+
+This paper cannot be denied to be a paper of weight and authenticity,
+because it is signed by a gentleman now in this House, who sits on one
+side of the gentleman at your bar, as his bail. This grievance,
+therefore, so authenticated, so great, and described in so many
+circumstances, I think it might be sufficient for me, in this part of
+the business, to show was, when Mr. Hastings was sent to India, a
+prevalent evil.
+
+But, my Lords, it is necessary that I should show to you something more,
+because, _prima fronte_, this is some exculpation of Mr. Hastings: for,
+if he was only a partaker in a general misconduct, it was rather _vitium
+loci et vitium temporis_ than _vitium hominis_. This might be said in
+his exculpation. But I am next to show your Lordships the means which
+the Company took for removing this grievance; and that Mr. Hastings's
+peculiar trust, the great specific ground of his appointment, was a
+confidence that he would eradicate this very evil, of which we are going
+to prove that he has been one of the principal promoters. I wish your
+Lordships to advert to one particular circumstance,--namely, that the
+two persons who were bidders at this time, and at this auction of
+government, for the favor and countenance of the Presidency at Calcutta,
+were Mahomed Reza Khan and Rajah Nundcomar. I wish your Lordships to
+recollect this by-and-by, when we shall bring before you the very same
+two persons, who, in the same sort of transaction, and in circumstances
+exactly similar, or very nearly so, were candidates for the favor of Mr.
+Hastings.
+
+My Lords, our next step will be to show you that the Company in 1768 had
+made a covenant expressly forbidding the taking of presents of above
+400_l._ value in each present by the Governor-General. I take it for
+granted, this will not be much litigated. They renewed and enforced that
+with other covenants and other instructions; and at last came an act of
+Parliament, in the clearest, the most definite, the most specific words
+that all the wisdom of the legislature, intent upon the eradication of
+this evil, could use, to prevent the receiving of presents.
+
+My Lords, I think it is necessary to state, that there has been some
+little difficulty concerning this word, _presents_. Bribery and
+extortion have been covered by the name of presents, and the authority
+and practice of the East has been adduced as a palliation of the crime.
+My Lords, no authority of the East will be a palliation of the breach of
+laws enacted in the West: and to those laws of the West, and not the
+vicious customs of the East, we insist upon making Mr. Hastings liable.
+But do not your Lordships see that this is an entire mistake? that there
+never was any custom of the East for it? I do not mean vicious practices
+and customs, which it is the business of good laws and good customs to
+eradicate. There are three species of presents known in the East,--two
+of them payments of money known to be legal, and the other perfectly
+illegal, and which has a name exactly expressing it in the manner our
+language does. It is necessary that your Lordships should see that Mr.
+Hastings has made use of a perversion of the names of authorized gifts
+to cover the most abominable and prostituted bribery. The first of those
+presents is known in the country by the name of _peshcush_: this
+_peshcush_ is a fine paid, upon the grant of lands, to the sovereign, or
+whoever grants them. The second is the _nuzzer_, or _nuzzerana_, which
+is a tribute of acknowledgment from an inferior to a superior. The last
+is called _reshwat_, in the Persian language,--that is to say, a bribe,
+or sum of money clandestinely and corruptly taken,--and is as much
+distinguished from the others as, in the English language, a fine or
+acknowledgment is distinguished from a bribe. To show your Lordships
+this, we shall give in evidence, that, whenever a peshcush or fine is
+paid, it is a sum of money publicly paid, and paid in proportion to the
+grant,--and that the sum is entered upon the very grant itself. We shall
+prove the nuzzer is in the same manner entered, and that all legal fees
+are indorsed upon the body of the grant for which they are taken: and
+that they are no more in the East than in the West any kind of color or
+pretence for corrupt acts, which are known by the circumstance of their
+being clandestinely taken, and which are acknowledged and confessed to
+be illegal and corrupt. Having stated that Mr. Hastings, in some of the
+evidence that we shall produce, endeavors to confound these three
+things, I am only to remark that the nuzzer is generally a very small
+sum of money, that it sometimes amounts to one gold mohur, that
+sometimes it is less, and that, in all the records of the Company, I
+have never known it exceed one gold mohur, or about thirty-five
+shillings,--passing by the fifty gold mohurs which were given to Mr.
+Hastings by Cheyt Sing, and a hundred gold mohurs which were given to
+the Mogul, as a nuzzer, by Mahomed Ali, Nabob of Arcot.
+
+The Company, seeing that this nuzzer, though small in each sum, might
+amount at last to a large tax upon the country, (and it did so in fact,)
+thought proper to prohibit any sum of money to be taken upon any pretext
+whatever; and the Company in the year 1775 did expressly explode the
+whole doctrine of peshcush, nuzzer, and every other private lucrative
+emolument, under whatever name, to be taken by the Governor-General, and
+did expressly send out an order that that was the construction of the
+act, and that he was not even to take a nuzzer. Thus we shall show that
+that act had totally cut up the whole system of bribery and corruption,
+and that Mr. Hastings had no sort of color whatever for taking the money
+which we shall prove he has taken.
+
+I know that positive prohibitions, that acts of Parliament, that
+covenants, are things of very little validity indeed, as long as all the
+means of corruption are left in power, and all the temptations to
+corrupt profit are left in poverty. I should really think that the
+Company deserved to be ill served, if they had not annexed such
+appointments to great trusts as might secure the persons intrusted from
+the temptations of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases is the
+greatest security, given a lawful gratification to the natural passions
+of men. Matrimony is to be used, as a true remedy against a vicious
+course of profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and the just
+profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful means which might be made
+use of to supply them. For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any
+man to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in blessings, to
+expect labor without a prospect of reward, and fatigue without any means
+of securing rest, is an unreasonable demand in any human creature from
+another. Those who trust that they shall find in men uncommon and heroic
+virtues are themselves endeavoring to have nothing paid them but the
+common returns of the worst parts of human infirmity. And therefore I
+shall show your Lordships that the Company did provide large, ample,
+abundant means for supporting the Governor-General,--that Lord Clive, in
+the year 1765, and the Council with him, of which Mr. Sumner, I am glad
+and proud to say, was one, did fix such an allowance as they thought a
+sufficient security to the Governor-General against the temptations
+attendant upon his situation; and therefore, after they had fixed this
+sum, they say, "that, although by this means the Governor will not be
+able to amass a million or half a million in the space of two or three
+years, yet he will acquire a very handsome independency, and be in that
+very situation which a man of honor and true zeal for the service would
+wish to possess. Thus situated, he may defy all opposition in Council;
+he will have nothing to ask, nothing to propose, but what he wishes for
+the advantage of his employers; he may defy the law, because there can
+be no foundation for a bill of discovery; and he may defy the obloquy of
+the world, because there can be nothing censurable in his conduct. In
+short, if stability can be insured to such a government as this, where
+riches have been acquired in abundance in a small space of time, by all
+ways and means, and by men with or without capacities, it must be
+effected by a Governor thus restricted,"--that is, a Governor restricted
+from every emolument but that of his salary. I must remark, that this
+salary and these emoluments were not settled upon the vague speculations
+of men taking the measure of their necessities for India from the
+manners of England; but it was fixed by the Council themselves,--fixed
+in India,--fixed by those who knew and were in the situation of the
+Governor-General, and who knew what was necessary to support his dignity
+and to preserve him from the temptation of corruption: and they have
+laid open to you such a body of advantages arising from it as would lead
+any man, who had a regard to his honor or conscience, to think himself
+happy in having such a provision made for him, and at the same time
+every temptation to act corruptly removed far from him.
+
+The emoluments of the office, though reduced from the original plan
+which Lord Clive had proposed, may be computed at near 30,000_l._ a
+year, when Mr. Hastings was President: 22,000_l._ in certain money, and
+the rest in other advantages. Whatever it was, I have shown that it was
+thought sufficient by those who were the best judges, and who, in
+carving for others, were carving for themselves their own allowance at
+the time. But, my Lords, I am to give a better opinion of the
+sufficiency of that provision to guard against the temptation, out of
+Mr. Hastings's own mouth. He says, in his letter to the Court of
+Directors, "Although I disclaim the consideration of my own interest in
+these speculations, and flatter myself that I proceed upon more liberal
+grounds, yet I am proud to avow the feelings of an honest ambition that
+stimulates me to aspire at the possession of my present station for
+years to come. Those who know my natural turn of mind will not ascribe
+this to sordid views. A very few years' possession of the government
+would undoubtedly enable me to retire with a fortune amply fitted to the
+measure of my desires, were I to consult only my ease: but in my present
+situation I feel my mind expand to something greater; I have catched the
+desire of applause in public life."
+
+Here Mr. Hastings confesses that the emoluments affixed to office were
+not only sufficient for the purposes and ends which the nature of his
+office demanded, and the support of present dignity, but that they were
+sufficient to secure him, in a very few years, a comfortable retreat;
+but his object in wishing to hold his office long was _to catch applause
+in public life_. What an unfortunate man is he, who has so often told
+us, in so many places, and through so many mouths, that, after fourteen
+years' possession of an office which was to make him a comfortable
+fortune in a few years, he is at length bankrupt in fortune, and for his
+applause in public life is now at your Lordships' bar, and his accuser
+is his country! This, my Lords, is to be unfortunate: but there are some
+misfortunes that never do or ever can arrive but through crimes. He was
+a deserter from the path of honor. At the turning of the two ways he
+made a glorious choice,--he caught at the applause of ambition: which
+though I am ready to consent is not virtue, yet surely a generous
+ambition for applause for public services in life is one of the best
+counterfeits of virtue, and supplies its place in some degree; and it
+adds a lustre to real virtue, where it exists as the substratum of it.
+Human nature, while it is made as it is, never can wholly repudiate it
+for its imperfection, because there is something yet more perfect. But
+what shall we say to the deserter of that cause, who, having glory and
+honor before him, has chosen to plunge himself into the downward road to
+sordid riches?
+
+My Lords, I have shown the grievances that existed. I have shown the
+means that existed to put Mr. Hastings beyond a temptation to those
+practices of which we accuse him, even in his own opinion,--if he will
+not follow his example in the House of Commons, and disavow this letter,
+as he has done his defence before them, and say he never wrote it. That
+situation which was to afford him a comfortable fortune in a few years
+he has held for many years, and therefore he has not one excuse to make
+for himself; but I shall show your Lordships much greater and stronger
+proofs, that will lean heavy upon him in the day of your sentence. The
+first, the peculiar, trust that was put in him, was to redress all those
+grievances.
+
+My Lords, I have stated to you the condition of India in 1765. You may
+suppose that the means that were taken, the regulations that were made
+by the Company at that period of time, had operated their effect, and
+that by the beginning of the year 1772, when Mr. Hastings came first to
+his government, these evils did not then require, perhaps, so vigorous
+an example, or so much diligence in putting an end to them; but, my
+Lords, I have to show you a very melancholy truth, that, notwithstanding
+all these means, the Company was of opinion that all these disorders had
+increased, and accordingly they say, without entering into all the
+grievous circumstances of this letter, which was wrote on the 10th of
+April, 1773, "We wish we could refute the observation, that almost every
+attempt made by us and our administration at your Presidency for
+reforming abuses has rather increased them, and added to the misery of a
+country we are so anxious to protect and cherish." They say, that, "when
+oppression pervades the whole country, when youths have been suffered
+with impunity to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over the natives, and
+to acquire rapid fortunes by monopolizing of commerce, it cannot be a
+wonder to us or yourselves that Dadney merchants do not come forward to
+contract with the Company, that the manufactures find their way through
+foreign channels, or that our investments are at once enormously dear
+and of a debased quality. It is evident, then, that the evils which have
+been so destructive to us lie too deep for any partial plans to reach or
+correct; it is therefore our resolution to aim at the root of those
+evils, and we are happy in having reason to believe that in every just
+and necessary regulation we shall meet with the approbation and support
+of the legislature, who consider the public as materially interested in
+the Company's prosperity."
+
+This is to show your Lordships that Mr. Hastings was armed with great
+powers to correct great abuses, and that there was reposed in him a
+special trust for that purpose. And now I shall show, by the
+twenty-fifth paragraph of the same letter, that they intrusted Mr.
+Hastings with this very great power from some particular hope they had,
+not only of his abstaining himself, which is a thing taken for granted,
+but of his restraining abuses through every part of the service; and
+therefore they say, "that, in order to effectuate this great end, the
+first step must be to restore perfect obedience and due subordination to
+your administration. Our Governor and Council must reassume and exercise
+their delegated powers upon every just occasion,--punish delinquents,
+cherish the meritorious, discountenance that luxury and dissipation
+which, to the reproach of government, prevailed in Bengal. Our
+President, Mr. Hastings, we trust, will set the example of temperance,
+economy, and application; and upon this, we are sensible, much will
+depend. And here we take occasion to indulge the pleasure we have in
+acknowledging Mr. Hastings's services upon the coast of Coromandel, in
+constructing with equal labor and ability the plan which has so much
+improved our investments there; and as we are persuaded he will
+persevere in the same laudable pursuit through every branch of our
+affairs in Bengal, he, in return, may depend on the steady support and
+favor of his employers." Here are not only laws to restrain abuse, here
+are not only salaries to prevent the temptation to it, but here are
+praises to animate and encourage him, here is what very few men, even
+bad in other respects, have resisted,--here is a great trust put in him,
+to call upon him with particular vigor and exertion to prevent all
+abuses through the settlement, and particularly these abuses of
+corruption. Much trust is put in his frugality, his order, his
+management of his private affairs; and from thence they hope that he
+would not ruin his own fortune, but improve it by honorable means, and
+teach the Company's servants the same order and management, in order to
+free them from temptation to rapacity in their own particular
+situations. There have been known to be men, otherwise corrupt and
+vicious, who, when great trust was put in them, have called forth
+principles of honor latent in their minds; and men who were nursed, in a
+manner, in corruption have been not only great reformers by institution,
+but greater reformers by the example of their own conduct. Then I am to
+show, that, soon after his coming to that government, there were means
+given him instantly of realizing those hopes and expectations, by
+putting into his hands several arduous and several difficult
+commissions.
+
+My Lords, in the year 1772 the Company had received alarming advices of
+many disorders throughout the country: there were likewise, at the same
+time, circumstances in the state of the government upon which they
+thought it necessary to make new regulations. The famine which prevailed
+in and devastated Bengal, and the ill use that was made of that calamity
+to aggravate the distress for the advantage of individuals, produced a
+great many complaints, some true, some exaggerated, but universally
+spread, as I believe is in the memory of those who are not very young
+among us. This obliged the Company to a very serious consideration of an
+affair which dishonored and disgraced their government, not only at
+home, but through all the countries in Europe, much more than perhaps
+even more grievous and real oppressions that were exercised under them.
+It had alarmed their feelings, it had been marked, and had called the
+attention of the public upon them in an eminent manner.
+
+Your Lordships remember the death of Jaffier Ali Khan, the first of
+those subahs who introduced the English power into Bengal. He died about
+four or five years before this period. He was succeeded by two of his
+sons, who succeeded to one another in a very rapid succession. The first
+was the person of whom we have read an account to you. He was the
+natural son of the Nabob by a person called Munny Begum, who, for the
+corrupt gifts the circumstances of which we have recited, had, in
+prejudice of the lawful issue of the Nabob, been raised to the _musnud_;
+but as bastard slips, it is said in King Richard, (an abuse of a
+Scripture phrase,) do not take deep root, this bastard slip, Nujim ul
+Dowlah, shortly died, and the legitimate son, Syef ul Dowlah, succeeded
+him. After him another legitimate son, Mobarek ul Dowlah, succeeded in a
+minority. When I say _succeeded_, I wish your Lordships to understand
+that there is no regular succession in the office of subah or viceroy
+of the kingdom; but, in general, succession has been considered, and
+persons have been put in that place upon some principles resembling a
+regular succession. That regular succession had been broken in favor of
+a natural son, and the mother of that natural son did obtain the
+superiority in the female part of the family for a time.
+
+In consequence of these two circumstances, namely, the famine, and the
+abuses that were supposed to arise from it, and from the circumstance of
+the minority of Mobarek ul Dowlah, who now reigns or appears to
+reign,--in consequence of these two circumstances, the Company gave two
+sets of orders.
+
+The first order related to Mahomed Reza Khan, who was (as your Lordships
+remember I took, in the beginning of this affair, means of explaining)
+lord-deputy of the province under the native government, the English
+holding the dewanny,--and deputy dewan, or high-steward, under the name
+of the English, and had the command of the whole revenue; and who was
+accused before the Company (the channel of which accusation we now
+learn) of having aggravated that famine by a monopoly for his own
+benefit. The Company, upon these loose and general charges, ordered that
+he should be divested of his office, that he should be brought down to
+Calcutta, and there be obliged to render an account of his conduct.
+
+The next regulation they made was concerning the effective government of
+the country, which was become vacant by the removal of Mahomed Reza
+Khan. The offices which he held were in effect these: he was guardian to
+the Nabob by the appointment of the Company; he had the care and
+management of his family; he had the care of the public justice; and he
+represented that shadow of government to foreign nations which it was
+the policy of the Company, at that time, to keep up. This was the person
+whom Mr. Hastings was ordered to remove; in consequence of which removal
+all these offices were to be supplied,--of guardian of the Nabob's
+person and manager of his family, of chief magistrate, and of
+representative of the fallen dignity of the native government to the
+foreign nations which traded to Bengal.
+
+To these orders was added an instruction of a very remarkable nature,
+which was a third trust that was given to Mr. Hastings: that during the
+Nabob's minority he should reduce the annual allowance, which was
+thirty-two lacs, to sixteen; and that to prevent the abuse of this
+restricted sum, and to prevent its being directed by the minister's
+authority to other purposes than that for which the Company allowed it,
+(that is to say, allowed him out of what was his own,) of these sixteen
+lacs an account was to be regularly kept, as a check upon the person so
+appointed, which account was ordered to be transmitted to Calcutta, and
+to be sent to England.
+
+Now we are to show your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's conduct was upon
+all these occasions; and for this we mean to produce testimony recorded
+in the Company's books, and authentic documents taken from the public
+offices of that country. At the same time I do admit that there never
+was a positive testimony that did not stand something in need of the
+support of presumption: for, as we know that witnesses may be perjured,
+and as we know that documents can be forged, we have recourse to a known
+principle in the laws of all countries, that circumstances cannot lie;
+and therefore, if the testimony that is given was ever so clear and
+positive, yet, if it is contrary to the circumstances of the country, if
+it is contrary to the circumstances of the facts to which it alludes, if
+the deposition is totally adverse and alien to the characters of the
+persons, then I will say, that, though the testimonies should be many,
+though they should be consistent, and though they should be clear, yet
+they will still leave some degree of hesitation and doubt upon every
+mind timorous in the execution of justice, as every mind ought to be.
+If, for instance, ten witnesses were to swear that the Chief-Justice of
+England, that the Lord High-Chancellor, or the Archbishop of Canterbury,
+was seen, in the robes of his function, at noonday, robbing upon the
+highway, it is not the clearness, the weight, the authority of
+testimonies, that could make me believe it; I should attribute it to any
+cause, either corruption, mistake, error, or madness, rather than
+believe that fact. Why? Because it is totally alien to the character of
+the persons, the situation, the circumstances, and to all the rules of
+probability. But if, on the contrary, the crime charged has a perfect
+relation with the person, with his known conduct, with his known habits,
+with the situation and circumstances of the place that he is in, and
+with the very corrupt inherent nature of the act that he does, then much
+less proof than we are able to produce will serve; and according to the
+nature and strength of the presumptions arising from the inherent nature
+of a vicious principle and vicious motives in the act, will be
+strengthened the weakest evidence, or, if it comes to a sufficient
+height, the whole burden of proof will be turned upon the party
+accused. And thus we shall think ourselves bound to show your Lordships,
+in every step of this proceeding, that there is an inherent presumption
+of corruption in every act. We shall show the presumptions which
+preceded, we shall show the presumptions which accompanied the proof;
+and these, with the subsequent presumptions, will make it impossible to
+disbelieve them. Such a body of proof was never given upon any such
+occasion: and it is such proof as will prevail against the whole voice
+of corruption, that amazing, active, diligent, spreading voice, which
+has been made, by buzzing in every part of this country, sometimes to
+sound like the public voice; it will put it to silence, by showing that
+your Lordships have proceeded upon the strongest evidence, active and
+passive.
+
+First, Mr. Hastings received a positive order to seize upon Mahomed Reza
+Khan. That order he executed with a military promptitude of obedience,
+which will show your Lordships what are the services which are congenial
+to his own mind, and which find in him always a ready acquiescence, a
+faithful agent, and a spirited instrument in the execution. The very day
+after he received the order, he sent up, privately, without
+communicating with the Council, from whom he was not ordered to keep
+this proceeding a secret,--he sent up, and found that great and
+respectable man and respectable magistrate, who was in all those high
+offices which I have stated: and if I was to compare them to
+circumstances and situations in this country, I should say he had united
+in himself the character of First Lord of the Treasury, the character of
+Chief-Justice, the character of Lord High-Chancellor, and the character
+of Archbishop of Canterbury: a man of great gravity, dignity, and
+authority, and advanced in years; had once 100,000_l._ a year for the
+support of his dignity, and had at that time 50,000_l._ This man,
+sitting in his garden, reposing himself after the toils of his
+situation, (for he was one of the most laborious men in the world,) was
+suddenly arrested, and, without a moment's respite, dragged down to
+Calcutta, and there by Mr. Hastings (exceeding the orders of the
+Company) confined near two years under a guard of soldiers. Mr. Hastings
+kept this great man for several months without even attempting the trial
+upon him. How he tried him afterwards your Lordships may probably in the
+course of this business inquire; and you will then judge, from the
+circumstances of that trial, that, as he was not tried for his crime, so
+neither was he acquitted for his innocence;--but at present I leave him
+in that situation. Mr. Hastings, unknown to the Council, having executed
+the orders of the Company in the last degree of rigor to this unhappy
+man, keeps him in that situation, without a trial, under a guard,
+separated from his country, disgraced and dishonored, and by Mr.
+Hastings's express order not suffered either to make a visit or receive
+a visitor.
+
+There was another commission for Mr. Hastings contained in these orders.
+The Company, because they were of opinion that justice could not be
+easily obtained while the first situations of the country were filled
+with this man's adherents, desired Mr. Hastings to displace them:
+leaving him a very large power, and confiding in his justice, prudence,
+and impartiality not to abuse a trust of such delicacy. But we shall
+prove to your Lordships that Mr. Hastings thought it necessary to turn
+out, from the highest to the lowest, several hundreds of people, for no
+other reason than that they had been put in their employments by that
+very man whom the English government had formerly placed there. If _we_
+were to insist that we could not possibly try Mr. Hastings, or come at
+his wickedness, until we had eradicated his influence in Bengal, and
+left not one man in it who was during his government in any place or
+office whatever, yet, though we should readily admit that we could not
+do the whole without it, at the same time, rather than make a general
+massacre of every person presumed to be under his influence, we would
+leave some of his crimes unproved. He did avow and declare, that, unless
+he turned all these persons out of their offices, he could never hope to
+come at the truth of any charges against Mahomed Reza Khan, against whom
+no specific charge had been made. Yet, upon loose and general charges,
+did he seize upon this man, confine him in this manner, and every person
+who derived any place or authority from him, high or low, was turned
+out. Mr. Hastings had in the Company's orders something to justify him
+in rigor, but he had likewise a prudential power over that rigor; and he
+not only treated this man in the manner described, but every human
+creature connected with him, as if they had been all guilty, without any
+charge whatever against them. These are his reasons for taking this
+extraordinary step.
+
+"I pretend not to enter into the views of others. My own were these.
+Mahomed Reza Khan's influence still prevailed generally throughout the
+country. In the Nabob's household, and at the capital, it was scarce
+affected by his present disgrace. His favor was still courted, and his
+anger dreaded. Who, under such discouragements, would give information
+or evidence against him? His agents and creatures filled every office of
+the nizamut and dewanny. How was the truth of his conduct to be
+investigated by these? It would be superfluous to add other arguments to
+show the necessity of prefacing the inquiry by breaking his influence,
+removing his dependants, and putting the direction of all the affairs
+which had been committed to his care into the hands of the most powerful
+or active of his enemies."
+
+My Lords, if _we_ of the House of Commons were to desire and to compel
+the East India Company, or to address the crown, to remove, according to
+their several situations and several capacities, every creature that had
+been put into office by Mr. Hastings, because we could otherwise make no
+inquiry into his conduct, should we not be justified by his own example
+in insisting upon the removal of every creature of the reigning power
+before we could inquire into his conduct? We have not done that, though
+we feel, as he felt, great disadvantages in proceeding in the inquiry
+while every situation in Bengal is notoriously held by his
+creatures,--always excepting the first of all, but which we could show
+is nothing under such circumstances. Then what do I infer from
+this,--from his obedience to the orders of the Company, carried so much
+beyond necessity, and prosecuted with so much rigor,--from the inquiry
+being suspended for so long a time,--from every person in office being
+removed from his situation,--from all these precautions being used as
+prefatory to the inquiry, when he himself says, that, after he had used
+all these means, he found not the least benefit and advantage from them?
+The use I mean to make of this is, to let your Lordships see the great
+probability and presumption that Mr. Hastings, finding himself in the
+very selfsame situation that had occurred the year before, when
+Nundcomar was sold to Mahomed Reza Khan, of selling Mahomed Reza Khan to
+Nundcomar, made a corrupt use of it, and that, as Mahomed Reza Khan was
+not treated with severity for his crimes, so neither was he acquitted
+for his innocence. The Company had given Mr. Hastings severe orders, and
+very severely had he executed them. The Company gave him no orders not
+to institute a present inquiry; but he, under pretence of business,
+neglected that inquiry, and suffered this man to languish in prison to
+the utter ruin of his fortune.
+
+We have in part shown your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's own manner of
+proceeding with regard to a public delinquent is; but at present we
+leave Mahomed Reza Khan where he was. Do your Lordships think that there
+is no presumption of Mr. Hastings having a corrupt view in this
+business, and of his having put this great man, who was supposed to be
+of immense wealth, under contributions? Mr. Hastings never trusted his
+colleagues in this proceeding; and what reason does he give? Why, he
+supposed that they must be bribed by Mahomed Reza Khan. "For," says he,
+"as I did not know their characters at that time, I did not know whether
+Mahomed Reza Khan had not secured them to his interest by the known ways
+in which great men in the East secure men to their interest." He never
+trusted his colleagues with the secret; and the person that he employed
+to prosecute Mahomed Reza Khan was his bitter enemy, Nundcomar. I will
+not go the length of saying that the circumstance of enmity disables a
+person from being a prosecutor; under some circumstances it renders a
+man incompetent to be a witness; but this I know, that the circumstance
+of having no other person to rely upon in a charge against any man but
+his enemy, and of having no other principle to go upon than what is
+supposed to be derived out of that enmity, must form some considerable
+suspicion against the proceeding. But in this he was justified by the
+Company; for Nundcomar, the great rival of Mahomed Reza Khan, was in the
+worst situation with the Company as to his credit. This Nundcomar's
+politics in the country had been by Mr. Hastings himself, and by several
+persons joined with him, cruelly represented to the Company; and
+accordingly he stood so ill with them, by reason of Mr. Hastings's
+representations and those of his predecessors, that the Company ordered
+and directed, that, if he could be of any use in the inquiry into
+Mahomed Reza Khan's conduct, some reward should be given him suitable to
+his services; but they caution Mr. Hastings at the same time against
+giving him any trust which he might employ to the disadvantage of the
+Company. Now Mr. Hastings began, before he could experience any service
+from him, by giving him his reward, and not the base reward of a base
+service, _money_, but every trust and power which he was prohibited from
+giving him. Having turned out every one of Mahomed Reza Khan's
+dependants, he filled every office, as he avows, with the creatures of
+Nundcomar. Now when he uses a cruel and rigorous obedience in the case
+of Mahomed Reza Khan, when he breaks through the principles of his
+former conduct with regard to Nundcomar, when he gives _him_, Nundcomar,
+trust, whom he was cautioned not to trust, and when he gives him that
+reward before any service could be done,--I say, when he does this, in
+violation of the Company's orders and his own principles, it is the
+strongest evidence that he now found them in the situation in which they
+were in 1765, when bribes were notoriously taken, and that each party
+was mutually sold to the other, and faith kept with neither. The
+situation in which Mr. Hastings thus placed himself should have been
+dreaded by him of all things, because he knew it was a situation in
+which the most outrageous corruption had taken place before.
+
+There is another circumstance which serves to show that in the
+persecution of these great men, and the persons employed by them, he
+could have no other view than to extort money from them. There was a
+person of the name of Shitab Roy, who had a great share in the conduct
+of the revenues of Bahar. Mr. Hastings, in the letter to the Company,
+complaining of the state of their affairs, and saying that there were
+great and suspicious balances in the kingdom of Bahar, does not even
+name the name of Shitab Roy. There was an English counsellor, a
+particular friend of Mr. Hastings's, there, under whose control Shitab
+Roy acted. Without any charges, without any orders from the Company, Mr.
+Hastings dragged down that same Shitab Roy, and in the same ignominious
+prison he kept him the same length of time, that is, one year and three
+months, without trial; and when the trial came on, there was as much
+appearance of collusion in the trial as there was of rigor in the
+previous process. This is the manner in which Mr. Hastings executed the
+command of the Company for removing Mahomed Reza Khan.
+
+When a successor to Mahomed Reza Khan was to be appointed, your
+Lordships naturally expect, from the character I have given of him, and
+from the nature of his functions, that Mr. Hastings would be
+particularly precise, would use the utmost possible care in nominating a
+person to succeed him, who might fulfil the ends and objects of his
+employment, and be at the same time beyond all doubt and suspicion of
+corruption in any way whatever. Let us now see how he fills up that
+office thus vacant. When the Company ordered Mahomed Reza Khan to be
+dispossessed of his office, they ordered at the same time that the
+salary of his successor should be reduced: that 30,000_l._ was a
+sufficient recompense for that office. Your Lordships will see by the
+allowance for the office, even reduced as it was, that they expected
+some man of great eminence, of great consequence, and fit for those
+great and various trusts. They cut off the dewanny from it, that is, the
+collection of the revenues; and having lessened his labors, they
+lessened his reward.--They ordered that this person, who was to be
+guardian of the Nabob in his minority, and who was to represent the
+government, should have but 30,000_l._ The order they give is this.
+
+"And that as Mahomed Reza Khan can no longer be considered by us as one
+to whom such a power can safely be committed, we trust to your local
+knowledge the selection of some person well qualified for the affairs of
+government, and of whose attachment to the Company you shall be well
+assured. Such person you will recommend to the Nabob, to succeed Mahomed
+Reza, as minister of the government, and guardian of the Nabob's
+minority; and we persuade ourselves that the Nabob will pay such regard
+to your recommendation as to invest him with the necessary power and
+authority.
+
+"As the advantages which the Company may receive from the appointment of
+such minister will depend on his readiness to promote our views and
+advance our interest, we are willing to allow him so liberal a
+gratification as may excite his zeal and insure his attachment to the
+Company; we therefore empower you to grant to the person whom you shall
+think worthy of this trust an annual allowance not exceeding three lacs
+of rupees, which we consider not only as a munificent reward for any
+services he shall render the Company, but sufficient to enable him to
+support his station with suitable rank and dignity. And here we must
+add, that, in the choice you shall make of a person to be the active
+minister of the Nabob's government, we hope and trust that you will show
+yourselves worthy of the confidence we have placed in you by being
+actuated therein by no other motives than those of the public good and
+the safety and interest of the Company."
+
+My Lords, here they have given a reward, and they have described a
+person fit to succeed in all capacities the man whom they had thought
+fit to depose. Now, as we have seen how Mr. Hastings obeyed the
+Company's orders in the manner of removing Mahomed Reza Khan from his
+office, let us see how he obeyed their order for filling it up. Your
+Lordships will naturally suppose that he made all the orders of
+Mahometan and Hindoo princes to pass in strict review before him; that
+he had considered their age, authority, dignity, the goodness of their
+manners; and upon the collation of all these circumstances had chosen a
+person fit to be a regent to guard the Nabob's minority from all
+rapacity whatever, and fit to instruct him in everything. I will give
+your Lordships Mr. Hastings's own idea of the person necessary to fill
+such offices.
+
+"That his rank ought to be such as at least ought not to wound the
+Nabob's honor, or lessen his credit in the estimation of the people, by
+the magisterial command which the new guardian must exercise over
+him,--with abilities and vigor of mind equal to the support of that
+authority; and the world will expect that the guardian be especially
+qualified by his own acquired endowments to discharge the duties of that
+relation in the education of his young pupil, to inspire him with
+sentiments suitable to his birth, and to instruct him in the principles
+of his religion."
+
+This, upon another occasion, is Mr. Hastings's sense of the man who
+ought to be placed in that situation of trust in which the Company
+ordered him to place him. Did Mr. Hastings obey that order? No, my
+Lords, he appointed no man to fill that office. What, no man at all? No,
+he appointed no person at all in the sense which is mentioned there,
+which constantly describes a person at least of the male sex: he
+appointed a woman to fill that office; he appointed a woman, in a
+country where no woman can be seen, where no woman can be spoken to by
+any one without a curtain between them; for all these various duties,
+requiring all these qualifications described by himself, he appointed a
+woman. Do you want more proof than this violent transgression of the
+Company's orders upon that occasion that some corrupt motive must have
+influenced him?
+
+My Lords, it is necessary for me to state the situation of the family,
+that you may judge from thence of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings's
+proceedings. The Nabob Jaffier Ali Khan had among the women of his
+seraglio a person called Munny Begum. She was a dancing-girl, whom he
+had seen at some entertainment; and as he was of a licentious turn, this
+dancing-girl, in the course of her profession as a prostitute, so far
+inveigled the Nabob, that, having a child or pretending to have had a
+child by him, he brought her into the seraglio; and the Company's
+servants sold to that son the succession of that father. This woman had
+been sold as a slave,--her profession a dancer, her occupation a
+prostitute. And, my Lords, this woman having put her natural son, as we
+state, and shall prove, in the place of the legitimate offspring of the
+Nabob, having got him placed by the Company's servants on the musnud,
+she came to be at the head of that part of the household which relates
+to the women: which is a large and considerable trust in a country where
+polygamy is admitted, and where women of great rank may possibly be
+attended by two thousand of the same sex in inferior situations. As soon
+as the legitimate son of the Nabob came to the musnud, there was no
+ground for keeping this woman any longer in that situation; and upon an
+application of the Company to Mahomed Reza Khan to know who ought to
+have the right of superiority, he answered, as he ought to have done,
+that, though all the women of the seraglio ought to have honor, yet the
+mother of the Nabob ought to have the superiority of it. Therefore this
+woman was removed, and the mother of the Nabob was placed in her
+situation. In that situation Mr. Hastings found the seraglio. If his
+duties had gone no further than the regulation of an Eastern household,
+he ought to have kept the Nabob's mother there by the rules of that
+country.
+
+What did he do? Not satisfied with giving to this prostitute every favor
+that she could desire, (and money must be the natural object of such a
+person,) Mr. Hastings deposes the Nabob's own mother, turns her out of
+the employment, and puts at the head of the seraglio this prostitute,
+who at the best, in relation to him, could only be a step-mother. If you
+heard no more, do your Lordships want anything further to convince you
+that this must be a violent, atrocious, and corrupt act,--suppose it had
+gone no further than the seraglio? But when I call this woman a
+dancing-girl, I state something lower than Europeans have an idea of
+respecting that situation. She was born a slave, bred a dancing-girl.
+Her dancing was not any of those noble and majestic movements which make
+part of the entertainment of the most wise, of the education of the most
+virtuous, which improve the manners without corrupting the morals of all
+civilized people, and of which, among uncivilized people, the professors
+have their due share of admiration; but these dances were not decent to
+be seen nor fit to be related. I shall pass them by. Your Lordships are
+to suppose the lowest degree of infamy in occupation and situation, when
+I tell you that Munny Begum was a slave and a dancing-girl.
+
+The history of the Munny Begum is this. "At a village called Balkonda,
+near Sekundra, there lived a widow, who, from her great poverty, not
+being able to bring up her daughter Munny, gave her to a slave-girl
+belonging to Summin Ali Khan, whose name was Bissoo. During the space of
+five years she lived at Shahjehanabad, and was educated by Bissoo after
+the manner of a dancing-girl. Afterwards the Nabob Shamut Jung, upon
+the marriage of Ikram ul Dowlah, brother to the Nabob Surajah ul Dowlah,
+sent for Bissoo Beg's set of dancing-girls from Shahjehanabad, of which
+Munny Begum was one, and allowed them ten thousand rupees for their
+expenses, to dance at the wedding. While the ceremony was celebrating,
+they were kept by the Nabob; but some months afterwards he dismissed
+them, and they took up their residence in this city. Mir Mahomed Jaffier
+Khan then took them into keeping, and allowed Munny and her set five
+hundred rupees per month, till at length, finding that Munny was
+pregnant, he took her into his own house. She gave birth to the Nabob
+Nujim ul Dowlah, and in this manner has she remained in the Nabob's
+family ever since."
+
+Now it required a very peculiar mode of selection to take such a woman,
+so circumstanced, (resembling whom there was not just such another,) to
+depose the Nabob's own mother from the superiority of the household, and
+to substitute this woman. It would have been an abominable abuse, and
+would have implied corruption in the grossest degree, if Mr. Hastings
+had stopped there. He not only did this, but he put _her_, this woman,
+in the very place of Mahomed Reza Khan: he made her guardian, he made
+her regent, he made her viceroy, he made her the representative of the
+native government of the country in the eyes of strangers. There was not
+a trust, not a dignity in the country, which he did not put, during the
+minority of this unhappy person, her step-son, into the hands of this
+woman.
+
+Reject, if you please, the strong presumption of corruption in
+disobeying the order of the Company directing him to select a _man_ fit
+to supply the place of Mahomed Reza Khan, to exercise all the great and
+arduous functions of government and of justice, as well as the
+regulation of the Nabob's household; and then I will venture to say,
+that neither your Lordships, nor any man living, when he hears of this
+appointment, does or can hesitate a moment in concluding that it is the
+result of corruption, and that you only want to be informed what the
+corruption was. Here is such an arrangement as I believe never was
+before heard of: a secluded woman in the place of a man of the world; a
+fantastic dancing-girl in the place of a grave magistrate; a slave in
+the place of a woman of quality; a common prostitute made to superintend
+the education of a young prince; and a step-mother, a name of horror in
+all countries, made to supersede the natural mother from whose body the
+Nabob had sprung.
+
+These are circumstances that leave no doubt of the grossest and most
+flagrant corruption. But was there no application made to Mr. Hastings
+upon that occasion? The Nabob's uncle, whom Mr. Hastings declares to be
+a man of no dangerous ambition, no alarming parts, no one quality that
+could possibly exclude him from that situation, makes an application to
+Mr. Hastings for that place, and was by Mr. Hastings rejected. The
+reason he gives for his rejection is, because he cannot put any man in
+it without danger to the Company, who had ordered him to put a man into
+it. One would imagine the trust to be placed in him was such as enabled
+him to overturn the Company in a moment. Now the situation in which the
+Nabob's uncle, Yeteram ul Dowlah, would have been placed was this: he
+would have had no troops, he would have had no treasury, he would have
+had no collections of revenue, nothing, in short, that could have made
+him dangerous, but he would have been an absolute pensioner and
+dependant upon the Company, though in high office; and the least attempt
+to disturb the Company, instead of increasing, would have been
+subversive of his own power. If Mr. Hastings should still insist that
+there might be danger from the appointment of a man, we shall prove that
+he was of opinion that there could be no danger from any one,--that the
+Nabob himself was a mere shadow, a cipher, and was kept there only to
+soften the English government in the eyes and opinion of the natives.
+
+My Lords, I will detail these circumstances no further, but will bring
+some collateral proofs to show that Mr. Hastings was at that very time
+conscious of the wicked and corrupt act he was doing. For, besides this
+foolish principle of policy, which he gives as a reason for defying the
+orders of the Company, and for insulting the country, that had never
+before seen a woman in that situation, and _his_ declaration to the
+Company, that their government cannot be supported by private justice,
+(a favorite maxim, which he holds upon all occasions,) besides these
+reasons which he gave for his politic injustice, he gives the following.
+The Company had ordered that 30,000_l._ should be given to the person
+appointed. He knew that the Company could never dream of giving this
+woman 30,000_l._ a year, and he makes use of that circumstance to
+justify him in putting her in that place: for he says, the Company, in
+the distressed state of its affairs, could never mean to give 30,000_l._
+a year for the office which they order to be filled; and accordingly,
+upon principles of economy, as well as upon principles of prudence, he
+sees there could be no occasion for giving this salary, and that it will
+be saved to the Company. But no sooner had he given her the appointment
+than that appointment became a ground for giving her that money. The
+moment he had appointed her, he overturns the very principle upon which
+he had appointed her, and gives the 30,000_l._ to her, and the officers
+under her, saving not one shilling to the Company by this infamous
+measure, which he justified only upon the principle of economy. The
+30,000_l._ was given, the principle of economy vanished, a shocking
+arrangement was made, and Bengal saw a dancing-girl administering its
+justice, presiding over all its remaining power, wealth, and influence,
+exhibiting to the natives of the country their miserable state of
+degradation, and the miserable dishonor of the English Company in Mr.
+Hastings's abandonment of all his own pretences.
+
+But there is a still stronger presumption. The Company ordered that this
+person, who was to have the management of the Nabob's revenue, and who
+was to be his guardian, should keep a strict account, which account
+should be annually transmitted to the Presidency, and by the Presidency
+to Europe; and the purpose of it was, to keep a control upon the reduced
+expenses of the sixteen lac which were ordered in the manner I
+mentioned. Your Lordships will naturally imagine that that control was
+kept safe. No, here is the order of the Directors, and you will see how
+Mr. Hastings obeyed it.
+
+"As the disbursement of the sums allotted to the Nabob for the
+maintenance of his household and family and the support of his dignity
+will pass through the hands of the minister who shall be selected by
+you, conformable to our preceding orders, we expect that you will
+require such minister to deliver annually to your board a regular and
+exact account of the application of the several sums paid by the Company
+to the Nabob. This you will strictly examine; and we trust that you will
+not suffer any part of the Nabob's stipend to be appropriated to the
+minister's own use, or wasted among the unnecessary dependants of the
+court, but that the whole amount be applied to the purposes for which it
+was assigned by us."
+
+One would have imagined, that, after Mr. Hastings had made so suspicious
+an arrangement, (I will not call it by any worse name,) he would have
+removed all suspicion with regard to money,--that he would have obeyed
+the Company by constituting the control which they had ordered to be
+placed over a man, even a fit man, and a man worthy of the trust
+committed to him. But what is his answer, when three years after he is
+desired to produce this account? His answer is,--"I can save the board
+the trouble of this reference by acquainting them that no such accounts
+have ever been transmitted, nor, as I can affirm with most certain
+knowledge, any orders given for that purpose, either to Gourdas, to
+whose office it did not properly belong, nor to the Begum, who had the
+actual charge and responsibility of those disbursements."
+
+He has given to this woman the charge of all the disbursements of the
+Company; the officer whom you would imagine would be responsible was not
+responsible, but to this prostitute and dancing-girl the whole of the
+revenue was given; when he was ordered to transmit that account, he not
+only did not produce that account, but had given no order that it
+should be kept: so that no doubt can be left upon your Lordships' minds,
+that the sixteen lac, which were reserved for the support of the dignity
+of the government of that country, were employed for the purpose of Mr.
+Hastings's having a constant bank, from which he should draw every
+corrupt emolument he should think fit for himself and his associates.
+Thus your Lordships see that he appointed an improper person to the
+trust without any control, and that the very accounts which were to be
+the guardians of his purity, and which were to remove suspicion from
+him, he never so much as directed or ordered. If any one can doubt that
+that transaction was in itself corrupt, I can only say that his mind
+must be constituted in a manner totally different from that which
+prevails in any of the higher or lower branches of judicature in any
+country in the world. The suppression of an account is a proof of
+corruption.
+
+When Mr. Hastings committed these acts of violence against Mahomed Reza
+Khan, when he proceeded to make arrangements in the Company's affairs of
+the same kind with those in which corruption had been before exercised,
+he was bound by a particular responsibility that there should be nothing
+mysterious in his own conduct, and that at least all the accounts should
+be well kept. He appointed a person nominally for that
+situation,--namely, the Rajah Gourdas. Who was he? A person acting, he
+says, under the influence of Rajah Nundcomar, whom he had declared was
+not fit to be employed or trusted: all the offices were filled by him.
+But had Rajah Gourdas, whose character is that of an excellent man,
+against whom there could lie no reasonable objection on account of his
+personal character, and whose want of talents was to be supplied by
+those of Nundcomar, (and of _his_ parts Mr. Hastings spoke as highly as
+possible,)--had he, I say, the management? No: but Munny Begum. Did she
+keep any accounts? No.
+
+Mr. Hastings was ordered, and a very disagreeable and harsh order it
+was, to take away one half of the Nabob's allowance which he had by
+treaty. I do not charge Mr. Hastings with this reduction: he had nothing
+to do with that. Sixteen lac were cut off, and sixteen left; these two
+sums had been distributed, one for the support of the seraglio and the
+dignity of the state, the other for the court establishment and the
+household. The sixteen lac which was left, therefore, required to be
+well economized, and well administered. There was a rigor in the
+Company's order relative to it, which was, that it should take place
+from an antedated time, that is, a whole year prior to the communication
+of their order to the Nabob. The order was, that the Nabob's stipend
+should be reduced to sixteen lac a year from the month of January. Mr.
+Hastings makes this reflection upon it, in order to leave no doubt upon
+your mind of his integrity in administering that great trust: he says,--
+
+"Your order for the reduction of the Nabob's stipend was communicated to
+him in the month of December, 1771. He remonstrated against it, and
+desired it might be again referred to the Company. The board entirely
+acquiesced in his remonstrance, and the subsequent payments of his
+stipend were paid as before. I might easily have availed myself of this
+plea. I might have treated it as an act of the past government, with
+which I had no cause to interfere, and joined in asserting the
+impossibility of his defraying the vast expense of his court and
+household without it, which I could have proved by plausible arguments,
+drawn from the actual amount of the nizamut and bhela establishments;
+and both the Nabob and Begum would have liberally purchased my
+forbearance. Instead of pursuing this plan, I carried your orders
+rigidly and literally into execution. I undertook myself the laborious
+and reproachful task of limiting his charges, from an excess of his
+former stipend, to the sum of his reduced allowance."
+
+He says in another place,--"The stoppage of the king's tribute was an
+act of mine, and I have been often reproached with it. It was certainly
+in my power to have continued the payment of it, and to have made my
+terms with the king for any part of it which I might have chosen to
+reserve for my own use. He would have thanked me for the remainder."
+
+My Lords, I believe it is a singular thing, and what your Lordships have
+been very little used to, to see a man in the situation of Mr. Hastings,
+or in any situation like it, so ready in knowing all the resources by
+which sinister emolument may be made and concealed, and which, under
+pretences of public good, may be transferred into the pocket of him who
+uses those pretences. He is resolved, if he is innocent, that his
+innocence shall not proceed from ignorance. He well knows the ways of
+falsifying the Company's accounts; he well knows the necessities of the
+natives, and he knows that by paying a part of their dues they will be
+ready to give an acquittance of the whole. These are parts of Mr.
+Hastings's knowledge of which your Lordships will see he also well
+knows how to avail himself.
+
+But you would expect, when he reduced the allowance to sixteen lac, and
+took credit to himself as if he had done the thing which he professed,
+and had argued from his rigor and cruelty his strict and literal
+obedience to the Company, that he had in reality done it. The very
+reverse: for it will be in proof, that, after he had pretended to reduce
+the Company's allowance, he continued it a twelvemonth from the day in
+which he said he had entirely executed it, to the amount of 90,000_l._,
+and entered a false account of the suppression in the Company's
+accounts; and when he has taken a credit as under pretence of reducing
+that allowance, he paid 90,000_l._ more than he ought. Can you, then,
+have a doubt, after all these false pretences, after all this fraud,
+fabrication, and suppression which he made use of, that that 90,000_l._,
+of which he kept no account and transmitted no account, was money given
+to himself for his own private use and advantage?
+
+This is all that I think necessary to state to your Lordships upon this
+monstrous part of the arrangement; and therefore, from his rigorous
+obedience in cases of cruelty, and, where control was directed, from his
+total disobedience, and from his choice of persons, from his suppression
+of the accounts that ought to have been produced, and falsifying the
+accounts that were kept, there arises a strong inference of corruption.
+When your Lordships see all this in proof, your Lordships will justify
+me in saying that there never was (taking every part of the arrangement)
+such a direct, open violation of any trust.--I shall say no more with
+regard to the appointment of Munny Begum.
+
+My Lords, here ended the first scene, and here ends that body of
+presumption arising from the transaction and inherent in it. My Lords,
+the next scene that I am to bring before you is the positive proof of
+corruption in this transaction, in which I am sure you already see that
+corruption must exist. The charge was brought by a person in the highest
+trust and confidence with Mr. Hastings, a person employed in the
+management of the whole transaction, a person to whom the management,
+subordinate to Munny Begum, of all the pecuniary transactions, and all
+the arrangements made upon that occasion, was intrusted.
+
+On the 11th day of March, 1775, Nundcomar gives to Mr. Francis, a member
+of the Council, a charge against Mr. Hastings, consisting of two parts.
+The first of these charges was a vast number of corrupt dealings, with
+respect to which he was the informer, not the witness, but to which he
+indicated the modes of inquiry; and they are corrupt dealings, as Mr.
+Hastings himself states them, amounting to millions of rupees, and in
+transactions every one of which implies in it the strongest degree of
+corruption. The next part was of those to which he was not only an
+informer, but a witness, in having been the person who himself
+transmitted the money to Mr. Hastings and the agents of Mr. Hastings;
+and accordingly, upon this part, which is the only part we charge, his
+evidence is clear and full, that he gave the money to Mr. Hastings,--he
+and the Begum (for I put them together). He states, that Mr. Hastings
+received for the appointment of Munny Begum to the rajahship two lacs of
+rupees, or about 22,000_l._, and that he received in another gross sum
+one lac and a half of rupees: in all making three lac and a half, or
+about 36,000_l._ This charge was signed by the man, and accompanied with
+the account.
+
+Mr. Hastings, on that day, made no reflection or observation whatever
+upon this charge, except that he attempted to excite some suspicion that
+Mr. Francis, who had produced it, was concerned in the charge, and was
+the principal mover in it. He asks Mr. Francis that day this question:--
+
+"The Governor-General observes, as Mr. Francis has been pleased to
+inform the board that he was unacquainted with the contents of the
+letter sent in to the board by Nundcomar, that he thinks himself
+justified in carrying his curiosity further than he should have
+permitted himself without such a previous intimation, and therefore begs
+leave to ask Mr. Francis whether he was before this acquainted with
+Nundcomar's intention of bringing such charges against him before the
+board.
+
+"_Mr. Francis._--As a member of this Council, I do not deem myself
+obliged to answer any question of mere curiosity. I am willing, however,
+to inform the Governor-General, that, though I was totally unacquainted
+with the contents of the paper I have now delivered in to the board till
+I heard it read, I did apprehend in general that it contained some
+charge against him. It was this apprehension that made me so
+particularly cautious in the manner of receiving the Rajah's letter. I
+was not acquainted with Rajah Nundcomar's intention of bringing in such
+charges as are mentioned in the letter.
+
+    "Warren Hastings.
+    J. Clavering.
+    Geo. Monson.
+    P. Francis."
+
+Now what the duty of Mr. Hastings and the Council was, upon receiving
+such information, I shall beg leave to state to your Lordships from the
+Company's orders; but, before I read them, I must observe, that, in
+pursuance of an act of Parliament, which was supposed to be made upon
+account of the neglect of the Company, as well as the neglects of their
+servants, and for which general neglects responsibility was fixed upon
+the Company for the future, while for the present their authority was
+suspended, and a Parliamentary commission sent out to regulate their
+affairs, the Company did, upon that occasion, send out a general code
+and body of instructions to be observed by their servants, in the 35th
+paragraph of which it is said,--
+
+"We direct that you immediately cause the strictest inquiry to be made
+into all oppressions which may have been committed either against the
+natives or Europeans, and into all abuses that may have prevailed in the
+collection of the revenues, or any part of the civil government of the
+Presidency: and that you communicate to us all information which you may
+be able to learn relative thereto, or to any dissipation or embezzlement
+of the Company's money."
+
+Your Lordships see here that there is a direct duty fixed upon them to
+forward, to promote, to set on foot, without exception of any persons
+whatever, an inquiry into all manner of corruption, peculation, and
+oppression. Therefore this charge of Nundcomar's was a case exactly
+within the Company's orders; such a charge was not sought out, but was
+actually laid before them; but if it had not been actually laid before
+them, if they had any reason to suspect that such corruptions existed,
+they were bound by this order to make an active inquiry into them.
+
+Upon that day (11th March, 1775) nothing further passed; and, on the
+part of Mr. Hastings, that charge, as far as we can find, might have
+stood upon the records forever, without his making the smallest
+observation upon it, or taking any one step to clear his own character.
+But Nundcomar was not so inattentive to his duties as an accuser as Mr.
+Hastings was to his duties as an inquirer; for, without a moment's
+delay, upon the first board-day, two days after, Nundcomar came and
+delivered the following letter.
+
+"I had the honor to lay before you, in a letter of the 11th instant, an
+abstracted, but true account of the Honorable Governor in the course of
+his administration. What is there written I mean not the least to alter:
+far from it. I have the strongest written vouchers to produce in support
+of what I have advanced; and I wish and entreat, for my honor's sake,
+that you will suffer me to appear before you, to establish the fact by
+an additional, incontestable evidence."
+
+My Lords, I will venture to say, if ever there was an accuser that
+appeared well and with weight before any court, it was this man. He does
+not shrink from his charge; he offered to meet the person he charged
+face to face, and to make good his charge by his own evidence, and
+further evidence that he should produce. Your Lordships have also seen
+the conduct of Mr. Hastings on the first day; you have seen his
+acquiescence under it; you have seen the suspicion he endeavored to
+raise. Now, before I proceed to what Mr. Hastings thought of it, I must
+remark upon this accusation, that it is a specific accusation, coming
+from a person knowing the very transaction, and known to be concerned in
+it,--that it was an accusation in writing, that it was an accusation
+with a signature, that it was an accusation with a person to make it
+good, that it was made before a competent authority, and made before an
+authority bound to inquire into such accusation. When he comes to
+produce his evidence, he tells you, first, the sums of money given, the
+species in which they were given, the very bags in which they were put,
+the exchange that was made by reducing them to the standard money of the
+country; he names all the persons through whose hands the whole
+transaction went, eight in number, besides himself, Munny Begum, and
+Gourdas, being eleven, all referred to in this transaction. I do believe
+that since the beginning of the world there never was an accusation
+which was more deserving of inquiry, because there never was an
+accusation which put a false accuser in a worse situation, and that put
+an honest defendant in a better; for there was every means of collation,
+every means of comparison, every means of cross-examining, every means
+of control. There was every way of sifting evidence, in which evidence
+could be sifted. Eleven witnesses to the transaction are referred to;
+all the particulars of the payment, every circumstance that could give
+the person accused the advantage of showing the falsehood of the
+accusation, were specified. General accusations may be treated as
+calumnies; but particular accusations, like these, afford the defendant,
+if innocent, every possible means for making his defence: therefore the
+very making no defence at all would prove, beyond all doubt, a
+consciousness of guilt.
+
+The next thing for your Lordships' consideration is the conduct of Mr.
+Hastings upon this occasion. You would imagine that he would have
+treated the accusation with a cold and manly disdain; that he would
+have challenged and defied inquiry, and desired to see his accuser face
+to face. This is what any man would do in such a situation. I can
+conceive very well that a man composed, firm, and collected in himself,
+conscious of not only integrity, but known integrity, conscious of a
+whole life beyond the reach of suspicion,--that a man placed in such a
+situation might oppose general character to general accusation, and
+stand collected in himself, poised on his own base, and defying all the
+calumnies in the world. But as it shows a great and is a proof of a
+virtuous mind to despise calumny, it is the proof of a guilty mind to
+despise a specific accusation, when made before a competent authority,
+and with competent means to prove it. As Mr. Hastings's conduct was what
+no man living expected, I will venture to say that no expression can do
+it justice but his own. Upon reading the letter, and a motion being made
+that Rajah Nundcomar be brought before the board to prove the charge
+against the Governor-General, the Governor-General enters the following
+minute.
+
+"Before the question is put, I declare that I will not suffer Nundcomar
+to appear before the board as my accuser. I know what belongs to the
+dignity and character of the first member of this administration. I will
+not sit at this board in the character of a criminal, nor do I
+acknowledge the members of this board to be my judges. I am reduced on
+this occasion to make the declaration, that I look upon General
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis as my accusers. I cannot
+prove this in the direct letter of the law, but in my conscience I
+regard them as such, and I will give my reasons for it. On their arrival
+at this place, and on the first formation of the Council, they thought
+proper to take immediate and decisive measures in contradiction and for
+the repeal of those which were formed by me in conjunction with the last
+administration. I appealed to the Court of Directors from their acts.
+Many subsequent letters have been transmitted both by them and by me to
+the Court of Directors: by me, in protestation against their conduct; by
+them, in justification of it. Quitting this ground, they since appear to
+me to have chosen other modes of attack, apparently calculated to divert
+my attention and to withdraw that of the public from the subject of our
+first differences, which regarded only the measures that were necessary
+for the good of the service, to attacks directly and personally levelled
+at me for matters which tend to draw a personal and popular odium upon
+me: and fit instruments they have found for their purpose,--Mr. Joseph
+Fowke, Mahrajah Nundcomar, Roopnarain Chowdry, and the Ranny of Burdwan.
+
+"It appears incontestably upon the records that the charges preferred by
+the Ranny against me proceeded from the office of Mr. Fowke. All the
+papers transmitted by her came in their original form written in the
+English language,--some with Persian papers, of which they were supposed
+to be translations, but all strongly marked with the character and idiom
+of the English language. I applied on Saturday last for Persian
+originals of some of the papers sent by her, and I was refused: I am
+justified in declaring my firm belief that no such originals exist.
+
+"With respect to Nundcomar's accusations, they were delivered by the
+hands of Mr. Francis, who has declared that he was called upon by Rajah
+Nundcomar, as a duty belonging to his office as a councillor of this
+state, to lay the packet which contained them before the board,--that he
+conceived that he could not, consistent with his duty, refuse such a
+letter at the instance of a person of the Rajah's rank, and did
+accordingly receive it, and laid it before the board,--declaring at the
+same time that he was unacquainted with the contents of it. I believe
+that the Court of Directors, and those to whom those proceedings shall
+be made known, will think differently of this action of Mr. Francis:
+that Nundcomar was guilty of great insolence and disrespect in the
+demand which he made of Mr. Francis; and that it was not a duty
+belonging to the office of a councillor of this state to make himself
+the carrier of a letter, which would have been much more properly
+committed to the hands of a peon or hircarra, or delivered by the writer
+of it to the secretary himself.
+
+"Mr. Francis has acknowledged that he apprehended in general that it
+contained some charge against me. If the charge was false, it was a
+libel. It might have been false for anything that Mr. Francis could know
+to the contrary, since he was unacquainted with the contents of it. In
+this instance, therefore, he incurred the hazard of presenting a libel
+to the board: this was not a duty belonging to his office as a
+councillor of this state. I must further inform the board that I have
+been long since acquainted with Nundcomar's intentions of making this
+attack upon me. Happily, Nundcomar, among whose talents for intrigue
+that of secrecy is not the first, has been ever too ready to make the
+first publication of his own intentions. I was shown a paper containing
+many accusations against me, which I was told was carried by Nundcomar
+to Colonel Monson, and that he himself was employed for some hours in
+private with Colonel Monson, explaining the nature of those charges.
+
+"I mention only what I was told; but as the rest of the report which was
+made to me corresponds exactly with what has happened since, I hope I
+shall stand acquitted to my superiors and to the world in having given
+so much credit to it as to bring the circumstance upon record. I cannot
+recollect the precise time in which this is said to have happened, but I
+believe it was either before or at the time of the dispatch of the
+'Bute' and 'Pacific.' The charge has since undergone some alteration;
+but of the copy of the paper which was delivered to me, containing the
+original charge, I caused a translation to be made; when, suspecting the
+renewal of the subject in this day's consultation, I brought it with me,
+and I desire it may be recorded, that, when our superiors, or the world,
+if the world is to be made the judge of my conduct, shall be possessed
+of these materials, they may, by comparing the supposed original and
+amended list of accusations preferred against me by Nundcomar, judge how
+far I am justified in the credit which I give to the reports above
+mentioned. I do not mean to infer from what I have said that it makes
+any alteration in the nature of the charges, whether they were delivered
+immediately from my ostensible accusers, or whether they came to the
+board through the channel of patronage; but it is sufficient to
+authorize the conviction which I feel in my own mind, that those
+gentlemen are parties in the accusations of which they assert the right
+of being the judges.
+
+"From the first commencement of this administration, every means have
+been tried both to deprive me of the legal authority with which I have
+been trusted, and to proclaim the annihilation of it to the world; but
+no instance has yet appeared of this in so extraordinary a degree as in
+the question now before the board. The chief of the administration, your
+superior, Gentlemen, appointed by the legislature itself, shall I sit at
+this board to be arraigned in the presence of a wretch whom you all know
+to be one of the basest of mankind? I believe I need not mention his
+name; but it is Nundcomar. Shall I sit here to hear men collected from
+the dregs of the people give evidence, at his dictating, against my
+character and conduct? I will not. You may, if you please, form
+yourselves into a committee for the investigation of these matters in
+any manner which you may think proper; but I will repeat, that I will
+not meet Nundcomar at the board, nor suffer Nundcomar to be examined at
+the board; nor have you a right to it, nor can it answer any other
+purpose than that of vilifying and insulting me to insist upon it.
+
+"I am sorry to have found it necessary to deliver my sentiments on a
+subject of so important a nature in an unpremeditated minute, drawn from
+me at the board, which I should have wished to have had leisure and
+retirement to have enabled me to express myself with that degree of
+caution and exactness which the subject requires. I have said nothing
+but what I believe and am morally certain I shall stand justified for in
+the eyes of my superiors and the eyes of the world; but I reserve to
+myself the liberty of adding my further sentiments in such a manner and
+form as I shall hereafter judge necessary."
+
+My Lords, you see here the picture of Nundcomar drawn by Mr. Hastings
+himself; you see the hurry, the passion, the precipitation, the
+confusion, into which Mr. Hastings is thrown by the perplexity of
+detected guilt; you see, my Lords, that, instead of defending himself,
+he rails at his accuser in the most indecent language, calling him a
+wretch whom they all knew to be the basest of mankind,--that he rails at
+the Council, by attributing their conduct to the worst of motives,--that
+he rails at everybody, and declares the accusation to be a libel: in
+short, you see plainly that the man's head is turned. You see there is
+not a word he says upon this occasion which has common sense in it; you
+see one great leading principle in it,--that he does not once attempt to
+deny the charge. He attempts to vilify the witness, he attempts to
+vilify those he supposes to be his accusers, he attempts to vilify the
+Council; he lags upon the accusation, he mixes it with other
+accusations, which had nothing to do with it, and out of the whole he
+collects a resolution--to do what? To meet his adversary and defy him?
+No,--that he will not suffer him to appear before him: he says, "I will
+not sit at this board in the character of a criminal, nor do I
+acknowledge the board to be my judges."
+
+He was not called upon to acknowledge them to be his judges. Both he and
+they were called upon to inquire into all corruptions without exception.
+It was his duty not merely [not?] to traverse and oppose them while
+inquiring into acts of corruption, but he was bound to take an active
+part in it,--that if they had a mind to let such a thing sleep upon
+their records, it was his duty to have brought forward the inquiry. They
+were not his judges, they were not his accusers; they were his
+fellow-laborers in the inquiry ordered by the Court of Directors, their
+masters, and by which inquiry he might be purged of that corruption with
+which he stood charged.
+
+He says, "Nundcomar is a wretch whom you all know to be the basest of
+mankind." I believe they did not know the man to be a wretch, or the
+basest of mankind; but if he was a wretch, and if he was the basest of
+mankind, if he was guilty of all the crimes with which we charge Mr.
+Hastings, (not one of which was ever proved against him,)--if any of
+your Lordships were to have the misfortune to be before this tribunal,
+before any inquest of the House of Commons, or any other inquest of this
+nation, would you not say that it was the greatest possible advantage to
+you that the man who accused you was a miscreant, the vilest and basest
+of mankind, by the confession of all the world? Do mankind really, then,
+think that to be accused by men of honor, of weight, of character, upon
+probable charges, is an advantage to them, and that to be accused by the
+basest of mankind is a disadvantage? No: give me, if ever I am to have
+accusers, miscreants, as he calls him,--wretches, the basest and vilest
+of mankind. "The board," says he, "are my accusers." If they were, it
+was their duty; but they were not his accusers, but were inquiring into
+matters which it was equally his duty to inquire into. He would not
+suffer Nundcomar to be produced; he would not suffer Nundcomar to be
+examined; he rather suffered such an accusation to stand against his
+name and character than permit it to be inquired into. Do I want any
+other presumption of his guilt, upon such an occasion, than such conduct
+as this?
+
+This man, whom he calls a wretch, the basest and vilest of mankind, was
+undoubtedly, by himself, in the records of the Company, declared to be
+one of the first men of that country, everything that a subject could
+be, a person illustrious for his birth, sacred with regard to his caste,
+opulent in fortune, eminent in situation, who had filled the very first
+offices in that country; and that he was, added to all this, a man of
+most acknowledged talents, and of such a superiority as made the whole
+people of Bengal appear to be an inferior race of beings compared to
+him,--a man whose outward appearance and demeanor used to cause
+reverence and awe, and who at that time was near seventy years of age,
+which, without any other title, generally demands respect from mankind.
+And yet this man he calls the basest of mankind, a name which no man is
+entitled to call another till he has proved something to justify him in
+so doing; and notwithstanding his opulence, his high rank, station, and
+birth, he despises him, and will not suffer him to be heard as an
+accuser before him. I will venture to say that Mr. Hastings, in so
+doing, whether elevated by philosophy or inflated by pride, is not like
+the rest of mankind. We do know, that, in all accusations, a great part
+of their weight and authority comes from the character, the situation,
+the name, the description, the office, the dignity of the persons who
+bring them; mankind are so made, we cannot resist this prejudice; and it
+has weight, and ever will have _prima facie_ weight, in all the
+tribunals in the world. If, therefore, Rajah Nundcomar was a man who (it
+is not degrading to your Lordships to say) was equal in rank, according
+to the idea of his country, to any peer in this House, as sacred as a
+bishop, of as much gravity and authority as a judge, and who was
+prime-minister in the country in which he lived, with what face can Mr.
+Hastings call this man a wretch, and say that he will not suffer him to
+be brought before him? If, indeed, joined with such circumstances, the
+accuser be a person of bad morals, then, I admit, those bad morals take
+away from their weight; but for a proof of that you must have some other
+grounds than the charges and the railing of the culprit against him.
+
+I might say that his passion is a proof of his guilt; and there is an
+action which is more odious than the crimes he attempts to cover,--_for
+he has murdered this man by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey_; and if his
+counsel should be unwise enough to endeavor to detract from the credit
+of this man by the pretended punishment to which he was brought, we will
+open that dreadful scene to your Lordships, and you will see that it
+does not detract from his credit, but brings an eternal stain and
+dishonor upon the justice of Great Britain: I say nothing further of it.
+As he stood there, as he gave that evidence that day, the evidence was
+to be received; it stands good, and is a record against Mr.
+Hastings,--with this addition, that he would not suffer it to be
+examined. He railed at his colleagues. He says, if the charge was false,
+they were guilty of a libel. No: it might have been the effect of
+conspiracy, it might be punished in another way; but if it was false, it
+was no libel. And all this is done to discountenance inquiry, to bring
+odium upon his colleagues for doing their duty, and to prevent that
+inquiry which could alone clear his character.
+
+Mr. Hastings had himself forgotten the character which he had given of
+Nundcomar; but he says that his colleagues were perfectly well
+acquainted with him, and knew that he was a wretch, the basest of
+mankind. But before I read to you the character which Mr. Hastings gave
+of him, when he recommended him to the Presidency, (to succeed Mahomed
+Reza Khan,) I am to let your Lordships understand fully the purpose for
+which Mr. Hastings gave it. Upon that occasion, all the Council, whom he
+stated to lie under suspicion of being bought by Mahomed Reza Khan, all
+those persons with one voice cried out against Nundcomar; and as Mr.
+Hastings was known to be of the faction the most opposite to Nundcomar,
+they charged him with direct inconsistency in raising Nundcomar to that
+exalted trust,--a charge which Mr. Hastings could not repel any other
+way than by defending Nundcomar. The weight of their objections chiefly
+lay to Nundcomar's political character; his moral character was not
+discussed in that proceeding. Mr. Hastings says,--
+
+"The President does not take upon him to vindicate the moral character
+of Nundcomar; his sentiments of this man's former political conduct are
+not unknown to the Court of Directors, who, he is persuaded, will be
+more inclined to attribute his present countenance of him to motives of
+zeal and fidelity to the service, in repugnance perhaps to his own
+inclinations, than to any predilection in his favor. He is very well
+acquainted with most of the facts alluded to in the minute of the
+majority, having been a principal instrument in detecting them:
+nevertheless he thinks it but justice to make a distinction between the
+violation of a trust and an offence committed against our government by
+a man who owed it no allegiance, nor was indebted to it for protection,
+but, on the contrary, was the minister and actual servant of a master
+whose interest naturally suggested that kind of policy which sought, by
+foreign aids, and the diminution of the power of the Company, to raise
+his own consequence, and to reestablish his authority. He has never been
+charged with any instance of infidelity to the Nabob Mir Jaffier, the
+constant tenor of whose politics, from his first accession to the
+nizamut till his death, corresponded in all points so exactly with the
+artifices which were detected in his minister that they may be as fairly
+ascribed to the one as to the other: their immediate object was beyond
+question the aggrandizement of the former, though the latter had
+ultimately an equal interest in their success. The opinion which the
+Nabob himself entertained of the services and of the fidelity of
+Nundcomar evidently appeared in the distinguished marks which he
+continued to show him of his favor and confidence to the latest hour of
+his life.
+
+"His conduct in the succeeding administration appears not only to have
+been dictated by the same principles, but, if we may be allowed to speak
+favorably of any measures which opposed the views of our own government
+and aimed at the support of an adverse interest, surely it was not only
+not culpable, but even praiseworthy. He endeavored, as appears by the
+abstracts before us, to give consequence to his master, and to pave the
+way to his independence, by obtaining a firman from the king for his
+appointment to the subahship; and he opposed the promotion of Mahomed
+Reza Khan, because he looked upon it as a supersession of the rights and
+authority of the Nabob. He is now an absolute dependant and subject of
+the Company, on whose favor he must rest all his hopes of future
+advancement."
+
+The character here given of him is that of an excellent patriot, a
+character which all your Lordships, in the several situations which you
+enjoy or to which you may be called, will envy,--the character of a
+servant who stuck to his master against all foreign encroachments, who
+stuck to him to the last hour of his life, and had the dying testimony
+of his master to his services.
+
+Could Sir John Clavering, could Colonel Monson, could Mr. Francis know
+that this man, of whom Mr. Hastings had given that exalted character
+upon the records of the Company, was the basest and vilest of mankind?
+No, they ought to have esteemed him the contrary: they knew him to be a
+man of rank, they knew him to be a man perhaps of the first capacity in
+the world, and they knew that Mr. Hastings had given this honorable
+testimony of him on the records of the Company but a very little time
+before; and there was no reason why they should think or know, as he
+expresses it, that he was the basest and vilest of mankind. From the
+account, therefore, of Mr. Hastings himself, he was a person competent
+to accuse, a witness fit to be heard; and that is all I contend for. Mr.
+Hastings would not hear him, he would not suffer the charge he had
+produced to be examined into.
+
+It has been shown to your Lordships that Mr. Hastings employed Nundcomar
+to inquire into the conduct and to be the principal manager of a
+prosecution against Mahomed Reza Khan. Will you suffer this man to
+qualify and disqualify witnesses and prosecutors agreeably to the
+purposes which his own vengeance and corruption may dictate in one case,
+and which the defence of those corruptions may dictate in another? Was
+Nundcomar a person fit to be employed in the greatest and most sacred
+trusts in the country, and yet not fit to be a witness to the sums of
+money which he paid Mr. Hastings for those trusts? Was Nundcomar a fit
+witness to be employed and a fit person to be used in the prosecution of
+Mahomed Reza Khan, and yet not fit to be employed against Mr. Hastings,
+who himself had employed him in the very prosecution of Mahomed Reza
+Khan?
+
+If Nundcomar was an enemy to Mr. Hastings, he was an enemy to Mahomed
+Reza Khan; and Mr. Hastings employed him, avowedly and professedly on
+the records of the Company, on account of the very qualification of that
+enmity. Was he a wretch, the basest of mankind, when opposed to Mr.
+Hastings? Was he not as much a wretch, and as much the basest of
+mankind, when Mr. Hastings employed him in the prosecution of the first
+magistrate and Mahometan of the first descent in Asia? Mr. Hastings
+shall not qualify and disqualify men at his pleasure; he must accept
+them such as they are; and it is a presumption of his guilt accompanying
+the charge, (which I never will separate from it,) that he would not
+suffer the man to be produced who made the accusation. And I therefore
+contend, that, as the accusation was so made, so witnessed, so detailed,
+so specific, so entered upon record, and so entered upon record in
+consequence of the inquiries ordered by the Company, his refusal and
+rejection of inquiry into it is a presumption of his guilt.
+
+He is full of his idea of dignity. It is right for every man to preserve
+his dignity. There is a dignity of station, which a man has in trust to
+preserve; there is a dignity of personal character, which every man by
+being made man is bound to preserve. But you see Mr. Hastings's idea of
+dignity has no connection with integrity; it has no connection with
+honest fame; it has no connection with the reputation which he is bound
+to preserve. What, my Lords, did he owe nothing to the Company that had
+appointed him? Did he owe nothing to the legislature,--did he owe
+nothing to your Lordships, and to the House of Commons, who had
+appointed him? Did he owe nothing to himself? to the country that bore
+him? Did he owe nothing to the world, as to its opinion, to which every
+public man owes a reputation? What an example was here held out to the
+Company's servants!
+
+Mr. Hastings says, "This may come into a court of justice; it will come
+into a court of justice: I reserve my defence on the occasion till it
+comes into a court of justice, and here I make no opposition to it." To
+this I answer, that the Company did not order him so to reserve himself,
+but ordered him to be an inquirer into those things. Is it a lesson to
+be taught to the inferior servants of the Company, that, provided they
+can escape out of a court of justice by the back-doors and sally-ports
+of the law, by artifice of pleading, by those strict and rigorous rules
+of evidence which have been established for the protection of innocence,
+but which by them might be turned to the protection and support of
+guilt, that such an escape is enough for them? that an Old Bailey
+acquittal is enough to establish a fitness for trust? and if a man shall
+go acquitted out of such a court, because the judges are bound to acquit
+him against the conviction of their own opinion, when every man in the
+market-place knows that he is guilty, that he is fit for a trust? Is it
+a lesson to be held out to the servants of the Company, that, upon the
+first inquiry which is made into corruption, and that in the highest
+trust, by the persons authorized to inquire into it, he uses all the
+powers of that trust to quash it,--vilifying his colleagues, vilifying
+his accuser, abusing everybody, but never denying the charge? His
+associates and colleagues, astonished at this conduct, so wholly unlike
+everything that had ever appeared of innocence, request him to consider
+a little better. They declare they are not his accusers; they tell him
+they are not his judges; that they, under the orders of the Company, are
+making an inquiry which he ought to make. He declares he will not make
+it. Being thus driven to the wall, he says, "Why do you not form
+yourselves into a committee? I won't suffer these proceedings to go on
+as long as I am present." Mr. Hastings plainly had in view, that, if the
+proceedings had been before a committee, there would have been a doubt
+of their authenticity, as not being before a regular board; and he
+contended that there could be no regular board without his own presence
+in it: a poor, miserable scheme for eluding this inquiry; partly by
+saying that it was carried on when he was not present, and partly by
+denying the authority of this board.
+
+I will have nothing to do with the great question that arose upon the
+Governor-General's resolution to dissolve a board, whether the board
+have a right to sit afterwards; it is enough that Mr. Hastings would not
+suffer them, as a Council, to examine into what, as a Council, they were
+bound to examine into. He absolutely declared the Council dissolved,
+when they did not accept his committee, for which they had many good
+reasons, as I shall show in reply, if necessary, and which he could have
+no one good reason for proposing;--he then declares the Council
+dissolved. The Council, who did not think Mr. Hastings had a power to
+dissolve them while proceeding in the discharge of their duty, went on
+as a Council. They called in Nundcomar to support his charge: Mr.
+Hastings withdrew. Nundcomar was asked what he had to say further in
+support of his own evidence. Upon which he produces a letter from Munny
+Begum, the dancing-girl that I have spoken of, in which she gives him
+directions and instructions relative to his conduct in every part of
+those bribes; by which it appears that the corrupt agreement for her
+office was made with Mr. Hastings through Nundcomar, before he had
+quitted Calcutta. It points out the execution of it, and the manner in
+which every part of the sum was paid: one lac by herself in Calcutta;
+one lac, which she ordered Nundcomar to borrow, and which he did borrow;
+and a lac and a half which were given to him, Mr. Hastings, besides this
+purchase money, under color of an entertainment. This letter was
+produced, translated, examined, criticized, proved to be sealed with the
+seal of the Begum, acknowledged to have no marks but those of
+authenticity upon it, and as such was entered upon the Company's
+records, confirming and supporting the evidence of Nundcomar, part by
+part, and circumstance by circumstance. And I am to remark, that, since
+this document, so delivered in, has never been litigated or controverted
+in the truth of it, from that day to this, by Mr. Hastings, so, if there
+was no more testimony, here is enough, upon this business. Your
+Lordships will remark that this charge consisted of two parts: two lacs
+that were given explicitly for the corrupt purchase of the office; and
+one lac and a half given in reality for the same purpose, but under the
+color of what is called an entertainment.
+
+Now in the course of these proceedings it was thought necessary that Mr.
+Hastings's banian, Cantoo Baboo, (a name your Lordships will be well
+acquainted with, and who was the minister in this and all the other
+transactions of Mr. Hastings,) should be called before the board to
+explain some circumstances in the proceedings. Mr. Hastings ordered his
+banian, a native, not to attend the sovereign board appointed by
+Parliament for the government of that country, and directed to inquire
+into transactions of this nature. He thus taught the natives not only to
+disobey the orders of the Court of Directors, enforced by an act of
+Parliament, but he taught his own servant to disobey, and ordered him
+not to appear before the board. Quarrels, duels, and other mischiefs
+arose. In short, Mr. Hastings raised every power of heaven and of hell
+upon this subject: but in vain: the inquiry went on.
+
+Mr. Hastings does not meet Nundcomar: he was afraid of him. But he was
+not negligent of his own defence; for he flies to the Supreme Court of
+Justice. He there prosecuted an inquiry against Nundcomar for a
+conspiracy. Failing in that, he made other attempts, and disabled
+Nundcomar from appearing before the board by having him imprisoned, and
+thus utterly crippled that part of the prosecution against him. But as
+guilt is never able thoroughly to escape, it did so happen, that the
+Council, finding monstrous deficiencies in the Begum's affairs, finding
+the Nabob's allowance totally squandered, that the most sacred pensions
+were left unpaid, that nothing but disorder and confusion reigned in all
+his affairs, that the Nabob's education was neglected, that he could
+scarcely read or write, that there was scarcely any mark of a man left
+in him except those which Nature had at first imprinted,--I say, all
+these abuses being produced in a body before them, they thought it
+necessary to send up to inquire into them; and a considerable deficiency
+or embezzlement appearing in the Munny Begum's account of the young
+Nabob's stipend, she voluntarily declared, by a writing under her seal,
+that she had given 15,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings for an entertainment.
+
+Mr. Hastings, finding that the charge must come fully against him,
+contrived a plan which your Lordships will see the effects of presently,
+and this was, to confound this lac and an half, or 15,000_l._, with the
+two lacs given directly and specifically as a bribe,--intending to avail
+himself of this finesse whenever any payment was to be proved of the two
+lacs, which he knew would be proved against him, and which he never did
+deny; and accordingly your Lordships will find some confusion in the
+proofs of the payment of those sums. The receipt of two lacs is proved
+by Nundcomar, proved with all the means of detection which I have
+stated; the receipt of the lac and a half is proved by Munny Begum's
+letter, the authenticity of which was established, and never denied by
+Mr. Hastings. In addition to these proofs, Rajah Gourdas, who had the
+management of the Nabob's treasury, verbally gave an account perfectly
+corresponding with that of Nundcomar and the Munny Begum's letter; and
+he afterwards gave in writing an attestation, which in every point
+agrees correctly with the others. So that there are three witnesses upon
+this business. And he shall not disqualify Rajah Gourdas, because,
+whatever character he thought fit to give Nundcomar, he has given the
+best of characters to Rajah Gourdas, who was employed by Mr. Hastings in
+occupations of trust, and therefore any objections to his competency
+cannot exist. Having got thus far, the only thing that remained was to
+examine the records of the public offices, and see whether any trace of
+these transactions was to be found there. These offices had been thrown
+into confusion in the manner you will hear; but, upon strict inquiry,
+there was a _shomaster_, or office paper, produced, from which it
+appears that the officer of the treasury, having brought to the Nabob an
+account of one lac and a half which he said had been given to Mr.
+Hastings, desired to know from him under what head of expense it should
+be entered, and that he, the Nabob, desired him to put it under the head
+of expenses for entertaining Mr. Hastings. If there had been a head of
+entertainment established as a regular affair, the officer would never
+have gone to the Nabob and asked under what name to enter it; but he
+found an irregular affair, and he did not know what head to put it
+under. And from the whole of the proceedings it appears that three lacs
+and a half were paid: two lac by way of bribe, one lac and a half under
+the color of an entertainment. Mr. Hastings endeavors to invalidate the
+first obliquely, not directly, for he never directly denied it; and he
+partly admits the second, in hopes that all the proof of payment of the
+first charge should be merged and confounded in the second. And
+therefore your Lordships will see from the beginning of that business
+till it came into the hands of Mr. Smith, his agent, then appearing in
+the name and character of agent and solicitor to the Company, that this
+was done to give some appearance and color to it by a false
+representation, as your Lordships will see, of every part of the
+transaction.
+
+The proof, then, of the two lacs rests upon the evidence of Nundcomar,
+the letter of Munny Begum, and the evidence of Rajah Gourdas. The
+evidence of the lac and a half, by way of entertainment, was at first
+the same; and afterwards begins a series of proofs to which Mr. Hastings
+has himself helped us. For, in the first place, he produces this office
+paper in support of his attempt to establish the confusion between the
+payment of the two lacs and of the lac and a half. He did not himself
+deny that he received a lac and a half, because with respect to that lac
+and a half he had founded some principle of justification. Accordingly
+this office paper asserts and proves this lac and a half to have been
+given, in addition to the other proofs. Then Munny Begum herself is
+inquired of. There is a commission appointed to go up to her residence;
+and the fact is proved to the satisfaction of Mr. Goring, the
+commissioner. The Begum had put a paper of accounts, through her son,
+into his hands, which shall be given at your Lordships' bar, in which
+she expressly said that she gave Mr. Hastings a lac and a half for
+entertainment. But Mr. Hastings objects to Mr. Goring's evidence upon
+this occasion. He wanted to supersede Mr. Goring in the inquiry; and he
+accordingly appoints, with the consent of the Council, two creatures of
+his own to go and assist in that inquiry. The question which he directs
+these commissioners to put to Munny Begum is this:--"Was the sum of
+money charged by you to be given to Mr. Hastings given under an idea of
+entertainment customary, or upon what other ground, or for what other
+reason?" He also desires the following questions may be proposed to the
+Begum:--"Was any application made to you for the account which you have
+delivered of three lacs and a half of rupees said to have been paid to
+the Governor and Mr. Middleton? or did you deliver the account of your
+own free will, and unsolicited?" My Lords, you see that with regard to
+the whole three lacs and a half of rupees the Begum had given an account
+which tended to confirm the payment of them; but Mr. Hastings wanted to
+invalidate that account by supposing she gave it under restraint. The
+second question is,--"In what manner was the application made to you,
+and by whom?" But the principal question is this:--"On what account was
+the one lac and a half given to the Governor-General which you have laid
+to his account? Was it in consequence of any requisition from him, or of
+any previous agreement, or of any established usage?" When a man asks
+concerning a sum of money, charged to be given to him by another person,
+on what account it was given, he does indirectly admit that that money
+actually was paid, and wants to derive a justification from the mode of
+the payment of it; and accordingly that inference was drawn from the
+question so sent up, and it served as an instruction to Munny Begum; and
+her answer was, that it was given to him, as an ancient usage and
+custom, for an entertainment. So that the fact of the gift of the money
+is ascertained by the question put by Mr. Hastings to her, and her
+answer. And thus at last comes his accomplice in this business, and
+gives the fullest testimony to the lac and a half.
+
+I must beg leave, before I go further, to state the circumstances of
+the several witnesses examined upon this business. They were of two
+kinds: voluntary witnesses, and accomplices forced by inquiry and
+examination to discover their own guilt. Of the first kind were
+Nundcomar and Rajah Gourdas: these were the only two that can be said to
+be voluntary in the business, and who gave their information without
+much fear, though the last unwillingly, and with a full sense of the
+danger of doing it. The other was the evidence of his accomplice, Munny
+Begum, wrung from her by the force of truth, in which she confessed that
+she gave the lac and a half, and justifies it upon the ground of its
+being a customary entertainment. Besides this, there is the evidence of
+Chittendur, who was one of Mr. Hastings's instruments, and one of the
+Begum's servants. He, being prepared to confound the two lacs with the
+one lac and a half, says, upon his examination, that a lac and a half
+was given; but upon examining into the particulars of it, he proves that
+the sum he gave was two lacs, and not a lac and a half: for he says that
+there was a dispute about the other half lac; Nundcomar demanded
+interest, which the Begum was unwilling to allow, and consequently that
+half lac remained unpaid. Now this half lac can be no part of the lac
+and a half, which is admitted on all hands, and proved by the whole body
+of concurrent testimony, to have been given to Mr. Hastings in one
+lumping sum. When Chittendur endeavors to confound it with the lac and a
+half, he clearly establishes the fact that it was a parcel of the two
+lacs, and thus bears evidence, in attempting to prevaricate in favor of
+Mr. Hastings, that one lac and a half was paid, which Mr. Hastings is
+willing to allow; but when he enters into the particulars of it, he
+proves by the subdivision of the payment, and by the non-payment of part
+of it, that it accords with the two lacs, and not with the lac and a
+half.
+
+There are other circumstances in these accounts highly auxiliary to this
+evidence. The lac and a half was not only attested by Rajah Gourdas, by
+the Begum, by Chittendur, by the Begum again upon Mr. Hastings's own
+question, indirectly admitted by Mr. Hastings, proved by the orders for
+it to be written off to expense, (such a body of proof as perhaps never
+existed,) but there is one proof still remaining, namely, a paper, which
+was produced before the Committee, and which we shall produce to your
+Lordships. It is an authentic paper, delivered in favor of Mr. Hastings
+by Major Scott, who acted at that time as Mr. Hastings's agent, to a
+committee of the House of Commons, and authenticated to come from Munny
+Begum herself. All this body of evidence we mean to produce; and we
+shall prove, first, that he received the two lacs,--and, secondly, that
+he received one lac and a half under the name of entertainment. With
+regard to the lac and a half, Mr. Hastings is so far from controverting
+it, even indirectly, that he is obliged to establish it by testimonies
+produced by himself, in order to sink in that, if he can, the two lacs,
+which he thinks he is not able to justify, but which he fears will be
+proved against him. The lac and a half, I do believe, he will not be
+advised to contest; but whether he is or no, we shall load him with it,
+we shall prove it beyond all doubt. But there are other circumstances
+further auxiliary in this business, which, from the very attempts to
+conceal it, prove beyond doubt the fraudulent and wicked nature of the
+transaction. In the account given by the Begum, a lac, which is for Mr.
+Hastings's entertainment, is entered in a suspicious neighborhood; for
+there is there entered a lac of rupees paid for the subahdarry sunnuds
+to the Mogul through the Rajah Shitab Roy. Upon looking into the
+account, and comparing it with another paper produced, the first thing
+we find is, that this woman charges the sum paid to be a sum due; and
+then she charges this one lac to have been paid when the Mogul was in
+the hands of the Mahrattas, when all communication with him was stopped,
+and when Rajah Shitab Roy, who is supposed to have paid it, was under
+confinement in the hands of Mr. Hastings. Thus she endeavors to conceal
+the lac of rupees paid to Mr. Hastings.
+
+In order to make this transaction, which, though not in itself
+intricate, is in some degree made so by Mr. Hastings, clear to your
+Lordships, we pledge ourselves to give to your Lordships, what must be a
+great advantage to the culprit himself, a syllabus, the heads of all
+this charge, and of the proofs themselves, with their references, to
+show how far the proof goes to the two lacs, and then to the one lac and
+a half singly. This we shall put in writing, that you may not depend
+upon the fugitive memory of a thing not so well, perhaps, or powerfully
+expressed as it ought to be, and in order to give every advantage to the
+defendant, and to give every facility to your Lordships' judgment: and
+this will, I believe, be thought a clear and fair way of proceeding.
+Your Lordships will then judge whether Mr. Hastings's conduct at the
+time, his resisting an inquiry, preventing his servant appearing as an
+evidence, discountenancing and discouraging his colleagues, raising
+every obstruction to the prosecution, dissolving the Council,
+preventing evidence and destroying it as far as lay in his power by
+collateral means, be not also such presumptive proofs as give double
+force to all the positive proof we produce against him.
+
+The lac and a half, I know, he means to support upon the custom of
+entertainment; and your Lordships will judge whether or not a man who
+was ordered and had covenanted never to take more than 400_l._ could
+take 16,000_l._ under color of an entertainment. That which he intends
+to produce as a justification we charge, and your Lordships and the
+world will think, to be the heaviest aggravation of his crime. And after
+explaining to your Lordships the circumstances under which this
+justification is made, and leaving a just impression of them upon your
+minds, I shall beg your Lordships' indulgence to finish this member of
+the business to-morrow.
+
+It is stated and entered in the account, that an entertainment was
+provided for Mr. Hastings at the rate of 200_l._ a day. He stayed at
+Moorshedabad for near three months; and thus you see that visits from
+Mr. Hastings are pretty expensive things: it is at the rate of
+73,000_l._ a year for his entertainment. We find that Mr. Middleton, an
+English gentleman who was with him, received likewise (whether under the
+same pretence I know not, and it does not signify) another sum equal to
+it; and if these two gentlemen had stayed in that country a year, their
+several allowances would have been 146,000_l._ out of the Nabob's
+allowance of 160,000_l._ a year: they would have eat up nearly the whole
+of it. And do you wonder, my Lords, that such guests and such hosts are
+difficult to be divided? Do you wonder that such visits, when so well
+paid for and well provided for, were naturally long? There is hardly a
+prince in Europe who would give to another prince of Europe from his
+royal hospitality what was given upon this occasion to Mr. Hastings.
+
+Let us now see what was Mr. Hastings's business during this long
+protracted visit. First, he tells you that he came there to reduce all
+the state and dignity of the Nabob. He tells you that he felt no
+compunction in reducing that state; that the elephants, the menagerie,
+the stables, all went without mercy, and consequently all the persons
+concerned in them were dismissed also. When he came to the abolition of
+the pensions, he says,--"I proceeded with great pain, from the
+reflection that I was the instrument in depriving whole families, all at
+once, of their bread, and reducing them to a state of penury: convinced
+of the necessity of the measure, I endeavored to execute it with great
+impartiality." Here he states the work he was employed in, when he took
+this two hundred pounds a day for his own pay. "It was necessary to
+begin with reforming the useless servants of the court, and retrenching
+the idle parade of elephants, menageries, &c., which loaded the civil
+list. This cost little regret in performing; but the Resident, who took
+upon himself the chief share in this business, acknowledges that he
+suffered considerably in his feelings, when he came to touch on the
+pension list. Some hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of the
+country, excluded, under our government, from almost all employments,
+civil or military, had, ever since the revolution, depended on the
+bounty of the Nabob; and near ten lacs were bestowed that way. It is not
+that the distribution was always made with judgment or impartial, and
+much room was left for a reform; but when the question was to cut off
+entirely the greatest part, it could not fail to be accompanied with
+circumstances of real distress. The Resident declares, that, even with
+some of the highest rank, he could not avoid discovering, under all the
+pride of Eastern manners, the manifest marks of penury and want. There
+was, however, no room left for hesitation: to confine the Nabob's
+expenses within the limited sum, it was necessary that pensions should
+be set aside."
+
+Here, my Lords, is a man sent to execute one of the most dreadful
+offices that was ever executed by man,--to cut off, as he says himself,
+with a bleeding heart, the only remaining allowance made for hundreds of
+the decayed nobility and gentry of a great kingdom, driven by our
+government from the offices upon which they existed. In this moment of
+anxiety and affliction, when he says he felt pain and was cut to the
+heart to do it,--at this very moment, when he was turning over fourteen
+hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry of this country to downright
+want of bread,--just at that moment, while he was doing this act, and
+feeling this act in this manner, from the collected morsels forced from
+the mouths of that indigent and famished nobility he gorged his own
+ravenous maw with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for his
+entertainment. As we see him in this business, this man is unlike any
+other: he is also never corrupt but he is cruel; he never dines without
+creating a famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity of
+standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent, the oppressed, and
+ruined; he takes to himself double what would maintain them. His is
+unlike the generous rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a
+living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like that of the
+ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed, the sickly, the dying, and
+the dead, and only anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.
+His cruelty is beyond his corruption: but there is something in his
+hypocrisy which is more terrible than his cruelty; for, at the very time
+when with double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription, and
+sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility and gentry of a great
+country, his eyes overflow with tears, and he turns the precious balm
+that bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine, into fatal,
+rancorous, mortal poison to the human race.
+
+You have seen, that, when he takes two hundred pounds a day for his
+entertainment, he tells you that in this very act he is starving
+fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry. My Lords, you have
+the blood of nobles,--if not, you have the blood of men in your veins:
+you feel as nobles, you feel as men. What would you say to a cruel Mogul
+exactor, by whom after having been driven from your estates, driven from
+the noble offices, civil and military, which you hold, driven from your
+bishoprics, driven from your places at court, driven from your offices
+as judges, and, after having been reduced to a miserable flock of
+pensioners, your very pensions were at last wrested from your mouths,
+and who, though at the very time when those pensions were wrested from
+you he declares them to have been the only bread of a miserable decayed
+nobility, takes himself two hundred pounds a day for his entertainment,
+and continues it till it amounts to sixteen thousand pounds? I do
+think, that, of all the corruptions which he has not owned, but has not
+denied, or of those which he does in effect own, and of which he brings
+forward the evidence himself, the taking and claiming under color of an
+entertainment is ten times the most nefarious.
+
+I shall this day only further trouble your Lordships to observe that he
+has never directly denied this transaction. I have tumbled over the
+records, I have looked at every part, to see whether he denies it. He
+did not deny it at the time, he did not deny it to the Court of
+Directors: on the contrary, he did in effect acknowledge it, when,
+without directly acknowledging it, he promised them a full and liberal
+explanation of the whole transaction. He never did give that
+explanation. Parliament took up the business; this matter was reported
+at the end of the Eleventh Report; but though the House of Commons had
+thus reported it, and made that public which before was upon the
+Company's records, he took no notice of it. Then another occasion
+arises: he comes before the House of Commons; he knows he is about to be
+prosecuted for those very corruptions; he well knows these charges exist
+against him; he makes his defence (if he will allow it to be his
+defence); but, though thus driven, he did not there deny it, because he
+knew, that, if he had denied it, it could be proved against him. I
+desire your Lordships will look at that paper which we have given in
+evidence, and see if you find a word of denial of it: there is much
+discourse, much folly, much insolence, but not one word of denial. Then,
+at last, it came before this tribunal against him. I desire to refer
+your Lordships to that part of his defence to the article in which this
+bribe is specifically charged: he does not deny it there; the only
+thing which looks like a denial is one sweeping clause inserted, (in
+order to put us upon the proof,) that all the charges are to be
+conceived as denied; but a specific denial to this specific charge in no
+stage of the business, from beginning to end, has he once made.
+
+And therefore here I close that part of the charge which relates to the
+business of Nundcomar. Your Lordships will see such a body of
+presumptive proof and positive proof as never was given yet of any
+secret corrupt act of bribery; and there I leave it with your Lordships'
+justice. I beg pardon for having detained you so long; but your
+Lordships will be so good as to observe that no business ever was
+covered with more folds of iniquitous artifice than this which is now
+brought before you.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+
+SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--When I last had the honor of addressing your Lordships, I
+endeavored to state with as much perspicuity as the nature of an
+intricate affair would admit, and as largely as in so intricate an
+affair was consistent with the brevity which I endeavored to preserve,
+the proofs which had been adduced against Warren Hastings upon an
+inquiry instituted by an order of the Court of Directors into the
+corruption and peculation of persons in authority in India. My Lords, I
+have endeavored to show you by anterior presumptive proofs, drawn from
+the nature and circumstances of the acts themselves inferring guilt,
+that such actions and such conduct could be referable only to one cause,
+namely, _corruption_; I endeavored to show you afterwards, my Lords,
+what the specific nature and extent of the corruption was, as far as it
+could be fully proved; and lastly, the great satisfactory presumption
+which attended the inquiry with regard to Mr. Hastings,--namely, that,
+contrary to law, contrary to his duty, contrary to what is owed by
+innocence to itself, Mr. Hastings resisted that inquiry, and employed
+all the power of his office to prevent the exercise of it, either in
+himself or in others. These presumptions and these proofs will be
+brought before your Lordships, distinctly and in order, at the end of
+this opening.
+
+The next point on which I thought it necessary to proceed was relative
+to the presumptions which his subsequent conduct gave with regard to his
+guilt: because, my Lords, his uniform tenor of conduct, such as must
+attend guilt, both in the act, at the time of the inquiry, and
+subsequent to it, will form such a body of satisfactory evidence as I
+believe the human mind is not made to resist.
+
+My Lords, there is another reason why I choose to enter into the
+presumptions drawn from his conduct and the fact, taking his conduct in
+two parts, if it may be so expressed, _omission_ and _commission_, in
+order that your Lordships should more fully enter into the consequences
+of this system of bribery. But before I say anything upon that, I wish
+your Lordships to be apprised, that the Commons, in bringing this bribe
+of three lac and a half before your Lordships, do not wish by any means
+to have it understood that this is the whole of the bribe that was
+received by Mr. Hastings in consequence of delivering up the whole
+management of the government of the country to that improper person whom
+he nominated for it. My Lords, from the proofs that will be adduced
+before you, there is great probability that he received very nearly a
+hundred thousand pounds; there is positive proof of his receiving fifty;
+and we have chosen only to charge him with that of which there is such
+an accumulated body of proof as to leave no doubt upon the minds of your
+Lordships. All this I say, because we are perfectly apprised of the
+sentiments of the public upon this point: when they hear of the enormity
+of Indian peculation, when they see the acts done, and compare them
+with the bribes received, the acts seem so enormous and the bribes
+comparatively so small, that they can hardly be got to attribute them to
+that motive. What I mean to state is this: that, from a collective view
+of the subject, your Lordships will be able to judge that enormous
+offences have been committed, and that the bribe which we have given in
+proof is a specimen of the nature and extent of those enormous bribes
+which extend to much greater sums than we are able to prove before you
+in the manner your Lordships would like and expect.
+
+I have already remarked to your Lordships, that, after this charge was
+brought and recorded before the Council in spite of the resistance made
+by Mr. Hastings, in which he employed all the power and authority of his
+station, and the whole body of his partisans and associates in iniquity,
+dispersed through every part of these provinces,--after he had taken all
+these steps, finding himself pressed by the proof and pressed by the
+presumption of his resistance to the inquiry, he did think it necessary
+to make something like a defence. Accordingly he has made what he calls
+a justification, which did not consist in the denial of that fact, or
+any explanation of it. The mode he took for his defence was abuse of his
+colleagues, abuse of the witnesses, and of every person who in the
+execution of his duty was inquiring into the fact, and charging them
+with things which, if true, were by no means sufficient to support him,
+either in defending the acts themselves, or in the criminal means he
+used to prevent inquiry into them. His design was to mislead their
+minds, and to carry them from the accusation and the proof of it. With
+respect to the passion, violence, and intemperate heat with which he
+charged them, they were proceeding in an orderly, regular manner; and if
+on any occasion they seem to break out into warmth, it was in
+consequence of that resistance which he made to them, in what your
+Lordships, I believe, will agree with them in thinking was one of the
+most important parts of their functions. If they had been intemperate in
+their conduct, if they had been violent, passionate, prejudiced against
+him, it afforded him only a better means of making his defence; because,
+though in a rational and judicious mind the intemperate conduct of the
+accuser certainly proves nothing with regard to the truth or falsehood
+of his accusation, yet we do know that the minds of men are so
+constituted that an improper mode of conducting a right thing does form
+some degree of prejudice against it. Mr. Hastings, therefore, unable to
+defend himself upon principle, has resorted as much as he possibly could
+to prejudice. And at the same time that there is not one word of denial,
+or the least attempt at a refutation of the charge, he has loaded the
+records with all manner of minutes, proceedings, and letters relative to
+everything but the fact itself. The great aim of his policy, both then,
+before, and ever since, has been to divert the mind of the auditory, or
+the persons to whom he addressed himself, from the nature of his cause,
+to some collateral circumstance relative to it,--a policy to which he
+has always had recourse; but that trick, the last resource of despairing
+guilt, I trust will now completely fail him.
+
+Mr. Hastings, however, began to be pretty sensible that this way of
+proceeding had a very unpromising and untoward look; for which reason he
+next declared that he reserved his defence for fear of a legal
+prosecution, and that some time or other he would give a large and
+liberal explanation to the Court of Directors, to whom he was answerable
+for his conduct, of his refusing to suffer the inquiry to proceed, of
+his omitting to give them satisfaction at the time, of his omitting to
+take any one natural step that an innocent man would have taken upon
+such an occasion. Under this promise he has remained from that time to
+the time you see him at your bar, and he has neither denied, exculpated,
+explained, or apologized for his conduct in any one single instance.
+
+While he accuses the intemperance of his adversaries, he shows a degree
+of temperance in himself which always attends guilt in despair: for
+struggling guilt may be warm, but guilt that is desperate has nothing to
+do but to submit to the consequences of it, to bear the infamy annexed
+to its situation, and to try to find some consolation in the effects of
+guilt with regard to private fortune for the scandal it brings them into
+in public reputation. After the business had ended in India, the causes
+why he should have given the explanation grew stronger and stronger: for
+not only the charges exhibited against him were weighty, but the manner
+in which he was called upon to inquire into them was such as would
+undoubtedly tend to stir the mind of a man of character, to rouse him to
+some consideration of himself, and to a sense of the necessity of his
+defence. He was goaded to make this defence by the words I shall read to
+your Lordships from Sir John Clavering.
+
+"In the late proceedings of the Revenue Board it will appear that there
+is no species of peculation from which the Honorable Governor-General
+has thought it reasonable to abstain." He further says, in answer to
+Mr. Hastings, "The malicious view with which this innuendo" (an innuendo
+of Mr. Hastings) "is thrown out is only worthy of a man who, having
+disgraced himself in the eyes of every man of honor both in Asia and in
+Europe, and having no imputation to lay to our charge, has dared to
+attempt in the dark what malice itself could not find grounds to aim at
+openly."
+
+These are the charges which were made upon him,--not loosely, in the
+heat of conversation, but deliberately, in writing, entered upon record,
+and sent to his employers, the Court of Directors, those whom the law
+had set over him, and to whose judgment and opinion he was responsible.
+Do your Lordships believe that it was conscious innocence that made him
+endure such reproaches, so recorded, from his own colleague? Was it
+conscious innocence that made him abandon his defence, renounce his
+explanation, and bear all this calumny, (if it was calumny,) in such a
+manner, without making any one attempt to refute it? Your Lordships will
+see by this, and by other minutes with which the books are filled, that
+Mr. Hastings is charged quite to the brim with corruptions of all sorts,
+and covered with every mode of possible disgrace. For there is something
+so base and contemptible in the crimes of peculation and bribery, that,
+when they come to be urged home and strongly against a man, as here they
+are urged, nothing but a consciousness of guilt can possibly make a
+person so charged support himself under them. Mr. Hastings considered
+himself, as he has stated, to be under the necessity of bearing them.
+What is that necessity? Guilt. Could he say that Sir John Clavering (for
+I say nothing now of Colonel Monson and Mr. Francis, who were joined
+with him) was a man weak and contemptible? I believe there are those
+among your Lordships who remember that Sir John Clavering was known
+before he went abroad, and better known by his conduct after, to be a
+man of the most distinguished honor that ever served his Majesty; he
+served his Majesty in a military situation for many years, and
+afterwards in that high civil situation in India. It is known that
+through every step and gradation of a high military service, until he
+arrived at the highest of all, there never was the least blot upon him,
+or doubt or suspicion of his character; that his temper for the most
+part, and his manners, were fully answerable to his virtues, and a noble
+ornament to them; that he was one of the best natured, best bred men, as
+well as one of the highest principled men to be found in his Majesty's
+service; that he had passed the middle time of life, and come to an age
+which makes men wise in general; so that he could be warmed by nothing
+but that noble indignation at guilt which is the last thing that ever
+was or will be extinguished in a virtuous mind. He was a man whose voice
+was not to be despised; but if his character had been personally as
+contemptible as it was meritorious and honorable in every respect, yet
+his situation as a commissioner named by an act of Parliament for the
+express purpose of reforming India gave him a weight and consequence
+that could not suffer Mr. Hastings, without a general and strong
+presumption of his guilt, to acquiesce in such recorded minutes from
+him. But if he had been a weak, if he had been an intemperate man, (in
+reality he was as cool, steady, temperate, judicious a man as ever was
+born,) the Court of Directors, to whom Mr. Hastings was responsible by
+every tie and every principle, and was made responsible at last by a
+positive act of Parliament obliging him to yield obedience to their
+commands as the general rule of his duty,--the Court of Directors, I
+say, perfectly approved of every part of General Clavering's, Colonel
+Monson's, and Mr. Francis's conduct; they approved of this inquiry which
+Mr. Hastings rejected; and they have declared, "that the powers and
+instructions vested in and given to General Clavering and the other
+gentlemen were such as fully authorized them in every inquiry that seems
+to have been their object ... Europeans."[2]
+
+Now after the supreme authority, to which they were to appeal in all
+their disputes, had passed this judgment upon this very inquiry, the
+matter no longer depended upon Mr. Hastings's opinion; nor could he be
+longer justified in attributing that to evil motives either of malice or
+passion in his colleagues. When the judges who were finally to determine
+who was malicious, who was passionate, who was or was not justified
+either in setting on foot the inquiry or resisting it, had passed that
+judgment, then Mr. Hastings was called upon by all the feelings of a
+man, and by his duty in Council, to give satisfaction to his masters,
+the Directors, who approved of the zeal and diligence shown in that very
+inquiry, the passion of which he only reprobated, and upon which he
+grounded his justification.
+
+If anything but conscious guilt could have possibly influenced him to
+such more than patience under this accusation, let us see what was his
+conduct when the scene was changed. General Clavering, fatigued and
+broken down by the miseries of his situation, soon afterwards lost a
+very able and affectionate colleague, Colonel Monson, (whom Mr. Hastings
+states to be one of the bitterest of his accusers,) a man one of the
+most loved and honored of his time, a person of your Lordships' noble
+blood, and a person who did honor to it, and if he had been of the
+family of a commoner, well deserved to be raised to your distinction.
+When that man died,--died of a broken heart, to say nothing else,--and
+General Clavering felt himself in a manner without help, except what he
+derived from the firmness, assiduity, and patience of Mr. Francis,
+sinking like himself under the exertion of his own virtues, he was
+resolved to resign his employment. The Court of Directors were so
+alarmed at this attempt of his to resign his employment, that they wrote
+thus: "When you conceived the design of quitting our service, we imagine
+you could not have heard of the resignation of Mr. Hastings ... your
+zeal and ability."[3]
+
+My Lords, in this struggle, and before he could resign finally, another
+kind of resignation, the resignation of Nature, took place, and Sir John
+Clavering died. The character that was given Sir John Clavering at that
+time is a seal to the whole of his proceedings, and the use that I shall
+make of it your Lordships will see presently. "The abilities of General
+Clavering, the comprehensive knowledge he had attained of our affairs
+... to the East India Company."[4]
+
+And never had it a greater loss. There is the concluding funeral
+oration made by his masters, upon a strict, though by no means partial,
+view of his conduct. My Lords, here is the man who is the great accuser
+of Mr. Hastings, as he says. What is he? a slight man, a man of mean
+situation, a man of mean talents, a man of mean character? No: of the
+highest character. Was he a person whose conduct was disapproved by
+their common superiors? No: it was approved when living, and ratified
+when dead. This was the man, a man equal to him in every respect, upon
+the supposed evil motives of whom alone was founded the sole
+justification of Mr. Hastings.
+
+But be it, then, that Sir John Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr.
+Francis were all of them the evil-minded persons that he describes them
+to be, and that from dislike to them, from a kind of manly resentment,
+if you please, against such persons, an hatred against malicious
+proceedings, and a defiance of them, he did not think proper, as he
+states, to make his defence during that period of time, and while
+oppressed by that combination,--yet, when he got rid of the two former
+persons, and when Mr. Francis was nothing, when the whole majority was
+in his hand, and he was in full power, there was a large, open, full
+field for inquiry; and he was bound to re-institute that inquiry, and to
+clear his character before his judges and before his masters. Mr.
+Hastings says, "No: they have threatened me with a prosecution, and I
+reserve myself for a court of justice."
+
+Mr. Hastings has now at length taken a ground, as you will see from all
+his writings, which makes all explanation of his conduct in this
+business absolutely impossible. For, in the first place, he says, "As a
+prosecution is meditated against me, I will say nothing in explanation
+of my conduct, because I might disclose my defence, and by that means do
+myself a prejudice." On the other hand, when the prosecution is dropped,
+as we all know it was dropped in this case, then he has a direct
+contrary reason, but it serves him just as well: "Why, as no prosecution
+is intended, no defence need be made." So that, whether a prosecution is
+intended or a prosecution dropped, there is always cause why Mr.
+Hastings should not give the Court of Directors the least satisfaction
+concerning his conduct, notwithstanding, as we shall prove, he has
+reiteratedly promised, and promised it in the most ample and liberal
+manner. But let us see if there be any presumption in his favor to rebut
+the presumption which he knew was irresistible, and which, by making no
+defence for his conduct, and stopping the inquiry, must necessarily lie
+upon him. He reserves his defence, but he promises both defence and
+explanation.
+
+Your Lordships will remark that there is nowhere a clear and positive
+denial of the fact. Promising a defence, I will admit, does not directly
+and _ex vi termini_ suppose that a man may not deny the fact, because it
+is just compatible with the defence; but it does by no means exclude the
+admission of the fact, because the admission of the fact may be attended
+with a justification: but when a man says that he will explain his
+conduct with regard to a fact, then he admits that fact, because there
+can be no explanation of a fact which has no existence. Therefore Mr.
+Hastings admits the fact by promising an explanation, and he shows he
+has no explanation nor justification to give by never having given it.
+Goaded, provoked, and called upon for it, in the manner I have
+mentioned, he chooses to have a feast of disgrace, (if I may say so,) to
+have a riot of infamy, served up to him day by day for a course of
+years, in every species of reproach that could be given by his
+colleagues, and by the Court of Directors, "from whom," he says, "I
+received nothing but opprobrious and disgraceful epithets," and he says
+"that his predecessors possessed more of their confidence than he had."
+Yet for years he lay down in that sty of disgrace, fattening in it,
+feeding upon that offal of disgrace and excrement, upon everything that
+could be disgustful to the human mind, rather than deny the fact and put
+himself upon a civil justification. Infamy was never incurred for
+nothing. We know very well what was said formerly:--
+
+        "Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo
+    Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca."
+
+And never did a man submit to infamy for anything but its true reward,
+_money_. Money he received; the infamy he received along with it: he was
+glad to take his wife with all her goods; he took her with her full
+portion, with every species of infamy that belonged to her; and your
+Lordships cannot resist the opinion that he would not have suffered
+himself to be disgraced with the Court of Directors, disgraced with his
+colleagues, disgraced with the world, disgraced upon an eternal record,
+unless he was absolutely guilty of the fact that was charged upon him.
+
+He frequently expresses that he reserves himself for a court of justice.
+Does he, my Lords? I am sorry that Mr. Hastings should show that he
+always mistakes his situation; he has totally mistaken it: he was a
+servant, bound to give a satisfactory account of his conduct to his
+masters, and, instead of that, he considers himself and the Court of
+Directors as litigant parties,--them as the accusers, and himself as the
+culprit. What would your Lordships, in private life, conceive of a
+steward who was accused of embezzling the rents, robbing and oppressing
+the tenants, and committing a thousand misdeeds in his stewardship, and
+who, upon your wishing to make inquiry into his conduct, and asking an
+explanation of it, should answer, "I will give no reply: you may intend
+to prosecute me and convict me as a cheat, and therefore I will not give
+you any satisfaction": what would you think of that steward? You could
+have no doubt that such a steward was a person not fit to be a steward,
+nor fit to live.
+
+Mr. Hastings reserves himself for a court of justice: that single
+circumstance, my Lords, proves that he was guilty. It may appear very
+odd that his guilt should be inferred from his desire of trial in a
+court in which he could be acquitted or condemned. But I shall prove to
+you from that circumstance that Mr. Hastings, in desiring to be tried in
+a court of justice, convicts himself of presumptive guilt.
+
+When Mr. Hastings went to Bengal in the year 1772, he had a direction
+exactly similar to this which he has resisted in his own case: it was to
+inquire into grievances and abuses. In consequence of this direction, he
+proposes a plan for the regulation of the Company's service, and one
+part of that plan was just what you would expect from him,--that is, the
+power of destroying every Company's servant without the least
+possibility of his being heard in his own defence or taking any one
+step to justify himself, and of dismissing him at his own discretion:
+and the reason he gives for it is this. "I shall forbear to comment upon
+the above propositions: if just and proper, their utility will be
+self-apparent. One clause only in the last article may require some
+explanation, namely, the power proposed for the Governor of recalling
+any person from his station without assigning a reason for it. In the
+charge of oppression," (now here you will find the reason why Mr.
+Hastings wishes to appeal to a court of justice, rather than to give
+satisfaction to his employers,) "though supported by the cries of the
+people and the most authentic representations, it is yet impossible in
+most cases to obtain legal proofs of it; and unless the discretionary
+power which I have recommended be somewhere lodged, the assurance of
+impunity from any formal inquiry will baffle every order of the board,
+as, on the other hand, the fear of the consequence will restrain every
+man within the bounds of his duty, if he knows himself liable to suffer
+by the effects of a single control." You see Mr. Hastings himself is of
+opinion that the cries of oppression, though extorted from a whole
+people by the iron hand of severity,--that these cries of a whole
+people, attended even with authentic documents sufficient to satisfy the
+mind of any man, may be totally insufficient to convict the oppressor in
+a court; and yet to that court, whose competence he denies, to that very
+court, he appeals, in that he puts his trust, and upon that ground he
+refuses to perform the just promise he had given of any explanation to
+those who had employed him.
+
+Now I put this to your Lordships: if a man is of opinion that no public
+court can truly and properly bring him to any account for his conduct,
+that the forms observable in courts are totally adverse to it, that
+there is a general incompetency with regard to such a court, and yet
+shuns a tribunal capable and competent, and applies to that which he
+thinks is incapable and incompetent, does not that man plainly show that
+he has rejected what he thinks will prove his guilt, and that he has
+chosen what he thinks will be utterly insufficient to prove it? And if
+this be the case, as he asserts it to be, with an under servant, think
+what must be the case of the upper servant of all: for, if an inferior
+servant is not to be brought to justice, what must be the situation of a
+Governor-General? It is impossible not to see, that, as he had conceived
+that a court of justice had not sufficient means to bring his crimes to
+light and detection, nor sufficient to bring him to proper and adequate
+punishment, therefore he flew to a court of justice, not as a place to
+decide upon him, but as a sanctuary to secure his guilt. Most of your
+Lordships have travelled abroad, and have seen in the unreformed
+countries of Europe churches filled with persons who take sanctuary in
+them. You do not presume that a man is innocent because he is in a
+sanctuary: you know, that, so far from demonstrating his innocence, it
+demonstrates his guilt. And in this case, Mr. Hastings flies not to a
+court for trial, but as a sanctuary to secure him from it.
+
+Let us just review the whole of his conduct; let us hear how Mr.
+Hastings has proceeded with regard to this whole affair. The court of
+justice dropped; the prosecution in Bengal ended. With Sir Elijah Impey
+as chief-justice, who, as your Lordships have seen, had a most close and
+honorable connection with the Governor-General, (all the circumstances
+of which I need not detail to you, as it must be fresh in your
+Lordships' memory,) he had not much to fear from the impartiality of the
+court. He might be sure the forms of law would not be strained to do him
+mischief; therefore there was no great terror in it. But whatever terror
+there might be in it was overblown, because his colleagues refused to
+carry him into it, and therefore that opportunity of defence is gone. In
+Europe he was afraid of making any defence, but the prosecution here was
+also soon over; and in the House of Commons he takes this ground of
+justification for not giving any explanation, that the Court of
+Directors had received perfect satisfaction of his innocence; and he
+named persons of great and eminent character in the profession, whose
+names certainly cannot be mentioned without highly imposing upon the
+prejudices and weighing down almost the reason of mankind. He quotes
+their opinions in his favor, and argues that the exculpation which they
+give, or are supposed to give him, should excuse him from any further
+explanation.
+
+My Lords, I believe I need not say to great men of the profession, many
+of the first ornaments of which I see before me, that they are very
+little influenced in the seat of judgment by the opinions which they
+have given in the chamber, and they are perfectly in the right: because
+while in the chamber they hear but one part of the cause; it is
+generally brought before them in a very partial manner, and they have
+not the lights which they possess when they sit deliberately down upon
+the tribunal to examine into it; and for this reason they discharge
+their minds from every prejudice that may have arisen from a foregone
+partial opinion, and come uninfluenced by it as to a new cause. This, we
+know, is the glory of the great lawyers who have presided and do preside
+in the tribunals of this country; but we know, at the same time, that
+those opinions (which they in their own mind reject, unless supported
+afterwards by clear and authentic testimony) do weigh upon the rest of
+mankind at least: for it is impossible to separate the opinion of a
+great and learned man from some consideration of the person who has
+delivered that opinion.
+
+Mr. Hastings, being conscious of this, and not fearing the tribunal
+abroad for the reason that I gave you, namely, his belief that it was
+not very adverse to him, and also knowing that the prosecution there was
+dropped, had but one thing left for his consideration, which was, how he
+should conflict with the tribunal at home: and as the prosecution must
+originate from the Court of Directors, and be authorized by some great
+law opinions, the great point with him was, some way or other, by his
+party, I will not say by what means or circumstances, but by some party
+means, to secure a strong interest in the executive part of the India
+House. My Lords, was that interest used properly and fairly? I will not
+say that friendship and partiality imply injustice; they certainly do
+not; but they do not imply justice. The Court of Directors took up this
+affair with great warmth; they committed it to their solicitor, and the
+solicitor would naturally (as most solicitors do) draw up a case a
+little favorably for the persons that employed him; and if there was any
+leaning, which upon my word I do not approve in the management of any
+cause whatever, yet, if there was a leaning, it must be a leaning for
+the client.
+
+Now the counsel did not give a decided opinion against the prosecution,
+but upon the face of the case they expressed great doubts upon it; for,
+with such a strange, disorderly, imperfect, and confused case as was
+laid before them, they could not advise a prosecution; and in my opinion
+they went no further. And, indeed, upon that case that went before them,
+I, who am authorized by the Commons to prosecute, do admit that a great
+doubt might lie upon the most deciding mind, whether, under the
+circumstances there stated, a prosecution could be or ought to be
+pursued. I do not say which way my mind would have turned, upon that
+very imperfect state of the case; but I still allow so much to their
+very great ability, great minds, and sound judgment, that I am not sure,
+if it was _res integra_, I would not have rather hesitated myself (who
+am now here an accuser) what judgment to give.
+
+It does happen that there are very singular circumstances in this
+business, to which your Lordships will advert; and you will consider
+what weight they ought to have upon your Lordships' minds. The person
+who is now the solicitor of the Company is a very respectable man in the
+profession,--Mr. Smith; he was at that time also the Company's
+solicitor, and he has since appeared in this cause as Mr. Hastings's
+solicitor. Now there is something particular in a man's being the
+solicitor to a party who was prosecuting another, and continuing
+afterwards in his office, and becoming the solicitor to the party
+prosecuted. It would be nearly as strange as if our solicitor were to be
+the solicitor of Mr. Hastings in this prosecution and trial before your
+Lordships. It is true, that we cannot make out, nor do we attempt to
+prove, that Mr. Smith was at that time actually Mr. Hastings's
+solicitor: all that we shall attempt to make out is, that the case he
+produced was just such a case as a solicitor anxious for the
+preservation of his client, and not anxious for the prosecution, would
+have made out.
+
+My Lords, I have next to remark, that the opinion which the counsel gave
+in this case, namely, a very doubtful opinion, accompanied with strong
+censure of the manner in which the case was stated, was drawn from them
+by a case in which I charge that there were _misrepresentation_,
+_suppression_, and _falsification_.
+
+Now, my Lords, in making this charge I am in a very awkward and
+unpleasant situation; but it is a situation in which, with all the
+disagreeable circumstances attending it, I must proceed. I am, in this
+business, obliged to name many men: I do not name them wantonly, but
+from the absolute necessity, as your Lordships will see, of the case. I
+do not mean to reflect upon this gentleman: I believe, at the time when
+he made this case, and especially the article which I state as a
+_falsification_, he must have trusted to some of the servants of the
+Company, who were but young in their service at that time. There was a
+very great error committed; but by whom, or how, your Lordships in the
+course of this inquiry will find. What I charge first is, that the case
+was improperly stated; secondly, that it was partially stated; and that
+afterwards a further report was made upon reference to the same officer
+in the committee. Now, my Lords, of the three charges which I have made,
+the two former, namely, the misrepresentation and suppression, were
+applicable to the case; but all the three, misrepresentation,
+suppression, and falsification, were applicable to the report.
+
+This I say in vindication of the opinions given, and for the
+satisfaction of the public, who may be imposed upon by them. I wish the
+word to be understood. When I say _imposed_, I always mean by it the
+weight and authority carried: a meaning which this word, perhaps, has
+not got yet thoroughly in the English language; but in a neighboring
+language _imposing_ means, that it weighs upon men's minds with a
+sovereign authority. To say that the opinions of learned men, though
+even thus obtained, may not have weight with this court, or with any
+court, is a kind of compliment I cannot pay to them at the expense of
+that common nature in which I and all human beings are involved.
+
+He states in the case the covenants and the salary of Mr. Hastings, and
+his emoluments, very fairly. I do not object to any part of that. He
+then proceeds to state very partially the business upon which the
+Committee of Circuit went, and without opening whose conduct we cannot
+fully bring before you this charge of bribery. He then states, "that, an
+inquiry having been made by the present Supreme Council of Bengal
+respecting the conduct of the members of the last administration,
+several charges have been made, stating moneys very improperly received
+by Mr. Hastings during the time of the late administration: amongst
+these is one of his having received 150,000 rupees of Munny Begum, the
+guardian of the Nabob, who is an infant."
+
+In this statement of the case everything is put out of its true place.
+Mr. Hastings was not charged with receiving a lac and a half of rupees
+from Munny Begum, the guardian of the Nabob,--for she was not then his
+guardian; but he was charged with receiving a lac and a half of rupees
+for removing the Nabob's own mother, who was his natural guardian, and
+substituting this step-mother, who was a prostitute, in her place;
+whereas here it supposes he found her a guardian, and that she had made
+him a present, which alters the whole nature of the case. The case, in
+the recital of the charge, sets out with what every one of your
+Lordships knows now not to be the truth of the fact, nor the thing that
+in itself implies the criminality: he ought to have stated that in the
+beginning of the business. The suppressions in the recital are amazing.
+He states an inquiry having been made by the Supreme Council of Bengal
+respecting the conduct of the members of the last administration. That
+inquiry was made in consequence of the charge, and not the charge
+brought forward, as they would have it believed, in consequence of the
+inquiry. There is no mention that that inquiry had been expressly
+ordered by the Court of Directors; but it is stated as though it was a
+voluntary inquiry. Now there is always something doubtful in voluntary
+inquiries with regard to the people concerned. He then supposes, upon
+this inquiry, that to be the charge which is not the charge at all. The
+crime, as I have stated, consisted of two distinct parts, but both
+inferring the same corruption: the first, two lac of rupees taken
+expressly for the nomination of this woman to this place; and the other,
+one lac and a half of rupees, in effect for the same purpose, but under
+the name and color of an entertainment. The drawer of the case, finding
+that in the one case, namely, the two lac of rupees, the evidence was
+more weak, but that no justification could be set up,--finding in the
+other, the lac and a half of rupees, the proof strong and not to be
+resisted, but that some justification was to be found for it, lays aside
+the charge of the two lac totally; and the evidence belonging to it,
+which was considered as rather weak, is applied to the other charge of a
+lac and a half, the proof of which upon its own evidence was
+irresistible.
+
+My speech I hope your Lordships consider as only pointing out to your
+attention these particulars. Your Lordships will see it exemplified
+throughout the whole, that, when there is evidence (for some evidence is
+brought) that does belong to the lac and a half, it is entirely passed
+by, the most material circumstances are weakened, the whole strength and
+force of them taken away. Every one knows how true it is of evidence,
+_juncta juvant_: but here everything is broken and smashed to pieces,
+and nothing but disorder appears through the whole. For your Lordships
+will observe that the proof that belongs to one thing is put as
+belonging to another, and the proof of the other brought in a weak and
+imperfect manner in the rear of the first, and with every kind of
+observation to rebut and weaken it; and when this evidence is produced,
+which appears inapplicable almost in all the parts, in many doubtful,
+confused, and perplexed, and in some even contradictory, (which it will
+be when the evidence to one thing is brought to apply and bear upon
+another,) good hopes were entertained in consequence that that would
+happen which in part did happen, namely, that the counsel, distracted
+and confused, and finding no satisfaction in the case, could not advise
+a prosecution.
+
+But what is still more material and weighty, many particulars are
+suppressed in this case, and still more in the report; and turning from
+the case to the proceedings of the persons who are supposed to have the
+management of the inquiry, they bring forward, as an appendix to this
+case, Mr. Hastings's own invectives and charge against these persons, at
+the very same time that they suppress and do not bring forward, either
+in the charge or upon the report, what the other party have said in
+their own justification. The consequence of this management was, that a
+body of evidence which would have made this case the clearest in the
+world, and which I hope we shall make to appear so to your Lordships,
+was rendered for the most part inapplicable, and the whole puzzled and
+confused: I say, for the most part, for some parts did apply, but
+miserably applied, to the case. From their own state of the case they
+would have it inferred that the fault was not in their way of
+representing it, but in the infirmity, confusion, and disorder of the
+proofs themselves; but this, I trust we shall satisfy you, is by no
+means the case. I rest, however, upon the proof of partiality in this
+business, of the imposition upon the counsel, whether designed or not,
+and of the bias given by adding an appendix with Mr. Hastings's own
+remarks upon the case, without giving the reasons of the other parties
+for their conduct. Now, if there was nothing else than the fallacious
+recital, and afterwards the suppression, I believe any rational and
+sober man would see perfect, good, and sufficient ground for laying
+aside any authority that can be derived from the opinions of persons,
+though of the first character (and I am sure no man living does more
+homage to their learning, impartiality, and understanding than I do):
+first, because the statement of the case has thrown the whole into
+confusion; and secondly, as to the matter added as an appendix, which
+gives the representation of the delinquent and omits the representation
+of his prosecutors, it is observed very properly and very wisely by one
+of the great men before whom this evidence was laid, that "the evidence,
+as it is here stated, is still more defective, if the appendix is
+adopted by the Directors and meant to make a part of the case; for that
+throws discredit upon all the information so collected." Certainly it
+does; for, if the delinquent party, who is to be prosecuted, be heard
+with his own representation of the case, and that of his prosecutors be
+suppressed, he is master both of the lawyers and of the mind of mankind.
+
+My Lords, I have here attempted to point out the extreme inconsistencies
+and defects of this proceeding; and I wish your Lordships to consider,
+with respect to these proceedings of the India House in their
+prosecutions, that it is in the power of some of their officers to make
+statements in the manner that I have described, then to obtain the names
+of great lawyers, and under their sanction to carry the accused through
+the world as acquitted.
+
+These are the material circumstances which will be submitted to your
+Lordships' sober consideration in the course of this inquiry. I have now
+stated them on these two accounts: first, to rebut the reason which Mr.
+Hastings has assigned for not giving any satisfaction to the Court of
+Directors, namely, because they did not want it, having dropped a
+prosecution upon great authorities and opinions; and next, to show your
+Lordships how a business begun in bribery is to be supported only by
+fraud, deceit, and collusion, and how the receiving of bribes by a
+Governor-General of Bengal tends to taint the whole service from
+beginning to end, both at home and abroad.
+
+But though upon the partial case that was presented to them these great
+lawyers did not advise a prosecution, and though even upon a full
+representation of a case a lawyer might think that a man ought not to be
+prosecuted, yet he may consider him to be the vilest man upon earth. We
+know men are acquitted in the great tribunals in which several Lords of
+this country have presided, and who perhaps ought not to have been
+brought there and prosecuted before them, and yet about whose
+delinquency there could be no doubt. But though we have here sufficient
+reason to justify the great lawyers whose names and authorities are
+produced, yet Mr. Hastings has extended that authority beyond the length
+of their opinions. For, being no longer under the terror of the law,
+which, he said, restrained him from making his defence, he was then
+bound to give that satisfaction to his masters and the world which every
+man in honor is bound to do, when a grave accusation is brought against
+him. But this business of the law I wish to sleep from this moment, till
+the time when it shall come before you; though I suspect, and have had
+reason (sitting in committees in the House of Commons) to believe, that
+there was in the India House a bond of iniquity, somewhere or other,
+which was able to impose in the first instance upon the solicitor, the
+guilt of which, being of another nature, I shall state hereafter, that
+your Lordships may be able to discover through whose means and whose
+fraud Mr. Hastings obtained these opinions.
+
+If, however, all the great lawyers had been unanimous upon that
+occasion, still it would have been necessary for Mr. Hastings to say, "I
+cannot, according to my opinion, be brought to give an account in a
+court of justice, and I have got great lawyers to declare, that, upon
+the case laid before them, they cannot advise a prosecution; but now is
+the time for me to come forward, and, being no longer in fear that my
+defence may be turned against me, I will produce my defence for the
+satisfaction of my masters and the vindication of my own character." But
+besides this doubtful opinion (for I believe your Lordships will find it
+no better than a doubtful opinion) given by persons for whom I have the
+highest honor, and given with a strong censure upon the state of the
+case, there were also some great lawyers, men of great authority in the
+kingdom, who gave a full and decided opinion that a prosecution ought to
+be instituted against him; but the Court of Directors decided otherwise,
+they overruled those opinions, and acted upon the opinions in favor of
+Mr. Hastings. When, therefore, he knew that the great men in the law
+were divided upon the propriety of a prosecution, but that the Directors
+had decided in his favor, he was the more strongly bound to enter into a
+justification of his conduct.
+
+But there was another great reason which should have induced him to do
+this. One great lawyer, known to many of your Lordships, Mr. Sayer, a
+very honest, intelligent man, who had long served the Company and well
+knew their affairs, had given an opinion concerning Mr. Hastings's
+conduct in stopping these prosecutions. There was an abstract question
+put to Mr. Sayer, and other great lawyers, separated from many of the
+circumstances of this business, concerning a point which incidentally
+arose; and this was, whether Mr. Hastings, as Governor-General, had a
+power so to dissolve the Council, that, if he declared it dissolved,
+they could not sit and do any legal and regular act. It was a great
+question with the lawyers at the time, and there was a difference of
+opinion on it. Mr. Sayer was one of those who were inclined to be of
+opinion that the Governor-General had a power of dissolving the Council,
+and that the Council could not legally sit after such dissolution. But
+what was his remark upon Mr. Hastings's conduct?--and you must suppose
+his remark of more weight, because, upon the abstract question, he had
+given his opinion in favor of Mr. Hastings's judgment. "The meeting of
+the Council depends on the pleasure of the Governor; and I think the
+duration of it must do so, too. But it was as great a crime to dissolve
+the Council upon base and sinister motives as it would be to assume the
+power of dissolving, if he had it not. I believe he is the first
+Governor that ever dissolved a Council inquiring into his behavior, when
+he was innocent. Before he could summon three Councils and dissolve
+them, he had time fully to consider what would be the result of such
+conduct, _to convince everybody, beyond a doubt, of his conscious
+guilt_."
+
+Mr. Sayer, then, among other learned people, (and if he had not been the
+man that I have described, yet, from his intimate connection with the
+Company, his opinion must be supposed to have great weight,) having used
+expressions as strong as the persons who have ever criminated Mr.
+Hastings most for the worst of his crimes have ever used to qualify and
+describe them, and having ascribed his conduct to base and sinister
+motives, he was bound upon that occasion to justify that strong conduct,
+allowed to be legal, and charged at the same time to be violent. Mr.
+Hastings was obliged then to produce something in his justification. He
+never did. Therefore, for all the reasons assigned by himself, drawn
+from the circumstances of prosecution and non-prosecution, and from
+opinions of lawyers and colleagues, the Court of Directors at the same
+time censuring his conduct, and strongly applauding the conduct of those
+who were adverse to him, Mr. Hastings was, I say, from those accumulated
+circumstances, bound to get rid of the infamy of a conduct which could
+be attributed to nothing but base and sinister motives, and which could
+have no effect but to convince men of his consciousness that he was
+guilty. From all these circumstances I infer that no man could have
+endured this load of infamy, and to this time have given no explanation
+of his conduct, unless for the reason which this learned counsel gives,
+and which your Lordships and the world will give, namely, his conscious
+guilt.
+
+After leaving upon your minds that presumption, not to operate without
+proof, but to operate along with the proof, (though, I take it, there
+are some presumptions that go the full length of proof,) I shall not
+press it to the length to which I think it would go, but use it only as
+auxiliary, assisting, and compurgatory of all the other evidences that
+go along with it.
+
+There is another circumstance which must come before your Lordships in
+this business. If you find that Mr. Hastings has received the two lac of
+rupees, then you will find that he was guilty, without color or pretext
+of any kind whatever, of acting in violation of his covenant, of acting
+in violation of the laws, and all the rules of honor and conscience. If
+you find that he has taken the lac and a half, which he admits, but
+which he justifies under the pretence of an entertainment, I shall beg
+to say something to your Lordships concerning that justification.
+
+The justification set up is, that he went up from Calcutta to
+Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three months, and that there an
+allowance was made to him of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an
+entertainment. Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine, if there
+was such a custom, whether or no his covenant justifies his conformity
+with it. I remember Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland,
+says it is no law, but a lewd custom. A governor is to conform himself
+to the laws of his own country, to the stipulations of those that employ
+him, and not to the lewd customs of any other country: those customs are
+more honored in the breach than in the observance. If Mr. Hastings was
+really feasted and entertained with the magnificence of the country, if
+there was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to amuse him in
+his leisure hours, if he was feasted with the hookah and every other
+luxury, there is something to be said for him, though I should not
+justify a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner. But in fact
+here was no entertainment that could amount to such a sum; and he has
+nowhere proved the existence of such a custom.
+
+But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is more honored in the
+breach than in the observance, that custom is capable of being abused to
+the grossest extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your
+Lordships' minds in such a manner that I hardly need detail the
+circumstances of it. What! two hundred pounds to be given to a man for
+one day's entertainment? If there is an end of it there, it ruins
+nobody, and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt anybody;
+but when that entertainment is renewed day after day for three months,
+it is no longer a compliment to the man, but a great pecuniary
+advantage, and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a grievous,
+an intolerable burden. It then becomes a matter of the most serious and
+dreadful extortion, tending to hinder the people who give it not only
+from giving entertainment, but from having bread to eat themselves.
+Therefore, if any such entertainment was customary, the custom was
+perverted by the abuse of its being continued for three months together.
+It was longer than Ahasuerus's feast. There is a feast of reason and a
+flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings's feast was a feast of avarice and a flow
+of money. No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table: he
+continued to sit at that table for three months.
+
+In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take any allowance above
+400_l._, and forbidden to take any allowance above 100_l._, without the
+knowledge, consent, and approbation of the Council to which he belongs.
+Now he takes 16,000_l._, not only without the consent of the Council,
+but without their knowledge,--without the knowledge of any other human
+being: it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own
+black agents and confidants, and those of Munny Begum. Why is it a
+secret? Hospitality, generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of
+display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them; they want to be shown
+to the world, not concealed. The concealment of acts of charity is what
+makes them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to whom there can
+be no concealment; but acts of corruption are kept secret, not to keep
+them secret from the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the
+secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to keep them secret
+from the eyes of mankind, whose opinions he does fear, in the immediate
+effect of them, and in their future consequences. Therefore he had but
+one reason to keep this so dark and profound a secret, till it was
+dragged into day in spite of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret,
+but his knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the light.
+Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its
+retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread
+abroad in the face of day. Such candles should not be hid under a
+bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to
+express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very
+splendor is a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light up this
+whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake
+them. Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr.
+Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the
+dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their prey
+into the jungles. Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment
+for the flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it
+is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.
+
+But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit?
+No: he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the
+neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob.
+On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly
+called a _visitation_. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a
+pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the
+world,--as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread,
+from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them
+to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering. When you
+consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing
+fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not
+conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not
+upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both
+to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.
+
+It is mentioned and supposed in the observations upon this case, though
+no circumstances relative to the persons or the nature of the visit are
+stated, that this expense was something which he might have charged to
+the Company and did not. It is first supposed by the learned counsel who
+made the observation, that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged
+thing; then, that he had not charged the Company anything for it. I have
+looked into that business. In the first place, I see no such custom; and
+if there was such a custom, there was the most abusive misemployment of
+it. I find that in that year there was paid from the Company's cash
+account to the Governor's travelling charges (and he had no other
+journey at that end of the year) thirty thousand rupees, which is about
+3,000_l._; and when we consider that he was in the receipt of near
+30,000_l._, besides the nuzzers, which amount to several thousand a
+year, and that he is allowed 3,000_l._ by the Company for his travelling
+expenses, is it right to charge upon the miserable people whom he was
+defrauding of their bread 16,000_l._ for his entertainment?
+
+I find that there are also other great sums relative to the expenses of
+the Committee of Circuit, which he was upon. How much of them is
+applicable to him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three
+thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not above a day or
+two's journey to Moorshedabad, and by his taking his road by Kishenagur
+he could not be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he must live
+somewhere; and he was actually paid three thousand pounds for travelling
+charges for three months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand
+pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.
+
+If you once admit that a man for an entertainment shall take sixteen
+thousand pounds, there never will be any bribe, any corruption, that may
+not be justified: the corrupt man has nothing to do but to make a visit,
+and then that very moment he may receive any sum under the name of this
+entertainment; that moment his covenants are annulled, his bonds and
+obligations destroyed, the act of Parliament repealed, and it is no
+longer bribery, it is no longer corruption, it is no longer peculation;
+it is nothing but thanks for obliging inquiries, and a compliment
+according to the mode of the country, by which he makes his fortune.
+
+What hinders him from renewing that visit? If you support this
+distinction, you will teach the Governor-General, instead of attending
+his business at the capital, to make journeys through the country,
+putting every great man of that country under the most ruinous
+contributions; and as this custom is in no manner confined to the
+Governor-General, but extends, as it must upon that principle, to every
+servant of the Company in any station whatever, then, if each of them
+were to receive an entertainment, I will venture to say that the
+greatest ravage of an hostile army could not, indeed, destroy the
+country more entirely than the Company's servants by such visits.
+
+Your Lordships will see that there are grounds for suspicion, not
+supported with the same evidence, but with evidence of great
+probability, that there was another entertainment given at the expense
+of another lac of rupees; and there is also great probability that Mr.
+Hastings received two lac of rupees, and Mr. Middleton another lac. The
+whole of the Nabob's revenues would have been exhausted by these two
+men, if they had stayed there a whole year: and they stayed three
+months. Nothing will be secured from the Company's servants, so long as
+they can find, under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt custom
+of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt practice. The excuse
+is worse than the thing itself. I leave it, then, with your judgment to
+decide whether you will or not, if this justification comes before you,
+establish a principle which would put all Bengal in a worse situation
+than an hostile army could do, and ruin all the Company's servants by
+sending them from their duty to go round robbing the whole country under
+the name of entertainments.
+
+My Lords, I have now done with this first part,--namely, the presumption
+arising from his refusal to make any defence, on pretence that the
+charge brought against him might be referred to a court of justice, and
+from the non-performance of his promise to give satisfaction to his
+employers,--and when that pretence was removed, still refusing to give
+that satisfaction, though suffering as he did under a load of infamy and
+obloquy, and though urged to give it by persons of the greatest
+character. I have stated this to your Lordships as the strongest
+presumption of guilt, and that this presumption is strengthened by the
+very excuse which he fabricated for a part of his bribes, when he knew
+that the proof of them was irresistible, and that this excuse is a high
+aggravation of his guilt,--that this excuse is not supported by law,
+that it is not supported by reason, that it does not stand with his
+covenant, but carries with it a manifest proof of corruption, and that
+it cannot be justified by any principle, custom, or usage whatever. My
+Lords, I say I have done with the presumption arising from his conduct
+as it regarded the fact specifically charged against him, and with
+respect to the relation he stood in to the Court of Directors, and from
+the attempt he made to justify that conduct. I believe your Lordships
+will think both one and the other strong presumptions of his
+criminality, and of his knowledge that the act he was doing was
+criminal.
+
+I have another fact to lay before your Lordships, which affords a
+further presumption of his guilt, and which will show the mischievous
+consequences of it; and I trust your Lordships will not blame me for
+going a little into it. Your Lordships know we charge that the
+appointment of such a woman as Munny Begum to the guardianship of the
+Nabob, to the superintendency of the civil justice of the country, and
+to the representation of the whole government, was made for no other
+purpose than that through this corrupt woman sixteen thousand pounds a
+year, the whole tattered remains of the Nabob's grandeur, might be a
+prey to Mr. Hastings: it could be for no other. Now your Lordships would
+imagine, that, after this, knowing he was already grievously suspected,
+he would have abstained from giving any further ground for suspicion by
+a repetition of the same acts through the same person; as no other
+reason could be furnished for such acts, done directly contrary to the
+order of his superiors, but that he was actuated by the influence of
+bribery. Your Lordships would imagine, that, when this Munny Begum was
+removed upon a charge of corruption, Mr. Hastings would have left her
+quiet in tranquil obscurity, and that he would no longer have attempted
+to elevate her into a situation which furnished against himself so much
+disgrace and obloquy to himself, and concerning which he stood charged
+with a direct and positive act of bribery. Your Lordships well know,
+that, upon the deposition of that great magistrate, Mahomed Reza Khan,
+this woman was appointed to supply his place. The Governor-General and
+Council (the majority of them being then Sir John Clavering, Colonel
+Monson, and Mr. Francis) had made a provisional arrangement for the
+time, until they should be authorized to fill up the place in a proper
+manner. Soon after, there came from Europe a letter expressing the
+satisfaction which the Court of Directors had received in the acquittal
+of Mahomed Reza Khan, expressing a regard for his character, an high
+opinion of his abilities, and a great disposition to make him some
+recompense for his extreme sufferings; and accordingly they ordered
+that he should be again employed. Having no exact ideas of the state of
+employments in that country, they made a mistake in the specific
+employment for which they named him; for, being a Mahometan, and the
+head of the Mahometans in that country, he was named to an office which
+must be held by a Gentoo. But the majority I have just named, who never
+endeavored by any base and delusive means to fly from their duty, or not
+to execute it at all, because they were desired to execute it in a way
+in which they could not execute it, followed the spirit of the order;
+and finding that Mahomed Reza Khan, before his imprisonment and trial,
+had been in possession of another employment, they followed the spirit
+of the instructions of the Directors and replaced him in that
+employment: by which means there was an end put to the government of
+Munny Begum, the country reverted to its natural state, and men of the
+first rank in the country were placed in the first situations in it. The
+seat of judicature was filled with wisdom, gravity, and learning, and
+Munny Begum sunk into that situation into which a woman who had been
+engaged in the practices that she had been engaged in naturally would
+sink at her time of life. Mr. Hastings resisted this appointment. He
+trifled with the Company's orders on account of the letter of them, and
+endeavored to disobey the spirit of them. However, the majority overbore
+him; they put Mahomed Reza Khan into his former situation; and as a
+proof and seal to the honor and virtue of their character, there was not
+a breath of suspicion that they had any corrupt motive for this conduct.
+They were odious to many of the India House here; they were odious to
+that corrupt influence which had begun and was going on to ruin India;
+but in the face of all this odium, they gave the appointment to Mahomed
+Reza Khan, because the act contained in itself its own justification.
+Mr. Hastings made a violent protest against it, and resisted it to the
+best of his power, always in favor of Munny Begum, as your Lordships
+will see. Mr. Hastings sent this protest to the Directors; but the
+Directors, as soon as the case came before them, acknowledged their
+error, and praised the majority of the Council, Sir John Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, for the wise and honorable part they
+had taken upon the occasion, by obeying the spirit and not the
+letter,--commended the act they had done,--confirmed Mahomed Reza Khan
+in his place,--and to prevent that great man from being any longer the
+sport of fortune, any longer the play of avarice between corrupt
+governors and dancing-girls, they gave him the pledged faith of the
+Company that he should remain in that office as long as his conduct
+deserved their protection: it was a good and an honorable tenure. My
+Lords, soon afterwards there happened two lamentable deaths,--first of
+Colonel Monson, afterwards of General Clavering. Thus Mr. Hastings was
+set loose: there was an inspection and a watch upon his conduct, and no
+more. He was then just in the same situation in which he had stood in
+1772. What does he do? Even just what he did in 1772. He deposes Mahomed
+Reza Khan, notwithstanding the Company's orders, notwithstanding their
+pledged faith; he turns him out, and makes a distribution of two lacs
+and a half of rupees, the salary of that great magistrate, in the manner
+I will now show your Lordships. He made an arrangement consisting of
+three main parts: the first was with regard to the women, the next with
+regard to the magistracy, the last with regard to the officers of state
+of the household.
+
+The first person that occurred to Mr. Hastings was Munny Begum; and he
+gave her, not out of that part of the Nabob's allowance which was to
+support the seraglio, but out of the allowance of this very magistrate,
+just as if such a thing had been done here out of the salary of a Lord
+Chancellor or a Lord Chief-Justice,--out of these two lacs and a half of
+rupees, that is, about twenty-four or twenty-five thousand pounds a
+year, he ordered an allowance to be made to Munny Begum of 72,000 rupees
+per annum, or 7,200_l._ a year; for the Nabob's own mother, whom he
+thrust, as usual, into a subordinate situation, he made an allowance of
+3,000_l._; to the Sudder ul Huk Khan, which is, translated into English,
+the Lord Chief-Justice, he allowed the same sum that he did to the
+dancing-girl, (which was very liberal in him, and I am rather astonished
+to find it,) namely, 7,200_l._ a year. And who do you think was the next
+public officer he appointed? It was the Rajah Gourdas, the son of
+Nundcomar, and whose testimony he has attempted both before and since
+this occasion to weaken. To him, however, he gave an employment of
+6,000_l._ a year, as if to make through the son some compensation to the
+manes of the father. And in this manner he distributes, with a wild and
+liberal profusion, between magistrates and dancing-girls, the whole
+spoil of Mahomed Reza Khan, notwithstanding the Company's direct and
+positive assurance given to him. Everything was done, at the same time,
+to put, as it was before, into the hands of this dancing-girl the
+miserable Nabob's whole family; and that the fund for corruption might
+be large enough, he did not take the money for this dancing-girl out of
+the Nabob's separate revenue, of which he and the dancing-girl had the
+private disposal between them.
+
+Now upon what pretence did he do all this? The Nabob had represented to
+Mr. Hastings that he was now of age,--that he was an independent,
+sovereign prince,--that, being independent and sovereign in his
+situation, and being of full age, he had a right to manage his own
+concerns himself; and therefore he desired to be admitted to that
+management. And, indeed, my Lords, ostensibly, and supposing him to have
+been this independent prince, and that the Company had no authority or
+had never exercised any authority over him through Mr. Hastings, there
+might be a good deal said in favor of this request. But what was the
+real state of the case? The Nabob was a puppet in the hands of Mr.
+Hastings and Munny Begum; and you will find, upon producing the
+correspondence, that he confesses that she was the ultimate object and
+end of this request.
+
+I think this correspondence, wherein a son is made to petition, in his
+own name, for the elevation of a dancing-girl, his step-mother, above
+himself and everybody else, will appear to your Lordships such a
+curiosity as, I believe, is not to be found in the state correspondence
+of the whole world. The Nabob begins thus:--"The excellency of that
+policy by which her Highness the Begum" (meaning Munny Begum) "(may her
+shadow be far extended!) formerly, during the time of her
+administration, transacted the affairs of the nizamut in the very best
+and most advantageous manner, was, by means of the delusions of enemies
+disguised under the appearance of friends, hidden from me. Having lately
+seriously reflected on my own affairs, I am convinced that it was the
+effect of maternal affection, was highly proper, and for my
+interest,--and that, except the said Begum is again invested with the
+administration, the regulation and prosperity of this family, which is
+in fact her own, cannot be effected. For this cause, from the time of
+her suspension until now, I have passed my time, and do so still, in
+great trouble and uneasiness. As all affairs, and particularly the
+happiness and prosperity of this family, depend on your pleasure, I now
+trouble you, in hopes that you, likewise concurring in this point, will
+be so kind as to write in fit and proper terms to her Highness the
+Begum, that she will always, as formerly, employ her authority in the
+administration of the nizamut and the affairs of this family."
+
+This letter, my Lords, was received upon the 23d of August; and your
+Lordships may observe two things in it: first, that, some way or other,
+this Nabob had been (as the fact was) made to express his desire of
+being released from his subjection to the Munny Begum, but that now he
+has got new lights, all the mists are gone, and he now finds that Munny
+Begum is not only the fittest person to govern him, but the whole
+country. This young man, whose incapacity is stated, and never denied,
+by Mr. Hastings, and by Lord Cornwallis, and by all the rest of the
+world who know him, begins to be charmed with the excellency of the
+policy of Munny Begum. Such is his violent impatience, such the
+impossibility of his existing an hour but under the government of Munny
+Begum, that he writes again on the 25th of August, (he had really the
+impatience of a lover,) and within five days afterwards writes
+again,--so impatient, so anxious and jealous is this young man to be put
+under the government of an old dancing-woman. He is afraid lest Mr.
+Hastings should imagine that some sinister influence had prevailed upon
+him in so natural and proper a request. He says, "Knowing it for my
+interest and advantage that the administration of the affairs of the
+nizamut should be restored to her Highness the Munny Begum, I have
+already troubled you with my request, that, regarding my situation with
+an eye of favor, you will approve of this measure. I am credibly
+informed that some one of my enemies, from selfish views, has, for the
+purpose of oversetting this measure, written you that the said Begum
+procured from me by artifice the letter I wrote you on this subject.
+This causes me the greatest astonishment. Please to consider, that
+artifice and delusion are confined to cheats and impostors, and can
+never proceed from a person of such exalted rank, who is the head and
+patron of all the family of the deceased Nabob, my father,--and that to
+be deluded, being a proof of weakness and folly, can have no relation to
+me, except the inventor of this report considers me as void of
+understanding, and has represented me to the gentlemen as a blockhead
+and an idiot. God knows how harshly such expressions appear to me; but,
+as the truth or falsehood has not yet been fully ascertained, I have
+therefore suspended my demand of satisfaction. Should it be true, be so
+kind as to inform me of it, that the person may be made to answer for
+it."
+
+My Lords, here is a very proper demand. The Nabob is astonished at the
+suspicion, that such a woman as Munny Begum, whose trade in youth had
+been delusion, should be capable of deluding anybody. Astonishing it
+certainly was, that a woman who had been a deluder in youth should be
+suspected to be the same in old age, and that he, a young man, should be
+subject to her artifices. "They must suspect me to be a great
+blockhead," he says, "if a man of my rank is to be deluded." There he
+forgot that it is the unhappy privilege of great men to be cheated, to
+be deluded, much more than other persons; but he thought it so
+impossible in the case of Munny Begum, that he says, "Produce me the
+traitor that could suppose it possible for me to be deluded, when I call
+for this woman as the governor of the country. I demand satisfaction." I
+rather wonder that Mr. Hastings did not inform him who it was that had
+reported so gross and improbable a tale, and deliver him up to the fury
+of the Nabob.
+
+Mr. Hastings is absolutely besieged by him; for he receives another
+letter upon the 3d of September. Here are four letters following one
+another quick as post expresses with horns sounding before them. "Oh, I
+die, I perish, I sink, if Munny Begum is not put into the government of
+the country!--I therefore desire to have her put into the government of
+the country, and that you will not keep me longer in this painful
+suspense, but will be kindly pleased to write immediately to the Munny
+Begum, that she take on herself the administration of the affairs of the
+nizamut, which is, in fact, her own family, without the interference of
+any other person whatever: by this you will give me complete
+satisfaction." Here is a correspondence more like an amorous than a
+state correspondence. What is this man so eager about, what in such a
+rage about, that he cannot endure the smallest delay of the post with
+common patience? Why, lest this old woman (who is not his mother, and
+with whom he had no other tie of blood) should not be made mistress of
+himself and the whole country! However, in a very few months afterwards
+he himself is appointed by Mr. Hastings to the government; and you may
+easily judge by the preceding letters who was to govern. It would be an
+affront to your Lordships' judgment to attempt to prove who was to
+govern, after he had desired to put the whole government of affairs into
+the hands of Munny Begum.
+
+Now, Munny Begum having obtained this salary, and being invested with
+this authority, and made in effect the total and entire governor of the
+country, as I have proved by the Nabob's letters, let us see the
+consequences of it; and then I desire to know whether your Lordships can
+believe that in all this haste, which, in fact, is Mr. Hastings's haste
+and impatience, (for we shall prove that the Nabob never did or could
+take a step but by his immediate orders and directions,)--whether your
+Lordships can believe that Mr. Hastings would incur all the odium
+attending such transactions, unless he had some corrupt consideration.
+
+My Lords, very soon after these appointments were made, consisting of
+Munny Begum at the head of the affairs, the Lord Chief-Justice under
+her, and under her direction, and Rajah Gourdas as steward of the
+household, the first thing we hear is, just what your Lordships expect
+to hear upon such a case, that this unfortunate chief-justice, who was a
+man undoubtedly of but a poor, low disposition, but, I believe, a
+perfectly honest, perfectly well-intentioned man, found it absolutely
+impossible for him to execute his office under the direction of Munny
+Begum; and accordingly, in the month of September following, he sends a
+complaint to Mr. Hastings, "that certain bad men had gained an
+ascendency over the Nabob's temper, by whose instigation he acts." After
+complaining of the slights he receives from the Nabob, he adds, "Thus
+they cause the Nabob to treat me, sometimes with indignity, at others
+with kindness, just as they think proper to advise him: their view is,
+that, by compelling me to displeasure at such unworthy treatment, they
+may force me either to relinquish my station, or to join with them, and
+act by their advice, and appoint creatures of their recommendation to
+the different offices, from which they might draw profit to themselves."
+This is followed by another letter, in which he shows who those corrupt
+men were that had gained the ascendency over the Nabob's
+temper,--namely, the eunuchs of Munny Begum: one of them her direct
+instrument in bribery with Mr. Hastings. What you would expect from such
+a state of things accordingly happened. Everything in the course of
+justice was confounded; all official responsibility destroyed; and
+nothing but a scene of forgery, peculation, and knavery of every kind
+and description prevailed through the country, and totally disturbed all
+order and justice in it. He says, "The Begum's ministers, before my
+arrival, with the advice of their counsellors, caused the Nabob to sign
+a receipt, in consequence of which they received at two different times
+near fifty thousand rupees, in the name of the officers of the Adawlut,
+Foujdarry, &c., from the Company's circar; and having drawn up an
+account-current in the manner they wished, they got the Nabob to sign
+it, and then sent it to me." In the same letter he asserts "that these
+people have the Nabob entirely in their power."
+
+My Lords, you see here Mr. Hastings enabling the corrupt eunuchs of this
+wicked old woman to draw upon the Company's treasury at their pleasure,
+under forged papers of the Nabob, for just such moneys as they please,
+under the name and pretence of giving it to the officers of justice, but
+which they distribute among themselves as they think fit. This complaint
+was soon followed by another, and they furnish, first, the strongest
+presumptive proof of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings; and, secondly,
+they show the horrible mischievous effects of his conduct upon the
+country.
+
+In consequence of the first complaint, Mr. Hastings directs this
+independent Nabob not to concern himself any longer with the Foujdarry.
+The Nabob, who had before declared that the superintendence of all the
+offices belonged to him, and was to be executed by himself, or under his
+orders, instantly obeys Mr. Hastings, and declares he will not interfere
+in the business of the courts any more. Your Lordships will observe
+further that the complaint is not against the Nabob, but against the
+creatures and the menial servants of Munny Begum: and yet it is the
+Nabob he forbids to interfere in this business; of the others he takes
+no notice; and this is a strong proof of the corrupt dealings of Mr.
+Hastings with this woman. When the whole country was fallen into
+confusion under the administration of this woman, and under her corrupt
+ministers, men base-born and employed in the basest offices, (the men of
+the household train of the women of rank in that country are of that
+description,) he writes to the Nabob again, and himself confesses the
+mischiefs that had arisen from his corrupt arrangements.
+
+"At your Excellency's request, I sent Sudder ul Huk Khan to take on him
+the administration of the affairs of the Adawlut and Foujdarry, and
+hoped by that means not only to have given satisfaction to your
+Excellency, but that through his abilities and experience these affairs
+would have been conducted in such manner as to have secured the peace of
+the country and the happiness of the people; and it is with the greatest
+concern I learn that this measure is so far from being attended with the
+expected advantages, that the affairs both of the Foujdarry and Adawlut
+are in the greatest confusion imaginable, and daily robberies and
+murders are perpetrated throughout the country. This is evidently owing
+to the want of a proper authority in the person appointed to superintend
+them. I therefore addressed your Excellency on the importance and
+delicacy of the affairs in question, and of the necessity of lodging
+full power in the hands of the person chosen to administer them. In
+reply to which your Excellency expressed sentiments coincident with
+mine. Notwithstanding which, your dependants and people, actuated by
+selfish and avaricious views, have by their interference so impeded the
+business as to throw the whole country into a state of confusion, from
+which nothing can retrieve it but an unlimited power lodged in the hands
+of the superintendent. I therefore request that your Excellency will
+give the strictest injunctions to all your dependants not to interfere
+in any manner with any matter relative to the affairs of the Adawlut and
+Foujdarry, and that you will yourself relinquish all interference
+therein, and leave them entirely to the management of Sudder ul Huk
+Khan. This is absolutely necessary to restore the country to a state of
+tranquillity."
+
+My Lords, what evidence do we produce to your Lordships of the
+consequences of Mr. Hastings's corrupt measures? His own. He here gives
+you the state into which the country was thrown by the criminal
+interference of the wicked woman whom he had established in power,
+totally superseding the regular judicial authority of the country, and
+throwing everything into confusion. As usual, there is such irregularity
+in his conduct, and his crimes are so multiplied, that all the
+contrivances of ingenuity are unable to cover them. Now and then he
+comes and betrays himself; and here he confesses you his own weakness,
+and the effects of his own corruption: he had appointed Munny Begum to
+this office of power, he dare not say a word to her upon her abuse of
+it, but he lays the whole upon the Nabob. When the Chief-Justice
+complains that these crimes were the consequence of Munny Begum's
+interference, and were committed by her creatures, why did he not say to
+the Nabob, "The Begum must not interfere; the Begum's eunuchs must not
+interfere"? He dared not: because that woman had concealed all the
+bribes but one from public notice to gratify him; she and Yatibar Ali
+Khan, her minister, who had the principal share in this destruction of
+justice and perversion of all the principal functions of government, had
+it in their power to discover the whole. Mr. Hastings was obliged, in
+consequence of that concealment, to support her and to support him.
+Every evil principle was at work. He bought a mercenary silence to pay
+the same back to them. It was a wicked silence, the concealment of their
+common guilt. There was at once a corrupt gratitude operating mutually
+by a corrupt influence on both, and a corrupt fear influencing the mind
+of Mr. Hastings, which did not permit him to put an end to this scene of
+disorder and confusion, bought at the expense of twenty-four thousand
+pounds a year to the Company. You will hereafter see what use he makes
+of the evidence of Yatibar Ali Khan, and of this woman, for concealing
+their guilt.
+
+Your Lordships will observe that the virtuous majority, whose reign was
+but short, and two of whom died of grief and vexation under the
+impediments which they met with from the corruptions and oppositions of
+Mr. Hastings, (their indirect murderer,--for it is well known to the
+world that their hearts were thus broken,) put their conduct out of all
+suspicion. For they ordered an exact account to be kept by Mahomed Reza
+Khan,--though, certainly, if any person in the country could be trusted,
+he, upon his character, might; but they did not trust him, because they
+knew the Company did not suffer them to trust any man: they ordered an
+exact account to be kept by him of the Nabob's expenses, which finally
+must be the Company's expenses; they ordered the account to be sent down
+yearly, to be controlled, if necessary, whilst the means of control
+existed.--What was Mr. Hastings's conduct? He did not give the persons
+whom he appointed any order to produce any account, though their
+character and circumstances were such as made an account ten thousand
+times more necessary from them than from those from whom it had been in
+former times by the Company strictly exacted. So that his not ordering
+any account to be given of the money that was to be expended leaves no
+doubt that the appointment of Munny Begum was in pursuance of his old
+system of bribery, and that he maintained her in office, to the
+subversion of public justice, for the purpose of robbing, and of
+continuing in the practice of robbing, the country.
+
+But though this continued longer than was for the good of the country,
+yet it did not continue absolutely and relatively long; because the
+Court of Directors, as soon as they heard of this iniquitous
+appointment, which glared upon them in all the light of its infamy,
+immediately wrote the strongest, the most decided, and the most
+peremptory censure upon him, attributing his acts, every one of them, to
+the same causes to which I attribute them. As a proof that the Court of
+Directors saw the thing in the very light in which I represent it to
+your Lordships, and indeed in which every one must see it, you will find
+that they reprobate all his idle excuses,--that they reprobate all the
+actors in the scene,--that they consider everything to have been done,
+not by the Nabob, but by himself,--that the object of the appointment of
+Munny Begum was _money_, and that the consequence of that appointment
+was the robbery of the Nabob's treasury. "We by no means approve your
+late proceedings, on the application of the Nabob Mobarek ul Dowlah for
+the removal of the Naib Subahdar. The requisition of Mobarek ul Dowlah
+was improper and unfriendly; because he must have known that the late
+appointment of Mahomed Reza Khan to the office of Naib Subahdar had been
+marked with the Company's special approbation, and that the Court of
+Directors had assured him of their favor so long as a firm attachment
+to the Company's interest and a proper discharge of the duties of his
+station should render him worthy of their protection. We therefore
+repeat our declaration, that to require the dismission of a
+prime-minister thus circumstanced, without producing the smallest proof
+of his infidelity to the Company, or venturing to charge him with one
+instance of maladministration in the discharge of his public duty, was
+improper and inconsistent with the friendship subsisting between the
+Nabob of Bengal and the Company." And further on they say,--"The Nabob
+having intimated that he had repeatedly stated the trouble and
+uneasiness which he had suffered from the naibship of the nizamut being
+vested in Mahomed Reza Khan, we observe one of the members of your board
+desired the Nabob's repeated letters on the subject might be read, but
+this reasonable request was overruled, on a plea of saving the board's
+time, which we can by no means admit as a sufficient objection. The
+Nabob's letters of the 25th and 30th August, of the 3d September and
+17th November, leave us no doubt of the true design of this
+extraordinary business being to bring forward Munny Begum, and again to
+invest her with improper power and influence, notwithstanding our former
+declaration, that so great a part of the Nabob's allowance had been
+embezzled or misapplied under her superintendence."
+
+At present I do not think it necessary, because it would be doing more
+than enough, it would be slaying the slain, to show your Lordships what
+Mr. Hastings's motives were in acting against the sense of the East
+India Company, appointed by an act of Parliament to control him,--that
+he did it for a corrupt purpose, that all his pretences were false and
+fraudulent, and that he had his own corrupt views in the whole of the
+proceeding. But in the statement which I have given of this matter, I
+beg your Lordships to observe the instruments with which Mr. Hastings
+acts. The great men of that country, and particularly the Subahdar
+himself, the Nabob, are and is in so equivocal a situation, that it
+afforded him two bolting-holes, by which he is enabled to resist the
+authority of the Company, and exercise an arbitrary authority of his
+own: for, though the Nabob has the titles of high sovereignty, he is the
+lowest of all dependants; he appears to be the master of the
+country,--he is a pensioner of the Company's government.
+
+When Mr. Hastings wants him to obey and answer his corrupt purposes, he
+finds him in the character of a pensioner: when he wants his authority
+to support him in opposition to the authority of the Company,
+immediately he invests him with high sovereign powers, and he dare not
+execute the orders of the Company for fear of doing some act that will
+make him odious in the eyes of God and man. We see how he appointed all
+officers for him, and forbade his interference in all affairs. When the
+Company see the impropriety and the guilt of these acts, and order him
+to rescind them, and appoint again Mahomed Reza Khan, he declares he
+will not, that he cannot do it in justice, but that he will consent to
+send him the order of the Company, but without backing it with any order
+of the board: which, supposing even there had been no private
+communication, was, in other words, commanding him to disobey it. So
+this poor man, who a short time before was at the feet of Mr. Hastings,
+whom Mr. Hastings declared to be a pageant, and swore in a court of
+justice that he was but a pageant, and followed that affidavit with
+long declarations in Council that he was a pageant in sovereignty, and
+ought in policy ever to be held out as such,--this man he sets up in
+opposition to the Company, and refuses to appoint Mahomed Reza Khan to
+the office which was guarantied to him by the express faith of the
+Company, pledged to his support. Will any man tell me that this
+resistance, under such base, though plausible pretences, could spring
+from any other cause than a resolution of persisting systematically in
+his course of corruption and bribery through Munny Begum?
+
+But there is another circumstance that puts this in a stronger light. He
+opposes the Nabob's mock authority to the authority of the Company, and
+leaves Mahomed Reza Khan unemployed, because, as he says, he cannot in
+justice execute orders from the Company (though they are his undoubted
+masters) contrary to the rights of the Nabob. You see what the rights of
+the Nabob were: the rights of the Nabob were, to be governed by Munny
+Begum and her scandalous ministers. But, however, we now see him exalted
+to be an independent sovereign; he defies the Company at the head of
+their armies and their treasury; that name that makes all India shake
+was defied by one of its pensioners. My Lords, human greatness is an
+unstable thing. This man, so suddenly exalted, was as soon depressed;
+and the manner of his depression is as curious as that of his exaltation
+by Mr. Hastings, and will tend to show you the man most clearly.
+
+Mr. Francis, whose conduct all along was directed by no other principles
+than those which were in conformity with the plan adopted by himself and
+his virtuous colleagues, namely, an entire obedience to the laws of his
+country, and who constantly had opposed Mr. Hastings, upon principles of
+honor, and principles of obedience to the authority of the Company under
+which he acted, had never contended for any one thing, in any way, or in
+any instance, but obedience to them, and had constantly asserted that
+Mahomed Reza Khan ought to be put into employment. Mr. Hastings as
+constantly opposed him; and the reason he gave for it was, that it was
+against the direct rights of the Nabob, and that they were rights so
+sacred that they could not be infringed even by the sovereign authority
+of the Company ordering him to do it. He had so great an aversion to the
+least subtraction of the Nabob's right, that, though expressly commanded
+by the Court of Directors, he would not suffer Mahomed Reza Khan to be
+invested with his office under the Company's authority. The Nabob was
+too sovereign, too supreme, for him to do it. But such is the fate of
+human grandeur, that a whimsical event reduced the Nabob to his state of
+pageant again, and made him the mere subject of--you will see whom. Mr.
+Hastings found he was so embarrassed by his disobedience to the spirit
+of the orders of the Company, and by the various wild projects he had
+formed, as to make it necessary for him, even though he had a majority
+in the Council, to gain over at any price Mr. Francis. Mr. Francis,
+frightened by the same miserable situation of affairs, (for this
+happened at a most dangerous period,--the height of the Mahratta war,)
+was willing likewise to give up his opposition to Mr. Hastings, to
+suspend the execution of many rightful things, and to concede them to
+the public necessity. Accordingly he agreed to terms with Mr. Hastings.
+But what was the price of that concession? Any base purpose, any
+desertion of public duty? No: all that he desired of Mr. Hastings was,
+that he should obey the orders of the Company; and among other acts of
+the obedience required was this, that Mahomed Reza Khan should be put
+into his office.
+
+You have heard how Mr. Hastings opposed the order of the Company, and on
+what account he opposed it. On the 1st of September he sent an order to
+the Nabob, now become his subject, to give up this office to Mahomed
+Reza Khan: an act which he had before represented as a dethroning of the
+Nabob. The order went on the 1st of September, and on the 3d this great
+and mighty prince, whom all earth could not move from the assertion of
+his rights, gives them all up, and Mahomed Reza Khan is invested with
+them. So there all his pretences were gone. It is plain that what had
+been done before was for Munny Begum, and that what he now gave up was
+from necessity: and it shows that the Nabob was the meanest of his
+servants; for in truth he ate his daily bread out of the hands of Mr.
+Hastings, through Munny Begum.
+
+Mahomed Reza Khan was now invested again with his office; but such was
+the treachery of Mr. Hastings, that, though he wrote to the Nabob that
+this was done in consequence of the orders of the Company, he did
+clandestinely, according to his usual mode, assure the Nabob that
+Mahomed Reza Khan should not hold the place longer than till he heard
+from England. He then wrote him another letter, that he should hold it
+no longer than while he submitted to his present necessity, (thus giving
+up to his colleague what he refused to the Company,) and engaged,
+privately, that he would dismiss Mahomed Reza Khan again. And
+accordingly, the moment he thought Mr. Francis was not in a condition to
+give him trouble any longer, that moment he again turned out Mahomed
+Reza Khan from that general superintendence of affairs which the Company
+gave him, and deposed him as a minister, leaving him only a very
+confined authority as a magistrate.
+
+All these changes, no less than four great revolutions, if I may so call
+them, were made by Mr. Hastings for his own corrupt purposes. This is
+the manner in which Mr. Hastings has played with the most sacred objects
+that man ever had a dealing with: with the government, with the justice,
+with the order, with the dignity, with the nobility of a great country:
+he played with them to satisfy his own wicked and corrupt purposes
+through the basest instrument.
+
+Now, my Lords, I have done with these presumptions of corruption with
+Munny Begum, and have shown that it is not a slight crime, but that it
+is attended with a breach of public faith, with a breach of his orders,
+with a breach of the whole English government, and the destruction of
+the native government, of the police, the order, the safety, the
+security, and the justice of the country,--and that all these are much
+concerned in this cause. Therefore the Commons stand before the face of
+the world, and say, We have brought a cause, a great cause, a cause
+worthy the Commons of England to prosecute, and worthy the Lords to
+judge and determine upon.
+
+I have now nothing further to state than what the consequences are of
+Mr. Hastings taking bribes,--that Mr. Hastings's taking of bribes is not
+only his own corruption, but the incurable corruption of the whole
+service. I will show, first, that he was named in 1773 to put an end to
+that corruption. I will show that he did not,--that he knowingly and
+willingly connived at it,--and that that connivance was the principal
+cause of all the disorders that have hitherto prevailed in that country.
+I will show you that he positively refused to obey the Company's order
+to inquire into and to correct the corruptions that prevailed in that
+country; next, that he established an avowed system of connivance, in
+order to gain over everything that was corrupt in the country; and that,
+lastly, to secure it, he gave up all the prosecutions, and enervated and
+took away the sole arm left to the Company for the assertion of
+authority and the preservation of good morals and purity in their
+service.
+
+My Lords, here is a letter, in the year 1773, in which the Court of
+Directors had, upon his own representation, approved some part of his
+conduct. He is charmed with their approbation; he promises the greatest
+things; but I believe your Lordships will see, from the manner in which
+he proceeds at that very instant, that a more deliberate system, for not
+only being corrupt himself, but supporting corruption in others, never
+was exhibited in any public paper.
+
+"While I indulge the pleasure which I receive from the past successes of
+my endeavors, I own I cannot refrain from looking back with a mixture of
+anxiety on the omissions by which I am sensible I may since have
+hazarded the diminution of your esteem. All my letters addressed to your
+Honorable Court, and to the Secret Committee, repeat the strongest
+promises of prosecuting the inquiries into the conduct of your servants
+which you had been pleased to commit particularly to my charge. You will
+readily perceive that I must have been sincere in those declarations;
+since it would have argued great indiscretion to have made them, had I
+foreseen my inability to perform them. I find myself now under the
+disagreeable necessity of avowing that inability; at the same time I
+will boldly take upon me to affirm, that, on whomsoever you might have
+delegated that charge, and by whatever powers it might have been
+accompanied, it would have been sufficient to occupy the entire
+attention of those who were intrusted with it, and, even with all the
+aids of leisure and authority, would have proved ineffectual. I dare
+appeal to the public records, to the testimony of those who have
+opportunities of knowing me, and even to the detail which the public
+voice can report of the past acts of this government, that my time has
+been neither idly nor uselessly employed: yet such are the cares and
+embarrassments of this various state, that, although much may be done,
+much more, even in matters of moment, must necessarily remain neglected.
+To select from the miscellaneous heap which each day's exigencies
+present to our choice those points on which the general welfare of your
+affairs most essentially depends, to provide expedients for future
+advantages and guard against probable evils, are all that your
+administration can faithfully promise to perform for your service with
+their united labors most diligently exerted. They cannot look back
+without sacrificing the objects of their immediate duty, which are those
+of your interests, to endless researches, which can produce no real
+good, and may expose your affairs to all the ruinous consequences of
+personal malevolence, both here and at home."
+
+My Lords, this is the first man, I believe, that ever took credit for
+his sincerity from his breach of his promises. "I could not," he says,
+"have made these promises, if I had not thought that I could perform
+them. Now I find I cannot perform them, and you have in that
+non-performance and in that profession a security for my sincerity when
+I promised them." Upon this principle, any man who makes a promise has
+nothing to do afterwards, but to say that he finds himself (without
+assigning any particular cause for it) unable to perform it,--not only
+to justify himself for his non-performance, but to justify himself and
+claim credit for sincerity in his original profession. The charge was
+given him specially, and he promised obedience, over and over, upon the
+spot, and in the country, in which he was no novice, for he had been
+bred in it: it was his native country in one sense, it was the place of
+his renewed nativity and regeneration. Yet this very man, as if he was a
+novice in it, now says, "I promised you what I now find I cannot
+perform." Nay, what is worse, he declares no man could perform it, if he
+gave up his whole time to it. And lastly, he says, that the inquiry into
+these corruptions, even if you succeeded in it, would do more harm than
+good. Now was there ever an instance of a man so basely deserting a
+duty, and giving so base a reason for it? His duty was to put an end to
+corruption in every channel of government. It cannot be done. Why?
+Because it would expose our affairs to malignity and enmity, and end,
+perhaps, to our disadvantage. Not only will he connive himself, but he
+advises the Company to do it. For fear of what? For fear that their
+service was so abandoned and corrupt, that the display of the evil would
+tend more to their disreputation than all their attempts to reform it
+would tend to their service.
+
+Mr. Hastings should naturally have imagined that the law was a resource
+in this desperate case of bribery. He tells you, that in "that charge of
+oppression, though they were supported by the cries of the people and
+the most authentic representations, it is yet impossible in most cases
+to obtain legal proofs." Here is a system of total despair upon the
+business, which I hope and believe is not a desperate one, and has not
+proved a desperate one, whenever a rational attempt has been made to
+pursue it. Here you find him corrupt, and you find, in consequence of
+that corruption, that he screens the whole body of corruption in India,
+and states an absolute despair of any possibility, by any art or
+address, of putting an end to it. Nay, he tells you, that, if corruption
+did not exist, if it was not connived at, that the India Company could
+not exist. Whether that be a truth or not I cannot tell; but this I
+know, that it is the most horrible picture that ever was made of any
+country. It might be said that these were excuses for omissions,--sins
+of omission he calls them. I will show that they were systematic, that
+Mr. Hastings did uniformly profess that he would connive at abuses, and
+contend that abuses ought to be connived at. When the whole mystery of
+the iniquity, in which he himself was deeply concerned, came to
+light,--when it appeared that all the Company's orders were
+contravened,--that contracts were given directly contrary to their
+orders, and upon principles subversive of their government, leading to
+all manner of oppression and ruin to the country,--what was Mr.
+Hastings's answer? "I must here remark, that the majority ... I had not
+the power of establishing it."[5] Then he goes on and states other cases
+of corruption, at every one of which he winks. Here he states another
+reason for his connivance. "Suppose again," (for he puts another
+supposition, and these suppositions are not hypotheses laid down for
+argument, but real facts then existing before the Council examining into
+grievances,)--"suppose again, that any person had benefited himself ...
+unprofitable discussion."[6]
+
+Here is a direct avowal of his refusing to examine into the conduct of
+persons in the Council, even in the highest departments of government,
+and the best paid, for fear he should dissatisfy them, and should lose
+their votes, by discovering those peculations and corruptions, though he
+perfectly knew them. Was there ever, since the world began, any man who
+would dare to avow such sentiments, until driven to the wall? If he
+could show that he himself abhorred bribes, and kept at a distance from
+them, then he might say, "I connive at the bribes of others"; but when
+he acknowledges that he takes bribes, how can you doubt that he buys a
+corrupt confederacy, and puts an end to any hope through him of
+reformation of the abuses at Bengal? But your Lordships will see that he
+not only connived at abuse, but patronized it and supported it for his
+own political purposes; since he here confesses, that, if inquiry into
+it created him ill-humor, and produced him an opposition in Council, he
+sacrificed it to the power of the Company, and the constitution of their
+government. Did he so? The Company ordered him to prosecute those
+people, and their constitution required that they should be prosecuted.
+"No," says Mr. Hastings, "the conniving at it procures a majority of
+votes." The very thing that he bought was not worth half the price he
+paid for it. He was sent to reform corruptions, and, in order that he
+might reform corruptions, he winked at, countenanced, and patronized
+them, to get a majority of votes; and what was, in fact, a sacrifice to
+his own interest, ambition, and corruption, he calls a sacrifice to the
+Company. He puts, then, this alternative: "Either give everything into
+my hand, suffer me to go on, and have no control, or else I wink at
+every species of corruption." It is a remarkable and stupendous thing,
+that, when all the world was alarmed at the disorders of the Company,
+when that alarm occasioned his being sent out, and when, in consequence
+of that alarm, Parliament suspended the constitution of the Company, and
+appointed another government, Mr. Hastings should tell that Company that
+Parliament had done wrong, and that the person put at the head of that
+government was to wink at those abuses. Nay, what is more, not only does
+Mr. Hastings declare, upon general principles, that it was impossible to
+pursue all the delinquencies of India, and that, if possible to pursue
+them, mischief would happen from it, but your Lordships will observe
+that Mr. Hastings, in this business, during the whole period of the
+administration of that body which was sent out to inquire into and
+reform the corruptions of India, did not call one person to an account;
+nor, except Mr. Hastings, this day, has any one been called to an
+account, or punished for delinquency. Whether he will be punished or no,
+time will show. I have no doubt of your Lordships' justice, and of the
+goodness of our cause.
+
+The table of the House of Commons groaned under complaints of the evils
+growing in India under this systematic connivance of Mr. Hastings. The
+Directors had set on foot prosecutions, to be conducted God knows how;
+but, such as they were, they were their only remedy; and they began to
+consider at last that these prosecutions had taken a long oblivious nap
+of many years; and at last, knowing that they were likely, in the year
+1782, to be called to a strict account about their own conduct, the
+Court of Directors began to rouse themselves, and they write thus:
+"Having in several of our letters to you very attentively perused all
+the proceedings referred to in these paragraphs, relative to the various
+forgeries on the Company's treasuries, we lament exceedingly that the
+parties should have been so long in confinement without being brought to
+trial."
+
+Here, my Lords, after justice had been asleep awhile, it revived. They
+directed two things: first, that those suits should be pursued; but
+whether pursued or not, that an account of the state of them should be
+given, that they might give orders concerning them.
+
+Your Lordships see the orders of the Company. Did they not want to
+pursue and to revive those dormant prosecutions? They want to have a
+state of them, that they may know how to direct the future conduct of
+them with more effect and vigor than they had yet been pursued with. You
+will naturally imagine that Mr. Hastings did not obey their orders, or
+obeyed them languidly. No, he took another part. He says, "Having
+attentively read and weighed the arguments ... for withdrawing them."[7]
+
+Thus he begins with the general principle of connivance; he directly
+avows he does it for a political purpose; and when the Company directs
+he shall proceed in the suits, instead of deferring to their judgment,
+he takes the judgment on himself, and says theirs is untenable; he
+directly discharges the prosecutions of the Company, supersedes the
+authority of his masters, and gives a general release to all the persons
+who were still suffering by the feeble footsteps of justice in that
+country. He gave them an act of indemnity, and that was the last of his
+acts.
+
+Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery, the presumptions that
+arise from his own bribes, his attention to secure others from the
+punishment of theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his
+discharging it,--when we see all this, can we avoid judging and forming
+our opinions upon two grand points: first, that no man would proceed in
+that universal patronage of guilt, unless he was guilty himself; next,
+that, by a universal connivance for fourteen years, he is himself the
+cause and mainspring of all the evils, calamities, extortion, and
+bribery, that have prevailed and ravaged that country for so long a
+time? There is, indeed, no doubt either of his guilt, or of the
+consequences of it, by which he has extinguished the last expiring hope
+and glimpse that remained of procuring a remedy for India of the evils
+that exist in it.
+
+I would mention, that, as a sort of postscript, when he could no longer
+put the government into the hands of that infamous woman, Munny Begum,
+he sent an amorous, sentimental letter to the Company, describing her
+miserable situation, and advising the Company to give her a pension of
+seventy-two thousand rupees a year, to maintain her. He describes her
+situation in such a moving way as must melt every heart. He supposes her
+to be reduced to want by the cruel orders of the Company, who retain
+from her money which they were never obliged to give her. This
+representation, which he makes with as much fairness as he represents
+himself to be in a state of the most miserable poverty and distress, he
+alone made to the Company, because his colleagues would not countenance
+him in it; and we find, upon looking over Lord Cornwallis's last
+examination into the whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman
+was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty thousand pounds. Mr.
+Hastings, however, could not avoid making this representation; because
+he knew, that, if he quitted the country without securing that woman, by
+giving her a hope that she could procure by his credit here that money
+which by his authority he had before procured for her, she might then
+make a discovery of all the corruption that had been carried on between
+them; and therefore he squanders away the treasures of the Company, in
+order to secure himself from any such detection, and to procure for
+himself _razinamas_ and all those fine things. He knew that Munny Begum,
+that the whole seraglio, that all the country, whom he had put under the
+dominion of Sir John D'Oyly, that all those people might have made a
+discovery of all his corrupt proceedings; he therefore gets the Nabob to
+appoint Sir John D'Oyly his agent here, with a view of stopping his
+mouth, and by the hope of another 160,000_l._ a year to prevent his
+giving an account of the dilapidation and robbery that was made of the
+160,000_l._ which had been left him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have now finished what I proposed to say relative to his great fund of
+bribery, in the first instance of it,--namely, the administration of
+justice in the country. There is another system of bribery which I shall
+state before my friends produce the evidence. He put up all the great
+offices of the country to sale; he makes use of the trust he had of the
+revenues in order to destroy the whole system of those revenues, and to
+bind them and make them subservient to his system of bribery: and this
+will make it necessary for your Lordships to couple the consideration of
+the charge of the revenues, in some instances, with that of bribery.
+
+The next day your Lordships meet (when I hope I shall not detain you so
+long) I mean to open the second stage of his bribery, the period of
+discovery: for the first stage was the period of concealment. When he
+found his bribes could no longer be concealed, he next took upon him to
+discover them himself, and to take merit from them.
+
+When I shall have opened the second scene of his peculation, and his new
+principles of it, when you see him either treading in old corruptions,
+and excelling the examples he imitated, or exhibiting new ones of his
+own, in which of the two his conduct is the most iniquitous, and
+attended with most evil to the Company, I must leave your Lordships to
+judge.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[2] Document wanting.
+
+[3] Document wanting.
+
+[4] Document wanting.
+
+[5] Document wanting.
+
+[6] Document wanting.
+
+[7] Document wanting.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--Agreeably to your Lordships' proclamation, which I have just
+heard, and the duty enjoined me by the House of Commons, I come forward
+to make good their charge of high crimes and misdemeanors against Warren
+Hastings, Esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal, and now a prisoner
+at your bar.
+
+My Lords, since I had last the honor of standing in this place before
+your Lordships, an event has happened upon which it is difficult to
+speak and impossible to be silent. My Lords, I have been disavowed by
+those who sent me here to represent them. My Lords, I have been
+disavowed in a material part of that engagement which I had pledged
+myself to this House to perform. My Lords, that disavowal has been
+followed by a censure. And yet, my Lords, so censured and so disavowed,
+and by such an authority, I am sent here again, to this the place of my
+offence, under the same commission, by the same authority, to make good
+the same charge, against the same delinquent.
+
+My Lords, the situation is new and awful: the situation is such as, I
+believe, and I am sure, has nothing like it on the records of
+Parliament, nor, probably, in the history of mankind. My Lords, it is
+not only new and singular, but, I believe, to many persons, who do not
+look into the true interior nature of affairs, it may appear that it
+would be to me as mortifying as it is unprecedented. But, my Lords, I
+have in this situation, and upon the consideration of all the
+circumstances, something more to feed my mind with than mere
+consolation; because, my Lords, I look upon the whole of these
+circumstances, considered together, as the strongest, the most decisive,
+and the least equivocal proof which the Commons of Great Britain can
+give of their sincerity and their zeal in this prosecution. My Lords, is
+it from a mistaken tenderness or a blind partiality to me, that, thus
+censured, they have sent me to this place? No, my Lords, it is because
+they feel, and recognize in their own breasts, that active principle of
+justice, that zeal for the relief of the people of India, that zeal for
+the honor of Great Britain, which characterizes me and my excellent
+associates, that, in spite of any defects, in consequence of that zeal
+which they applaud, and while they censure its mistakes, and, because
+they censure its mistakes, do but more applaud, they have sent me to
+this place, instructed, but not dismayed, to pursue this prosecution
+against Warren Hastings, Esquire. Your Lordships will therefore be
+pleased to consider this, as I consider it, not as a thing honorable to
+me, in the first place, but as honorable to the Commons of Great
+Britain, in whose honor the national glory is deeply concerned; and I
+shall suffer myself with pleasure to be sacrificed, perhaps, in what is
+dearer to me than my life, my reputation, rather than let it be supposed
+that the Commons should for one moment have faltered in their duty. I,
+my Lords, on the one hand, feeling myself supported and encouraged,
+feeling protection and countenance from this admonition and warning
+which has been given to me, will show myself, on the other hand, not
+unworthy so great and distinguished a mark of the favor of the
+Commons,--a mark of favor not the consequence of flattery, but of
+opinion. I shall feel animated and encouraged by so noble a reward as I
+shall always consider the confidence of the Commons to be: the only
+reward, but a rich reward, which I have received for the toils and
+labors of a long life.
+
+The Commons, then, thus vindicated, and myself thus encouraged, I shall
+proceed to make good the charge in which the honor of the Commons, that
+is, the national honor, is so deeply concerned. For, my Lords, if any
+circumstance of weakness, if any feebleness of nerve, if any yielding to
+weak and popular opinions and delusions were to shake us, consider what
+the situation of this country would be. This prosecution, if weakly
+conceived, ill digested, or intemperately pursued, ought never to have
+been brought to your Lordships' bar: but being brought to your
+Lordships' bar, the nation is committed to it, and the least appearance
+of uncertainty in our minds would disgrace us forever. _Esto perpetua_,
+has been said. To the glory of this nation, much more be it said, _Esto
+perpetua_; and I will say, that, as we have raised and exhibited a
+theatre of justice which has excited the admiration of all Europe, there
+would be a sort of lustre in our infamy, and a splendor in the disgrace
+that we should bring upon ourselves, if we should, just at that moment,
+turn that theatre of our glory into a spectacle of dishonor beyond what
+has ever happened to any country of the world.
+
+The Commons of Great Britain, whilst willing to keep a strong and firm
+hand over all those who represent them in any business, do at the same
+time encourage them in the prosecution of it, by allowing them a just
+discretion and latitude wherever their own orders have not marked a
+distinction. I shall therefore go on with the more cheerful confidence,
+not only for the reasons that I have stated, but for another and
+material reason. I know and am satisfied, that, in the nobleness of your
+judgment, you will always make a distinction between the person that
+gives the order and the organ that is to execute it. The House of
+Commons know no such thing as indiscretion, imprudence, or impropriety:
+it is otherwise with their instruments. Your Lordships very well know,
+that, if you hear anything that shall appear to you to be regular, apt
+to bring forward the charge, just, prudent, cogent, you are to give it
+to the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled; if you should
+hear from me (and it must be from me alone, and not from any other
+member of the Committee) anything that is unworthy of that situation,
+that comes feeble, weak, indigested, or ill-prepared, you are to
+attribute that to the instrument. Your Lordships' judgment would do this
+without my saying it. But whilst I claim it on the part of the Commons
+for their dignity, I claim for myself the necessary indulgence that must
+be given to all weakness. Your Lordships, then, will impute it where you
+would have imputed it without my desire. It is a distinction you would
+naturally have made, and the rather because what is alleged by us at the
+bar is not the ground upon which you are to give judgment. If not only
+I, but the whole body of managers, had made use of any such expressions
+as I made use of,--even if the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament
+assembled, if the collective body of Parliament, if the voice of Europe,
+had used them,--if we had spoken with the tongues of men and angels,
+you, in the seat of judicature, are not to regard what we say, but what
+we prove; you are to consider whether the charge is well substantiated,
+and proof brought out by legal inference and argument. You know, and I
+am sure the habits of judging which your Lordships have acquired by
+sitting in judgment must better inform you than any other men, that the
+duties of life, in order to be well performed, must be methodized,
+separated, arranged, and harmonized in such a manner that they shall not
+clash with one another, but each have a department assigned and
+separated to itself. My Lords, in that manner it is that we, the
+prosecutors, have nothing to do with the principles which are to guide
+the judgment, that we have nothing to do with the defence of the
+prisoner. Your Lordships well know, that, when we come before you, you
+hear a party; that, when the accused come before you, you hear a party:
+that it is for you to doubt, and wait till you come to the close, before
+you decide; that it is for us, the prosecutors, to have decided before
+we came here. To act as prosecutors, we ought to have no doubt or
+hesitation, nothing trembling or quivering in our minds upon the
+occasion. We ought to be fully convinced of guilt, before we come to
+you. It is, then, our business to bring forward the proofs,--to enforce
+them with all the clearness, illustration, example, that we can bring
+forward,--that we are to show the circumstances that can aggravate the
+guilt,--that we are to go further, show the mischievous consequences and
+tendency of those crimes to society,--and that we are, if able so to do,
+to arouse and awaken in the minds of all that hear us those generous and
+noble sympathies which Providence has planted in the breasts of all men,
+to be the true guardians of the common rights of humanity. Your
+Lordships know that this is the duty of the prosecutors, and that
+therefore we are not to consider the defence of the party, which is
+wisely and properly left to himself; but we are to press the accusation
+with all the energy of which it is capable, and to come with minds
+perfectly convinced before an august and awful tribunal which at once
+tries the accuser and the accused.
+
+Having stated thus much with respect to the Commons, I am to read to
+your Lordships the resolution which the Commons have come to upon this
+great occasion, and upon which I shall take the liberty to say a very
+few words.
+
+My Lords, the Commons have resolved last night, and I did not see the
+resolution till this morning, "that no direction or authority was given
+by this House to the committee appointed to manage the impeachment
+against Warren Hastings, Esquire, to make any charge or allegation
+against the said Warren Hastings respecting the condemnation or
+execution of Nundcomar; and that the words spoken by the Right Honorable
+Edmund Burke, one of the said managers, _videlicet_, that he (meaning
+Mr. Hastings) murdered that man (meaning Nundcomar) by the hands of Sir
+Elijah Impey, ought not to have been spoken."
+
+My Lords, this is the resolution of the House of Commons. Your
+Lordships well know and remember my having used such or similar words,
+and the end and purpose for which I used them. I owe a few words of
+explanation to the Commons of Great Britain, who attend in a committee
+of the whole House to be the observers and spectators of my conduct. I
+owe it to your Lordships, I owe it to this great auditory, I owe it to
+the present times and to posterity, to make some apology for a
+proceeding which has drawn upon me the disavowal of the House which I
+represent. Your Lordships will remember that this charge which I have
+opened to your Lordships is primarily a charge founded upon the evidence
+of the Rajah Nundcomar; and consequently I thought myself obliged, I
+thought it a part of my duty, to support the credit of that person, who
+is the principal evidence to support the direct charge that is brought
+before your Lordships. I knew that Mr. Hastings, in his anticipated
+defence before the House of Commons, had attempted to shake the credit
+of that witness. I therefore thought myself justified in informing your
+Lordships, and in warning him, that, if he did attempt to shake the
+credit of an important witness against him by an allegation of his
+having been condemned and executed for a forgery, I would endeavor to
+support his credit by attacking that very prosecution which brought on
+that condemnation and that execution; and that I did consider it, and
+would lay grounds before your Lordships to prove it, to be a murder
+committed, instead of a justification set up, or that ought to be set
+up.
+
+Now, my Lords, I am ordered by the Commons no longer to persist in that
+declaration; and I, who know nothing in this place, and ought to know
+nothing in this place, but obedience to the Commons, do mean, when Mr.
+Hastings makes that objection (if he shall be advised to make it)
+against the credit of Rajah Nundcomar, not thus to support that credit;
+and therefore that objection to the credit of the witness must go
+unrefuted by me. My Lords, I must admit, perhaps against my private
+judgment, (but that is of no consideration for your Lordships, when
+opposed to the judgment of the House of Commons,) or, at least, not
+contest, that a first minister of state, in a great kingdom, who had the
+benefit of the administration, and of the entire and absolute command of
+a revenue of fifteen hundred thousand pounds a year, had been guilty of
+a paltry forgery in Calcutta; that this man, who had been guilty of this
+paltry forgery, had waited for his sentence and his punishment, till a
+body of English judges, armed with an English statute, came to Calcutta;
+and that this happened at the very happy nick and moment when he was
+accusing Mr. Hastings of the bribery with which we now in the name of
+the Commons charge him; that it was owing to an entirely fortuitous
+concurrence of circumstances, in which Mr. Hastings had no share, or
+that it was owing to something beyond this, something that is rather
+pious than fortuitous, namely, that, as Mr. Hastings tells you himself,
+"all persuasions of men were impressed with a superstitious belief that
+a fortunate influence directed all my actions to their destined ends."
+I, not being at that time infected with the superstition, and
+considering what I thought Mr. Hastings's guilt to be, and what I must
+prove it to be as well as I can, did not believe that Providence did
+watch over Mr. Hastings, so as in the nick of time, like a god in a
+machine, to come down to save him in the moment of his imminent peril
+and distress: I did not think so, but I must not say so.
+
+But now, to show that it was not weakly, loosely, or idly, that I took
+up this business, or that I anticipated a defence which it was not
+probable for Mr. Hastings to make, (and I wish to speak to your
+Lordships in the first instance, but to the Commons in the next,) I will
+read part of Mr. Hastings's defence before the House of Commons: it is
+in evidence before your Lordships. He says,--"My accuser" (meaning
+myself, then acting as a private member of Parliament) "charges me with
+'the receipt of large sums of money, corruptly taken before the
+promulgation of the Regulating Act of 1773, contrary to my covenants
+with the Company, and with the receipt of very large sums taken since,
+in defiance of that law, and contrary to my declared sense of its
+provisions.' And he ushers in this charge in the following pompous
+diction: 'That in March, 1775, the late Rajah Nundcomar, a native Hindoo
+of the highest caste in his religion, and of the highest rank in
+society, by the offices which he had held under the country government,
+did lay before the Council an account of various sums of money,' &c. It
+would naturally strike every person ignorant of the character of
+Nundcomar, that an accusation made by a person of the highest caste in
+his religion and of the highest rank by his offices demanded particular
+notice, and acquired a considerable degree of credit, from a prevalent
+association of ideas that a nice sense of honor is connected with an
+elevated rank of life: but when this honorable House is informed that my
+accuser knew (though he suppressed the facts) that this person, of high
+rank and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to honor, veracity,
+and credit,--that there are facts recorded on the very Proceedings which
+my accuser partially quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a
+most flagrant forgery of letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram
+ul Dowlah, (independent of the forgery for which he suffered death,) of
+the most deliberate treachery to the state, for which he was confined,
+by the orders of the Court of Directors, to the limits of the town of
+Calcutta, in order to prevent his dangerous intrigues, and of having
+violated every principle of common honesty in private life,--I say, when
+this honorable House is acquainted it is from mutilated and garbled
+assertions, founded on the testimony of such an evidence, without the
+whole matter being fairly stated, I do hope and trust it will be
+sufficient for them to reject _now_ these vague and unsupported charges,
+in like manner as they were _before_ rejected by the Court of Directors
+and his Majesty's ministers, when they were first made by General
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis.--I must here interrupt the
+course of my defence to explain on what grounds I employed or had any
+connection with a man of so flagitious a character as Nundcomar."
+
+My Lords, I hope this was a good and reasonable ground for me to
+anticipate the defence which Mr. Hastings would make in this
+House,--namely, on the known, recognized, infamous character of
+Nundcomar, with regard to certain proceedings there charged at large,
+with regard to one forgery for which he suffered and two other forgeries
+with which Mr. Hastings charged him. I, who found that the Commons of
+Great Britain had received that very identical charge of Nundcomar, and
+given it to me in trust to make it good, did naturally, I hope
+excusably, (for that is the only ground upon which I stand,) endeavor to
+support that credit upon which the House acted. I hope I did so; and I
+hope that the goodness of that intention may excuse me, if I went a
+little too far on that occasion. I would have endeavored to support that
+credit, which it was much Mr. Hastings's interest to shake, and which he
+had before attempted to shake.
+
+Your Lordships will have the goodness to suppose me now making my
+apology, and by no manner of means intending to persist either in this,
+or in anything which the House of Commons shall desire me not to declare
+in their name. But the House of Commons has not denied me the liberty to
+make you this just apology: God forbid they should! for they would be
+guilty of great injustice, if they did. The House of Commons, whom I
+represent, will likewise excuse me, their representative, whilst I have
+been endeavoring to support their characters in the face of the world,
+and to make an apology, and only an humble apology, for my conduct, for
+having considered that act in the light that I represented it,--and
+which I did merely from my private opinion, without any formal
+instruction from the House. For there is no doubt that the House is
+perfectly right, inasmuch as the House did neither formally instruct me
+nor at all forbid my making use of such an argument; and therefore I
+have given your Lordships the reason why it was fit to make use of such
+argument,--if it was right to make use of it. I am in the memory of your
+Lordships that I did conceive it to be relevant, and it was by the
+poverty of the language I was led to express my private feelings under
+the name of a _murder_. For, if the language had furnished me, under the
+impression of those feelings, with a word sufficient to convey the
+complicated atrocity of that act, as I felt it in my mind, I would not
+have made use of the word _murder_. It was on account of the language
+furnishing me with no other I was obliged to use that word. Your
+Lordships do not imagine, I hope, that I used that word in any other
+than a moral and popular sense, or that I used it in the legal and
+technical sense of the word _murder_. Your Lordships know that I could
+not bring before this bar any commoner of Great Britain on a charge for
+murder. I am not so ignorant of the laws and constitution of my country.
+I expressed an act which I conceived to be of an atrocious and evil
+nature, and partaking of some of the moral evil consequences of that
+crime. What led me into that error? Nine years' meditation upon that
+subject.
+
+My Lords, the prisoner at the bar in the year 1780 sent a petition to
+the House of Commons complaining of that very chief-justice, Sir Elijah
+Impey. The House of Commons, who then had some trust in me, as they have
+some trust still, did order me, along with persons more wise and
+judicious than myself, several of whom stand near me, to make an inquiry
+into the state of the justice of that country. The consequence of that
+inquiry was, that we began to conceive a very bad opinion both of the
+complainant and defendant in that business,--that we found the English
+justice to be, as we thought it, and reported it to the House, a
+grievance, instead of a redress, to the people of India. I could bring
+before your Lordships, if I did not spare your patience, whole volumes
+of reports, whole bodies of evidence, which, in the progress we have
+made in the course of eight or nine years, brought to my mind such a
+conviction as will never be torn from my heart but with my life; and I
+should have no heart that was fit to lodge any honest sentiment, if I
+departed from my opinion upon that occasion. But when I declare my own
+firm opinion upon it,--when I declare the reasons that led me to
+it,--when I mention the long meditation that preceded my founding a
+judgment upon it, the strict inquiry, the many hours and days spent in
+consideration, collation, and comparison,--I trust that infirmity which
+could be actuated by no malice to one party or the other may be excused;
+I trust that I shall meet with this indulgence, when your Lordships
+consider, that, as far as you know me, as far as my public services for
+many years account for me, I am a man of a slow, laborious, inquisitive
+temper, that I do seldom leave a pursuit without leaving marks, perhaps
+of my weakness, but leaving marks of that labor, and that, in
+consequence of that labor, I made that affirmation, and thought the
+nature of the cause obliged me to support and substantiate it. It is
+true that those who sent me here have sagacity to decide upon the
+subject in a week; they can in one week discover the errors of my labors
+for nine years.
+
+Now that I have made this apology to you, I assure you, you shall never
+hear me, either in my own name here, much less in the name of the
+Commons, urge one thing to you in support of the credit of Nundcomar
+grounded upon that judgment, until the House shall instruct and order me
+otherwise; because I know, that, when I can discover their sentiments,
+I ought to know nothing here but what is in strict and literal obedience
+to them.
+
+My Lords, another thing might make me, perhaps, a little willing to be
+admitted to the proof of what I advanced, and that is, the very answer
+of Mr. Hastings to this charge, which the House of Commons, however,
+have adopted, and therefore in some degree purified. "To the malicious
+part of this charge, which is the condemnation of Nundcomar for a
+forgery, I do declare, in the most solemn and unreserved manner, that I
+had no concern, either directly or indirectly, in the apprehending,
+prosecuting, or executing of Nundcomar. He suffered for a crime of
+forgery which he had committed in a private trust that was delegated to
+him, and for which he had been prosecuted in the dewanny courts of the
+country before the institution of the Supreme Court of Judicature. To
+adduce this circumstance, therefore, as a confirmation of what was
+before suspicious from his general depravity of character, is just as
+reasonable as to assert that the accusations of Empson and Dudley were
+confirmed because they suffered death for their atrocious acts."
+
+My Lords, this was Mr. Hastings's defence before the House of Commons,
+and it is now in evidence before your Lordships. In this defence, he
+supposes the charge which was made originally before the Commons, and
+which the Commons voted, (though afterwards, for the convenience of
+shortening it, the affair was brought before your Lordships in the way
+in which it is,)--he supposes, I say, the whole to proceed from a
+malicious intention; and I hope your Lordships will not think, and I
+hope the Commons, reconsidering this matter, will not think, that, when
+such an imputation of malice was made for the purpose of repelling this
+corroborating argument which was used in the House of Commons to prove
+his guilt, I was wrong in attempting to support the House of Commons
+against his imputation of malice.
+
+I must observe where I am limited and where I am not. I am limited,
+strictly, fully, (and your Lordships and my country, who hear me, will
+judge how faithfully I shall adhere to that limitation,) not to support
+the credit of Nundcomar by any allegation against Mr. Hastings
+respecting his condemnation or execution; but I am not at all limited
+from endeavoring to support his credit against Mr. Hastings's charges of
+other forgeries, and from showing you, what I hope to show you clearly
+in a few words, that Nundcomar cannot be presumed guilty of forgery with
+more probability than Mr. Hastings is guilty of bringing forward a light
+and dangerous (for I use no other words than a light and dangerous)
+charge of forgery, when it serves his purpose. Mr. Hastings charges
+Nundcomar with two other forgeries. "These two forgeries," he says, "are
+facts recorded in the very Proceedings which my accuser partially
+quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery
+of a letter from Munny Begum, and of a letter from the Nabob Yeteram ul
+Dowlah"; and therefore he infers malice in those who impute anything
+improper to him, knowing that the proof stood so. Here he asserts that
+there are records before the House of Commons, and on the Company's
+Proceedings and Consultations, proving Nundcomar to have been guilty of
+these two forgeries. Turn over the next page of his printed defence, and
+you find a very extraordinary thing. You would have imagined that this
+forgery of a letter from Munny Begum, which, he says, is recognized and
+proved on the Journals, was a forgery charged by Munny Begum herself, or
+by somebody on her part, or some person concerned in this business.
+There is no other charge of it whatever, but the charge of Warren
+Hastings himself. He wants you to discredit a man for forgery upon no
+evidence under heaven but that of his own, who thinks proper, without
+any sort of authority, without any sort of reference, without any sort
+of collateral evidence, to charge a man with that very direct forgery.
+"You are," he says, "well informed of the reasons which first induced me
+to give any share of my confidence to Nundcomar, with whose character I
+was acquainted by an experience of many years. The means which he
+himself took to acquire it were peculiar to himself. He sent a messenger
+to me at Madras, on the first news of my appointment to this Presidency,
+with pretended letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah,
+the brother of the Nabob Jaffier Ali Khan, filled with bitter invectives
+against Mahomed Reza Khan, and of as warm recommendations, as I
+recollect, of Nundcomar. I have been since informed by the Begum that
+the letter which bore her seal was a complete forgery, and that she was
+totally unacquainted with the use which had been made of her name till I
+informed her of it. Juggut Chund, Nundcomar's son-in-law, was sent to
+her expressly to entreat her not to divulge it. Mr. Middleton, whom she
+consulted on the occasion, can attest the truth of this story."
+
+Mr. Middleton is dead, my Lords. This is not the Mr. Middleton whom your
+Lordships have heard and know well in this House, but a brother of that
+Mr. Middleton, who is since dead. Your Lordships find, when we refer to
+the records of the Company for the proof of this forgery, that there is
+no other than the unsupported assertion of Mr. Hastings himself that he
+was guilty of it. Now that was bad enough; but then hear the rest. Mr.
+Hastings has charged this unhappy man, whom we must not defend, with
+another forgery; he has charged him with a forgery of a letter from
+Yeteram ul Dowlah to Mr. Hastings. Now you would imagine that he would
+have given his own authority at least for that assertion, which he says
+was proved. He goes on and says, "I have not yet had the curiosity to
+inquire of the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah whether his letter was of the
+same stamp; but I cannot doubt it."
+
+Now here he begins, in this very defence which is before your Lordships,
+to charge a forgery upon the credit of Munny Begum, without supporting
+it even by his own testimony,--and another forgery in the name of
+Yeteram ul Dowlah, which he said he had not even the curiosity to
+inquire into, and yet desires you, at the same time, to believe it to be
+proved. Good God! in what condition do men of the first character and
+situation in that country stand, when we have here delivered to us, as a
+record of the Company, Mr. Hastings's own assertions, saying that these
+forgeries were proved, though you have for the first nothing but his own
+unsupported assertion, and for the second his declaration only that he
+had not the curiosity to inquire into it! I am not forbidden by the
+Commons to state how and on what slight grounds Warren Hastings charges
+the natives of the country with forgery; neither am I forbidden to bring
+forward the accusation which Mr. Hastings made against Nundcomar for a
+conspiracy, nor the event of it, nor any circumstance relative to it. I
+shall therefore proceed in the best manner I can. There was a period,
+among the revolutions of philosophy, when there was an opinion, that, if
+a man lost one limb or organ, the strength of that which was lost
+retired into what was left. My Lords, if we are straitened in this, then
+our vigor will be redoubled in the rest, and we shall use it with double
+force. If the top and point of the sword is broken off, we shall take
+the hilt in our hand, and fight with whatever remains of the weapon
+against bribery, corruption, and peculation; and we shall use double
+diligence under any restraint which the wisdom of the Commons may lay
+upon us, or your Lordships' wisdom may oblige us to submit to.
+
+Having gone through this business, and shown in what manner I am
+restrained, where I am not to repel Mr. Hastings's defence, and where I
+am left at large to do it, I shall submit to the strict injunction with
+the utmost possible humility, and enjoy the liberty which is left to me
+with vigor, with propriety, and with discretion, I trust.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Lords, when the circumstance happened which has given occasion to the
+long parenthesis by which my discourse has been interrupted, I remember
+I was beginning to open to your Lordships the second period of Mr.
+Hastings's scheme and system of bribery. My Lords, his bribery is so
+extensive, and has had such a variety in it, that it must be
+distinguished not only with regard to its kind, but must be likewise
+distinguished according to the periods of bribery and the epochas of
+peculation committed by him. In the first of those periods we shall
+prove to your Lordships, I believe, without the aids that we hoped for,
+(your Lordships allowing, as I trust you will do, a good deal for our
+situation,)--we shall be able, I say, to prove that Mr. Hastings took,
+as a bribe for appointing Munny Begum, three lac and an half of rupees;
+we shall prove the taking at the same time the Rajeshaye bribes. Mr.
+Hastings at that time followed bribery in a natural manner: he took a
+bribe; he took it as large as he could; he concealed it as well as he
+could; and he got out of it by artifice or boldness, by use of trick or
+use of power, just as he was enabled: he acted like a wild, natural man,
+void of instruction, discipline, and art.
+
+The second period opened another system of bribery. About this time he
+began to think (from what communication your Lordships may guess) of
+other means by which, when he could no longer conceal any bribe that he
+had received, he not only might exempt himself from the charge and the
+punishment of guilt, but might convert it into a kind of merit, and,
+instead of a breaker of laws, a violator of his trust, a receiver of
+scandalous bribes, a peculator of the first magnitude, might make
+himself to be considered as a great, distinguishing, eminent financier,
+a collector of revenue in new and extraordinary ways, and that we should
+thus at once praise his diligence, industry, and ingenuity. The scheme
+he set on foot was this: he pretended that the Company could not exist
+upon principles of strict justice, (for so he expresses it,) and that
+their affairs, in many cases, could not be so well accommodated by a
+regular revenue as by privately taking money, which was to be applied to
+their service by the person who took it, at his discretion. This was the
+principle he laid down. It would hardly be believed, I imagine, unless
+strong proof appeared, that any man could be so daring as to hold up
+such a resource to a regular government, which had three million of
+known, avowed, a great part of it territorial, revenue. But it is
+necessary, it seems, to piece out the lion's skin with a fox's tail,--to
+tack on a little piece of bribery and a little piece of peculation, in
+order to help out the resources of a great and flourishing state; that
+they should have in the knavery of their servants, in the breach of
+their laws, and in the entire defiance of their covenants, a real
+resource applicable to their necessities, of which they were not to
+judge, but the persons who were to take the bribes; and that the bribes
+thus taken were, by a mental reservation, a private intention in the
+mind of the taker, unknown to the giver, to be some time or other, in
+some way or other, applied to the public service. The taking such bribes
+was to become a justifiable act, in consequence of that reservation in
+the mind of the person who took them; and he was not to be called to
+account for them in any other way than as he thought fit.
+
+My Lords, an act of Parliament passed in the year 1773, the whole drift
+of which, I may say, was to prevent bribery, peculation, and extortion
+in the Company's servants; and the act was penned, I think, with as much
+strictness and rigor as ever act was penned. The 24th clause of Chap.
+63, 13 Geo. III., has the following enactment: "And be it further
+enacted by the authority aforesaid, that, from and after the first day
+of August, 1774, no person holding or exercising any civil or military
+office under the crown, or the said United Company, in the East Indies,
+shall accept, receive, or take, directly or indirectly, by himself, or
+any other person or persons on his behalf, or for his use or benefit,
+of and from any of the Indian princes or powers, or their ministers or
+agents, or any of the natives of Asia, any present, gift, donation,
+gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise, upon any account, or on any
+pretence whatsoever, or any promise or engagement for any present, gift,
+donation, gratuity, or reward: and if any person, holding or exercising
+any such civil or military office, shall be guilty of any such offence,
+and shall be thereof legally convicted," &c., &c. It then imposes the
+penalties: and your Lordships see that human wisdom cannot pen an act
+more strongly directed against taking bribes upon any pretence whatever.
+
+This act of Parliament was in affirmance of the covenant entered into by
+the servants of the Company, and of the explicit orders of the Company,
+which forbid any person whatever in trust, "directly or indirectly, to
+accept, take, or receive, or agree to accept, take, or receive, any
+gift, reward, gratuity, allowance, donation, or compensation, in money,
+effects, jewels, _or otherwise howsoever_, from any of the Indian
+princes, sovereigns, subahs, or nabobs, or any of their ministers,
+servants, or agents, exceeding the value of four thousand rupees, &c.,
+&c. And that he, the said Warren Hastings, shall and will convey,
+assign, and make over to the said United Company, for their sole and
+proper use and benefit, all and every such gifts, rewards, gratuities,
+allowances, donations, or compensations whatsoever, which, contrary to
+the true intent and meaning of these presents, shall come into the
+hands, possession, or power of the said Warren Hastings, or any other
+person or persons in trust for him or for his use."
+
+The nature of the covenant, the act of Parliament, and the Company's
+orders are clear. First, they have not forbidden their
+Governor-General, nor any of their Governors, to take and accept from
+the princes of the country, openly and publicly, for their use, any
+territories, lands, sums of money, or other donations, which may be
+offered in consequence of treaty or otherwise. It was necessary to
+distinguish this from every other species of acceptance, because many
+occasions occurred in which fines were paid to the Company in
+consequence of treaties; and it was necessary to authorize the receipt
+of the same in the Company's treasury, as an open and known proceeding.
+It was never dreamed that this should justify the taking of bribes,
+privately and clandestinely, by the Governor, or any other servant of
+the Company, for the purpose of its future application to the Company's
+use. It is declared that all such bribes and money received should be
+the property of the Company. And why? As a means of recovering them out
+of the corrupt hands that had taken them. And therefore this was not a
+license for bribery, but a prohibitory and penal clause, providing the
+means of coercion, and making the prohibition stronger. Now Mr. Hastings
+has found out that this very coercive clause, which was made in order to
+enable his superiors to get at him and punish him for bribery, is a
+license for him to receive bribes. He is not only a practitioner of
+bribery, but a professor, a doctor upon the subject. His opinion is,
+that he might take presents or bribes to himself; he considers the penal
+clause which the Company attached to their prohibition, and by which all
+such bribes are constructively declared to be theirs, in order to
+recover them out of his hands, as a license to receive bribes, to extort
+money; and he goes with the very prohibition in his hand, the very
+means by which he was to be restrained, to exercise an unlimited
+bribery, peculation, and extortion over the unhappy natives of the
+country.
+
+The moment he finds that the Company has got a scent of any one of his
+bribes, he comes forward and says, "To be sure, I took it as a bribe; I
+admit the party gave me it as a bribe: I concealed it for a time,
+because I thought it was for the interest of the Company to conceal it;
+but I had a secret intention, in my own mind, of applying it to their
+service: you shall have it; but you shall have it as I please, and when
+I please; and this bribe becomes sanctified the moment I think fit to
+apply it to your service." Now can it be supposed that the India
+Company, or that the act of Parliament, meant, by declaring that the
+property taken by a corrupt servant, contrary to the true intent of his
+covenant, was theirs, to give a license to take such property,--and that
+one mode of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very covenants
+which were meant to prevent extortion, peculation, and corruption? What
+sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of
+bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist
+upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited
+by the violation of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? It is
+an odd sort of body to be so fed and so supported. This new constitution
+of revenue that he has made is indeed a very singular contrivance. It is
+a revenue to be collected by any officer of the Company, (for they are
+all alike forbidden, and all alike permitted,)--to be collected by any
+person, from any person, at any time, in any proportion, by any means,
+and in any way he pleases; and to be accounted for, or not to be
+accounted for, at the pleasure of the collector, and, if applied to
+their use, to be applied at his discretion, and not at the discretion of
+his employers. I will venture to say that such a system of revenue never
+was before thought of. The next part is an exchequer, which he has
+formed, corresponding with it. You will find the board of exchequer made
+up of officers ostensibly in the Company's service, of their public
+accountant and public treasurer, whom Mr. Hastings uses as an accountant
+and treasurer of bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to
+himself, acting in no public manner, and never acting but upon his
+requisition, concealing all his frauds and artifices to prevent
+detection and discovery. In short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may
+be permitted to repeat the words I made use of on a former occasion,
+extortion is the assessor, in which fraud is the treasurer, confusion
+the accountant, oblivion the remembrancer. That these are not mere
+words, I will exemplify as I go through the detail: I will show you that
+every one of the things I have stated are truths, in fact, and that
+these men are bound by the condition of their recognized fidelity to Mr.
+Hastings to keep back his secrets, to change the accounts, to alter the
+items, to make him debtor or creditor at pleasure, and by that means to
+throw the whole system of the Company's accounts into confusion.
+
+I have shown the impossibility of the Company's having intended to
+authorize such a revenue, much less such a constitution of it as Mr.
+Hastings has drawn from the very prohibitions of bribery, and such an
+exchequer as he has formed upon the principles I have stated. You will
+not dishonor the legislature or the Company, be it what it may, by
+thinking that either of them could give any sanction to it. Indeed, you
+will not think that such a device could ever enter into the head of any
+rational man. You are, then, to judge whether it is not a device to
+cover guilt, to prevent detection by destroying the means of it; and at
+the same time your Lordships will judge whether the evidence we bring
+you to prove that revenue is a mere pretext be not stronger than the
+strange, absurd reasons which he has produced for forming this new plan
+of an exchequer of bribery.
+
+My Lords, I am now going to read to you a letter in which Mr. Hastings
+declares his opinion upon the operation of the act, which he now has
+found the means, as he thinks, of evading. My Lords, I will tell you, to
+save you a good deal of reading, that there was certain prize-money
+given by Sujah ul Dowlah to a body of the Company's troops serving in
+the field,--that this prize-money was to be distributed among them; but
+upon application being made to Mr. Hastings for his opinion and sanction
+in the distribution, Mr. Hastings at first seemed inclined to give way
+to it, but afterwards, upon reading and considering the act of
+Parliament, before he allowed the soldiery to receive this public
+donation, he thus describes his opinion of the operation of the act.
+
+
+_Extract of a Letter from Mr. Hastings to Colonel Champion, 31 August,
+1774._
+
+"Upon a reference to the new act of Parliament, I was much disappointed
+and sorry to find that our intentions were entirely defeated by a clause
+in the act, (to be in force after the 1st of August, 1774,) which
+divests us of the power to grant, and expressly prohibits the army to
+receive, the Nabob's intended donation. Agreeable to the positive sense
+of this clause, notwithstanding it is expressed individually, there is
+not a doubt but the army is included with all other persons in the
+prohibition from receiving presents or donations; a confirmation of
+which is, that in the clause of exceptions, wherein 'counsellors-at-law,
+physicians, surgeons, and chaplains are permitted to receive the fees
+annexed to their profession,' no mention whatever is made of any
+latitude given to the army, or any circumstances wherein it would be
+allowable for them to receive presents.... This unlucky discovery of an
+exclusion by act of Parliament, which admits of no abatement or evasion
+wherever its authority extends, renders a revisal of our proceedings
+necessary, and leaves no option to our decision. It is not like the
+ordinances of the Court of Directors, where a favorable construction may
+be put, and some room is left for the interposition of the authority
+vested in ourselves,--but positive and decisive, admitting neither of
+refinement nor misconstruction. I should be happy, if in this instance a
+method could be devised of setting the act aside, which I should most
+willingly embrace; but, in my opinion, an opposition would be to incur
+the penalty."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings considered this act to be a most
+unlucky discovery: indeed, as long as it remained in force, it would
+have been unlucky for him, because it would have destroyed one of the
+principal sources of his illegal profits. Why does he consider it
+unlucky? Because it admits of no reservation, no exception, no
+refinement whatever, but is clear, positive, decisive. Now in what case
+was it that Mr. Hastings made this determination? In the case of a
+donation publicly offered to an army serving in the field by a prince
+then independent of the Company. If ever there was a circumstance in
+which any refinement, any favorable construction of the act could be
+used, it was in favor of a body of men serving in the field, fighting
+for their country, spilling their blood for it, suffering all the
+inconveniences of that climate. It was undoubtedly voluntarily offered
+to them by the party, in the height of victory, and enriched by the
+plunder of whole provinces. I believe your Lordships will agree with me,
+that, if any relaxation, any evasion, of an act of Parliament could be
+allowed, if the intention of the legislature could for a moment be
+trifled with, or supposed for a moment doubtful, it was in this
+instance; and yet, upon the rigor of the act, Mr. Hastings refuses that
+army the price of their blood, money won solely almost by their arms for
+a prince who had acquired millions by their bravery, fidelity, and
+sufferings. This was the case in which Mr. Hastings refused a public
+donation to the army; and from that day to this they have never received
+it.
+
+If the receipt of this public donation could be thus forbidden, whence
+has Mr. Hastings since learned that he may privately take money, and
+take it not only from princes, and persons in power, and abounding in
+wealth, but, as we shall prove, from persons in a comparative degree of
+penury and distress? that he could take it from persons in office and
+trust, whose power gave them the means of ruining the people for the
+purpose of enabling themselves to pay it? Consider in what a situation
+the Company must be, if the Governor-General can form such a secret
+exchequer of direct bribes, given _eo nomine_ as bribes, and accepted as
+such, by the parties concerned in the transaction, to be discovered only
+by himself, and with only the inward reservation that I have spoken of.
+
+In the first place, if Mr. Hastings should die without having made a
+discovery of all his bribes, or if any other servant of the Company
+should imitate his example without his heroic good intentions in doing
+such villanous acts, how is the Company to recover the bribe-money? The
+receivers need not divulge it till they think fit; and the moment an
+informer comes, that informer is ruined. He comes, for instance, to the
+Governor-General and Council, and charges, say, not Mr. Hastings, but
+the head of the Board of Revenue, with receiving a bribe. "Receive a
+bribe? So I did; but it was with an intention of applying it to the
+Company's service. There I nick the informer: I am beforehand with him:
+the bribe is sanctified by my inward jesuitical intention. I will make a
+merit of it with the Company. I have received 40,000_l._ as a bribe;
+there it is for you: I am acquitted; I am a meritorious servant: let the
+informer go and seek his remedy as he can." Now, if an informer is once
+instructed that a person who receives bribes can turn them into merit,
+and take away his action from him, do you think that you ever will or
+can discover any one bribe? But what is still worse, by this method
+disclose but one bribe, and you secure all the rest that you possibly
+can receive upon any occasion. For instance, strong report prevails that
+a bribe of 40,000_l._ has been given, and the receiver expects that
+information will be laid against him. He acknowledges that he has
+received a bribe of 40,000_l._, but says that it was for the service of
+the Company, and that it is carried to their account. And thus, by
+stating that he has taken some money which he has accounted for, but
+concealing from whom that money came, which is exactly Mr. Hastings's
+case, if at last an information should be laid before the Company of a
+specific bribe having been received of 40,000_l._, it is said by the
+receiver, "Lord! this is the 40,000_l._ I told you of: it is broken into
+fragments, paid by instalments; and you have taken it and put it into
+your own coffers."
+
+Again, suppose him to take it through the hand of an agent, such as
+Gunga Govind Sing, and that this agent, who, as we have lately
+discovered, out of a bribe of 40,000_l._, which Mr. Hastings was to have
+received, kept back half of it, falls into their debt like him: I desire
+to know what the Company can do in such a case. Gunga Govind Sing has
+entered into no covenants with the Company. There is no trace of his
+having this money, except what Mr. Hastings chooses to tell. If he is
+called upon to refund it to the Company, he may say he never received
+it, that he was never ordered to extort this money from the people; or
+if he was under any covenant not to take money, he may set up this
+defence: "I am forbidden to receive money; and I will not make a
+declaration which will subject me to penalties": or he may say in India,
+before the Supreme Court, "I have paid the bribe all to Mr. Hastings";
+and then there must be a bill and suit there, a bill and suit here, and
+by that means, having one party on one side the water and the other
+party on the other, the Company may never come to a discovery of it. And
+that in fact this is the way in which one of his great bribe-agents has
+acted I shall prove to your Lordships by evidence.
+
+Mr. Hastings had squeezed out of a miserable country a bribe of
+40,000_l._, of which he was enabled to bring to the account of the
+Company only 20,000_l._, and of which we should not even have known the
+existence, if the inquiries pursued with great diligence by the House of
+Commons had not extorted the discovery: and even now that we know the
+fact, we can never get at the money; the Company can never receive it;
+and before the House had squeezed out of him that some such money had
+been received, he never once told the Court of Directors that his black
+bribe-agent, whom he recommended to their service, had cheated both them
+and him of 20,000_l._ out of the fund of the bribe-revenue. If it be
+asked, Where is the record of this? Record there is none. In what office
+is it entered? It is entered in no office; it is mentioned as privately
+received for the Company's benefit: and you shall now further see what a
+charming office of receipt and account this new exchequer of Mr.
+Hastings's is.
+
+For there is another and a more serious circumstance attending this
+business. Every one knows, that, by the law of this, and, I believe, of
+every country, any money which is taken illegally from any person, as
+every bribe or sum of money extorted or paid without consideration is,
+belongs to the person who paid it, and he may bring his action for it,
+and recover it. Then see how the Company stands. The Company receives a
+bribe of 40,000_l._ by Mr. Hastings; it is carried to its account; it
+turns bribery into a revenue; it sanctifies it. In the mean time, the
+man from whom this money is illegally taken sues Mr. Hastings. Must not
+he recover of Mr. Hastings? Then, if so, must not Mr. Hastings recover
+it again from the Company? The Company undoubtedly is answerable for it.
+And here is a revenue which every man who has paid it may drag out of
+the treasury again. Mr. Hastings's donations of his bribes to the
+treasury are liable to be torn from it at pleasure by every man who
+gives the money. First it may be torn from him who receives it; and then
+he may recover it from the treasury, to which he has given it.
+
+But admitting that the taking of bribes can be sanctified by their
+becoming the property of the Company, it may still be asked, For what
+end and purpose has the Company covenanted with Mr. Hastings that money
+taken extorsively shall belong to the Company? Is it that satisfaction
+and reparation may be awarded against the said Warren Hastings to the
+said Company for their own benefit? No: it is for the benefit of the
+injured persons; and it is to be carried to the Company's account, "but
+in trust, nevertheless, and to the intent that the said Company may and
+do render and pay over the moneys received or recovered by them to the
+parties injured or defrauded, which the said Company accordingly hereby
+agree and covenant to do." Now here is a revenue to be received by Mr.
+Hastings for the Company's use, applied at his discretion to that use,
+and which the Company has previously covenanted to restore to the
+persons that are injured and damaged. This is a revenue which is to be
+torn away by the action of any person,--a revenue which they must
+return back to the person complaining, as they in justice ought to do:
+for no nation ever avowed making a revenue out of bribery and
+peculation. They are, then, to restore it back again. But how can they
+restore it? Mr. Hastings has applied it: he has given it in presents to
+princes,--laid it out in budgeros,--in pen, ink, and wax,--in salaries
+to secretaries: he has laid it out just in any way he pleased: and the
+India Company, who have covenanted to restore all this money to the
+persons from whom it came, are deprived of all means of performing so
+just a duty. Therefore I dismiss the idea that any man so acting could
+have had a good intention in his mind: the supposition is too weak,
+senseless, and absurd. It was only in a desperate cause that he made a
+desperate attempt: for we shall prove that he never made a disclosure
+without thinking that a discovery had been previously made or was likely
+to be made, together with an exposure of all the circumstances of his
+wicked and abominable concealment.
+
+You will see the history of this new scheme of bribery, by which Mr.
+Hastings contrived by avowing some bribes to cover others, attempted to
+outface his delinquency, and, if possible, to reconcile a weak breach of
+the laws with a sort of spirited observance of them, and to become
+infamous for the good of his country.
+
+The first appearance of this practice of bribery was in a letter of the
+29th of November, 1780. The cause which led to the discovery was a
+dispute between him and Mr. Francis at the board, in consequence of a
+very handsome offer made by Mr. Hastings to the board relative to a
+measure proposed by him, to which he found one objection to be the
+money that it would cost. He made the most generous and handsome offer,
+as it stands upon record, that perhaps any man ever made,--namely, that
+he would defray the expense out of his own private cash, and that he had
+deposited with the treasurer two lac of rupees. This was in June, 1780,
+and Mr. Francis soon after returned to Europe. I need not inform your
+Lordships, that Mr. Hastings had before this time been charged with
+bribery and peculation by General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr.
+Francis. He suspected that Mr. Francis, then going to Europe, would
+confirm this charge by the suspicious nature and circumstances of this
+generous offer; and this suspicion was increased by the connection which
+he supposed, and which we can prove he thought, Mr. Francis had with
+Cheyt Sing. Apprehending, therefore, that he might discover and bring
+the bribe to light some way or other, he resolved to anticipate any such
+discovery by declaring, upon the 29th of November, that this money was
+not his own. I will mention to your Lordships hereafter the
+circumstances of this money. He says, "My present reason for adverting
+to my conduct," (that is, his offer of two lac of rupees out of his own
+private cash for the Company's service, upon the 26th of June, 1780,)
+"on the occasion I have mentioned, is to obviate the false conclusions
+or purposed misrepresentations which may be made of it, either as an
+artifice of ostentation or as the effect of corrupt influence, by
+assuring you that the money, by whatever means it came into your
+possession, was not my own,--that I had myself no right to it, nor would
+or could have received it, but for the occasion, which prompted me to
+avail myself of the accidental means which were at that instant
+afforded me of accepting and converting it to the property and use of
+the Company: and with this brief apology I shall dismiss the subject."
+
+My Lords, you see what an account Mr. Hastings has given of some obscure
+transaction by which he contradicts the record. For, on the 26th of
+June, he generously, nobly, full of enthusiasm for their service, offers
+to the Company money of his own. On the 29th of November he tells the
+Court of Directors that the money he offered on the former day was not
+his own,--that his assertion was totally false,--that the money was not
+his,--that he had no right to receive it,--and that he would not have
+received it, but for the occasion, which prompted him to avail himself
+of the accidental means which at that instant offered.
+
+Such is the account sent by their Governor in India, acting as an
+accountant, to the Company,--a company with whom everything is matter of
+account. He tells them, indeed, that the sum he had offered was not his
+own,--that he had no right to it,--and that he would not have taken it,
+if he had not been greatly tempted by the occasion; but he never tells
+them by what means he came at it, the person from whom he received it,
+the occasion upon which he received it, (whether justifiable or not,) or
+any one circumstance under heaven relative to it. This is a very
+extraordinary account to give to the public of a sum which we find to be
+somewhere above twenty thousand pounds, taken by Mr. Hastings in some
+way or other. He set the Company blindly groping in the dark by the very
+pretended light, the ignis-fatuus, which he held out to them: for at
+that time all was in the dark, and in a cloud: and this is what Mr.
+Hastings calls _information_ communicated to the Company on the subject
+of these bribes.
+
+You have heard of obscurity illustrated by a further
+obscurity,--_obscurum per obscurius_. He continues to tell
+them,--"Something of affinity to this anecdote may appear in the first
+aspect of another transaction, which I shall proceed to relate, and of
+which it is more immediately my duty to inform you." He then tells them
+that he had contrived to give a sum of money to the Rajah of Berar, and
+the account he gives of that proceeding is this. "We had neither money
+to spare, nor, in the apparent state of that government in its relation
+to ours, would it have been either prudent or consistent with our public
+credit to have afforded it. It was, nevertheless, my decided opinion
+that some aid should be given, not less as a necessary relief than as an
+indication of confidence, and a return for the many instances of
+substantial kindness which we had within the course of the two last
+years experienced from the government of Berar. I had an assurance that
+such a proposal would receive the acquiescence of the board; but I knew
+that it would not pass without opposition, and it would have become
+public, which might have defeated its purpose. Convinced of the
+necessity of the expedient, and assured of the sincerity of the
+government of Berar, from evidences of stronger proof to me than I could
+make them appear to the other members of the board, I resolved to adopt
+it and take the entire responsibility of it upon myself. In this mode a
+less considerable sum would suffice. I accordingly caused three lac of
+rupees to be delivered to the minister of the Rajah of Berar resident in
+Calcutta. He has transmitted it to Cuttack. Two thirds of this sum I
+have raised by my own credit, and shall charge it in my official
+accounts; the other third I have supplied from the cash in my hands
+belonging to the Honorable Company."
+
+Your Lordships see in this business another mode which he has of
+accounting with the Company, and informing them of his bribe. He begins
+his account of this transaction by saying that it has something of
+affinity to the last anecdote,--meaning the account of the first bribe.
+An anecdote is made a head of an account; and this, I believe, is what
+none of your Lordships ever have heard of before,--and I believe it is
+yet to be learned in this commercial nation, a nation of accurate
+commercial account. The account he gives of the first is an anecdote;
+and what is his account of the second? A relation of an anecdote: not a
+near relation, but something of affinity,--a remote relation, cousin
+three or four times removed, of the half-blood, or something of that
+kind, to this anecdote: and he never tells them any circumstance of it
+whatever of any kind, but that it has some affinity to the former
+anecdote. But, my Lords, the thing which comes to some degree of
+clearness is this, that he did give money to the Rajah of Berar. And
+your Lordships will be so good as to advert carefully to the proportions
+in which he gave it. He did give him two lac of rupees of money raised
+by his own credit, his own money; and the third he advanced out of the
+Company's money in his hands. He might have taken the Company's money
+undoubtedly, fairly, openly, and held it in his hands, for a hundred
+purposes; and therefore he does not tell them that even that third was
+money he had obtained by bribery and corruption. No: he says it is money
+of the Company's, which he had in his hand. So that you must get
+through a long train of construction before you ascertain that this sum
+was what it turns out to be, a bribe, which he retained for the Company.
+Your Lordships will please to observe, as I proceed, the nature of this
+pretended generosity in Mr. Hastings. He is always generous in the same
+way. As he offered the whole of his first bribe as his own money, and
+afterward acknowledged that no part of it was his own, so he is now
+generous again in this latter transaction,--in which, however, he shows
+that he is neither generous nor just. He took the first money without
+right, and he did not apply it to the very service for which it was
+pretended to be taken. He then tells you of another anecdote, which, he
+says, has an affinity to that anecdote, and here he is generous again.
+In the first he appears to be generous and just, because he appears to
+give his own money, which he had a right to dispose of; then he tells
+you he is neither generous nor just, for he had taken money he had no
+right to, and did not apply it to the service for which he pretended to
+have received it. And now he is generous again, because he gives two lac
+of his own money,--and just, because he gives one lac which belonged to
+the Company; but there is not an idea suggested from whom he took it.
+
+But to proceed, my Lords. In this letter he tells you he had given two
+thirds his own money and one third the Company's money. So it stood upon
+the 29th of November, 1780. On the 5th of January following we see the
+business take a totally different turn; and then Mr. Hastings calls for
+three Company's bonds, upon two different securities, antedated to the
+1st and 2d of October, for the three lac, which he before told them was
+two thirds his own money and one third the Company's. He now declares
+the whole of it to be his own, and he thus applies by letter to the
+board, of which he himself was a majority.
+
+     "Honorable Sir and Sirs,--Having had occasion to disburse the sum
+     of three lacs of sicca rupees on account of secret services, which
+     having been advanced from my own private cash, I request that the
+     same may be repaid to me in the following manner.
+
+     "A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the second loan, bearing
+     date from 1st October, for one lac of sicca rupees.
+
+     "A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the first loan, bearing
+     date from 1st October, for one lac of sicca rupees."
+
+     "A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the first loan, bearing
+     date from the 2d October, for one lac of sicca rupees."
+
+Here are two accounts, one of which must be directly and flatly false:
+for he could not have given two thirds his own, and have supplied the
+other third from money of the Company's, and at the same time have
+advanced the whole as his own. He here goes the full length of the
+fraud: he declares that it is all his own,--so much his own that he does
+not trust the Company with it, and actually takes their bonds as a
+security for it, bearing an interest to be paid to him when he thinks
+proper.
+
+Thus it remained from the 5th of January, 1781, till 16th December,
+1782, when this business takes another turn, and in a letter of his to
+the Company these bonds become all their own. All the money advanced is
+now, all of it, the Company's money. First he says two thirds were his
+own; next, that the whole is his own; and the third account is, that the
+whole is the Company's, and he will account to them for it.
+
+Now he has accompanied this account with another very curious one. For
+when you come to look into the particulars of it, you will find there
+are three bonds declared to be the Company's bonds, and which refer to
+the former transactions, namely, the money for which he had taken the
+bonds; but when you come to look at the numbers of them, you will find
+that one of the three bonds which he had taken as his own disappears,
+and another bond, of another date, and for a much larger sum, is
+substituted in its place, of which he had never mentioned anything
+whatever. So that, taking his first account, that two thirds is his own
+money, then that it is all his own, in the third that it is all the
+Company's money, by a fourth account, given in a paper describing the
+three bonds, you will find that there is one lac which he does not
+account for, but substitutes in its place a bond before taken as his
+own. He sinks and suppresses one bond, he gives two bonds to the
+Company, and to supply the want of the third, which he suppresses, he
+brings forward a bond for another sum, of another date, which he had
+never mentioned before. Here, then, you have four different accounts: if
+any one of them is true, every one of the other three is totally false.
+Such a system of cogging, such a system of fraud, such a system of
+prevarication, such a system of falsehood, never was, I believe, before
+exhibited in the world.
+
+In the first place, why did he take bonds at all from the Company for
+the money that was their own? I must be cautious how I charge a legal
+crime. I will not charge it to be forgery, to take a bond from the
+Company for money which was their own. He was employed to make out bonds
+for the Company, to raise money on their credit. He pretends he lent
+them a sum of money, which was not his to lend: but he gives their own
+money to them as his own, and takes a security for it. I will not say
+that it is a forgery, but I am sure it is an offence as grievous,
+because it is as much a cheat as a forgery, with this addition to it,
+that the person so cheating is in a trust; he violates that trust, and
+in so doing he defrauds and falsifies the whole system of the Company's
+accounts.
+
+I have only to show what his own explanation of all these actions was,
+because it supersedes all observation of mine. Hear what prevaricating
+guilt says for the falsehood and delusion which had been used to cover
+it; and see how he plunges deeper and deeper upon every occasion. This
+explanation arose out of another memorable bribe, which I must now beg
+leave to state to your Lordships.
+
+About the time of the receipt of the former bribes, good fortune, as
+good things seldom come singly, is kind to him; and when he went up and
+had nearly ruined the Company's affairs in Oude and Benares, he received
+a present of 100,000_l._ sterling, or thereabouts. He received bills for
+it in September, 1781, and he gives the Company an account of it in
+January, 1782. Remark in what manner the account of this money was
+given, and the purposes for which he intends to apply it. He says, in
+this letter, "I received the offer of a considerable sum of money, both
+on the Nabob's part and that of his ministers, as a present to myself,
+not to the Company: I accepted it without hesitation, and gladly, being
+entirely destitute both of means and credit, whether for your service or
+the relief of my own necessities." My Lords, upon this you shall hear a
+comment, made by some abler persons than me. This donation was not made
+in species, but in bills upon the house of Gopaul Doss, who was then a
+prisoner in the hands of Cheyt Sing. After mentioning that he took this
+present for the Company, and for their exigencies, and partly for his
+own necessities, and in consequence of the distress of both, he desires
+the Company, in the moment of this their greatest distress, to award it
+to him, and therefore he ends, "If you should adjudge the deposit to me,
+I shall consider it as the most honorable approbation and reward of my
+labors: and I wish to owe my fortune to your bounty. I am now in the
+fiftieth year of my life: I have passed thirty-one years in the service
+of the Company, and the greatest part of that time in employments of the
+highest trust. My conscience allows me boldly to claim the merit of zeal
+and integrity; nor has fortune been unpropitious to their exertions. To
+these qualities I bound my pretensions. I shall not repine, if you shall
+deem otherwise of my services; nor ought your decision, however it may
+disappoint my hope of a retreat adequate to the consequence and
+elevation of the office which I now possess, to lessen my gratitude for
+having been so long permitted to hold it, since it has at least enabled
+me to lay up a provision with which I can be contented in a more humble
+station."
+
+And here your Lordships will be pleased incidentally to remark the
+circumstance of his condition of life and his fortune, to which he
+appeals, and upon account of which he desires this money. Your
+Lordships will remember that in 1773 he said, (and this I stated to you
+from himself,) that, if he held his then office for a very few years, he
+should be enabled to lay by an ample provision for his retreat. About
+nine years after that time, namely, in the month of January, 1782, he
+finds himself rather pinched with want, but, however, not in so bad a
+way but that the holding of his office had enabled him to lay up a
+provision with which he could be contented in a more humble station. He
+wishes to have affluence; he wishes to have dignity; he wishes to have
+consequence and rank: but he allows that he has competence. Your
+Lordships will see afterwards how miserably his hopes were disappointed:
+for the Court of Directors, receiving this letter from Mr. Hastings, did
+declare, that they could not give it to him, because the act had ordered
+that "no fees of office, perquisites, emoluments, or advantages
+whatsoever, should be accepted, received, or taken by such
+Governor-General and Council, or any of them, in any manner or on any
+account or pretence whatsoever"; "and as the same act further directs,
+'that no Governor-General, or any of the Council, shall directly take,
+accept, or receive, of or from any person or persons, in any manner or
+on any account whatsoever, any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or
+reward, pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement for any
+present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,' we cannot, were we so
+inclined, decree the amount of this present to the Governor-General. And
+it is further enacted, 'that any such present, gift, gratuity, donation,
+or reward, accepted, taken, or received, shall be deemed and construed
+to have been received to and for the sole use of the Company.'" And
+therefore they resolved, most unjustly and most wickedly, to keep it to
+themselves. The act made it in the first instance the property of the
+Company, and they would not give it him. And one should think this, with
+his own former construction of the act, would have made him cautious of
+taking bribes. You have seen what weight it had with him to stop the
+course of bribes which he was in such a career of taking in every place
+and with both hands.
+
+Your Lordships have now before you this hundred thousand pounds,
+disclosed in a letter from Patna, dated the 20th January, 1782. You find
+mystery and concealment in every one of Mr. Hastings's discoveries. For
+(which is a curious part of it) this letter was not sent to the Court of
+Directors in their packet regularly, but transmitted by Major Fairfax,
+one of his agents, to Major Scott, another of his agents, to be
+delivered to the Company. Why was this done? Your Lordships will judge,
+from that circuitous mode of transmission, whether he did not thereby
+intend to leave some discretion in his agent to divulge it or not. We
+are told he did not; but your Lordships will believe that or not,
+according to the nature of the fact. If he had been anxious to make this
+discovery to the Directors, the regular way would have been to send his
+letter to the Directors immediately in the packet: but he sent it in a
+box to an agent; and that agent, upon due discretion, conveyed it to the
+Court of Directors. Here, however, he tells you nothing about the
+persons from whom he received this money, any more than he had done
+respecting the two former sums.
+
+On the 2d of May following the date of this Patna letter he came down to
+Calcutta with a mind, as he himself describes it, greatly agitated. All
+his hope of plundering Benares had totally failed. The produce of the
+robbing of the Begums, in the manner your Lordships have heard, was all
+dissipated to pay the arrears of the armies: there was no fund left. He
+felt himself agitated and full of dread, knowing that he had been
+threatened with having his place taken from him several times, and that
+he might be called home to render an account. He had heard that
+inquiries had begun in a menacing form in Parliament; and though at that
+time Bengal was not struck at, there was a charge of bribery and
+peculation brought against the Governor of Madras. With this dread, with
+a mind full of anxiety and perturbation, he writes a letter, as he
+pretends, on the 22d of May, 1782. Your Lordships will remark, that,
+when he came down to Calcutta from his expedition up the country, he did
+not till the 22d of May give any account whatever of these
+transactions,--and that this letter, or pretended letter, of the 22d of
+May was not sent till the 16th of December following. We shall clearly
+prove that he had abundant means of sending it, and by various ways,
+before the 16th of December, 1782, when he inclosed in another letter
+that of the 22d of May. This is the letter of discovery; this is the
+letter by which his breast was to be laid open to his employers, and all
+the obscurity of his transactions to be elucidated. Here are indeed new
+discoveries, but they are like many new-discovered lands, exceedingly
+inhospitable, very thinly inhabited, and producing nothing to gratify
+the curiosity of the human mind.
+
+This letter is addressed to the Honorable the Court of Directors, dated
+Fort William, 22d May, 1782. He tells them he had promised to account
+for the ten lacs of rupees which he had received, and this promise, he
+says, he now performs, and that he takes that opportunity of accounting
+with them likewise for several other sums which he had received. His
+words are,--
+
+"This promise I now perform, and, deeming it consistent with the spirit
+of it, I have added such other sums as have been occasionally converted
+to the Company's property through my means, in consequence of the like
+original destination. Of the second of these sums you have already been
+advised in a letter which I had the honor to address the Honorable Court
+of Directors, dated 29th November, 1780. Both this and the third article
+were paid immediately to the treasury, by my order to the sub-treasurer
+to receive them on the Company's account, but never passed through my
+hands. The three sums for which bonds were granted were in like manner
+paid to the Company's treasury, without passing through my hands, but
+their _application_ was not specified. The sum of 50,000 current rupees
+was received while I was on my journey to Benares, and applied as
+expressed in the account.
+
+"As to the manner in which these sums have been expended, the reference
+which I have made of it in the accompanying account, to the several
+accounts in which they are credited, renders any other specification of
+it unnecessary,--_besides_ that these accounts either have or will have
+received a much stronger authentication than any that I could give to
+mine."
+
+I wish your Lordships to attend to the next paragraph, which is meant by
+him to explain why he took bribes at all,--why he took bonds for some of
+them, as moneys of his own, and not moneys of the Company,--why he
+entered some upon the Company's accounts, and why of the others he
+renders no account at all. Light, however, will beam upon you as we
+proceed.
+
+"Why these sums were taken by me,--why they were, except the second,
+quietly transferred to the Company's use,--why bonds were taken for the
+first, and not for the rest,--might, were this matter exposed to the
+view of the public, furnish a variety of conjectures, to which it would
+be of little use to reply. Were your Honorable Court to question me on
+these points, I would answer, that the sums were taken for the Company's
+benefit, at times when the Company very much needed them,--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 could at this distance of time verify, and that I did not
+think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. I trust,
+Honorable Sirs, to your breasts for a candid interpretation of my
+actions,--and assume the freedom to add, that I think myself, on such a
+subject, on such _an occasion_, entitled to it."
+
+Lofty, my Lords! You see, that, after the Directors had expected an
+explanation for so long a time, he says, "Why these sums were taken by
+me, and, except the second, quietly transferred to the Company's use, I
+cannot tell; why bonds were taken for the first, and not for the rest, I
+cannot tell: if this matter were exposed to view, it would furnish a
+variety of conjectures." Here is an account which is to explain the most
+obscure, the most mysterious, the most evidently fraudulent
+transactions. When asked how he came to take these bonds, how he came
+to use these frauds, he tells you he really does not know,--that he
+might have this motive for it, that he might have another motive for
+it,--that he wished to conceal it from public curiosity,--but, which is
+the most extraordinary, he is not quite sure that he had any motive for
+it at all, which his memory can trace. The whole of this is a period of
+a year and a half; and here is a man who keeps his account upon
+principles of whim and vagary. One would imagine he was guessing at some
+motive of a stranger. Why he came to take bonds for money not due to
+him, and why he enters some and not others,--he knows nothing of these
+things: he begs them not to ask about it, because it will be of no use.
+"You foolish Court of Directors may conjecture and conjecture on. You
+are asking me why I took bonds to myself for money of yours, why I have
+cheated you, why I have falsified my account in such a manner. I will
+not tell you."
+
+In the satisfaction which he had promised to give them he neither
+mentions the persons, the times, the occasions, or motives for any of
+his actions. He adds, "I did not think it worth my care to observe the
+same means with the rest." For some purposes, he thought it necessary to
+use the most complicated and artful concealments; for some, he could not
+tell what his motives were; and for others, that it was mere
+carelessness. Here is the exchequer of bribery!--have I falsified any
+part of my original stating of it?--an exchequer in which the man who
+ought to pay receives, the man who ought to give security takes it, the
+man who ought to keep an account says he has forgotten; an exchequer in
+which oblivion was the remembrancer; and, to sum up the whole, an
+exchequer into the accounts of which it was useless to inquire. This is
+the manner in which the account of near two hundred thousand pounds is
+given to the Court of Directors. You can learn nothing in this business
+that is any way distinct, except a premeditated design of a concealment
+of his transactions. That is avowed.
+
+But there is a more serious thing behind. Who were the instruments of
+his concealment? No other, my Lords, than the Company's public
+accountant. That very accountant takes the money, knowing it to be the
+Company's, and that it was only pretended to be advanced by Mr. Hastings
+for the Company's use. He sees Mr. Hastings make out bonds to himself
+for it, and Mr. Hastings makes him enter him as creditor, when in fact
+he was debtor. Thus he debauches the Company's accountant, and makes him
+his confederate. These fraudulent and corrupt acts, covered by false
+representations, are proved to be false not by collation with anything
+else, but false by a collation with themselves. This, then, is the
+account, and his explanation of it; and in this insolent, saucy,
+careless, negligent manner, a public accountant like Mr. Hastings, a man
+bred up a book-keeper in the Company's service, who ought to be exact,
+physically exact, in his account, has not only been vicious in his own
+account, but made the public accounts vicious and of no value.
+
+But there is in this account another curious circumstance with regard to
+the deposit of this sum of money, to which he referred in his first
+paragraph of his letter of the 29th of November, 1780. He states that
+this deposit was made and passed into the hands of Mr. Larkins on the
+1st of June. It did so; but it is not entered in the Company's accounts
+till November following. Now in all that intermediate space where was
+it? what account was there of it? It was entirely a secret between Mr.
+Larkins and Mr. Hastings, without a possibility of any one discovering
+any particular relative to it. Here is an account of two hundred
+thousand pounds received, juggled between the accountant and him,
+without a trace of it appearing in the Company's books. Some of those
+committees, to whom, for their diligence at least, I must say the public
+have some obligation, and in return for which they ought to meet with
+some indulgence, examining into all these circumstances, and having
+heard that Mr. Hastings had deposited a sum of money in the hands of the
+Company's sub-treasurer in the month of June, sent for the Company's
+books. They looked over those books, but they did not find the least
+trace of any such sum of money, and not any account of it: nor could
+there be, because it was not paid to the Company's account till the
+November following. The accountant had received the money, but never
+entered it from June till November. Then, at last, have we an account of
+it. But was it even then entered regularly upon the Company's accounts?
+No such thing: it is a deposit carried to the Governor-General's credit.
+
+    [_The entry of the several species in which this deposit was made
+    was here read from the Company's General Journal of 1780 and 1781._]
+
+My Lords, when this account appears at last, when this money does emerge
+in the public accounts, whose is it? Is it the Company's? No: Mr.
+Hastings's. And thus, if, notwithstanding this obscure account in
+November, the Directors had claimed and called for this affinity to an
+anecdote,--if they had called for this anecdote and examined the
+account,--if they had said, "We observe here entered two lac and
+upwards; come, Mr. Hastings, let us see where this money is,"--they
+would find that it is Mr. Hastings's money, not the Company's; they
+would find that it is carried to his credit. In this manner he hands
+over this sum, telling them, on the 22d of May, 1782, that not only the
+bonds were a fraud, but the deposit was a fraud, and that neither bonds
+nor deposit did in reality belong to him. Why did he enter it at all?
+Then, afterwards, why did he not enter it as the Company's? Why make a
+false entry, to enter it as his own? And how came he, two years after,
+when he does tell you that it was the Company's and not his own, to
+alter the public accounts? But why did he not tell them at that time,
+when he pretends to be opening his breast to the Directors, from whom he
+received it, or say anything to give light to the Company respecting it?
+who, supposing they had the power of dispensing with an act of
+Parliament, or licensing bribery at their pleasure, might have been
+thereby enabled to say, "Here you ought to have received it,--there it
+might be oppressive and of dreadful example."
+
+I have only to state, that, in this letter, which was pretended to be
+written on the 22d of May, 1782, your Lordships will observe that he
+thinks it his absolute duty (and I wish to press this upon your
+Lordships, because it will be necessary in a comparison which I shall
+have hereafter to make) to lay open all their affairs to them, to give
+them a full and candid explanation of his conduct, which he afterwards
+confesses he is not able to do. The paragraph has been just read to you.
+It amounts to this: "I have taken many bribes,--have falsified your
+accounts,--have reversed the principle of them in my own favor; I now
+discover to you all these my frauds, and think myself entitled to your
+confidence upon this occasion." Now all the principles of diffidence,
+all the principles of distrust, nay, more, all the principles upon which
+a man may be convicted of premeditated fraud, and deserve the severest
+punishment, are to be found in this case, in which he says he holds
+himself to be entitled to their confidence and trust. If any of your
+Lordships had a steward who told you he had lent you your own money, and
+had taken bonds from you for it, and if he afterwards told you that that
+money was neither yours nor his, but extorted from your tenants by some
+scandalous means, I should be glad to know what your Lordships would
+think of such a steward, who should say, "I will take the freedom to
+add, that I think myself, on such a subject, on such an occasion,
+entitled to your confidence and trust." You will observe his cavalier
+mode of expression. Instead of his exhibiting the rigor and severity of
+an accountant and a book-keeper, you would think that he had been a
+reader of sentimental letters; there is such an air of a novel running
+through the whole, that it adds to the ridicule and nausea of it: it is
+an oxymel of squills; there is something to strike you with horror for
+the villany of it, something to strike you with contempt for the fraud
+of it, and something to strike you with utter disgust for the vile and
+bad taste with which all these base ingredients are assorted.
+
+Your Lordships will see, when the account which is subjoined to this
+unaccountable letter comes before you, that, though the Company had
+desired to know the channels through which he got those sums, there is
+not (except by a reference that appears in another place to one of the
+articles) one single syllable of explanation given from one end to the
+other, there is not the least glimpse of light thrown upon these
+transactions. But we have since discovered from whom he got these
+bribes; and your Lordships will be struck with horror, when you hear it.
+
+I have already remarked to you, that, though this letter is dated upon
+the 22d of May, it was not dispatched for Europe till December
+following; and he gets Mr. Larkins, who was his agent and instrument in
+falsifying the Company's accounts, to swear that this letter was written
+upon the 22d of May, and that he had no opportunity to send it, but by
+the "Lively" in December. On the 16th of that month he writes to the
+Directors, and tells them that he is quite shocked to find he had no
+earlier opportunity of making this discovery, which he thought himself
+bound to make; though this discovery, respecting some articles of it,
+had now been delayed nearly two years, and though it since appears that
+there were many opportunities, and particularly by the "Resolution," of
+sending it. He was much distressed, and found himself in an awkward
+situation, from an apprehension that the Parliamentary inquiry, which he
+knew was at this time in progress, might have forced from him this
+notable discovery. He says, "I do not fear the consequences of any
+Parliamentary process." Indeed, he needed not to fear any Parliamentary
+inquiry, if it produced no further discovery than that which your
+Lordships have in the letter of the 22d of May, and in the accounts
+subjoined to it. He says, that "the delay is of no public consequence;
+but it has produced a situation which, with respect to myself, I regard
+as unfortunate, because it exposes me to the meanest imputation, from
+the occasion which the late Parliamentary inquiries have since
+furnished."
+
+Now here is a very curious letter, that I wish to have read for some
+other reasons, which will afterwards appear, but principally at present
+for the purpose of showing you that he held it to be his duty and
+thought it to the last degree dishonorable not to give the Company an
+account of those secret bribes: he thought it would reflect upon him,
+and ruin his character forever, if this account did not come voluntarily
+from him, but was extorted by terror of Parliamentary inquiry. In this
+letter of the 16th December, 1782, he thus writes.
+
+"The delay is of no public consequence, but it has produced a situation
+which, with respect to myself, I regard as unfortunate; because it
+exposes me to the meanest imputation, from the occasion which the late
+Parliamentary inquiries have since furnished, but which were unknown
+when my letter was written, and written in the necessary consequence of
+a promise made to that effect in a former letter to your Honorable
+Committee, dated 20th January last. However, to preclude the possibility
+of such reflections from affecting me, I have desired Mr. Larkins, who
+was privy to the whole transaction, to affix to the letter his affidavit
+of the date in which it was written. I own I feel most sensibly the
+mortification of being reduced to the necessity of using such
+precautions to guard my reputation from dishonor. If I had at any time
+possessed that degree of confidence from my immediate employers which
+they never withheld from the meanest of my predecessors, I should have
+disdained to use these attentions. How I have drawn on me a different
+treatment I know not; it is sufficient that I have not merited it. And
+in the course of a service of thirty-two years, and ten of these
+employed in maintaining the powers and discharging the duties of the
+first office of the British government in India, that honorable court
+ought to know whether I possess the integrity and honor which are the
+first requisites of such a station. If I wanted these, they have
+afforded me but too powerful incentives to suppress the information
+which I now convey to them through you, and to appropriate to my own use
+the sums which I have already passed to their credit, by the unworthy
+and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which they have passed
+upon me for the first communication of this kind: and your own
+experience will suggest to you, that there are persons who would profit
+by such a warning.
+
+"Upon the whole of these transactions, which to you, who are accustomed
+to view business in an official and regular light, may appear
+unprecedented, if not improper, I have but a few short remarks to
+suggest to your consideration.
+
+"If I appear in any unfavorable light by these transactions, I resign
+the common and legal security of those who commit crimes or errors. I am
+ready to answer every particular question that may be put against
+myself, upon honor or upon oath.
+
+"The sources from which these reliefs to the public service have come
+would never have yielded them to the Company publicly; and the
+exigencies of your service (exigencies created by the exposition of
+your affairs, and faction in your councils) required those supplies.
+
+"I could have concealed them, had I had a wrong motive, from yours and
+the public eye forever; and I know that the difficulties to which a
+spirit of injustice may subject me for my candor and avowal are greater
+than any possible inconvenience that could have attended the
+concealment, except the dissatisfaction of my own mind. These
+difficulties are but a few of those which I have suffered in your
+service. The applause of my own breast is my surest reward, and was the
+support of my mind in meeting them. Your applause, and that of my
+country, are my next wish in life."
+
+Your Lordships will observe at the end of this letter, that this man
+declares his first applause to be from his own breast, and that he next
+wishes to have the applause of his employers. But reversing this, and
+taking their applause first, let us see on what does he ground his hope
+of their applause? Was it on his former conduct? No: for he says that
+conduct had repeatedly met with their disapprobation. Was it upon the
+confidence which he knew they had in him? No: for he says they gave more
+of their confidence to the meanest of his predecessors. Observe, my
+Lords, the style of insolence he constantly uses with regard to all
+mankind. Lord Clive was his predecessor, Governor Cartier was his
+predecessor, Governor Verelst was his predecessor: every man of them as
+good as himself: and yet he says the Directors had given "more of their
+confidence to the _meanest_ of his predecessors." But what was to
+entitle him to their applause? A clear and full explanation of the
+bribes he had taken. Bribes was to be the foundation of their
+confidence in him, and the clear explanation of them was to entitle him
+to their applause! Strange grounds to build confidence upon!--the rotten
+ground of corruption, accompanied with the infamy of its avowal! Strange
+ground to expect applause!--a discovery which was no discovery at all!
+Your Lordships have heard this discovery, which I have not taken upon me
+to state, but have read his own letter on the occasion. Has there, at
+this moment, any light broken in upon you concerning this matter?
+
+But what does he say to the Directors? He says, "Upon the whole of these
+transactions, which to you, who are accustomed to view business in an
+official and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not improper, I
+have but a few short remarks to suggest to your consideration." He looks
+upon them and treats them as a set of low mechanical men, a set of
+low-born book-keepers, as base souls, who in an account call for
+explanation and precision. If there is no precision in accounts, there
+is nothing of worth in them. You see he himself is an eccentric
+accountant, a Pindaric book-keeper, an arithmetician in the clouds. "I
+know," he says, "what the Directors desire: but they are mean people;
+they are not of elevated sentiments; they are modest; they avoid
+ostentation in taking of bribes: I therefore am playing cups and balls
+with them, letting them see a little glimpse of the bribes, then
+carrying them fairly away." Upon this he founds the applause of his own
+breast.
+
+        Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo
+    Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.
+
+That private _ipse plaudo_ he may have in this business, which is a
+business of money; but the applause of no other human creature will he
+have for giving such an account as he admits this to be,--irregular,
+uncertain, problematical, and of which no one can make either head or
+tail. He despises us also, who are representatives of the people, and
+have amongst us all the regular officers of finance, for expecting
+anything like a regular account from him. He is hurt at it; he considers
+it as a cruel treatment of him; he says, "Have I deserved this
+treatment?" Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment, if
+treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of which he complains.
+The Court of Directors had, however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and
+pusillanimous, begged of him, as if they were his dependants, and not
+his masters, to give them some light into the account; they desire a
+receiver of money to tell from whom he received it, and how he applied
+it. He answers, They may be hanged for a parcel of mean, contemptible
+book-keepers, and that he will give them no account at all. He says, "If
+you sue me"--There is the point: he always takes security in a court of
+law. He considers his being called upon by these people, to whom he
+ought as a faithful servant to give an account, and to do which he was
+bound by an act of Parliament specially intrusting him with the
+administration of the revenues, as a gross affront. He adds, that he is
+ready to resign his defence, and to answer upon honor or upon oath.
+Answering upon honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your
+Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But he forgets, that,
+being the Company's servant, the Company may bring a bill in Chancery
+against him, and force him upon oath to give an account. He has not,
+however, given them light enough or afforded them sufficient ground for
+a fishing bill in Chancery. Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a
+Chancery way, or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms, and
+give you some account." In consequence of this the Company did demand
+from him an account, regularly, and as fully and formally as if they had
+demanded it in a court of justice. He positively refused to give them
+any account whatever; and they have never, to this very day in which we
+speak, had any account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your
+Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of fraud, falsification,
+iniquity, and prevarication, that, in defiance of his promise, which
+promise they quote upon him over and over again, he has never given them
+any account of this matter.
+
+He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming) that by calling
+him to account they may provoke him--to what? "To appropriate," he says,
+"to my own use the sums which I have already passed to your credit, by
+the unworthy and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which you
+have passed upon me for the first communication of this kind." They
+passed no reflections: they said they would neither praise nor blame
+him, but pressed him for an account of a matter which they could not
+understand: and I believe your Lordships understand it no more than
+they, for it is not in the compass of human understanding to conceive or
+comprehend it. Instead of an account of it, he dares to threaten them:
+"I may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be an honest
+man,--to falsify your account a second time, and to reclaim those sums
+which I have passed to your credit,--to alter the account again, by the
+assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration is this of his
+dominion over the public accounts, and of his power of altering them! a
+declaration, that, having first falsified those accounts in order to
+deceive them, and afterwards having told them of this falsification in
+order to gain credit with them, if they provoke him, he shall take back
+the money he had carried to their account, and make them his debtors for
+it! He fairly avows the dominion he has over the Company's accounts; and
+therefore, when he shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able
+to rebut that evidence, and say, "The Company's accounts are corrupted
+by you, through your agent, Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them,
+because you not only told the Company you could do so, but we can prove
+that you have actually done it." What a strange medley of evasion,
+pretended discovery, real concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears
+in every part of this letter!
+
+But admitting this letter to have been written upon the 22d of May, and
+kept back to the 16th of December, you would imagine that during all
+that interval of time he would have prepared himself to give some light,
+some illustration of these dark and mysterious transactions, which
+carried fraud upon the very face of them. Did he do so? Not at all. Upon
+the 16th of December, instead of giving them some such clear accounts as
+might have been expected, he falls into a violent passion for their
+expecting them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he tells them
+they knew who had profited by these transactions: thus, in order to
+strike terror into their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had
+practised or protected. What weight this may have had with them I know
+not; but your Lordships will expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after
+giving four accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three must
+necessarily be false,--after having thrown the Company's accounts into
+confusion, and being unable to tell, as he says himself, why he did
+so,--will at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who
+continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints that he ought to do
+it.--You have heard nothing yet but the consequences of their refusing
+to give him the present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had taken
+from the Nabob. They did right to refuse it to him; they did wrong to
+take it to themselves.
+
+We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges, in September, 1784,--that
+Ganges whose purifying water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and
+which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings's hands a little
+clean of bribery, and would have rolled down its golden sands like
+another Pactolus. Here we find him discovering another of his bribes.
+This was a bribe taken upon totally a different principle, according to
+his own avowal: it is a bribe not pretended to be received for the use
+of the Company,--a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself. He tells
+them that he had taken between thirty and forty thousand pounds. This
+bribe, which, like the former, he had taken without right, he tells them
+that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he insists upon their
+sanction for so doing. He says, he had in vain, upon a former occasion,
+appealed to their honor, liberality, and generosity,--that he now
+appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing this
+bribe--which he had taken without telling them from whom, where, or on
+what account--to his own use.
+
+Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which he wrote from Patna,
+on the 20th of January, 1782, he there states that he was in tolerable
+good circumstances, and that this had arisen from his having continued
+long in their service. Now, he has continued two years longer in their
+service, and he is reduced to beggary! "This," he says, "is a single
+example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit,
+and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want, and to
+sink in obscurity."
+
+So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could save an exceeding good
+fortune out of his place. In 1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has
+made a decent private competency; but in two years after he sunk to the
+extremity of private want. And how does he seek to relieve that want? By
+taking a bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the Company's
+service, but for his own. He takes the bribe with an express intention
+of keeping it for his own use, and he calls upon the Company for their
+sanction. If the money was taken without right, no claim of his could
+justify its being appropriated to himself: nor could the Company so
+appropriate it; for no man has a right to be generous out of another's
+goods. When he calls upon their justice and generosity, they might
+answer, "If you have a just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we
+will pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state your merits,
+and we will consider them." "But I have paid myself by a bribe; I have
+taken another man's money; and I call upon your justice--to do what? to
+restore it to its owner? no--to allow me to keep it myself." Think, my
+Lords, in what a situation the Company stands! "I have done a great
+deal for you; this is the jackal's portion; you have been the lion; I
+have been endeavoring to prog for you; I am your bribe-pander, your
+factor of corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn and
+ignominy, to insults even from you. I have been preying and plundering
+for you; I have gone through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness,
+wading through every species of dirt and corruption, for your advantage.
+I am now sinking into the extremity of private want; do give me
+this--what? money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me this
+bribe; vote me--what? money of your own? that would be generous: money
+you owe me? that would be just: no, money which I have extorted from
+another man; and I call upon your justice to give it me." This is his
+idea of justice. He says, "I am compelled to depart from that liberal
+plan which I originally adopted, and to claim from your justice (for you
+have forbid me to appeal to your generosity) the discharge of a debt
+which I can with the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due,
+and which I cannot sustain." Now, if any of the Company's servants may
+say, "I have been extravagant, profuse,--it was all meant for your
+good,--let me prey upon the country at my pleasure,--license my bribes,
+frauds, and peculations, and then you do me justice,"--what country are
+we in, where these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?
+
+It might naturally be expected that in this letter he would have given
+some account of the person from whom he had taken this bribe. But here,
+as in the other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the Ganges,
+like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw in Mr. Middleton; they
+recollect nothing, they know nothing. He has not stated, from that day
+to this, from whom he took that money. But we have made the discovery.
+And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to the
+present age and posterity, will be their use, that, if we pursue them
+with the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon us demands, and
+if your Lordships do firmly administer justice upon this man's frauds,
+you will at once put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever.
+Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry, it is the diligence of
+the House of Commons, which he has the audacity to call _malice_, that
+has discovered and brought to light the frauds which we shall be able to
+prove against him.
+
+I will now read to your Lordships an extract from that stuff, called a
+defence, which he has either written himself or somebody else has
+written for him, and which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases,
+when, under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment, he
+discovered at length from whom he got this last bribe.
+
+"The last part of the charge states, that, in my letter to the Court of
+Directors of the 21st February, 1784, I have confessed to have received
+another sum of money, the amount of which is not declared, but which,
+from the application of it, could not be less than thirty-four thousand
+pounds sterling, &c. In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a
+sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the Company not having at
+that time sufficient cash in their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed
+three lacs of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta, whom
+I desired to call upon me with a bond properly filled up. He did so; but
+at the time I was going to execute it he entreated I would rather
+accept the money than execute the bond. I neither accepted the offer nor
+refused it; and my determination upon it remained suspended between the
+alternative of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid, and of taking
+it, and applying it, as I had done other sums, to the Company's use. And
+there the matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow, when I
+determined to accept the money for the Company's use; and these were my
+motives. Having made disbursements from my own cash for services, which,
+though required to enable me to execute the duties of my station, I had
+hitherto omitted to enter into my public accounts, I resolved to
+reimburse myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the
+Company's affairs, by charging these disbursements in my durbar accounts
+of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received,
+which was this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company were not
+founded in justice, and _bona fide_ due, my acceptance of three lacs of
+rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that
+sum from me. No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of
+the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts."
+
+We do not _suspect_ him of presenting false accounts: we can prove, we
+are now radically proving, that he presents false accounts. We suspect
+no man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse no man who has
+not given ground for accusation; and we do not attempt to bring before a
+court of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively to
+prove. This will put an end to all idle prattle of malice, of groundless
+suspicions of guilt, and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring
+the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test,
+between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In
+his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited
+himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe
+from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years
+afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he
+wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is,
+for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great
+number of years. He proceeds:--
+
+"If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would
+furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that
+in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account
+of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have
+passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled
+it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts
+all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath
+overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent
+than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores
+for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of
+private want and to sink in obscurity."
+
+Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the House of Commons that
+he never made up any contingent accounts; and yet, as a set-off against
+this bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended to apply
+to the current use of the Company, he feigns and invents a claim upon
+them, namely, that he had, without any authority of the Company,
+squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and other idle services, a
+sum amounting to 34,000_l._ But was it for the Company's service? Is
+this language to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit to expend I
+have expended for the Company's service. I intended, indeed, at that
+time, to have been generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have
+paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I was then in the
+prime of my life, flowing in money, and had great expectations: I am now
+old; I cannot afford to be generous: I will look back into all my former
+accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I generously or prodigally
+spent as my own humor might suggest; and though, at the same time, I
+know you have given me a noble allowance, I now make a charge upon you
+for this sum of money, and intend to take a bribe in discharge of it."
+Now suppose Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope will long,
+and honorably and worthily, fill the seat, which that gentleman
+possessed,--suppose Lord Cornwallis, after never having complained of
+the insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two years ago said
+he had saved a sufficient competency out of it, should now tell you that
+30,00_l._ a year was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into
+want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged want taking a
+bribe, and then make out a bill of contingent expenses to cover it,
+would your Lordships bear this?
+
+Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow money for his own
+use, and that he applied to Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it
+upon him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you will be astonished
+to hear of generosity in a banian; there never was a banian and
+generosity united together: but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at
+once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings's face beams upon him.
+"Here," says Mr. Hastings, "I have prepared bonds for you."
+"Astonishing! how can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call upon
+me to lend you 34,000_l._, and propose bonds? No, you shall have it: you
+are the Governor-General, who have a large and ample salary; but I know
+you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity: I give you all
+this money." Nobkissin was quite shocked at Mr. Hastings's offering him
+a bond. My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower, a little
+more penurious, a little more exacting, a little more cunning, a little
+more money-making, than a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner
+of Duke's Place in London that is so crafty, so much a usurer, so
+skilful how to turn money to profit, and so resolved not to give any
+money but for profit, as a Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned.
+But this man, however, at once grows generous, and will not suffer a
+bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, is thrown into
+very great distress. You see sentiment always prevailing in Mr.
+Hastings. The sentimental dialogue which must have passed between him
+and a Gentoo broker would have charmed every one that has a taste for
+pathos and sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the money as a
+gift. He really does not know what to do: whether to insist upon giving
+a bond or not,--whether he shall take the money for his own use, or
+whether he shall take it for the Company's use. But it may be said of
+man as it is said of woman: the woman who deliberates is lost: the man
+that deliberates about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he
+deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is lost, the walls
+shake, down it comes,--and at the same moment enters Nobkissin into the
+citadel of his honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums
+beating, and Mr. Hastings's garrison goes out, very handsomely indeed,
+with the honors of war, all for the benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings
+consents to take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the money,
+and is perfectly satisfied.
+
+Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it to the Company's
+service. How? To pay his own contingent bills. "Everything that I do,"
+says he, "and all the money I squander, is all for the Company's
+benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look into them; they are
+given you upon honor. Let me take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be
+just or generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it." But in every
+transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have got a name, there we have got
+a crime. Nobkissin gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I
+believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately afterwards enters
+upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable
+districts in Bengal. We know very well, and shall prove to your
+Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from
+the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had
+been taken from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence of the
+Company's service, but sooner or later they fall upon the Company's
+treasury. And we shall prove that Nobkissin, within a year from the time
+when he gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Company, as
+their steward, to the amount of a sum the very interest of which,
+according to the rate of interest in that country, amounted to more than
+this bribe, taken, as was pretended, for the Company's service. Such are
+the consequences of a banian's generosity, and of Mr. Hastings's
+gratitude, so far as the interest of the country is concerned; and this
+is a good way to pay Mr. Hastings's contingent accounts. But this is not
+all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country to take the
+management of it, and the fortunes of all the great families in it are
+given entirely into his power. This is the way by which the Company are
+to keep their own servants from falling into "the extremity of private
+want." And the Company itself, in this pretended saving to their
+treasury by the taking of bribes, lose more than the amount of the
+bribes received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand, there is a
+balance accruing on the other. No man, who had any share in the
+management of the Company's revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not
+either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in
+balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both. In short,
+Mr. Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did
+not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit,
+but the Company's treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.
+
+And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic in bribes brought to
+light by the Court of Directors? No: we got it in the House of Commons.
+These bribes appear to have been taken at various times and upon various
+occasions; and it was not till his return from Patna, in February, 1782,
+that the first communication of any of them was made to the Court of
+Directors. Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of Directors
+wrote back to him, requiring some further explanation upon the subject.
+No explanation was given, but a communication of other bribes was made
+in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year, but not
+dispatched to Europe till the December following. This produced another
+requisition from the Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships
+are to observe that this correspondence is never in the way of letters
+written and answers given; but he and the Directors are perpetually
+playing at hide-and-seek with each other, and writing to each other at
+random: Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the Directors
+requiring an explanation the next; Mr. Hastings giving an account of
+another bribe on the third day, without giving any explanation of the
+former. Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their chase. But it
+was not till they learned that the committees of the House of Commons
+(for committees of the House of Commons had then some weight) were
+frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings, that at last
+some honest men in the Direction were permitted to have some ascendency,
+and that a proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your
+Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact account of all the
+bribes that he had received, and painting to him, in colors as strong at
+least as those I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations,--and
+what does them great honor for that moment, they particularly direct
+that the money which was taken from the Nabob of Oude should be carried
+to his account. These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee of
+Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved by the Court of
+Directors, but never were sent out to India. However, something was
+sent, but miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings never
+answered it, or gave them any explanation whatever. He now, being
+prepared for his departure from Calcutta, and having finished all his
+other business, went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now we cannot
+follow him. He returned in great disgust to Calcutta, and soon after set
+sail for England, without ever giving the Directors one word of the
+explanation which he had so often promised, and they had repeatedly
+asked.
+
+We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where you will suppose some
+satisfactory account of all these matters would be obtained from him.
+One would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he would have been a
+little quickened by a menace, as he expresses it, which had been thrown
+out against him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would be made
+into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive of the same thing,
+thought it good gently to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom
+and how we do not know, that he ought to give some explanation of these
+accounts. This produced a letter which I believe in the business of the
+whole world cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his parallel
+in this. Never did inventive folly, working upon conscious guilt, and
+throwing each other totally in confusion, ever produce such a false,
+fraudulent, prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given to
+you.
+
+You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the country, on the Ganges:
+now you see him at the waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his
+letter from that place to comprehend the substance of all his former
+letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity, fraud, and nonsense
+contained in the whole of them. Here it is, and your Lordships will
+suffer it to be read. I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that
+it has been the most difficult of all things to explain, but much more
+difficult to make pleasant and not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued
+through all its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most
+painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication, so there is
+nothing that more calls for the attention, the patience, the vigilance,
+and the scrutiny of an exact court of justice. But as you have already
+had almost the whole of the man, do not think it too much to hear the
+rest in this letter from Cheltenham. It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of
+July, 1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire;[8] and it begins
+thus:--
+
+"Sir,--The Honorable Court of Directors, in their general letter to
+Bengal by the 'Surprise,' dated the 16th of March, 1784, were pleased to
+express their desire that I should inform them of the periods when each
+sum of the presents mentioned in my address of the 22d May, 1782, was
+received,--what were my motives for withholding the several receipts
+from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors,--and
+what were my reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums, and for
+paying other sums into the treasury as deposits, on my own account."
+
+I wish your Lordships to pause a moment. Here is a letter written in
+July, 1785. You see that from the 29th of December [November?], 1780,
+till that time, during which interval, though convinced in his own
+conscience and though he had declared his own opinion of the necessity
+of giving a full explanation of these money transactions, he had been
+imposing upon the Directors false and prevaricating accounts of them,
+they were never able to obtain a full disclosure from him.
+
+He goes on:--"I have been kindly apprised that the information required
+as above is yet expected from me. I hope that the circumstances of my
+past situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for having thus
+long withheld it. The fact is, that I was not at the Presidency when the
+'Surprise' arrived; and when I returned to it, my time and attention
+were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my final departure from it, by
+a variety of other more important occupations, of which, Sir, I may
+safely appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion
+contributed by myself of the volumes which compose our Consultations of
+that period,"--
+
+These Consultations, my Lords, to which he appeals, form matter of one
+of the charges that the Commons have brought against Mr.
+Hastings,--namely, a fraudulent attempt to ruin certain persons employed
+in subordinate situations under him, for the purpose, by intruding
+himself into their place, of secretly carrying on his own transactions.
+These volumes of Consultations were written to justify that act.
+
+He next says,--"The submission which my respect would have enjoined me
+to pay to the command imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps
+from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it
+had left on my mind, that it was rather intended as a reprehension for
+something which had given offence in my report of the original
+transaction than an expression of any want of a further elucidation of
+it."
+
+Permit me to make a few remarks upon this extraordinary passage. A
+letter is written to him, containing a repetition of the request which
+had been made a thousand times before, and with which he had as often
+promised to comply. And here he says, "It was lost to my recollection."
+Observe his memory: he can forget the command, but he has an obscure
+recollection that he thought it a reprehension rather than a demand! Now
+a reprehension is a stronger mode of demand. When I say to a servant,
+"Why have you not given me the account which I have so often asked for?"
+is he to answer, "The reason I have not given it is because I thought
+you were railing at and abusing me"?
+
+He goes on:--"I will now endeavor to reply to the different questions
+which have been stated to me, in as explicit a manner as I am able. To
+such information as I can give the Honorable Court is fully entitled;
+and where that shall prove defective, I will point out the only means by
+which it may be rendered more complete."
+
+In order that your Lordships may thoroughly enter into the spirit of
+this letter, I must request that you will observe how handsomely and
+kindly these tools of Directors have expressed themselves to him, and
+that even their baseness and subserviency to him were not able to draw
+from him anything that could be satisfactory to his enemies: for as to
+these his friends, he cares but little about satisfying them, though
+they call upon him in consequence of his own promise; and this he calls
+a reprehension. They thus express themselves:--"Although it is not our
+intention to express any doubt of the integrity of the
+Governor-General,--on the contrary, after having received the presents,
+we cannot avoid expressing our approbation of his conduct in bringing
+them to the credit of the Company,--yet we must confess the statement of
+those transactions appears to us in many points so unintelligible, that
+we feel ourselves under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General
+for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily made to us. We
+therefore desire to be informed of the different periods when each sum
+was received, and what were the Governor-General's motives for
+withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council and
+of the Court of Directors, and what were his reasons for taking bonds
+for part of these sums and paying other sums into the treasury as
+deposits upon his own account." Such is their demand, and this is what
+his memory furnishes as nothing but a reprehension.
+
+He then proceeds:--"First, I believe I can affirm with certainty that
+the several sums mentioned in the account transmitted with my letter
+above mentioned were received at or within a very few days of the dates
+which are affixed to them in the account. But as this contains only the
+gross sums, and each of these was received in different payments, though
+at no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign a great degree
+of accuracy to the account."--Your Lordships see, that, after all, he
+declares he cannot make his account accurate. He further adds, "Perhaps
+the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient"--that is, this
+explanation, namely, that he can give none--"for any purpose to which
+their inquiry was directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave
+to refer, for a more minute information, and for the means of making any
+investigation which they may think it proper to direct, respecting the
+particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your
+accountant-general, who was privy to every process of it, and possesses,
+as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only account that
+I ever kept of it."
+
+Here is a man who of his bribe accounts cannot give an account in the
+country where they are carried on. When you call upon him in Bengal, he
+cannot give the account, because he is in Bengal; when he comes to
+England, he cannot give the account here, because his accounts are left
+in Bengal. Again, he keeps no accounts himself, but his accounts are in
+Bengal, in the hands of somebody else: to him he refers, and we shall
+see what that reference produced.
+
+"In this, each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically inserted, with
+the name of the person by whom it was made; and I shall write to him to
+desire that he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still in
+being and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect
+concerning it."--Here are accounts kept for the Company, and yet he does
+not know whether they are in existence anywhere.
+
+"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."
+
+You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in the banian language, a
+_painche_, in English, a _screw_. It is a puzzled and studied involution
+of a period, framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and the
+detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better exemplified than in
+this sentence: "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."
+Observe, that he says, not _facts stated_, but _facts implied in the
+report_. And of what was this to be a report? Of things which the
+Directors declared they did not understand. And then the inferences
+which are to follow these implied facts are to follow them--But how?
+_With a strong probability_. If you have a mind to study this Oriental
+figure of rhetoric, the _painche_, here it is for you in its most
+complete perfection. No rhetorician ever gave an example of any figure
+of oratory that can match this.
+
+But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that,
+in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's
+accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and
+afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or
+with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all,
+which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those
+sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run
+mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do you
+call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could
+not give you them? I cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating
+to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you
+may learn something from them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr.
+Larkins for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing this with his
+other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of
+fraud and concealment to cover his peculation. He tells them,--"I have
+said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the
+Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these
+was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense
+of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia,
+under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly
+apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December
+[November?], 1780." He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he
+received it: we have found it out by other collateral means.--"The other
+two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made
+public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it.
+The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every
+pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I
+could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized
+them."--Allowable means of receiving bribes! for such I shall prove them
+to be in the particular instances.--"But neither could it occur to me as
+necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid that I could thus
+procure; nor do I know how I could have stated it without appearing to
+court favor by an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the chance
+of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion
+of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my
+station, to which they might have had an equal claim."
+
+Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for many years, he does
+find out his motive, which he could not verify at the time,--namely,
+that, if he let his colleagues know that he was receiving bribes, and
+gaining the glory of receiving them, they might take it into their heads
+likewise to have their share in the same glory, as they were joined in
+the same commission, enjoyed the same powers, and were subject to the
+same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous in Mr. Hastings, not
+behaving like a good, fair colleague in office, not to let them know
+that he was going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive
+them of their share in the glory of it: but they were grovelling
+creatures, who thought that keeping clean hands was some virtue.--"Well,
+but you have applied some of these bribes to your own benefit: why did
+you give no account of those bribes?" "I did not," he says, "because it
+might have excited the envy of my colleagues." To be sure, if he was
+receiving bribes for his own benefit, and they not receiving such
+bribes, and if they had a liking to that kind of traffic, it is a good
+ground of envy, that a matter which ought to be in common among them
+should be confined to Mr. Hastings, and he therefore did well to conceal
+it; and on the other hand, if we suppose him to have taken them, as he
+pretends, for the Company's use, in order not to excite a jealousy in
+his colleagues for being left out of this meritorious service, to which
+they had an equal claim, he did well to take bonds for what ought to be
+brought to the Company's account. These are reasons applicable to his
+colleagues, who sat with him at the same board,--Mr. Macpherson, Mr.
+Stables, Mr. Wheler, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis:
+he was afraid of exciting their envy or their jealousy.
+
+You will next see another reason, and an extraordinary one it is, which
+he gives for concealing these bribes from his inferiors. But I must
+first tell your Lordships, what, till the proof is brought before you,
+you will take on credit,--indeed, it is on his credit,--that, when he
+formed the Committee of Revenue, he bound them by a solemn oath, "not,
+under any name or pretence whatever, to take from any zemindar, farmer,
+person concerned in the revenue, or any other, any gift, gratuity,
+allowance, or reward whatever, or anything beyond their salary"; and
+this is the oath to which he alludes. Now his reason for concealing his
+bribes from his inferiors, this Committee, under these false and
+fraudulent bonds, he states thus:--"I should have deemed it particularly
+dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a
+certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to
+my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them: I was
+therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it,
+which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the
+money to be brought to my own house, or that of any person known to be
+in trust for me."
+
+My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that he knew the practice of
+taking money from these people was a thing dishonorable in itself. "I
+should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own
+use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had
+interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by
+oath not to receive them." He held it particularly dishonorable to
+receive them; he had bound others by an oath not to receive them: but he
+received them himself; and why does he conceal it? "Why, because," says
+he, "if the suspicion came upon me, the dishonor would fall upon my
+pate." Why did he, by an oath, bind his inferiors not to take these
+bribes? "Why, because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and because
+it would be mischievous and ruinous to the Company's affairs to suffer
+them to take bribes." Why, then, did he take them himself? It was ten
+times more ruinous, that he, who was at the head of the Company's
+government, and had bound up others so strictly, should practise the
+same himself; and "therefore," says he, "I was more than ordinarily
+cautious." What! to avoid it? "No; to carry it on in so clandestine and
+private a manner as might secure me from the suspicion of that which I
+know to be detestable, and bound others up from practising."
+
+We shall prove that the kind of men from whom he interdicted his
+Committee to receive bribes were the identical men from whom he received
+them himself. If it was good for him, it was good for them to be
+permitted these means of extorting; and if it ought at all to be
+practised, they ought to be admitted to extort for the good of the
+Company. Rajah Nobkissin was one of the men from whom he interdicted
+them to receive bribes, and from whom he received a bribe for his own
+use. But he says he concealed it from them, because he thought great
+mischief might happen even from their suspicion of it, and lest they
+should thereby be inclined themselves to practise it, and to break their
+oaths.
+
+You take it, then, for granted that he really concealed it from them? No
+such thing. His principal confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr.
+Croftes, who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue, and whom
+he had made to swear not to take bribes: he is the confidant, and the
+very receiver, as we shall prove to your Lordships. What will your
+Lordships think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood, that
+he did it to conceal it from these men, when one of them was his
+principal confidant and agent in the transaction? What will you think of
+his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it? He
+ought to have avoided the crime, and the suspicion would take care of
+itself.
+
+"For these reasons," he says, "I caused it to be transported immediately
+to the treasury. There I well knew, Sir, it could not be received,
+without being passed to some credit; and this could only be done by
+entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The first was the least liable to
+reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the
+second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant. Possibly it
+was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was
+the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction
+itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed."
+
+My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false or groundless: it
+is completely fallacious in every part. The first sum, he says, was
+entered as a loan, the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because,
+when you enter moneys of this kind, you must enter them under some name,
+some head of account; "and I entered them," he says, "under these,
+because otherwise there was no entering them at all." Is this true? Will
+he stick to this? I shall desire to know from his learned counsel, some
+time or other, whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your
+Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which he brought under
+a regular official head, namely, _durbar charges_; and there is no
+reason why he should not have brought these under the same head.
+Therefore what he says, that there is no other way of entering them but
+as loans and deposits, is not true. He next says, that in the second sum
+there was no reason for concealment, because it was avowed. But that
+false deposit was as much concealment as the false loan, for he entered
+that money as his own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any money to
+the Company's account, he knew how to do it, for he had been accustomed
+to enter it under a general name, called durbar charges,--a name which,
+in its extent at least, was very much his own invention, and which, as
+he gives no account of those charges, is as large and sufficient to
+cover any fraudulent expenditure in the account as, one would think, any
+person could wish. You see him, then, first guessing one thing, then
+another,--first giving this reason, then another; at last, however, he
+seems to be satisfied that he has hit upon the true reason of his
+conduct.
+
+Now let us open the next paragraph, and see what it is.--"Although I am
+firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I
+will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the
+remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain
+that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the
+principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it. Of this I
+am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the
+receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of
+the Court of Directors. They had answered my purpose of public utility,
+and I had almost dismissed them from my remembrance."
+
+My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing account which he
+gives here, that several of these sums he meant to conceal forever, even
+from the knowledge of the Directors. Look back to his letter of 22d May,
+1782, and his letter of the 16th of December, and in them he tells you
+that he might have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to
+conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable so to do; that his
+conscience would have been wounded, if he had done it; and that he was
+afraid it would be thought that this discovery was brought from him in
+consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries. Here he says of a discovery
+which he values himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it
+should be attributed to arise from motives of fear. Now, at last, he
+tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time when he had just cause to dread
+the strict account to which he is called this day, first, that he cannot
+tell whether any one motive which he assigns, either in this letter or
+in the former, were his real motive or not; that he does not know
+whether he has not invented them since, in consequence of a train of
+meditation upon what he might have done or might have said; and, lastly,
+he says, contrary to all his former declarations, "that he had never
+meant nor could give the Directors the least notice of them at all, as
+they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed them from his
+remembrance." "I intended," he says, "always to keep them secret, though
+I have declared to you solemnly, over and over again, that I did not. I
+do not care how you discovered them; I have forgotten them; I have
+dismissed them from my remembrance." Is this the way in which money is
+to be received and accounted for?
+
+He then proceeds thus:--"But when fortune threw a sum of money in my way
+of a magnitude which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy
+of my situation at the time I received it made me more circumspect of
+appearances, I chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily
+and generally: hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity
+of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of
+which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession. I promised
+to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of
+it; and, in the performance of my promise, I thought it consistent with
+it to add to the amount all the former appropriations of the same kind:
+my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution which
+might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally
+attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards
+known, I might be asked what were my motives for withholding a part of
+these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of Directors and
+informing them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up every doubt."
+
+I am almost ashamed to remark upon the tergiversations and
+prevarications perpetually ringing the changes in this declaration. He
+would not have discovered this hundred thousand pounds, if he could have
+concealed it: he would have discovered it, lest malicious persons should
+be telling tales of it. He has a system of concealment: he never
+discovers anything, but when he thinks it can be forced from him. He
+says, indeed, "I could conceal these things forever, but my conscience
+would not give me leave": but it is guilt, and not honesty of
+conscience, that always prompts him. At one time it is the malice of
+people and the fear of misrepresentation which induced him to make the
+disclosure; and he values himself on the precaution which this fear had
+suggested to him. At another time it is the magnitude of the sum which
+produced this effect: nothing but the impossibility of concealing it
+could possibly have made him discover it. This hundred thousand pounds
+he declares he would have concealed, if he could; and yet he values
+himself upon the discovery of it. Oh, my Lords, I am afraid that sums of
+much greater magnitude have not been discovered at all! Your Lordships
+now see some of the artifices of this letter. You see the variety of
+styles he adopts, and how he turns himself into every shape and every
+form. But, after all, do you find any clear discovery? do you find any
+satisfactory answer to the Directors' letter? does he once tell you from
+whom he received the money? does he tell you for what he received it,
+what the circumstances of the persons giving it were, or any explanation
+whatever of his mode of accounting for it? No: and here, at last, after
+so many years' litigation, he is called to account for his
+prevaricating, false accounts in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.
+
+His explanation of his conduct relative to the bonds now only remains
+for your Lordships' consideration. Before he left Calcutta, in July,
+1784 [1781?], he says, when he was going upon a service which he thought
+a service of danger, he indorsed the false bonds which he had taken from
+the Company, declaring them to be none of his. You will observe that
+these bonds had been in his hands from the 9th or 15th of January (I am
+not quite sure of the exact date) to the day when he went upon this
+service, some time in the month of July, 1784 [1781?]. This service he
+had formerly declared he did not apprehend to be a service of danger;
+but he found it to be so after: it was in anticipation of that danger
+that he made this attestation and certificate upon the bonds. But who
+ever saw them? Mr. Larkins saw them, says he: "I gave them Mr. Larkins."
+We will show you hereafter that Mr. Larkins deserves no credit in this
+business,--that honor binds him not to discover the secrets of Mr.
+Hastings. But why did he not deliver them up entirely, when he was going
+upon that service? for all pretence of concealment in the business was
+now at an end, as we shall prove. Why did he not cancel these bonds?
+Why keep them at all? Why not enter truly the state of the account in
+the Company's records? "But I indorsed them," he says. "Did you deliver
+them so indorsed into the treasury?" "No, I delivered them indorsed into
+the hands of my bribe-broker and agent." "But why not destroy them, or
+give them up to the Company, and say you were paid, which would have
+been the only truth in this transaction? Why did you not indorse them
+before? Why not, during the long period of so many years, cancel them?"
+No, he kept them to the very day when he was going from Calcutta, and
+had made a declaration that they were not his. Never before, upon any
+account, had they appeared; and though the Committee of the House of
+Commons, in the Eleventh Report, had remarked upon all these scandalous
+proceedings and prevarications, yet he was not stimulated, even then, to
+give up these bonds. He held them in his hands till the time when he was
+preparing for his departure from Calcutta, in spite of the Directors, in
+spite of the Parliament, in spite of the cries of his own conscience, in
+a matter which was now grown public, and would knock doubly upon his
+reputation and conduct. He then declares they are not for his own use,
+but for the Company's service. But were they then cancelled? I do not
+find a trace of their being cancelled. In this letter of the 17th of
+January, 1785, he says with regard to these bonds, "The following sums
+were paid into the treasury, and bonds granted for the same in the name
+of the Governor-General, in whose possession the bonds remain, with a
+declaration upon each, indorsed and signed by him, that he has no claim
+on the Company for the amount either of principal or interest, no part
+of the latter having been received."
+
+To the account of the 22d of May, of the indorsement, is added the
+declaration upon oath. But why any man need to declare upon oath that
+the money which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from another
+person is not his is the most extraordinary thing in the world. If he
+had a mind to have it placed to his credit as his own, then an oath
+would be necessary; but in this case any one would believe him upon his
+word. He comes, however, and says, "This is indorsed upon oath." Oath!
+before what magistrate? In whose possession were the bonds? Were they
+given up? There is no trace of that upon the record, and it stands for
+him to prove that they were ever given up, and in any hands but Mr.
+Larkins's and his own. So here are the bonds, begun in obscurity and
+ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, corruption to
+corruption, and fraud to fraud. This is all we see of these bonds, till
+Mr. Larkins, to whom he writes some letter concerning them which does
+not appear, is called to read a funeral sermon over them.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Lords, I am come now near the period of this class of Mr. Hastings's
+bribes. I am a little exhausted. There are many circumstances that might
+make me wish not to delay this business by taking up another day at your
+Lordships' bar, in order to go through this long, intricate scene of
+corruption. But my strength now fails me. I hope within a very short
+time, to-morrow or the next court-day, to finish it, and to go directly
+into evidence, as I long much to do, to substantiate the charge; but it
+was necessary that the evidence should be explained. You have heard as
+much of the drama as I could go through: bear with my weakness a little:
+Mr. Larkins's letter will be the epilogue to it. I have already incurred
+the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by bringing home to
+him the proof of his crimes, and to display them in all their force and
+turpitude. It is my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to my
+heart.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[8] See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth Charges,
+Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.
+
+
+
+
+SPEECH
+
+ON
+
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.
+
+
+FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789.
+
+
+My Lords,--When I had the honor last to address you from this place, I
+endeavored to press this position upon your minds, and to fortify it by
+the example of the proceedings of Mr. Hastings,--that obscurity and
+inaccuracies in a matter of account constituted a just presumption of
+fraud. I showed, from his own letters, that his accounts were confused
+and inaccurate. I am ready, my Lords, to admit that there are situations
+in which a minister in high office may use concealment: it may be his
+duty to use concealment from the enemies of his masters; it may be
+prudent to use concealment from his inferiors in the service. It will
+always be suspicious to use concealment from his colleagues and
+cooerdinates in office; but when, in a money transaction, any man uses
+concealment with regard to them to whom the money belongs, he is guilty
+of a fraud. My Lords, I have shown you that Mr. Hastings kept no
+account, by his own confession, of the moneys that he had privately
+taken, as he pretends, for the Company's service, and we have but too
+much reason to presume for his own. We have shown you, my Lords, that he
+has not only no accounts, but no memory; we have shown that he does not
+even understand his own motives; that, when called upon to recollect
+them, he begs to guess at them; and that as his memory is to be supplied
+by his guess, so he has no confidence in his guesses. He at first finds,
+after a lapse of about a year and a half, or somewhat less, that he
+cannot recollect what his motives were to certain actions which upon the
+very face of them appeared fraudulent. He is called to an account some
+years after, to explain what they were, and he makes a just reflection
+upon it,--namely, that, as his memory did not enable him to find out his
+own motive at the former time, it is not to be expected that it would be
+clearer a year after. Your Lordships will, however, recollect, that in
+the Cheltenham letter, which is made of no perishable stuff, he begins
+again to guess; but after he has guessed and guessed again, and after he
+has gone through all the motives he can possibly assign for the action,
+he tells you he does not know whether those were his real motives, or
+whether he has not invented them since.
+
+In that situation the accounts of the Company were left with regard to
+very great sums which passed through Mr. Hastings's hands, and for which
+he, instead of giving his masters credit, took credit to himself, and,
+being their debtor, as he confesses himself to be at that time, took a
+security for that debt as if he had been their creditor. This required
+explanation. Explanation he was called upon for, over and over again;
+explanation he did not give, and declared he could not give. He was
+called upon for it when in India: he had not leisure to attend to it
+there. He was called upon for it when in Europe: he then says he must
+send for it to India. With much prevarication, and much insolence too,
+he confesses himself guilty of falsifying the Company's accounts by
+making himself their creditor when he was their debtor, and giving false
+accounts of this false transaction. The Court of Directors was slow to
+believe him guilty; Parliament expressed a strong suspicion of his
+guilt, and wished for further information. Mr. Hastings about this time
+began to imagine his conscience to be a faithful and true
+monitor,--which it were well he had attended to upon many occasions, as
+it would have saved him his appearance here,--and it told him that he
+was in great danger from the Parliamentary inquiries that were going on.
+It was now to be expected that he would have been in haste to fulfil the
+promise which he had made in the Patna letter of the 20th of January,
+1782; and accordingly we find that about this time his first agent,
+Major Fairfax, was sent over to Europe, which agent entered himself at
+the India House, and appeared before the Committee of the House of
+Commons, as an agent expressly sent over to explain whatever might
+appear doubtful in his conduct. Major Fairfax, notwithstanding the
+character in which Mr. Hastings employed him, appeared to be but a
+letter-carrier: he had nothing to say: he gave them no information in
+the India House at all: to the Committee (I can speak with the clearness
+of a witness) he gave no satisfaction whatever. However, this agent
+vanished in a moment, in order to make way for another, more
+substantial, more efficient agent,--an agent perfectly known in this
+country,--an agent known by the name given to him by Mr. Hastings, who,
+like the princes of the East, gives titles: he calls him an incomparable
+agent; and by that name he is very well known to your Lordships and the
+world. This agent, Major Scott, who I believe was here prior to the
+time of Major Fairfax's arrival in the character of an agent, and for
+the very same purposes, was called before the Committee, and examined,
+point by point, article by article, upon all that obscure enumeration of
+bribes which the Court of Directors declare they did not understand; but
+he declared that he could speak nothing with regard to any of these
+transactions, and that he had got no instructions to explain any part of
+them. There was but one circumstance which in the course of his
+examination we drew from him,--namely, that one of these articles,
+entered in the account of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received
+from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing. He produced an extract of
+a letter relative to it, which your Lordships in the course of this
+trial may see, and which will lead us into a further and more minute
+inquiry on that head; but when that committee made their report in 1783,
+not one single article had been explained to Parliament, not one
+explained to the Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr.
+Hastings had never thought proper to communicate to the East India
+Company, either by himself, nor, as far as we could find out, by his
+agent; nor was it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn out
+from him by a long examination in the Committee of the House of Commons.
+And thus, notwithstanding the letters he had written and the agents he
+employed, he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to give his employers
+no satisfaction at all. What is curious in this proceeding is, that Mr.
+Hastings, all the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the credit
+of a discovery. Your Lordships have seen what his discovery is; but Mr.
+Hastings, among his other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an
+effectual method of concealment through discovery. I will venture to
+say, that, whatever suspicions there might have been of Mr. Hastings's
+bribes, there was more effectual concealment in regard to every
+circumstance respecting them in that discovery than if he had kept a
+total silence. Other means of discovery might have been found, but this,
+standing in the way, prevented the employment of those means.
+
+Things continued in this state till the time of the letter from
+Cheltenham. The Cheltenham letter declared that Mr. Hastings knew
+nothing of the matter,--that he had brought with him no accounts to
+England upon the subject; and though it appears by this very letter that
+he had with him at Cheltenham (if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a
+great deal of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of the
+22d of May with him, yet any account that could elucidate that letter he
+declared that he had not; but he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India,
+whom your Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly
+apprised of all that transaction. Your Lordships will observe that Mr.
+Hastings has all his faculties, some way or other, in deposit: one
+person can speak to his motives; another knows his fortune better than
+himself; to others he commits the sentimental parts of his defence; to
+Mr. Larkins he commits his memory. We shall see what a trustee of memory
+Mr. Larkins is, and how far he answers the purpose which might be
+expected, when appealed to by a man who has no memory himself, or who
+has left it on the other side of the water, and who leaves it to another
+to explain for him accounts which he ought to have kept himself, and
+circumstances which ought to be deposited in his own memory.
+
+This Cheltenham letter, I believe, originally became known, as far as I
+can recollect, to the House of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Hastings's
+own agent: I do not like to be positive upon that point, but I think
+that was the first appearance of it. It appeared likewise in public: for
+it was thought so extraordinary and laborious a performance, by the
+writer or his friends, (as indeed it is,) that it might serve to open a
+new source of eloquence in the kingdom, and consequently was printed, I
+believe, at the desire of the parties themselves. But however it became
+known, it raised an extreme curiosity in the public to hear, when Mr.
+Hastings could say nothing, after so many years, of his own concerns and
+his own affairs, what satisfaction Mr. Larkins at last would give
+concerning them. This letter was directed to Mr. Devaynes, Chairman of
+the Court of Directors. It does not appear that the Court of Directors
+wrote anything to India in consequence of it, or that they directed this
+satisfactory account of the business should be given them; but some
+private communications passed between Mr. Hastings, or his agents, and
+Mr. Larkins. There was a general expectation upon this occasion, I
+believe, in the House of Commons and in the nation at large, to know
+what would become of the portentous inquiry. Mr. Hastings has always
+contrived to have half the globe between question and answer: when he
+was in India, the question went to him, and then he adjourned his answer
+till he came to England; and when he came to England, it was necessary
+his answer should arrive from India; so that there is no manner of doubt
+that all time was given for digesting, comparing, collating, and making
+up a perfect memory upon the occasion.
+
+But, my Lords, Mr. Larkins, who has in custody Mr. Hastings's memory, no
+small part of his conscience, and all his accounts, did, at last, in
+compliance with Mr. Hastings's desire, think proper to send an account.
+Then, at last, we may expect light. Where are we to look for accounts,
+but from an accountant-general? Where are they to be met with, unless
+from him? And accordingly, in that night of perplexity into which Mr.
+Hastings's correspondence had plunged them, men looked up to the dawning
+of the day which was to follow that star, the little Lucifer, which with
+his lamp was to dispel the shades of night, and give us some sort of
+light into this dark, mysterious transaction. At last the little lamp
+appeared, and was laid on the table of this House of Commons, on the
+motion of Mr. Hastings's friends: for we did not know of its arrival. It
+arrives, with all the intelligence, all the memory, accuracy, and
+clearness which Mr. Larkins can furnish for Mr. Hastings upon a business
+that before was nothing but mystery and confusion. The account is
+called,--
+
+_"Copy of the particulars of the dates on which the component parts of
+sundry sums included in the account of sums received on the account of
+the Honorable Company by the Governor-General, or paid to their Treasury
+by his order, and applied to their service, were received for Mr.
+Hastings, and paid to the Sub-Treasurer."_
+
+The letter from Mr. Larkins consisted of two parts: first, what was so
+much wanted, an account; next, what was wanted most of all to such an
+account as he sent, a comment and explanation. The account consisted of
+two members: one gave an account of several detached bribes that Mr.
+Hastings had received within the course of about a year and a half; and
+the other, of a great bribe which he had received in one gross sum of
+one hundred thousand pounds from the Nabob of Oude. It appeared to us,
+upon looking into these accounts, that there was some geography, a
+little bad chronology, but nothing else in the first: neither the
+persons who took the money, nor the persons from whom it was taken, nor
+the ends for which it was given, nor any other circumstances are
+mentioned.
+
+The first thing we saw was _Dinagepore_. I believe you know this piece
+of geography,--that it is one of the provinces of the kingdom of Bengal.
+We then have a long series of months, with a number of sums added to
+them; and in the end it is said, that on the 18th and 19th of Asin,
+(meaning part of September and part of October,) were paid to Mr.
+Croftes two lac of rupees; and then remains one lac, which was taken
+from a sum of three lac six thousand nine hundred and seventy-three
+rupees. After we had waited for Mr. Hastings's own account, after it had
+been pursued through a series of correspondence in vain, after his
+agents had come to England to explain it, this is the explanation that
+your Lordships have got of this first article, Dinagepore. Not the
+person paid to, not the person paying, are mentioned, nor any other
+circumstance, except the signature, _G.G.S._: this might serve for
+_George Gilbert Sanders_, or any other name you please; and seeing
+_Croftes_ above it, you might imagine it was an Englishman. And this,
+which I call a geographical and a chronological account, is the only
+account we have. Mr. Larkins, upon the mere face of the account, sadly
+disappoints us; and I will venture to say that in matters of account
+Bengal book-keeping is as remote from good book-keeping as the Bengal
+_painches_ are remote from all the rules of good composition. We have,
+however, got some light: namely, that one G.G.S. has paid some money to
+Mr. Croftes for some purpose, but from whom we know not, nor where; that
+there is a place called Dinagepore; and that Mr. Hastings received some
+money from somebody in Dinagepore.
+
+The next article is _Patna_. Your Lordships are not so ill acquainted
+with the geography of India as not to know that there is such a place as
+Patna, nor so ill acquainted with the chronology of it as not to know
+that there are three months called Baisakh, Asin, Chait. Here was paid
+to Mr. Croftes two lac of rupees, and there was left a balance of about
+two more. But though you learn with regard to the province of Dinagepore
+that there is a balance to be discharged by G.G.S., yet with regard to
+Patna we have not even a G.G.S.: we have no sort of light whatever to
+know through whose hands the money passed, nor any glimpse of light
+whatever respecting it.
+
+You may expect to be made amends in the other province, called _Nuddea_,
+where Mr. Hastings had received a considerable sum of money. There is
+the very same darkness: not a word from whom received, by whom received,
+or any other circumstance, but that it was paid into the hands of Mr.
+Hastings's _white banian_, as he was commonly called in that country,
+into the hands of Mr. Croftes, who is his white agent in receiving
+bribes: for he was very far from having but one.
+
+After all this inquiry, after so many severe animadversions from the
+House of Commons, after all those reiterated letters from the
+Directors, after an application to Mr. Hastings himself, when you are
+hunting to get at some explanation of the proceedings mentioned in the
+letter of the month of May, 1782, you receive here by Mr. Larkins's
+letter, which is dated the 5th of August, 1786, this account, which, to
+be sure, gives an amazing light into this business: it is a letter for
+which it was worth sending to Bengal, worth waiting for with all that
+anxious expectation with which men wait for great events. Upon the face
+of the account there is not one single word which can tend to illustrate
+the matter: he sums up the whole, and makes out that there was received
+five lac and fifty thousand rupees, that is to say, 55,000_l._, out of
+the sum of nine lac and fifty thousand engaged to be paid: namely,--
+
+From Dinagepore       4,00,000
+From Nuddea           1,50,000
+And from Patna        4,00,000
+                      --------
+                      9,50,000
+                      --------
+                    Or L95,000
+
+Now you have got full light! _Cabooleat_ signifies a contract, or an
+agreement; and this agreement was, to pay Mr. Hastings, as one should
+think, certain sums of money,--it does not say from whom, but only that
+such a sum of money was paid, and that there remains such a balance.
+When you come and compare the money received by Mr. Croftes with these
+cabooleats, you find that the cabooleats amount to 95,000_l._, and that
+the receipt has been about 55,000_l._, and that upon the face of this
+account there is 40,000_l._ somewhere or other unaccounted for. There
+never was such a mode of account-keeping, except in the new system of
+this bribe exchequer.
+
+Your Lordships will now see, from this luminous, satisfactory, and clear
+account, which could come from no other than a great accountant and a
+great financier, establishing some new system of finance, and
+recommending it to the world as superior to those old-fashioned foolish
+establishments, the Exchequer and Bank of England, what lights are
+received from Mr. Hastings.
+
+However, it does so happen that from these obscure hints we have been
+able to institute examinations which have discovered such a mass of
+fraud, guilt, corruption, and oppression as probably never before
+existed since the beginning of the world; and in that darkness we hope
+and trust the diligence and zeal of the House of Commons will find light
+sufficient to make a full discovery of his base crimes. We hope and
+trust, that, after all his concealments, and though he appear resolved
+to die in the last dike of prevarication, all his artifices will not be
+able to secure him from the siege which the diligence of the House of
+Commons has laid to his corruptions.
+
+Your Lordships will remark, in a paragraph, which, though it stands
+last, is the first in principle, in Mr. Larkins's letter, that, having
+before given his comment, he perorates, as is natural upon such an
+occasion. This peroration, as is usual in perorations, is in favor of
+the parties speaking it, and _ad conciliandum auditorem_. "Conscious,"
+he says, "that the concern which I have had in these transactions needs
+neither an apology nor an excuse,"--that is rather extraordinary,
+too!--"and that I have in no action of my life sacrificed the duty and
+fidelity which I owed to my honorable employers either to the regard
+which I felt for another or to the advancement of my own fortune, I
+shall conclude this address, firmly relying upon the candor of those
+before whom it may be submitted for its being deemed a satisfactory as
+well as a circumstantial compliance with the requisition in conformity
+to which the information it affords has been furnished,"--meaning, as
+your Lordships will see in the whole course of the letter, that he had
+written it in compliance with the requisition and in conformity to the
+information he had been furnished with by Mr. Hastings,--"without which
+it would have been as base as dishonorable for me spontaneously to have
+afforded it: for, though the duty which every man owes to himself should
+render him incapable of making an assertion not strictly true, no man
+actuated either by virtuous or honorable sentiments could mistakenly
+apprehend, that, unless he betrayed the confidence reposed in him by
+another, he might be deemed deficient in fidelity to his employers."
+
+My Lords, here is, in my opinion, a discovery very well worthy your
+Lordships' attention; here is the accountant-general of the Company, who
+declares, and fixes it as a point of honor, that he would not have made
+a discovery so important to them, if Mr. Hastings himself had not
+authorized him to make it: a point to which he considers himself bound
+by his honor to adhere. Let us see what becomes of us, when the
+principle of honor is so debauched and perverted. A principle of honor,
+as long as it is connected with virtue, adds no small efficacy to its
+operation, and no small brilliancy and lustre to its appearance: but
+honor, the moment that it becomes unconnected with the duties of
+official function, with the relations of life, and the eternal and
+immutable rules of morality, and appears in its substance alien to them,
+changes its nature, and, instead of justifying a breach of duty,
+aggravates all its mischiefs to an almost infinite degree; by the
+apparent lustre of the surface, it hides from you the baseness and
+deformity of the ground. Here is Mr. Hastings's agent, Mr. Larkins, the
+Company's general accountant, prefers his attachment to Mr. Hastings to
+his duty to the Company. Instead of the account which he ought to give
+to them in consequence of the trust reposed in him, he thinks himself
+bound by honor to Mr. Hastings, if Mr. Hastings had not called for that
+explanation, not to have given it: so that, whatever obscurity is in
+this explanation, it is because Mr. Hastings did not authorize or
+require him to give a clearer. Here is a principle of treacherous
+fidelity, of perfidious honor, of the faith of conspirators against
+their masters, the faith of robbers against the public, held up against
+the duty of an officer in a public situation. You see how they are bound
+to one another, and how they give their fidelity to keep the secrets of
+one another, to prevent the Directors having a true knowledge of their
+affairs; and I am sure, if you do not destroy this honor of conspirators
+and this faith of robbers, that there will be no other honor and no
+other fidelity among the servants in India. Mr. Larkins, your Lordships
+see, adheres to the principle of secrecy.
+
+You will next remark that Mr. Hastings had as many bribe-factors as
+bribes. There was confidence to be reposed in each of them, and not one
+of these men appears to be in the confidence of another. You will find
+in this letter the policy, the frame, and constitution of this new
+exchequer. Mr. Croftes seems to have known things which Mr. Larkins did
+not; Mr. Larkins knew things which Gunga Govind Sing did not; Gunga
+Govind Sing knew things which none of the rest of the confederates knew.
+Cantoo Baboo, who appears in this letter as a principal actor, was in a
+secret which Mr. Larkins did not know; it appears likewise, that there
+was a Persian moonshee in a secret of which Cantoo Baboo was ignorant;
+and it appears that Mr. Palmer was in the secret of a transaction not
+intrusted to any of the rest. Such is the labyrinth of this practical
+_painche_, or screw, that, if, for instance, you were endeavoring to
+trace backwards some transaction through Major Palmer, you would be
+stopped there, and must go back again; for it had begun with Cantoo
+Baboo. If in another you were to penetrate into the dark recess of the
+black breast of Cantoo Baboo, you could not go further; for it began
+with Gunga Govind Sing. If you pierce the breast of Gunga Govind Sing,
+you are again stopped; a Persian moonshee was the confidential agent. If
+you get beyond this, you find Mr. Larkins knew something which the
+others did not; and at last you find Mr. Hastings did not put entire
+confidence in any of them. You will see, by this letter, that he kept
+his accounts in all colors, black, white, and mezzotinto; that he kept
+them in all languages,--in Persian, in Bengalee, and in a language
+which, I believe, is neither Persian nor Bengalee, nor any other known
+in the world, but a language in which Mr. Hastings found it proper to
+keep his accounts and to transact his business. The persons carrying on
+the accounts are Mr. Larkins, an Englishman, Cantoo Baboo, a Gentoo, and
+a Persian moonshee, probably a Mahometan. So all languages, all
+religions, all descriptions of men are to keep the account of these
+bribes, and to make out this valuable account which Mr. Larkins gave
+you!
+
+Let us now see how far the memory, observation, and knowledge of the
+persons referred to can supply the want of them in Mr. Hastings. These
+accounts come at last, though late, from Mr. Larkins, who, I will
+venture to say, let the banians boast what they will, has skill perhaps
+equal to the best of them: he begins by explaining to you something
+concerning the present of the ten lac. I wish your Lordships always to
+take Mr. Hastings's word, where it can be had,--or Mr. Larkins's, who
+was the representative of and memory-keeper to Mr. Hastings; and then I
+may perhaps take the liberty of making some observations upon it.
+
+
+_Extract of a Letter from William Larkins, Accountant-General of Bengal,
+to the Chairman of the East India Company, dated 5th August, 1786._
+
+"Mr. Hastings returned from Benares to Calcutta on the 5th February,
+1782. At that time I was wholly ignorant of the letter which on the 20th
+January he wrote from Patna to the Secret Committee of the Honorable
+the Court of Directors. The rough draught of this letter, in the
+handwriting of Major Palmer, is now in my possession. Soon after his
+arrival at the Presidency, he requested me to form the account of his
+receipts and disbursements, which you will find journalized in the
+280th, &c., and 307th pages of the Honorable Company's general books of
+the year 1781-2. My official situation as accountant-general had
+previously convinced me that Mr. Hastings could not have made the issues
+which were acknowledged as received from him by some of the paymasters
+of the army, unless he had obtained some such supply as that which he
+afterwards, viz., on the 22d May, 1782, made known to me, when I
+immediately suggested to him the necessity of his transmitting that
+account which accompanied his letter of that date, till when the promise
+contained in his letter of 20th January had entirely escaped his
+recollection."
+
+The first thing I would remark on this (and I believe your Lordships
+have rather gone before me in the remark) is, that Mr. Hastings came
+down to Calcutta on the 5th of February; that then, or a few days after,
+he calls to him his confidential and faithful friend, (not his official
+secretary, for he trusted none of his regular secretaries with these
+transactions,)--he calls him to help him to make out his accounts during
+his absence. You would imagine that at that time he trusted this man
+with his account. No such thing: he goes on with the accountant-general,
+accounting with him for money expended, without ever explaining to that
+accountant-general how that money came into his hands. Here, then, we
+have the accountant making out the account, and the person accounting.
+The accountant does not in any manner make an objection, and say, "Here
+you are giving me an account by which it appears that you have expended
+money, but you have not told me where you received it: how shall I make
+out a fair account of debtor and creditor between you and the Company?"
+He does no such thing. There lies a suspicion in his breast that Mr.
+Hastings must have taken some money in some irregular way, or he could
+not have made those payments. Mr. Larkins begins to suspect him. "Where
+did you lose this bodkin?" said one lady to another, upon a certain
+occasion. "Pray, Madam, where did you find it?" Mr. Hastings, at the
+very moment of his life when confidence was required, even when making
+up his accounts with his accountant, never told him one word of the
+matter. You see he had no confidence in Mr. Larkins. This makes out one
+of the propositions I want to impress upon your Lordships' minds, that
+no one man did he let into every part of his transactions: a material
+circumstance, which will help to lead your Lordships' judgment in
+forming your opinion upon many parts of this cause.
+
+You see that Mr. Larkins suspected him. Probably in consequence of those
+suspicions, or from some other cause, he at last told him, upon the 22d
+of May, 1782, (but why at that time, rather than at any other time, does
+not appear; and this we shall find very difficult to be accounted
+for,)--he told him that he had received a bribe from the Nabob of Oude,
+of 100,000_l._ He informs him of this on the 22d of May, which, when the
+accounts were making up, he conceals from him. And he communicates to
+him the rough draught of his letter to the Court of Directors, informing
+them that this business was not transacted by any known secretary of the
+Company, nor with the intervention of any interpreter of the Company,
+nor passed through any official channel whatever, but through a
+gentleman much in his confidence, his military secretary; and, as if
+receiving bribes, and receiving letters concerning them, and carrying on
+correspondence relative to them, was a part of military duty, the rough
+draught of this letter was in the hands of this military secretary. Upon
+the communication of the letter, it rushes all at once into the mind of
+Mr. Larkins, who knows Mr. Hastings's recollection, who knows what does
+and what does not escape it, and who had a memory ready to explode at
+Mr. Hastings's desire, "Good God!" says he, "you have promised the
+Directors an account of this business!"--a promise which Mr. Larkins
+assures the Directors, upon his word, had entirely escaped Mr.
+Hastings's recollection. Mr. Hastings, it seems, had totally forgotten
+the promise relative to the paltry sum of 100,000_l._ which he had made
+to the Court of Directors in the January before; he never once thought
+of it, no, not even when he was making up his accounts of that very
+identical sum, till the 22d of May. So that these persons answer for one
+another's bad memory: and you will see they have good reason. Mr.
+Hastings's want of recollection appears in things of some moment.
+However lightly he may regard the sum of 100,000_l._, which, considering
+the enormous sums he has received, I dare say he does,--for he totally
+forgot it, he knew nothing about it,--observe what sort of memory this
+registrar and accountant of such sums as 100,000_l._ has. In what
+confusion of millions must it be, that such sums can be lost to Mr.
+Hastings's recollection! However, at last it was brought to his
+recollection, and he thought that it was necessary to give some account
+of it. And who is the accountant whom he produces? His own memory is no
+accountant. He had dismissed the matter (as he happily expresses it in
+the Cheltenham letter) from his memory. Major Palmer is not the
+accountant. One is astonished that a man who had had 100,000_l._ in his
+hands, and laid it out, as he pretends, in the public service, has not a
+scrap of paper to show for it. No ordinary or extraordinary account is
+given of it. Well, what is to be done in such circumstances? He sends
+for a person whose name you have heard and will often hear of, the
+faithful Cantoo Baboo. This man comes to Mr. Larkins, and he reads to
+him (be so good as to remark the words) from a Bengal paper the account
+of the detached bribes. Your Lordships will observe that I have stated
+the receipt of a number of detached bribes, and a bribe in one great
+body: one, the great _corps d'armee_; the other, flying scouting bodies,
+which were only to be collected together by a skilful man who knew how
+to manage them, and regulate the motions of those wild and disorderly
+troops. When No. 2 was to be explained, Cantoo Baboo failed him; he was
+not worth a farthing as to any transaction that happened when Mr.
+Hastings was in the Upper Provinces, where though he was his faithful
+and constant attendant through the whole, yet he could give no account
+of it. Mr. Hastings's moonshee then reads three lines from a paper to
+Mr. Larkins. Now it is no way even insinuated that both the Bengal and
+Persian papers did not contain the account of other immense sums; and,
+indeed, from the circumstance of only three lines being read from the
+Persian paper, your Lordships will be able, in your own minds, to form
+some judgment upon this business.
+
+I shall now proceed with his letter of explanation. "The particulars,"
+he goes on to say, "of the paper No. 1 were read to me from a Bengal
+paper by Mr. Hastings's banian, Cantoo Baboo; and if I am not mistaken,
+the three first lines of that No. 2 were read over to me from a Persian
+paper by his moonshee. The translation of these particulars, made by me,
+was, as I verily believe, the first complete memorandum that he ever
+possessed of them in the English language; and I am confident, that, if
+I had not suggested to him the necessity of his taking this precaution,
+he would at this moment have been unable to have afforded any such
+information concerning them."
+
+Now, my Lords, if he had not got, on the intimation of Mr. Larkins, some
+scraps of paper, your Lordships might have at this day wanted that
+valuable information which Mr. Larkins has laid before you.
+These, however, contain, Mr. Larkins says, "the first
+complete"--what?--account, do you imagine?--no, "the first complete
+_memorandum_." You would imagine that he would himself, for his own use,
+have notched down, somewhere or other, in short-hand, in Persian
+characters, short without vowels, or in some other way, _memorandums_.
+But he had not himself even a memorandum of this business; and
+consequently, when he was at Cheltenham, and even here at your bar, he
+could never have had any account of a sum of 200,000_l._, but by this
+account of Mr. Larkins, taken, as people read them, from detached pieces
+of paper.
+
+One would have expected that Mr. Larkins, being warned that day, and
+cautioned by the strange memory of Mr. Hastings, and the dangerous
+situation, therefore, in which he himself stood, would at least have
+been very guarded and cautious. Hear what he next says upon this
+subject. "As neither of the other sums passed through his hands, these"
+(meaning the scraps) "contained no such specification, and consequently
+could not enable him to afford the information with which he has
+requested me to furnish you; and it is more than probable, that, if the
+affidavit which I took on the 16th December, 1782, had not exposed my
+character to the suspicion of my being capable of committing one of the
+basest trespasses upon the confidence of mankind, I should, at this
+distance of time, have been equally unable to have complied with this
+request: but after I became acquainted with the insinuation suggested in
+the Eleventh Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, I
+thought it but too probable, that, unless I was possessed of the
+original memorandum which I had made of these transactions, I might not
+at some distant period be able to prove that I had not descended to
+commit so base an action. I have therefore always most carefully
+preserved every paper which I possessed regarding these transactions."
+
+You see that Mr. Hastings had no memorandums of his accounts; you see,
+that, after Mr. Larkins had made his memorandums of them, he had no
+design of guarding or keeping them; and you will commend those wicked
+and malicious committees who by their reports have told an
+accountant-general and first public officer of revenue, that, in order
+to guard his character from their suspicions, it was necessary that he
+should keep some paper or other of an account. We have heard of the
+base, wicked, and mercenary license that has been used by these
+gentlemen of India towards the House of Commons: a license to libel and
+traduce the diligence of the House of Commons, the purity of their
+motives, and the fidelity of their actions, by which the very means of
+informing the people are attempted to be used for the purpose of leaving
+them in darkness and delusion. But, my Lords, when the
+accountant-general declares, that, if the House of Commons had not
+expressed, as they ought to express, much diffidence and distrust
+respecting these transactions, and even suspected him of perjury, this
+very day that man would not have produced a scrap of those papers to
+you, but might have turned them to the basest and most infamous of uses.
+If, I say, we have saved these valuable fragments by suspecting his
+integrity, your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use: and I hope
+the world will learn that punishment will be of use, too, in preventing
+such transactions.
+
+Your Lordships have seen that no two persons knew anything of these
+transactions; you see that even memorandums of transactions of very
+great moment, some of which had passed in the year 1779, were not even
+so much as put in the shape of complete memoranda until May, 1782; you
+see that Mr. Hastings never kept them: and there is no reason to imagine
+that a black banian and a Persian moonshee would have been careful of
+what Mr. Hastings himself, who did not seem to stimulate his accountants
+to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity, was negligent.
+You see that Mr. Larkins, our last, our only hope, if he had not been
+suspected by the House of Commons, probably would never have kept these
+papers; and that you could not have had this valuable cargo, such as it
+is, if it had not been for the circumstance Mr. Larkins thinks proper to
+mention.
+
+From the specimen which we have given of Mr. Hastings's mode of
+accounts, of its vouchers, checks, and counter-checks, your Lordships
+will have observed that the mode itself is past describing, and that the
+checks and counter-checks, instead of being put upon one another to
+prevent abuse, are put upon each other to prevent discovery and to
+fortify abuse. When you hear that one man has an account of receipt,
+another of expenditure, another of control, you say that office is well
+constituted: but here is an office constituted by different persons
+without the smallest connection with each other; for the only purpose
+which they have ever answered is the purpose of base concealment.
+
+We shall now proceed a little further with Mr. Larkins. The first of the
+papers from which he took the memoranda was a paper of Cantoo Baboo. It
+contained detached payments, amounting in the whole, with the cabooleat,
+or agreement, to about 95,000_l._ sterling, and of which it appears that
+there was received by Mr. Croftes 55,000_l._, and no more.
+
+Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest in your memory what
+sort of an exchequer this is, even with regard to its receipts? As your
+Lordships have seen the economy and constitution of this office, so now
+see the receipt. It appears that in the month of May, 1782, out of the
+sums beginning to be received in the month of Shawal, that is in July,
+1779, there was, during that interval, 40,000_l._ out of 95,000_l._ sunk
+somewhere, in some of the turnings over upon the gridiron, through some
+of those agents and panders of corruption which Mr. Hastings uses. Here
+is the _valuable_ revenue of the Company, _which is to supply them in
+their exigencies, which is to come from sources which otherwise never
+would have yielded it_,--which, though small in proportion to the other
+revenue, yet is a diamond, something that by its value makes amends for
+its want of bulk,--falling short by 40,000_l._ out of 95,000_l._ Here is
+a system made for fraud, and producing all the effects of it.
+
+Upon the face of this account, the agreement was to yield to Mr.
+Hastings, some way or other, to be paid to Mr. Croftes, 95,000_l._, and
+there was a deficiency of 40,000_l._ Would any man, even with no more
+sense than Mr. Hastings, who wants all the faculties of the human mind,
+who has neither memory nor judgment, any man who was that poor
+half-idiot creature that Mr. Hastings pretends to be, engage in a
+dealing that was to extort from some one or other an agreement to pay
+95,000_l._ which was not to produce more than 55,000_l._? What, then, is
+become of it? Is it in the hands of Mr. Hastings's wicked bribe-brokers,
+or in his own hands? Is it in arrear? Do you know anything about it?
+Whom are you to apply to for information? Why, to G.G.S.--G.G.S. I find
+to be, what indeed I suspected him to be, a person that I have mentioned
+frequently to your Lordships, and that you will often hear of, commonly
+called Gunga Govind Sing,--in a short word, the wickedest of the whole
+race of banians: the consolidated wickedness of the whole body is to be
+found in this man.
+
+Of the deficiency which appears in this agreement with somebody or other
+on the part of Mr. Hastings through Gunga Govind Sing you will expect to
+hear some explanation. Of the first sum, which is said to have been paid
+through Gunga Govind Sing, amounting on the cabooleat to four lac, and
+of which no more than two lac was actually received,--that is to say,
+half of it was sunk,--we have this memorandum only: "Although Mr.
+Hastings was extremely dissatisfied with the excuses Gunga Govind Sing
+assigned for not paying Mr. Croftes the sum stated by the paper No. 1 to
+be in his charge, he never could obtain from him any further payments
+on this account." Mr. Hastings is exceedingly dissatisfied with those
+excuses, and this is the whole account of the transaction. This is the
+only thing said of Gunga Govind Sing in the account: he neither states
+how he came to be employed, or for what he was employed. It appears,
+however, from the transaction, as far as we can make our way through
+this darkness, that he had actually received 10,000_l._ of the money,
+which he did not account for, and that he pretended that there was an
+arrear of the rest. So here Mr. Hastings's bribe-agent admits that he
+had received 10,000_l._, but he will not account for it; he says there
+is an arrear of another 10,000_l._; and thus it appears that he was
+enabled to take from somebody at Dinagepore, by a cabooleat, 40,000_l._,
+of which Mr. Hastings can get but 20,000_l._: there is cent per cent
+loss upon it. Mr. Hastings was so exceedingly dissatisfied with this
+conduct of Gunga Govind Sing, that you would imagine a breach would have
+immediately ensued between them. I shall not anticipate what some of my
+honorable friends will bring before your Lordships; but I tell you,
+that, so far from quarrelling with Gunga Govind Sing, or being really
+angry with him, it is only a little pettish love quarrel with Gunga
+Govind Sing: _amantium irae amoris integratio est_. For Gunga Govind
+Sing, without having paid him one shilling of this money, attended him
+to the Ganges; and one of the last acts of Mr. Hastings's government was
+to represent this man, who was unfaithful even to fraud, who did not
+keep the common faith of thieves and robbers, this very man he
+recommends to the Company as a person who ought to be rewarded, as one
+of their best and most faithful servants. And how does he recommend him
+to be rewarded? By giving him the estate of another person,--the way in
+which Mr. Hastings desires to be always rewarded himself: for, in
+calling upon the Company's justice to give him some money for expenses
+with which he never charged them, he desires them to assign him the
+money upon some person of the country. So here Mr. Hastings recommends
+Gunga Govind Sing not only to trust, confidence, and employment, which
+he does very fully, but to a reward taken out of the substance of other
+people. This is what Mr. Hastings has done with Gunga Govind Sing; and
+if such are the effects of his anger, what must be the effect of his
+pleasure and satisfaction? Now I say that Mr. Hastings, who, in fact,
+saw this man amongst the very last with whom he had any communication in
+India, could not have so recommended him after this known fraud, in one
+business only, of 20,000_l._,--he could not so have supported him, he
+could not so have caressed him, he could not so have employed him, he
+could not have done all this, unless he had paid to Mr. Hastings
+privately that sum of money which never was brought into any even of
+these miserable accounts, without some payment or other with which Mr.
+Hastings was and ought to be satisfied, or unless Gunga Govind Sing had
+some dishonorable secret to tell of him which he did not dare to provoke
+him to give a just account of, or, lastly, unless the original agreement
+was that half or a third of the bribe should go to Gunga Govind Sing.
+
+Such is this patriotic scheme of bribery, this public-spirited
+corruption which Mr. Hastings has invented upon this occasion, and by
+which he thinks out of the vices of mankind to draw a better revenue
+than out of any legal source whatever; and therefore he has resolved to
+become the most corrupt of all Governors-General, in order to be the
+most useful servant to the finances of the Company.
+
+So much as to the first article of Dinagepore peshcush. All you have is,
+that G.G.S is Gunga Govind Sing; that he has cheated the public of half
+of it; that Mr. Hastings was angry with him, and yet went away from
+Bengal, rewarding, praising, and caressing him. Are these things to pass
+as matters of course? They cannot so pass with your Lordships' sagacity:
+I will venture to say that no court, even of _pie-poudre_, could help
+finding him guilty upon such a matter, if such a court had to inquire
+into it.
+
+The next article is _Patna_. Here, too, he was to receive 40,000_l._;
+but from whom this deponent saith not. At this circumstance Mr. Larkins,
+who is a famous deponent, never hints once. You may look through his
+whole letter, which is a pretty long one, (and which I will save your
+Lordships the trouble of hearing read at length now, because you will
+have it before you when you come to the Patna business,) and you will
+only find that somebody had engaged to pay him 40,000_l._, and that but
+half of this sum was received. You want an explanation of this. You have
+seen the kind of explanation given in the former case, a conjectural
+explanation of G.G.S. But when you come to the present case, who the
+person paying was, why the money was not paid, what the cause of failure
+was, you are not told: you only learn that there was that sum deficient;
+and Mr. Larkins, who is our last resort and final hope of elucidation in
+this transaction, throws not the smallest glimpse of light upon it. We
+of the House of Commons have been reduced to form the best legitimate
+conjectures we could upon this business, and those conjectures have led
+us to further evidence, which will enable us to fix one of the most
+scandalous and most mischievous bribes, in all the circumstances of it,
+upon Mr. Hastings, that was ever known. If he extorted 40,000_l._ under
+pretence of the Company's service, here is again another failure of half
+the money. Oh, my Lords, you will find that even the remaining part was
+purchased with the loss of one of the best revenues in India, and with
+the grievous distress of a country that deserved well your protection,
+instead of being robbed to give 20,000_l._ to the Company, and another
+20,000_l._ to some robber or other, black or white. When I say, given to
+some other robber, black or white, I do not suppose that either
+generosity, friendship, or even communion, can exist in that country
+between white men and black: no, their colors are not more adverse than
+their characters and tempers. There is not that _idem velle et idem
+nolle_, there are none of those habits of life, nothing, that can bind
+men together even in the most ordinary society: the mutual means of such
+an union do not exist between them. It is a money-dealing, and a
+money-dealing only, which can exist between them; and when you hear that
+a black man is favored, and that 20,000_l._ is pretended to be left in
+his hands, do not believe it: indeed, you cannot believe it; for we will
+bring evidence to show that there is no friendship between those
+people,--and that, when black men give money to a white man, it is a
+bribe,--and that, when money is given to a black man, he is only a
+sharer with the white man in their infamous profits. We find, however,
+somebody, anonymous, with 20,000_l._ left in his hands; and when we come
+to discover who the man is, and the final balance which appears against
+him in his account with the Company, we find that for this 20,000_l._,
+which was received for the Company, they paid such a compound interest
+as was never before paid for money advanced: the most violently griping
+usurer, in dealing with the most extravagant heir, never made such a
+bargain as Mr. Hastings has made for the Company by this bribe.
+Therefore it could be nothing but fraud that could have got him to have
+undertaken such a revenue. This evidently shows the whole to be a
+pretence to cover fraud, and not a weak attempt to raise a revenue,--and
+that Mr. Hastings was not that idiot he represents himself to be, a man
+forgetting all his offices, all his duties, all his own affairs, and all
+the public affairs. He does not, however, forget how to make a bargain
+to get money; but when the money is to be recovered for the Company, (as
+he says,) he forgets to recover it: so that the accuracy with which he
+begins a bribe, _acribus initiis et soporosa fine_, and the carelessness
+with which he ends it, are things that characterize, not weakness and
+stupidity, but fraud.
+
+The next article we proceed to is _Nuddea_. Here we have more light; but
+does Mr. Larkins anywhere tell you anything about Nuddea? No it appears
+as if the account had been paid up, and that the cabooleat and the
+payments answer and tally with each other; yet, when we come to produce
+the evidence upon these parts, you will see most abundant reason to be
+assured that there is much more concealed than is given in this
+account,--that it is an account current, and not an account
+closed,--and that the agreement was for some other and greater sum than
+appears. It might be expected that the Company would inquire of Mr.
+Hastings, and ask, "From whom did he get it? Who has received it? Who is
+to answer for it?" But he knew that they were not likely to make any
+inquiry at all,--they are not that kind of people. You would imagine
+that a mercantile body would have some of the mercantile excellencies,
+and even you would allow them perhaps some of the mercantile faults. But
+they have, like Mr. Hastings, forgotten totally the mercantile
+character; and, accordingly, neither accuracy nor fidelity of account do
+they ever require of Mr. Hastings. They have too much confidence in him;
+and he, accordingly, acts like a man in whom such confidence, without
+reason, is reposed.
+
+Your Lordships may perhaps suppose that the payment of this money was an
+act of friendship and generosity in the people of the country. No: we
+have found out, and shall prove, from whom he got it; at least we shall
+produce such a conjecture upon it as your Lordships will think us bound
+to do, when we have such an account before us. Here on the face of the
+account there is no deficiency; but when we look into it, we find
+skulking in a corner a person called Nundulol, from whom there is
+received 58,000 rupees. You will find that he, who appears to have paid
+up this money, and which Mr. Hastings spent as he pleased in his journey
+to Benares, and who consequently must have had some trust reposed in
+him, was the wickedest of men, next to those I have mentioned,--always
+giving the first rank to Gunga Govind Sing, _primus inter pares_, the
+second to Debi Sing, the third to Cantoo Baboo: this man is fit to be
+one next on a par with them. Mr. Larkins, when he comes to explain this
+article, says, "I believe it is for a part of the Dinagepore peshcush,
+which would reduce the balance to about 5,000_l._": but he does not
+pretend to know what it is given for; he gives several guesses at it;
+"but," he says, "as I do not know, I shall not pretend to give more than
+my conjecture upon it." He is in the right; because we shall prove
+Nundulol never did have any thing to do with the Dinagepore peshcush.
+These are very extraordinary proceedings. It is my business simply to
+state them to your Lordships now; we will give them in afterwards in
+evidence, and I will leave that evidence to be confirmed and fortified
+by further observations.
+
+One of the objects of Mr. Larkins's letter is to illustrate the bonds.
+He says, "The two first stated sums" (namely, Dinagepore and Patna, in
+the paper marked No. 1, I suppose, for he seems to explain it to be
+such) "are sums for a part of which Mr. Hastings took two bonds: viz.,
+No. 1539, dated 1st October, 1780, and No. 1540, dated 2d October, 1780,
+each for the sum of current rupees 1,16,000, or sicca rupees one lac.
+The remainder of that amount was carried to the credit of the head,
+_Four per Cent Remittance Loan:_ Mr. Hastings having taken a bond for
+it, (No. 89,) which has been since completely liquidated, conformable to
+the law." But before I proceed with the bonds, I will beg leave to
+recall to your Lordships' recollection that Mr. Larkins states in his
+letter that these sums were received in November. How does this agree
+with another state of the transaction given by Mr. Hastings, namely,
+that the time of his taking the bonds was the 1st and 2d of October? Mr.
+Larkins, therefore, who has thought proper to say that the money was
+received in the month of November, has here given as extraordinary an
+instance either of fraudulent accuracy or shameful official inaccuracy
+as was ever perhaps discovered. The first sums are asserted to be paid
+to Mr. Croftes on the 18th and 19th of Asin, 1187. The month of Asin
+corresponds with the month of September and part of October, and not
+with November; and it is the more extraordinary that Mr. Larkins should
+mistake this, because he is in an office which requires monthly
+payments, and consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual
+transfer from one month to another: we cannot suppose any accountant in
+England can be more accurately acquainted with the succession of months
+than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative state of Bengal and
+English months. How are we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you
+have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a moralist
+inaccurate, you know that these are cases which, from the narrow bounds
+of our weak faculties, do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what is an
+inaccurate _accountant_ good for? "Silly man, that dost not know thy own
+silly trade!" was once well said: but the trade here is not silly. You
+do not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because you have
+thousands of them; but you justly blame a public accountant who is
+guilty of a gross inaccuracy. But what end could his being inaccurate
+answer? Why not name October as well as November? I know no reason for
+it; but here is certainly a gross mistake: and from the nature of the
+thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be a mere mistake. But
+take it that it is a mistake, and to have nothing of fraud, but mere
+carelessness; this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very
+punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.
+
+But to return to the bonds. We find a bond taken in the month of Shawal,
+1186, or 1779, but the receipt is said to be in Asin, 1780: that is to
+say, there was a year and about three months between the collection and
+the receipt; and during all that period of time an enormous sum of money
+had lain in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed when Mr.
+Hastings should think fit. He employed it, he says, for the Mahratta
+expedition. Now he began that letter on the 29th of November by telling
+you that the bribe would not have been taken from Cheyt Sing, if it had
+not been at the instigation of an exigency which it seems required a
+supply of money, to be procured lawfully or unlawfully. But in fact
+there was no exigency for it before the Berar army came upon the borders
+of the country,--that army which he invited by his careless conduct
+towards the Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to buy
+off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was taken from Cheyt Sing long
+before he had this occasion for it. The fund lay in Gunga Govind Sing's
+hands; and he afterwards applied to that purpose a part of this fund,
+which he must have taken without any view whatever to the Company's
+interest. This pretence of the exigency of the Company's affairs is the
+more extraordinary, because the first receipt of these moneys was some
+time in the year 1779 (I have not got the exact date of the agreement);
+and it was but a year before that the Company was so far from being in
+distress, that he declared he should have, at very nearly the period
+when this bribe became payable, a very large sum (I do not recollect the
+precise amount) in their treasury. I cannot certainly tell when the
+cabooleat, or agreement, was made; yet I shall lay open something very
+extraordinary upon that subject, and will lead you, step by step, to the
+bloody scenes of Debi Sing. Whilst, therefore, Mr. Hastings was carrying
+on these transactions, he was carrying them on without any reference to
+the pretended object to which he afterwards applied them. It was an old,
+premeditated plan; and the money to be received could not have been
+designed for an exigency, because it was to be paid by monthly
+instalments. The case is the same with respect to the other cabooleats:
+it could not have been any momentary exigence which he had to provide
+for by these sums of money; they were paid regularly, period by period,
+as a constant, uniform income, to Mr. Hastings.
+
+You find, then, Mr. Hastings first leaving this sum of money for a year
+and three months in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; you find, that, when
+an exigence pressed him by the Mahrattas suddenly invading Bengal, and
+he was obliged to refer to his bribe-fund, he finds that fund empty, and
+that, in supplying money for this exigence, he takes a bond for two
+thirds of his own money and one third of the Company's. For, as I stated
+before, Mr. Larkins proves of one of these accounts, that he took, in
+the month of January, for this bribe-money, which, according to the
+principles he lays down, was the Company's money, three bonds as for
+money advanced from his own cash. Now this sum of three lacs, instead of
+being all his own, as it should appear to be in the month of January,
+when he took the bonds, or two thirds his own and one third the
+Company's, as he said in his letter of the 29th of November, turns out,
+by Mr. Larkins's account, paragraph 9, which I wish to mark to your
+Lordships, to be two thirds the Company's money and one third his own;
+and yet it is all confounded under bonds, as if the money had been his
+own. What can you say to this heroic sharper disguised under the name of
+a patriot, when you find him to be nothing but a downright cheat, first
+taking money under the Company's name, then taking their securities to
+him for their own money, and afterwards entering a false account of
+them, contradicting that by another account?--and God knows whether the
+third be true or false. These are not things that I am to make out by
+any conclusion of mine; here they are, made out by himself and Mr.
+Larkins, and, comparing them with his letter of the 27th, you find a
+gross fraud covered by a direct falsehood.
+
+We have now done with Mr. Larkins's account of the bonds, and are come
+to the other species of Mr. Hastings's frauds, (for there is a great
+variety in them,) and first to Cheyt Sing's bribe. Mr. Larkins came to
+the knowledge of the bond-money through Gunga Govind Sing and through
+Cantoo Baboo. Of this bribe he was not in the secret originally, but was
+afterwards made a confidant in it; it was carried to him; and the
+account he gives of it I will state to your Lordships.
+
+"The fourth sum stated in Mr. Hastings's account was the produce of
+sundry payments made to me by Sadamund, Cheyt Sing's buckshee, who
+either brought or sent the gold mohurs to my house, from whence they
+were taken by me to Mr. Croftes, either on the same night or early in
+the morning after: they were made at different times, and I well
+remember that the same people never came twice. On the 21st June, 1780,
+Mr. Hastings sent for me, and desired that I would take charge of a
+present that had been offered to him by Cheyt Sing's buckshee, under the
+plea of atoning for the opposition which he had made towards the payment
+of the extra subsidy for defraying part of the expenses of the war, but
+really in the hope of its inducing Mr. Hastings to give up that claim;
+with which view the present had first been offered. Mr. Hastings
+declared, that, although he would not take this for his own use, he
+would apply it to that of the Company, in removing Mr. Francis's
+objections to the want of a fund for defraying the extra expenses of
+Colonel Camac's detachment. On my return to the office, I wrote down the
+substance of what Mr. Hastings had said to me, and requested Mr. James
+Miller, my deputy, to seal it up with his own seal, and write upon it,
+that he had then done so at my request. He was no further informed of my
+motive for this than merely that it contained the substance of a
+conversation which had passed between me and another gentleman, which,
+in case that conversation should hereafter become the subject of
+inquiry, I wished to be able to adduce the memorandum then made of it,
+in corroboration of my own testimony; and although that paper has
+remained unopened to this hour, and notwithstanding that I kept no
+memorandum whatever of the substance thereof, yet, as I have wrote this
+representation under the most scrupulous adherence to what I conceived
+to be truth, should it ever become necessary to refer to this paper, I
+am confident that it will not be found to differ materially from the
+substance of this representation."
+
+I forgot to mention, that, besides these two bonds, which Mr. Hastings
+declared to be the Company's, and one bond his own, that he slipped into
+the place of the bond of his own a much better, namely, a bond of
+November, which he never mentioned to the Company till the 22d of May;
+and this bond for current rupees 1,74,000, or sicca rupees 1,50,000, was
+taken for the payment stated in the paper No. 1 to have been made to Mr.
+Croftes on the 11th Aghan, 1187, which corresponds to the 23d of
+November, 1780. This is the Nuddea money, and this is all that you know
+of it; you know that this money, for which he had taken this other bond
+from the Company, was not his own neither, but bribes taken from the
+other provinces.
+
+I am ashamed to be troublesome to your Lordships in this dry affair, but
+the detection of fraud requires a good deal of patience and assiduity,
+and we cannot wander into anything that can relieve the mind: if it was
+in my power to do it, I would do it. I wish, however, to call your
+Lordships' attention to this last bribe before I quit these bonds. Such
+is the confusion, so complicated, so intricate are these bribe accounts,
+that there is always something left behind, glean never so much from the
+paragraphs of Mr. Hastings and Mr. Larkins. "I could not bring them to
+account," says Mr. Larkins. "They were received before the 1st and 2d of
+October." Why does not the running treasury account give an account of
+them? The Committee of the House of Commons examined whether the running
+treasury account had any such account of sums deposited. No such thing.
+They are said by Mr. Hastings to be deposited in June: they were not
+deposited in October, nor any account of them given till the January
+following. "These bonds," says he, "I could not enter as regular money,
+to be entered on the Company's account, or in any public way, until I
+had had an order of the Governor-General and Council." But why had not
+you an order of the Governor-General and Council? We are not calling on
+you, Mr. Larkins, for an account of your conduct: we are calling upon
+Mr. Hastings for an account of his conduct, and which he refers to you
+to explain. Why did not Mr. Hastings order you to carry them to the
+public account? "Because," says he, "there was no other way." Every one
+who knows anything of a treasury or public banking-place knows, that if
+any person brings money as belonging to the public, that the public
+accountant is bound, no doubt, to receive it and enter it as such.
+"But," says he, "I could not do it until the account could be settled,
+as between debtor and creditor: I did not do it till I could put on one
+side durbar charges, secret service, to such an amount, and balance that
+again with bonds to Mr. Hastings." That is, he could not make an entry
+regularly in the Company's books until Mr. Hastings had enabled him to
+commit one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public trust that
+ever was committed, by ordering that money of the Company's to be
+considered as his own, and a bond to be taken as a security for it from
+the Company, as if it was his own.
+
+But to proceed with this deposit. What is the substance of Mr. Larkins's
+explanation of it? The substance of this explanation is, that here was a
+bribe received by Mr. Hastings from Cheyt Sing, guarded with such
+scrupulous secrecy, that it was not carried to the house of Mr. Croftes,
+who was to receive it finally, but to the house of Mr. Larkins, as a
+less suspected place; and that it was conveyed in various sums, no two
+people ever returning twice with the various payments which made up that
+sum of 23,000_l._ or thereabouts. Now do you want an instance of
+prevarication and trickery in an account? If any person should inquire
+whether 23,000_l._ had been paid by Cheyt Sing to Mr. Hastings, there
+was not any one man living, or any person concerned in the transaction,
+except Mr. Larkins, who received it, that could give an account of how
+much he received, or who brought it. As no two people are ever his
+confidants in the same transaction in Mr. Hastings's accounts, so here
+no two people are permitted to have any share whatever in bringing the
+several fragments that make up this sum. This bribe, you might imagine,
+would have been entered by Mr. Larkins to some public account, at least
+to the fraudulent account of Mr. Hastings. No such thing. It was never
+entered till the November following. It was not entered till Mr. Francis
+had left Calcutta. All these corrupt transactions were carried on
+privately by Mr. Hastings alone, without any signification to his
+colleagues of his carrying on this patriotic traffic, as he called it.
+Your Lordships will also consider both the person who employs such a
+fraudulent accountant, and his ideas of his duty in his office. These
+are matters for your Lordships' grave determination; but I appeal to
+you, upon the face of these accounts, whether you ever saw anything so
+gross,--and whether any man could be daring enough to attempt to impose
+upon the credulity of the weakest of mankind, much more to impose upon
+such a court as this, such accounts as these are.
+
+If the Company had a mind to inquire what is become of all the debts due
+to them, and where is the cabooleat, he refers them to Gunga Govind
+Sing. "Give us," say they, "an account of this balance that remains in
+your hands." "I know," says he, "of no balance." "Why, is there not a
+cabooleat?" "Where is it? What are the date and circumstances of it?
+There is no such cabooleat existing." This is the case even where you
+have the name of the person through whose hands the money passed. But
+suppose the inquiry went to the payments of the Patna cabooleat. "Here,"
+they say, "we find half the money due: out of forty thousand pounds
+there is only twenty thousand received: give us some account of it." Who
+is to give an account of it? Here there is no mention made of the name
+of the person who had the cabooleat: whom can they call upon? Mr.
+Hastings does not remember; Mr. Larkins does not tell; they can learn
+nothing about it. If the Directors had a disposition, and were honest
+enough to the Proprietors and the nation to inquire into it, there is
+not a hint given, by either of those persons, who received the Nuddea,
+who received the Patna, who received the Dinagepore peshcush.
+
+But in what court can a suit be instituted, and against whom, for the
+recovery of this balance of 40,000_l._ out of 95,000_l._? I wish your
+Lordships to examine strictly this account,--to examine strictly every
+part, both of the account itself, and Mr. Larkins's explanation: compare
+them together, and divine, if you can, what remedy the Company could
+have for their loss. Can your Lordships believe that this can be any
+other than a systematical, deliberate fraud, grossly conducted? I will
+not allow Mr. Hastings to be the man he represents himself to be: he was
+supposed to be a man of parts; I will only suppose him to be a man of
+mere common sense. Are these the accounts we should expect from such a
+man? And yet he and Mr. Larkins are to be magnified to heaven for great
+financiers; and this is to be called book-keeping! This is the Bengal
+account saved so miraculously on the 22d of May.
+
+Next comes the Persian account. You have heard of a present to which it
+refers. It has been already stated, but it must be a good deal farther
+explained. Mr. Larkins states that this account was taken from a paper,
+of which three lines, and only three lines, were read to him by a
+Persian moonshee; and it is not pretended that this was the whole of it.
+The three lines read are as follows.
+
+"From the Nabob" (meaning the Nabob
+  of Oude) "to the Governor-General,
+  six lac                               L60,000
+
+From Hussein Reza Khan and Hyder Beg
+  Khan to ditto, three lac               30,000
+
+And ditto to Mrs. Hastings, one lac      10,000."
+
+Here, I say, are the three lines that were read by a Persian moonshee.
+Is he a man you can call to account for these particulars? No: he is an
+anonymous moonshee; his name is not so much as mentioned by Mr. Larkins,
+nor hinted at by Mr. Hastings; and you find these sums, which Mr.
+Hastings mentions as a sum in gross given to himself, are not so. They
+were given by three persons: one, six lacs, was given by the Nabob to
+the Governor; another, of three lacs more, by Hussein Reza Khan [and
+Hyder Beg Khan?]; and a third, one lac, by both of them clubbing, as a
+present to Mrs. Hastings. This is the first discovery that appears of
+Mrs. Hastings having been concerned in receiving presents for the
+Governor-General and others, in addition to Gunga Govind Sing, Cantoo
+Baboo, and Mr. Croftes. Now, if this money was not received for the
+Company, is it proper and right to take it from Mrs. Hastings? Is there
+honor and justice in taking from a lady a gratuitous present made to
+her? Yet Mr. Hastings says he has applied it all to the Company's
+service. He has done ill, in suffering it to be received at all, if she
+has not justly and properly received it. Whether, in fact, she ever
+received this money at all, she not being upon the spot, as I can find,
+at the time, (though, to be sure, a present might be sent her,) I
+neither affirm nor deny, farther than that, as Mr. Larkins says, there
+was a sum of 10,000_l._ from these ministers to Mrs. Hastings. Whether
+she ever received any other money than this, I also neither affirm nor
+deny. But in whatever manner Mrs. Hastings received this or any other
+money, I must say, in this grave place in which I stand, that, if the
+wives of Governors-General, the wives of Presidents of Council, the
+wives of the principal officers of the India Company, through all the
+various departments, can receive presents, there is an end of the
+covenants, there is an end of the act of Parliament, there is an end to
+every power of restraint. Let a man be but married, and if his wife may
+take presents, that moment the acts of Parliament, the covenants, and
+all the rest expire. There is something, too, in the manners of the East
+that makes this a much more dangerous practice. The people of the East,
+it is well known, have their zenanah, the apartment for their wives, as
+a sanctuary which nobody can enter,--a kind of holy of holies, a
+consecrated place, safe from the rage of war, safe from the fury of
+tyranny. The rapacity of man has here its bounds: here you shall come,
+and no farther. But if English ladies can go into these zenanahs and
+there receive presents, the natives of Hindostan cannot be said to have
+anything left of their own. Every one knows that in the wisest and best
+time of the Commonwealth of Rome, towards the latter end of it, (I do
+not mean the best time for morals, but the best for its knowledge how to
+correct evil government, and to choose the proper means for it,) it was
+an established rule, that no governor of a province should take his wife
+along with him into his province,--wives not being subject to the laws
+in the same manner as their husbands; and though I do not impute to any
+one any criminality here, I should think myself guilty of a scandalous
+dereliction of my duty, if I did not mention the fact to your Lordships.
+But I press it no further: here are the accounts, delivered in by Mr.
+Larkins at Mr. Hastings's own requisition.
+
+The three lines which were read out of a Persian paper are followed by a
+long account of the several species in which this present was received,
+and converted by exchange into one common standard. Now, as these three
+lines of paper, which are said to have been read out of a Persian paper,
+contain an account of bribes to the amount of 100,000_l._, and as it is
+not even insinuated that this was the whole of the paper, but rather the
+contrary indirectly implied, I shall leave it for your Lordships, in
+your serious consideration, to judge what mines of bribery that paper
+might contain. For why did not Mr. Larkins get the whole of that paper
+read and translated? The moment any man stops in the midst of an
+account, he is stopping in the midst of a fraud.
+
+My Lords, I have one farther remark to make upon these accounts. The
+cabooleats, or agreements for the payments of these bribes, amount, in
+the three specified provinces, to 95,000_l._ Do you believe that these
+provinces were thus particularly favored? Do you think that they were
+chosen as a little demesne for Mr. Hastings? that they were the only
+provinces honored with his protection, so far as to take bribes from
+them? Do you perceive anything in their local situation that should
+distinguish them from other provinces of Bengal? What is the reason why
+Dinagepore, Patna, Nuddea, should have the post of honor assigned them?
+What reason can be given for not taking bribes also from Burdwan, from
+Bissunpore, in short, from all the sixty-eight collections which
+comprise the revenues of Bengal, and for selecting only three? How came
+he, I say, to be so wicked a servant, that, out of sixty-eight
+divisions, he chose only three to supply the exigencies of the Company?
+He did not do his duty in making this distinction, if he thought that
+bribery was the best way of supplying the Company's treasury, and that
+it formed the most useful and effectual resource for them,--which he has
+declared over and over again. Was it right to lay the whole weight of
+bribery, extortion, and oppression upon those three provinces, and
+neglect the rest? No: you know, and must know, that he who extorts from
+three provinces will extort from twenty, if there are twenty. You have a
+standard, a measure of extortion, and that is all: _ex pede Herculem_:
+guess from thence what was extorted from all Bengal. Do you believe he
+could be so cruel to these provinces, so partial to the rest, as to
+charge them with that load, with 95,000_l._, knowing the heavy
+oppression they were sinking under, and leave all the rest untouched?
+You will judge of what is concealed from us by what we have discovered
+through various means that have occurred, in consequence both of the
+guilty conscience of the person who confesses the fact with respect to
+these provinces, and of the vigor, perseverance and sagacity of those
+who have forced from him that discovery. It is not, therefore, for me to
+say that the 100,000_l._ and 95,000_l._ only were taken. Where the
+circumstances entitle me to go on, I must not be stopped, but at the
+boundary where human nature has fixed a barrier.
+
+You have now before you the true reason why he did not choose that this
+affair should come before a court of justice. Rather than this exposure
+should be made, he to-day would call for the mountains to cover him: he
+would prefer an inquiry into the business of the three seals, into
+anything foreign to the subject I am now discussing, in order to keep
+you from the discovery of that gross bribery, that shameful peculation,
+that abandoned prostitution and corruption, which he has practised with
+indemnity and impunity to this day, from one end of India to the other.
+
+At the head of the only account we have of these transactions stands
+Dinagepore; and it now only remains for me to make some observations
+upon Mr. Hastings's proceedings in that province. Its name, then, and
+that money was taken from it, is all that appears; but from whom, by
+what hands, by what means, under what pretence it was taken, he has not
+told you, he has not told his employers. I believe, however, I can tell
+from whom it was taken, and I believe it will appear to your Lordships
+that it must have been taken from the unhappy Rajah of Dinagepore; and I
+shall in a very few words state the circumstances attending, and the
+service performed for it: from these you will be able to form a just
+opinion concerning this bribe.
+
+Dinagepore, a large province, was possessed by an ancient family, the
+last of which, about the year 1184 of their era, the Rajah Bija Naut,
+had no legitimate issue. When he was at the point of death, he wished to
+exclude from the succession to the zemindary his half-brother, Cantoo
+Naut, with whom he had lived upon ill terms for many years, by adopting
+a son. Such an adoption, when a person has a half-brother, as he had, in
+my poor judgment is not countenanced by the Gentoo laws. But Gunga
+Govind Sing, who was placed, by the office he held, at the head of the
+registry, where the records were kept by which the rules of succession
+according to the custom of the country are ascertained, became master of
+these Gentoo laws; and through his means Mr. Hastings decreed in favor
+of the adoption. We find that immediately after this decree Gunga Govind
+Sing received a cabooleat on Dinagepore for the sum of 40,000_l._, of
+which it appears that he has actually exacted 30,000_l._, though he has
+paid to Mr. Hastings only 20,000_l._ We find, before the young Rajah had
+been in possession a year, his natural guardians and relations, on one
+pretence or another, all turned out of their offices. The peshcush, or
+fixed annual rent, payable to the Company for his zemindary, fell into
+arrear, as might naturally be expected, from the Rajah's inability to
+pay both his rent and this exorbitant bribe, extorted from a ruined
+family. Instantly, under pretext of this arrearage, Gunga Govind Sing,
+and the fictitious Committee which Mr. Hastings had made for his wicked
+purposes, composed of Mr. Anderson, Mr. Shore, and Mr. Croftes, who were
+but the tools, as they tell us themselves, of Gunga Govind Sing, gave
+that monster of iniquity, Debi Sing, the government of this family. They
+put this noble infant, this miserable Rajah, together with the
+management of the provinces of Dinagepore and Rungpore, into his wicked
+and abominable hands, where the ravages he committed excited what was
+called a rebellion, that forced him to fly from the country, and into
+which I do not wonder he should be desirous that a political and not a
+juridical inquiry should be made. The savage barbarities which were
+there perpetrated I have already, in the execution of my duty, brought
+before this House and my country; and it will be seen, when we come to
+the proof, whether what I have asserted was the effect either of a
+deluded judgment or disordered imagination, and whether the facts I
+state cannot be substantiated by authentic reports, and were none of my
+invention, and, lastly, whether the means that were taken to discredit
+them do not infinitely aggravate the guilt of the offenders. Mr.
+Hastings wanted to fly from judicial inquiry; he wanted to put Debi Sing
+anywhere but in a court of justice. A court of justice, where a direct
+assertion is brought forward, and a direct proof applied to it, is an
+element in which he cannot live for a moment. He would seek refuge
+anywhere, even in the very sanctuary of his accusers, rather than abide
+a trial with him in a court of justice. But the House of Commons was too
+just not to send him to this tribunal, whose justice they cannot doubt,
+whose penetration he cannot elude, and whose decision will justify those
+managers whose characters he attempted to defame.
+
+But this is not all. We find, that, after the cruel sale of this infant,
+who was properly and directly under the guardianship of the Company,
+(for the Company acts as steward and dewan of the province, which office
+has the guardianship of minors,) after he had been robbed of 40,000_l._
+by the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, and afterwards, under pretence of his
+being in debt to the Company, delivered into the hands of that monster,
+Debi Sing, Mr. Hastings, by way of anticipation of these charges, and in
+answer to them, has thought proper to produce the certificate from this
+unfortunate boy which I will now again read to you.
+
+     "I, Radanaut, Zemindar of Purgunnah Havelly Punjera, commonly
+     called Dinagepore:--As it has been learnt by me, the mutsuddies,
+     and the respectable officers of my zemindary, that the ministers of
+     England are displeased with the late Governor, Warren Hastings,
+     Esquire, upon the suspicion that he oppressed us, took money from
+     us by deceit and force, and ruined the country; therefore we, upon
+     the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent on and
+     necessary for us to abide by, following the rules laid down in
+     giving evidence, declare the particulars of the acts and deeds of
+     Warren Hastings, Esquire, full of circumspection and caution,
+     civility and justice, superior to the caution of the most learned,
+     and, by representing what is fact, wipe away the doubts that have
+     possessed the minds of the ministers of England: that Mr. Hastings
+     is possessed of fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to
+     us; that he is clear of the contamination of mistrust and wrong,
+     and his mind is free of covetousness or avarice. During the time of
+     his administration, no one saw other conduct than that of
+     protection to the husbandmen, and justice; no inhabitant ever
+     experienced afflictions, no one ever felt oppression from him. Our
+     reputations have always been guarded from attacks by his prudence,
+     and our families have always been protected by his justice. He
+     never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards us, but
+     healed the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation, by
+     means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never permitting one of
+     us to sink in the pit of despondence. He supported every one by his
+     goodness, overset the designs of evil-minded men by his authority,
+     tied the hands of oppression with the strong bandage of justice,
+     and by these means expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness
+     and joy over us. He reestablished justice and impartiality. We
+     were, during his government, in the enjoyment of perfect happiness
+     and ease, and many of us are thankful and satisfied. As Mr.
+     Hastings was well acquainted with our manners and customs, he was
+     always desirous, in every respect, of doing whatever would preserve
+     our religious rites, and guard them against every kind of accident
+     and injury, and at all times protected us. Whatever we have
+     experienced from him, and whatever happened from him, we have
+     written without deceit or exaggeration."
+
+My Lords, this Radanaut, zemindar of the purgunnah, who, as your
+Lordships hear, bears evidence upon oath to all the great and good
+qualities of the Governor, and particularly to his absolute freedom from
+covetousness,--this person, to whom Mr. Hastings appeals, was, as the
+Committee state, a boy between five and six years old at the time when
+he was given into the hands of Debi Sing, and when Mr. Hastings left
+Bengal, which was in 1786 [1785?], was between eleven and twelve years
+old. This is the sort of testimony that Mr. Hastings produces, to prove
+that he was clear from all sort of extortion, oppression, and
+covetousness, in this very zemindary of Dinagepore. This boy, who is so
+observant, who is so penetrating, who is so accurate in his knowledge of
+the whole government of Mr. Hastings, was, I say, when he left his
+government, at the utmost, but eleven years and a half old. Now to what
+an extremity is this unhappy man at your bar driven, when, oppressed by
+this accumulative load of corruption charged upon him, and seeing his
+bribery, his prevarication, his fraudulent bonds brought before you, he
+gives the testimony of this child, who for the greatest part of his time
+lived three hundred miles from the seat of Mr. Hastings's government!
+Consider the miserable situation of this poor, unfortunate boy, made to
+swear, with all the solemnities of his religion, that Mr. Hastings was
+never guilty in his province of any act of rapacity! Such are the
+testimonies, which are there called _razinamas_, in favor of Mr.
+Hastings, with which all India is said to sound. Do we attempt to
+conceal them from your Lordships? No, we bring them forth, to show you
+the wickedness of the man, who, after he has robbed innocence, after he
+has divided the spoil between Gunga Govind Sing and himself, gets the
+party robbed to perjure himself for his sake,--if such a creature is
+capable of being guilty of perjury. We have another razinama sent from
+Nuddea, by a person nearly under the same circumstances with Radanaut,
+namely, Maha Rajah Dirauje Seo Chund Behadre, only made to differ in
+some expressions from the former, that it might not appear to originate
+from the same hand. These miserable razinamas he delivers to you as the
+collected voice of the country, to show how ill-founded the impressions
+are which committees of the House of Commons (for to them they allude, I
+suppose) have taken concerning this man, during their inquiries into the
+management of the affairs of the Company in India.
+
+Before I quit this subject, I have only to give you the opinion of Sir
+Elijah Impey, a name consecrated to respect forever, (your Lordships
+know him in this House as well as I do,) respecting these petitions and
+certificates of good behavior.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"From the reasons and sentiments that they contain," &c.[9]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The moment an Englishman appears, as this gentleman does, in the
+province of Dinagepore, to collect certificates for Mr. Hastings, it is
+a command for them, the people, to say what he pleases.
+
+And here, my Lords, I would wish to say something of the miserable
+situation of the people of that country; but it is not in my commission,
+and I must be silent, and shall only request your Lordships to observe
+how this crime of bribery grows in its magnitude. First, the bribe is
+taken, through Gunga Govind Sing, from this infant, for his succession
+to the zemindary. Next follows the removal from their offices, and
+consequent ruin, of all his nearest natural relations. Then the delivery
+of the province to Debi Sing, upon the pretence of the arrears due to
+the Company, with all the subsequent horrors committed under the
+management of that atrocious villain. And lastly, the gross subornation
+of perjury, in making this wretched minor, under twelve years of age,
+bear testimony upon oath to the good qualities of Mr. Hastings and of
+his government,--this minor, I say, who lived three hundred miles from
+the seat of his government, and who, if he knew anything at all of his
+own affairs, must have known that Mr. Hastings was the cause of all his
+sufferings.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My Lords, I have now gone through the whole of what I have in charge. I
+have laid before you the covenants by which the Company have thought fit
+to guard against the avarice and rapacity of their Governors. I have
+shown that they positively forbid the taking of all sorts of bribes and
+presents; and I have stated the means adopted by them for preventing the
+evasion of their orders, by directing, in all money transactions, the
+publicity of them. I have farther shown, that, in order to remove every
+temptation to a breach of their orders, the next step was the framing a
+legal fiction, by which presents and money, under whatever pretence
+taken, were made the legal property of the Company, in order to enable
+them to recover them out of any rapacious hands that might violate the
+new act of Parliament. I have also stated this act of Parliament. I have
+stated Mr. Hastings's sense of it. I have stated the violation of it by
+his taking bribes from all quarters. I have stated the fraudulent bonds
+by which he claimed a security for money as his own which belonged to
+the Company. I have stated the series of frauds, prevarications,
+concealments, and all that mystery of iniquity, which I waded through
+with pain to myself, I am sure, and with infinite pain, I fear, to your
+Lordships. I have shown your Lordships that his evasions of the clear
+words of his covenant and the clear words of an act of Parliament were
+such as did not arise from an erroneous judgment, but from a corrupt
+intention; and I believe you will find that his attempt to evade the law
+aggravates infinitely his guilt in breaking it. In all this I have only
+_opened_ to you the package of this business; I have opened it to
+ventilate it, and give air to it; I have opened it, that a quarantine
+might be performed,--that the sweet air of heaven, which is polluted by
+the poison it contains, might be let loose upon it, and that it may be
+aired and ventilated before your Lordships touch it. Those who follow me
+will endeavor to explain to your Lordships what Mr. Hastings has
+endeavored to involve in mystery, by bringing proof after proof that
+every bribe that was here concealed was taken with corrupt purposes and
+followed with the most pernicious consequences. These are things which
+will be brought to you in proof. I have only regarded the system of
+bribery; I have endeavored to show that it is a system of mystery and
+concealment, and consequently a system of fraud.
+
+You now see some of the means by which fortunes have been made by
+certain persons in India; you see the confederacies they have formed
+with one another for their mutual concealment and mutual support; you
+will see how they reply to their own deceitful inquiries by fraudulent
+answers; you will see that Cheltenham calls upon Calcutta, as one deep
+calls upon another, and that the call which is made for explanation is
+answered in mystery; in short, you will see the very constitution of
+their minds here developed.
+
+And now, my Lords, in what a situation are we all placed! This
+prosecution of the Commons, I wish to have it understood, and I am sure
+I shall not be disclaimed in it, is a prosecution not only for the
+punishing a delinquent, a prosecution not merely for preventing this and
+that offence, but it is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose
+of preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that characterize the
+people of England. The situation in which we stand is dreadful. These
+people pour in upon us every day. They not only bring with them the
+wealth which they have acquired, but they bring with them into our
+country the vices by which it was acquired. Formerly the people of
+England were censured, and perhaps properly, with being a sullen,
+unsocial, cold, unpleasant race of men, and as inconstant as the climate
+in which they are born. These are the vices which the enemies of the
+kingdom charged them with: and people are seldom charged with vices of
+which they do not in some measure partake. But nobody refused them the
+character of being an open-hearted, candid, liberal, plain, sincere
+people,--qualities which would cancel a thousand faults, if they had
+them. But if, by conniving at these frauds, you once teach the people of
+England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded conduct,--if you teach
+them qualities directly the contrary to those by which they have
+hitherto been distinguished,--if you make them a nation of concealers, a
+nation of dissemblers, a nation of liars, a nation of forgers,--my
+Lords, if you, in one word, turn them into a people of _banians_, the
+character of England, that character which, more than our arms, and more
+than our commerce, has made us a great nation, the character of England
+will be gone and lost.
+
+Our liberty is as much in danger as our honor and our national
+character. We, who here appear representing the Commons of England, are
+not wild enough not to tremble both for ourselves and for our
+constituents at the effect of riches. _Opum metuenda potestas._ We dread
+the operation of money. Do we not know that there are many men who wait,
+and who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution, to let loose
+all the corrupt wealth of India, acquired by the oppression of that
+country, for the corruption of all the liberties of this, and to fill
+the Parliament with men who are now the object of its indignation?
+To-day the Commons of Great Britain prosecute the delinquents of India:
+to-morrow the delinquents of India may be the Commons of Great Britain.
+We know, I say, and feel the force of money; and we now call upon your
+Lordships for justice in this cause of money. We call upon you for the
+preservation of our manners, of our virtues. We call upon you for our
+national character. We call upon you for our liberties; and hope that
+the freedom of the Commons will be preserved by the justice of the
+Lords.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[9] This document cannot be found
+
+
+END OF VOL. X.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
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diff --git a/18192.zip b/18192.zip
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index 0000000..ad27f3e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/18192.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
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diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..31b849c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #18192 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18192)
diff --git a/old/18192-h.htm.2006-04-17 b/old/18192-h.htm.2006-04-17
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fdc9b37
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/18192-h.htm.2006-04-17
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke.
+    </title>
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+/*
+ * set the body text indention, and spacing, and leading
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+	body > p { /* paras at <body> level - not in <div> or <table>  */
+		text-align: justify;
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+ */
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+		margin-top:2em;  /* clear space above top border */
+		/* border-left: 3px solid gray;  REMOVED BY MP */
+		/* border-top: 4px solid gray; */
+		/* padding-left:2em; /* space in from left border */
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+		padding-bottom: 1em; /* push left border below text */
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+/*
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+ */
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+			margin-top: 2em;
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+ *	- one-point smaller font (questionable?)
+ *	- <p class="citation"> right-just and italicized
+ *	- <p class="signature"> deeply indented
+ */
+	.blockquote {
+		margin-left: 5%;
+		margin-right: 5%;
+		}
+	p.citation { /* author citation at end of blockquote or poem */
+                margin-left:20%;
+		text-align: left;
+		/* text-align: right;    MP, I DON'T LIKE THIS */
+		/* font-style: italic;   MP, I DON'T LIKE THIS */
+		}
+	p.quotdate { /* date of a letter aligned right */
+		text-align: right;
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+	p.quotsig { /* author signature at end of letter */
+		margin-left: 35%;
+		text-indent: -4em; /* gimmick to move 2nd line right */
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+	dt { margin-top: 0.5em; }
+	/* turn off list decoration in a single item  to form the
+	 * second para of a 2-para item: < li class="off" >
+	 * or make an unmarked list: < ul class="off" >
+	 */
+	.off { list-style-type: none; } /* 2nd para of a 2-para list item */
+/*
+ * In all browsers **except MSIE 5** the items of an "inside" list are
+ * indented as if they still had their symbol.
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+	ol.inside, ul.inside {
+		list-style-position: inside;
+		margin-left: -2.5em; /* For everybody but MSIE 5, boo */}
+/*
+ * The TOC, LOI, and Index are unordered lists with no prefix symbols.
+ * The tocright class is used to right-align page numbers in a TOC
+ * (not to be confused with linenum, used for poetry line#s).
+ */
+
+/* MP... In konqueror, the numbers all pile up together at the first item */
+
+	ul.TOC { /* styling the Table of Contents */
+		list-style-type: none; /* a list with no symbol */
+		position: relative; /* makes a "container" for span.tocright */
+		margin-right: 5%; /* pulls the page#s in a skosh */
+                padding-right: 3em; /* MP stops text hitting numbers */
+                margin-left: 1em;  /* MP for long titles,indent all lines */
+                text-indent: -1em; /* MP for long titles, unindent 1st line */
+		}
+	ul.TOCSub { /* sub-entries in the TOC */
+		list-style-type: none;
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+                padding-right: 3em; /* MP stops text hitting numbers */
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+	ul.LOI { /* styling the List of Illustrations */
+		list-style-type: none;
+		position: relative; /* makes a "container" for span.tocright */
+		margin-right: 5%; /* pulls the page#s in a skosh */
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+
+	ul.IX { /* styling the IndeX */
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+		font-size: 80%;
+		}
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+/*
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+ * to center a table or image in all browsers:
+ *	<div class="ctr">	 <table/img ... >  ... < / div>
+ */
+	div.ctr { text-align: center; }
+	div.ctr table { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;  text-align: left; }
+	div.ctr img { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }
+
+/*
+ * Use of <ins> ... < /ins> for marking corrected typos:
+ * Surround the corrected text with:
+ *   <ins class="correction"
+ *		title="Transcriber's Note: original read 'txet'">text< /ins>
+ * Very fine underline is not intrusive. Explanation pops up on hover.
+ */
+	ins.correction {
+		text-decoration:none;
+		border-bottom: thin dotted gray;}
+
+/*
+ * Styling for images and captions
+ */
+	img { /* the default image has */
+			border: 1px solid black; /* a thin black line border */
+			padding: 6px; /* ..spaced a bit out from the graphic */
+		}
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+	img.plain { /* image with no border or padding, see float */
+			border: none; padding: 0;
+		}
+	p.caption { margin-top: 0; font-size: smaller; }
+
+/*
+ * style sidenotes as class="sn", use in div or p
+ * guiguts expects a class "sidenote"
+ */
+	.sn, .sidenote {
+		/* sidenote box appearance controls: */
+			width: 15em; 		/* ..fixed width, */
+			float: right;		/* ..float to the right, */
+			margin-right: -16em;	/* ..exdent into body margin */
+			margin-top: 0; /* top even with following <p>'s top */
+			border: 1px dotted black; /* ..optional border */
+			background-color: rgb(90%,90%,90%); /* ..optional tint */
+		/* sidenote content control: */
+			font-size: smaller;	/* ..small text; could be x-small */
+			text-indent: 0;		/* ..no para indent */
+			text-align: left;	/* ..right align text in box */
+			margin-left: 0.2em; /* ensure space from text */
+		}
+
+/*
+ * style sidebars as div class="sb"
+ */
+	.sb {
+			width: 40%;		/* make 100% to force in-line */
+			float: right;
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+			padding: 0 0 0 0.5em; /* get text away from border */
+			margin: 0 0 1em 0.5em; /* get border clear of body text */
+			background-color: rgb(90%,90%,90%); /* ..optional tint */
+		}
+/*
+ * style floating images just like sidebars but no border
+ * Use image class="plain", as div border encloses all.
+ * Use div when caption accompanies image, span for image-only
+ * Note: guiguts expects class names figleft, figright
+ */
+	.floatr, .figright {
+			float: right;
+			clear: right; /* don't allow overlaps */
+			text-align: center; /* img, caption centered in box */
+			border: 1px solid black; /* thin border */
+			margin-left: 4px; /* keep body text away from border */
+			padding: 3px; /* keep caption text away border */
+		}
+
+	.floatl, .figleft {
+			float: left;
+			clear: left; /* don't allow overlaps */
+			text-align: center; /* img, caption centered in box */
+			border: 1px solid black; /* thin border */
+			margin-right: 4px; /* keep body text away from border */
+			padding: 3px; /* keep caption text from touching border */
+		}
+/*
+ *   Styling tables and their content
+ */
+
+	table { /* style all < table> elements */
+		margin-top: 1em; /* space above the table */
+		caption-side: /* top; or */ bottom ;
+		empty-cells: show; /* usual default is hide */
+	}
+
+	thead td, tfoot td { /* center & bold */
+		text-align: center;
+		font-weight: bold;
+		background-color: #ddd; /* dubious: gray background */
+	}
+	table .shade { /* tr or td class="shade" */
+		background-color: #ddd;
+	}
+	td, td > p {
+		margin-top: 0.25em;
+		/* line-height: 1.1em; OLD */
+		/* font-size: 90%; OLD */
+		/* text-align: left; OLD*/
+	}
+        td.wrap { /* MP's magic table: For cells in 1st col with lots of text,
+                     allows rewrap with indent.
+                     set padding-left: to 1 on main table...
+                     Numbers following should be "valign: bottom"*/
+                text-indent: -1em;
+                padding-right: 2em;
+        }
+                  /* use to add borders to table cells */
+        .bb       {border-bottom: solid 1px;}
+        .bl       {border-left: solid 1px;}
+        .bt       {border-top: solid 1px;}
+        .br       {border-right: solid 1px;}
+        .bbox     {border: solid 1px;}
+        .center   {text-align: center;}
+/*
+ * Styling Poetry the method generated by Guiguts:
+ *  div class=poem encloses poem
+ *  h4 within the poem div for poem title
+ *  div class=stanza encloses stanza
+ *	p [class=iN] encloses line
+ *  span class=linenum encloses line number
+ */
+	.poem {
+		text-align: left;
+		margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%;
+		position: relative;  /* basis of .linenum positions */
+		/* background-color: #fdc; /* Demonstration only: DELETE */
+		}
+	.poem h4 {
+		margin-left: 5em;
+		text-decoration: underline;
+		}
+	.poem .stanza {
+		margin-top: 1em; /* vertical break between stanzas */
+		}
+	.stanza div { /* default line */
+		line-height: 1.2em;
+		margin-top: 0em;
+		margin-left: 2em;
+		text-indent: -2em;
+		}
+	.poem .i1 {margin-left: 2em;} /* p or span indents */
+	.poem .i2 {margin-left: 4em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i3 {margin-left: 5em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i4 {margin-left: 6em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i5 {margin-left: 7em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i6 {margin-left: 8em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i7 {margin-left: 9em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i8 {margin-left: 10em;} /* indents */
+	.poem .i9 {margin-left: 11em;} /* indents */
+    .poem .caesura	{	/* vertical break in mid-line */
+    	vertical-align: -200%;
+    	}
+
+	.poem .linenum {
+		margin: 0; text-indent:0;
+		font-size: 90%;			/* they are smaller */
+		text-align: center;		/* centered in a space... */
+		width: 1.75em;				/* ...about 3+ digits wide */
+		position: absolute;		/* positioned out of text flow */
+		/*left: -4em; 		  ...positioned in LEFT margin */
+		right: -4em;	/*		 ...positioned in RIGHT margin */
+		color: #777; background-color: #ddd; /* medium gray on light gray */
+		/* color: #fff; background-color: #888;  white on medium gray */
+		}
+
+/*
+ * Making page numbers visible: Change the display: value of this class
+ *		for visible page numbers: "inline"
+ *		for hidden page numbers: "none"
+ */
+
+/* THESE LINES ADDED BY MP */
+    /*.pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right; color: #778899;} /* page numbers */
+    /*.pagenum  {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: smaller; text-align: left; color: #778899;} /* page numbers */
+    .pagenum {
+      font-size: smaller;
+      text-align: right;
+      padding: 0 0 0 0 ;
+      margin: 0 0 0 0;
+      position: absolute; right: 1%;
+      color: #778899;
+    }
+    /* Uncomment to get page numbers displayed with text */
+    a.pagenum:after            {display: inline; color: #778899; /* background-color: yellow;*/ content: "{" attr(title) "}";}
+
+    /* Change cursor over Greek text (the transliteration will appear in a popup) */
+    :lang(el)                  {cursor: help;}
+
+
+/*
+ * This code uses the :after selector to display the title string
+ * from the anchor inline in the text. It presumes every page anchor is:
+ *   <a class="page1" id="Page_NN" title="NN" > < /a>
+ *
+ * Advantage: non-CSS browsers display nothing.
+ * Problem: display is within the text between words. (you can't do
+ * absolute positioning of generated content.)
+ */
+	.page1:after {
+				display: inline; /* none or inline */
+				content: "[" attr(title) "]";
+				font-size: 50%;
+				background-color: rgb(95%,95%,95%);
+				vertical-align: 0.25em; /* raise its baseline */
+				}
+/*
+ * This code uses absolute positioning to display page numbers in the
+ * right margin. It presumes that every page-number anchor is augmented
+ * with a text span:
+ *	<a id="Page_NN">< /a> <span class="page2">NN< /span>
+ *
+ * Advantage: absolute positioning lets you put #s in the margin.
+ * Drawback: non-CSS browsers display the number inline instead.
+ * Drawback: multiple pagenumbers in the same text line overlap in the margin
+ */
+
+	.page2 {	display: inline; /* none or inline	*/
+				font-size:50%;
+				text-align: right;
+				padding: 0 0 0 0 ;
+				margin: 0 0 0 0;
+				position: absolute; right: 1%;}
+
+/*
+ * Styling footnotes and their references. See text for discussion.
+ * NOTE: Guiguts keeps changing the classnames it uses for the
+ * footnote div and p's. Be prepared to change these to match.
+ */
+
+	.fnanchor {   /* MODIFIED FROM fnref BY MP FOR GUIGUTS NOMENCLATURE */
+			font-size: smaller; /* discreet [X] */
+			vertical-align: 2px; /* bumped up a trace from baseline */
+		}
+
+	.note {
+			font-size: 90%;  /* somewhat smaller */
+			margin: 0 2em 2em 1em;
+                        text-align: justify;
+		}
+
+	.footnotes {  /* ADDED BY MP */
+                      border: dashed 1px;  /* Added by MP */
+                /*but note that knoqueror messes it up (though readable)*/
+		}
+/*
+ * Stylings for drama:
+ *    h4.scn is the scene-header, centered, italic
+ *    span.cnm is for all character-names
+ *    p.sdn is the stage-direction paragraph
+ *    span.sdr is the end-of-line right-aligned direction
+ *    span.sdm is the mid-line embedded direction
+ */
+
+	h4.scn {
+		text-align: center; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic;
+	}
+	p.sdn {
+		text-align: center; font-style: italic;
+	}
+	p.dlg {
+		margin:0.25em;
+		line-height: 1.2em;
+		position: relative; /* establish "container" for span.sdn */
+	}
+	.dlg .in5em { position:relative; left: 5em; }
+	.dlg .in10em { position: relative; left: 10em; }
+	span.sdm { font-style: italic; 	}
+	span.sdm:before {  font-style:normal; content: "[" }
+	span.sdm:after { font-style:normal; content: "]" }
+	span.sdr {
+		font-style: italic;
+		position: absolute;
+		text-align: right;
+		right: 0; top:auto;
+	}
+	span.sdr:before { font-style:normal; content: "[" }
+	.cnm { /* Character NaMe default (dialog) */
+		font-style: italic;
+	}
+	.sdn .cnm, sdm .cnm, .sdr .cnm { /* Character NaMe inside Stage DirectioN */
+		font-style: normal;
+	}
+	.dlg .linenum {
+		margin: 0; text-indent:0;
+		font-size: 90%;			/* they are smaller */
+		text-align: center;		/* centered in a space... */
+		width: 1.75em;			/* ...about 3+ digits wide */
+		position: absolute;		/* positioned out of text flow */
+		/*  left: -5em; 		  ...positioned in LEFT margin */
+		right: 0;			/* ...positioned in RIGHT margin */
+		color: #000; background-color: #ccc; /* black on light gray */
+		}
+
+    /* XML end  ]]> */ /*old browser end */ -->
+    </style>
+   </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund
+Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12)
+
+Author: Edmund Burke
+
+Release Date: April 17, 2006 [EBook #18192]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF THE RIGHT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Susan Skinner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at
+http://gallica.bnf.fr)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<p><a name="Page_-3" id="Page_-3"></a></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>THE WORKS
+<br /><br />
+<span style="font-size: 71%">OF</span>
+<br /><br />
+THE RIGHT HONOURABLE<br />
+
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 200%">EDMUND BURKE</span></h2>
+
+<h3>IN TWELVE VOLUMES<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller">VOLUME THE TENTH</span></h3>
+<p />
+<div style="text-align: center">
+<img src="images/001.png" alt="BURKE COAT OF ARMS." title="BURKE COAT OF ARMS" />
+</div>
+<p />
+<p style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0"><b>London</b><br />
+
+<br />
+
+JOHN C. NIMMO<br />
+<br />
+14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W.C.<br />
+
+MDCCCLXXXVII<br /></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+
+
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_X" id="CONTENTS_OF_VOL_X"></a>CONTENTS OF VOL. X.</h2>
+
+
+
+
+
+<ul class="TOCSub"><li><a href="#SPEECHES_IN_THE_IMPEACHMENT">SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE, LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.</a></li>
+
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li>    <a href="#SPEECH_IN_OPENING">SPEECH IN OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.</a></li>
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li>      <a href="#THIRD_DAY_MONDAY_FEBRUARY_18_1788">THIRD DAY: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1788</a>                    <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#FOURTH_DAY_TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_19_1788">FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19</a>                       <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_99">99</a></span></li></ul></li></ul></li>
+
+
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li><a href="#SPEECH_ON_THE_SIXTH_ARTICLE_OF_CHARGE">SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.</a></li>
+<li><ul class="TOCSub"><li>      <a href="#FIRST_DAY_TUESDAY_APRIL_21_1789">FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789</a>                    <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_149">149</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#SECOND_DAY_SATURDAY_APRIL_25_1789">SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25</a>                        <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#THIRD_DAY_TUESDAY_MAY_5_1789">THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5</a>                             <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_306">306</a></span></li>
+<li>      <a href="#FOURTH_DAY_THURSDAY_MAY_7_1789">FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7</a>                           <span class="tocright"><a href="#Page_396">396</a></span></li></ul></li></ul></li></ul>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">{1}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="SPEECHES_IN_THE_IMPEACHMENT" id="SPEECHES_IN_THE_IMPEACHMENT"></a>SPEECHES<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+THE IMPEACHMENT<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">OF</span><br />
+<br />
+WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.</span></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 25%;" />
+
+<h2><a name="SPEECH_IN_OPENING" id="SPEECH_IN_OPENING"></a>SPEECH IN OPENING.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 75%;">(CONTINUED.)</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 75%;">FEBRUARY, 1788.</span></h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">{2}</a></span></p><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">{3}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="THIRD_DAY_MONDAY_FEBRUARY_18_1788" id="THIRD_DAY_MONDAY_FEBRUARY_18_1788"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 75%;">THIRD DAY: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1788.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">{4}</a></span>
+and directly with the corruptions of India,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was my design to class the crimes of the late
+Governor of Bengal,&mdash;to show their mutual bearings,&mdash;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,&mdash;to
+show how that led to prodigality of the
+public money,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">{5}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have to state to-day the root of all
+these misdemeanors,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;<i>arbitrary
+power</i>. 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">{6}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>We say, then, not only that he governed arbitrarily,
+but corruptly,&mdash;that is to say, that he was a giver
+and receiver of bribes, and formed a system for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">{7}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">{8}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;money got by oppression, violence, extortion
+from the poor, or the heavy hand of power
+upon the rich and great.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">{9}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">{10}</a></span>&mdash;namely,
+<i>territories</i> or <i>sums of money</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>When these covenants arrived in India, the servants
+refused at first to execute them,&mdash;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 re&euml;stablished
+in the province of Oude, and paid a sum of 500,000<i>l.</i>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">{11}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">{12}</a></span>fused
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;next,
+by covenant,&mdash;and lastly, by act of Parliament:
+that is to say, by all the things that bind mankind, or
+that can bind them,&mdash;first, moral obligation inherent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>
+in the duty of their office,&mdash;next, the positive injunctions
+of the legislature of the country,&mdash;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,&mdash;that they should take no presents.</p>
+
+<p>I am to mark to your Lordships, that this law and
+this covenant did consider indirect ways of taking
+presents&mdash;taking them by others, and such like&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">{14}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Governors, we know very well, cannot with their
+own hands be continually receiving bribes,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;they
+were necessary,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 bri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">{15}</a></span>bery:
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">{16}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,)&mdash;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,&mdash;that is, either given to themselves to
+hold on the footing of farmers, or totally confiscated,&mdash;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 <i>moneyed
+merit</i>. 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,&mdash;corrupt and treacherous, as it
+was,&mdash;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<i>l.</i> Then a new source of corruption
+was opened,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">{17}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;yet, in fact, this business
+of balances is that <i>nidus</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 knowl<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">{18}</a></span>edge
+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 <i>ad infinitum</i>. 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,&mdash;Was such a one farmer? No. Cantoo
+Baboo? No. Another? No,&mdash;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 <i>them</i> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">{19}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>him</i> 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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i>, gave
+him farms paying a revenue of 130,000<i>l.</i> a year to
+government. Men undoubtedly have been known
+to be under the dominion of their domestics; such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">{20}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">{21}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;by the direct sale of the
+successions of families,&mdash;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,&mdash;that is, in the
+case of those <i>vakeels</i>, (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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">{22}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">{23}</a></span>
+of it, that they will serve as a shield to cover the
+honor of England, whenever this country is upbraided
+in India.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With the other gentlemen, who were visible too,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">{24}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">{25}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;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 Kh&acirc;n. He shall not blow
+hot and cold. In what respect was Mr. Hastings
+better than Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, 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?&mdash;Such was the accuser. He
+was the man that gave the bribes, and, in addition to
+his own evidence, offers proof by other witnesses.</p>
+
+<p>What was the accusation? Was the accusation
+improbable, either on account of the subject-matter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">{26}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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?&mdash;But I cannot mention
+this proceeding without shame and horror.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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,&mdash;time, place, persons, species, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">{27}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;this
+man whom he dared not meet as a defendant.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">{28}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then he took another step: he accused Nundcomar
+of a conspiracy,&mdash;which was a way he then and
+ever since has used, whenever means were taken to
+detect any of his own iniquities.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;he flew to this court, charging this Nundcomar
+and others with being conspirators.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>stone-dead</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">{29}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;hanged justly, if you please; and that
+it did so happen,&mdash;luckily for Mr. Hastings,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>His accuser was supposed to be what men may be,
+and yet very competent for accusers, namely, one of
+his accomplices in guilty actions,&mdash;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,&mdash;and that Mr. Hastings was proved afterwards
+to have received a sum of money from him,
+which may be well referred to bribes.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">{30}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But though Nundcomar was put out of the way by
+the means by which <i>he</i> 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<i>l.</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">{31}</a></span>
+200<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> a year
+for himself; and as I find his companion was put on
+the same allowance, it will be 146,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">{32}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">{33}</a></span>
+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 Kh&acirc;n 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<i>l.</i> 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 Kh&acirc;n, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Kh&acirc;n's salary as a
+spoil.</p>
+
+<p>When the orders of the Court to restore Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">{34}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;informs her that he was compelled
+by necessity to the present arrangement in
+favor of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, 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 Kh&acirc;n from the lieutenancy and controllership,
+leaving him only the judicial department miserably
+curtailed.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">{35}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> payable to
+him yearly, to give up to the Company no less than
+40,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Under this head you will have produced to you full
+proof of his sale of a judicial office to a person called
+Kh&acirc;n Jehan Kh&acirc;n, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">{36}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">{37}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;I am upon my defence,&mdash;let all
+charges remain against me,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">{38}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I
+am on my guard,&mdash;I will give you no satisfaction,&mdash;I
+have promised it, but I have already
+deferred it for seven or eight years"? Is not this
+tantamount to a denial?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">{39}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of this inquiry we find a sort of
+pause in his peculations, a sort of gap in the history,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">{40}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">{41}</a></span>
+bribes: for I would not suggest, nor have your Lordships
+to think, that I believe that these were his only
+bribes,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>would</i> have concealed the Nabob's 100,000<i>l.</i>, but
+that the magnitude rendered it easy of discovery.
+He, therefore, avows an intention of concealment.</p>
+
+<p>But it happens here, very singularly, that this sum,
+which his fears of discovery by <i>others</i> obliged him to
+discover <i>himself</i>, 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;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">{42}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;"<i>Exoriare,
+aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor</i>,"&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">{43}</a></span>
+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 <i>for their
+own use</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">{44}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He wrote over to the Court of Directors, that there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">{45}</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a bold, ferocious, plain, downright
+use of power. In the second, he is grown a little
+more careful and guarded,&mdash;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 sci<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">{46}</a></span>ence,
+and have for the first time established the corruption
+of the supreme magistrate as a principle of
+resource for government."</p>
+
+<p>There are crimes, undoubtedly, of great magnitude,
+naturally fitted to create horror, and that
+loudly call for punishment, that have yet no idea of
+<i>turpitude</i> 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 <i>horrible</i>, 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,&mdash;"<i>Dicam insigne,
+recens, alio indictum ore</i>"&mdash;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 corrup<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>tion.
+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,&mdash;he steals, he filches, he
+plunders, he oppresses, he extorts,&mdash;all for the good
+of the dear East India Company,&mdash;all for the advantage
+of his honored masters, the Proprietors,&mdash;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,&mdash;who never had the confidence in him
+that they had in the meanest of his predecessors."</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">{48}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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. <i>Semel malus pr&aelig;sumitur semper malus.</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>His conduct upon these occasions may be thought
+irrational. But, thank God, guilt was never a rational<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">{49}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">{50}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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 affirma<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">{51}</a></span>tion
+of the facts implied in that report of them, and
+such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability,
+follow them."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;gentle hints, <i>gemitus columb&aelig;</i>,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">{52}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">{53}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;your Lordships will remark the
+whole of this most daring and systematic plan of bribery
+and peculation,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that is, to four
+covenanted servants&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">{54}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">{55}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">{56}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> a year upon the establishment. But for
+great, eminent, capital services, 62,000<i>l.</i>, though a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">{57}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>many</i> people
+speak ill of him, ever pointed to any particular <i>act</i> 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,&mdash;"He had many enemies
+at the time he was proposed to be employed in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">{58}</a></span>
+the Company's service, and not <i>one advocate</i> 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 <i>specific</i>
+facts. I have heard him loaded, as I have many
+others, with general reproaches, but have never heard
+any one express a doubt of <i>his abilities</i>." 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I do, then, declare my conviction, and wish it may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">{59}</a></span>
+stand recorded to posterity, that there never was a
+<i>bad man</i> that had ability for <i>good service</i>. 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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">{60}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i>, 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,&mdash;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, "<i>Dinagepore, No. 1</i>," I find
+"<i>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</i>." We find here, "<i>Dinagepore
+peshcush, four lacs of rupees, cabooleat</i>": 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">{61}</a></span>
+monthly payments, a sum of about three lacs of rupees,
+upon an engagement to pay him four; that is, he
+received about 30,000<i>l.</i> out of 40,000<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> out of the 40,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you are not very much enlightened,
+I believe, by seeing these words, <i>Dinagepore peshcush</i>.
+We find a province, we find a sum of money, we find
+an agent, and we find a receiver. The <i>province</i> is
+<i>Dinagepore</i>, the <i>agent</i> is <i>Gunga Govind Sing</i>, the <i>sum</i>
+agreed on is 40,000<i>l.</i>, and the <i>receiver</i> of a part of
+that is <i>Mr. Hastings</i>. 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 <i>murder
+by persons unknown</i>: 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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, however, now see what was the state of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">{62}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">{63}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> for a judgment; which,
+whether that judgment was right or wrong, true or
+false, he corruptly received.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">{64}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>This history of this Dinagepore peshcush is the
+public one received by the Company, and which is
+entered upon the record,&mdash;but not the private, and
+probably the true history of this corrupt transaction.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<i>l.</i> a year,&mdash;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,)&mdash;this Gunga Govind Sing produces
+soon after another character, to whom he consigns<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">{65}</a></span>
+the custody of the whole family and the whole province.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">Arcades ambo,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Et cantare pares, et respondere parati.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noindent">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<i>l.</i> for <i>his
+own</i> inheritance, if it was his due,&mdash;for the inheri<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">{66}</a></span>tance
+of <i>others</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">{67}</a></span>
+of three great and once wealthy provinces,&mdash;(which
+is best or worst I shall not pretend to determine,)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>[<i>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.</i>]</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>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 transmit<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">{68}</a></span>ted
+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,)&mdash;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<i>l.</i> as a part of a bribe.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is necessary to inform your Lordships who this
+Debi Sing was, to whom these great trusts were committed,
+and those great provinces given.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">{69}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 Kh&acirc;n, 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<i>l.</i> in debt: that is to say, as soon
+as he was a great debtor, he ceased to be a great
+criminal.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">{70}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Debi Sing obtained by his services no slight influence
+over Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, a person of a character
+very different from his.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> sterling a year, was with difficulty
+leased for a yearly sum under 90,000<i>l.</i>, and with all
+rigor of exaction produced in effect little more than
+60,000<i>l.</i>, 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">{71}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Debi Sing found this administration composed mostly
+of young men, dissipated and fond of pleasure, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">{72}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">{73}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">{74}</a></span>times
+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 <i>by proxy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>carte blanche</i> on the table,&mdash;all to no purpose.
+"What are you?&mdash;stones? Have I not men to deal
+with? Will flesh and blood refuse me?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a
+set of innocent officers,&mdash;sold his fellow-servants of
+the Company, entitled by every duty to his protection,&mdash;sold
+English subjects, recommended by every
+tie of national sympathy,&mdash;sold the honor of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">{75}</a></span>
+British government itself,&mdash;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 <i>him</i> 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,)&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;territories
+making together a tract of land superior
+in dimensions to the northern counties of England,
+Yorkshire included.</p>
+
+<p>To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">{76}</a></span>
+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 <i>dewan</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i> 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<i>l.</i> 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 <i>this</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">{77}</a></span>
+discretion of the donor in what manner he was to
+indemnify himself for it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;as from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">{78}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;sold for&mdash;what
+do your Lordships think? They were sold for less
+than one year's purchase,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>When he had thus sold and separated these lands,
+he united the whole body of them, amounting to about
+7,000<i>l.</i> sterling a year (but, according to the rate of
+money and living in that country, equivalent to a rental
+in England of 30,000<i>l.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a circumstance attending this business<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">{79}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">{80}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;even
+the very feeble consolations of death, were, by
+the same rigid hand of tyranny,&mdash;a tyranny more
+consuming than the funeral pile, more greedy than
+the grave, and more inexorable than death itself,&mdash;seized
+and taken to make good the honor of corruption
+and the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or
+his instruments.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">{81}</a></span>
+houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a <i>thousand</i>
+of which would not perhaps produce twenty
+shillings."</p>
+
+<p>These were the opulent people from whose superfluities
+Mr. Hastings was to obtain a gift of 40,000<i>l.</i>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>
+means, in a very short time they fell into the hands
+of usurers.</p>
+
+<p>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?&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">{83}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>I come now to the last stage of their miseries.
+Everything visible and vendible was seized and sold.
+Nothing but the bodies remained.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">{84}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">{85}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">{86}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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 <i>Bechettea</i>, 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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">{87}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">{88}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;(I cannot
+proceed for shame and horror!)&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">{89}</a></span>
+cruelty,&mdash;there, where the reverence of nature and
+the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture
+to describe their practices.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">{90}</a></span>
+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 <i>halicore</i>, if (which is rare) he survives that miserable
+degradation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous
+and oppressive demands, exacted with such tor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">{91}</a></span>tures,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In our Indian government, whatever grievance is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">{92}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">{93}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;not only to
+inquire and to report, but to decide and to redress.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">{94}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">{95}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">{96}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Persons even less informed than your Lordships
+are well apprised that all officers representing government,
+and making in that character an author<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">{97}</a></span>ized
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">{98}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit
+down. After some time Mr. Burke again addressed
+the House.</i>]</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>[<i>Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House,
+on the motion of His Royal Highness the Prince of
+Wales, adjourned.</i>]<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">{99}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="FOURTH_DAY_TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_19_1788" id="FOURTH_DAY_TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_19_1788"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 noth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">{100}</a></span>ing
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">{101}</a></span>
+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 <i>pensioner</i>. No longer the sneaking tone
+of apology; no longer the modest allegations that
+the commissioner was misinformed;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Things were now in a proper train; the Committee
+find the cause growing and ripening to their wishes;&mdash;answers,
+replies, objections, and interrogatories,&mdash;accounts
+opposed to accounts,&mdash;balances now on the
+one side, now on the other,&mdash;now debtor becomes
+creditor, and creditor debtor,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">{102}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;and at a time
+when they saw <i>him</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>A new commission of junior servants was at the
+same time sent out to review and re&euml;xamine 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>vakeel</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>
+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<i>l.</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">{104}</a></span>
+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, "<i>If he should be left under
+a guard, the people would consider him as under
+disgrace.</i>" 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">{105}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;an
+equal judge, however. The judge was Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, his original patron, and the author of all
+his fortunes,&mdash;a judge who depends on him, as a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">{106}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>I have stated before that I considered Mr. Hastings
+as responsible for the characters of the people he employed,&mdash;doubly
+responsible, if he <i>knew</i> them to be
+bad. I therefore charge him with putting in situations
+in which any evil may be committed persons of
+known evil characters.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">{107}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;that is to say, by Gunga Govind Sing
+himself, the confidential agent of Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings is further responsible, because he
+took a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> from some person in power
+in Dinagepore and Rungpore, the countries which
+were ravaged in this manner, through the hands of
+Gunga Govind Sing,&mdash;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<i>l.</i> a year,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>
+to supersede all the English provincial authorities,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 pro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">{109}</a></span>ductive
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings says,&mdash;"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."</p>
+
+<p>We shall now see what things Mr. Hastings did,
+what course he was in, a little before his departure,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>One of his last political acts was this.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">{110}</a></span>
+such things were doing, I shall prove. But that is
+not now my consideration.</p>
+
+<p>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," &amp;c., &amp;c., &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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,) <i>even he</i> 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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">{111}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;here the native
+authority which he settled, and the establishment of
+native iniquity in a regular system under Gunga
+Govind Sing,&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">{112}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<i>l.</i>
+in bribes, and 30,000<i>l.</i> 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,&mdash;this is clear, and what we undertake to
+prove,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I must re-state to your Lordships, because I wish<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">{113}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;when they know they are tools for his
+own corrupt purposes?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">{114}</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">{115}</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>There is the real President of the Committee,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;for what?&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">{116}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">{117}</a></span>
+Hastings left Bengal eight or nine, Mr. Hastings had
+received from that country a bribe of about 40,000<i>l.</i>
+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,&mdash;that he
+should not be robbed, if Gunga Govind Sing could
+help it,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">{118}</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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 accompanying <i>durkhausts</i>, or petitions, for grants
+of lands lying in different districts, the total <i>jumma</i>,
+or rent, of which amount to Rupees 2,38,061. 12. 1."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships recollect that Mr. Larkins was one
+of the bribe-agents of Mr. Hastings,&mdash;one, I mean,
+of a corporation, but not corporate in their acts.
+My Lords, Mr. Larkins has told you, he has told us,
+and he has told the Court of Directors, that Mr. Hastings
+parted in a quarrel with Gunga Govind Sing, because
+he had not faithfully kept his engagement with
+regard to his bribe, and that, instead of 40,000<i>l.</i> from
+Dinagepore, he had only paid him 30,000<i>l.</i> My
+Lords, that iniquitous men will defraud one another
+I can conceive; but you will perceive by Mr. Hastings's
+behavior at parting, that he either had in fact
+received this money from Gunga Govind Sing, or in
+some way or other had abundant reason to be satis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">{119}</a></span>fied,&mdash;that
+he totally forgot his anger upon this occasion,
+and that at parting his last act was to ratify
+<i>grants of lands</i> (so described by Mr. Hastings) to
+Gunga Govind Sing. Your Lordships will recollect
+the tender and forgiving temper of Mr. Hastings.
+Whatever little bickerings there might have been between
+them about their small money concerns, the
+purifying waters of the Ganges had washed away all
+sins, enmities, and discontent. By some of those arts
+which Gunga Govind Sing knows how to practise, (I
+mean conciliatory, honest arts,) he had fairly wiped
+away all resentment out of Mr. Hastings's mind; and
+he, who so long remembered the affront offered him
+by Cheyt Sing, totally forgets Gunga Govind Sing's
+fraud of 10,000<i>l.</i>, and attempts to make others the
+instruments of giving him what he calls his reward.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings states, among Gunga Govind's merits,
+that he had, from the time of its institution, and with
+a very short intermission, served the office of dewan
+to the Calcutta Committee. That short intermission
+was when he was turned out of office upon proof of
+peculation and embezzlement of public money; but
+of this cause of the intermission in the political life
+and political merits of Gunga Govind Sing Mr. Hastings
+does not tell you.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships shall now hear what opinion a
+member of the Provincial Council at Calcutta, in
+which he had also served, had of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Gunga Govind Sing?" The answer is,
+"He was, when I left Bengal, dewan to the Committee
+of Revenue.&mdash;What was his office and power
+during Mr. Hastings's administration since 1780?&mdash;He
+was formerly dewan to the Provincial Council
+stationed at Calcutta, of which I was a member. His<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">{120}</a></span>
+conduct then was licentious and unwarrantable, oppressive
+and extortionary. He was stationed under
+us to be an humble and submissive servant, and to be
+of use to us in the discharge of our duty. His conduct
+was everything the reverse. We endeavored to
+correct the mischiefs he was guilty of as much as
+possible. In one attempt to release fifteen persons
+illegally confined by him, we were dismissed our offices:
+a different pretence was held out for our dismission,
+but it was only a pretence. Since his appointment
+as dewan to the present Committee of Revenue,
+his line of conduct has only been a continuance of
+what I have described, but upon a larger scale.&mdash;What
+was the general opinion of the natives of the
+use he made of his power? He was looked up to by
+the natives as the second person in the government,
+if not the first. He was considered as the only channel
+for obtaining favor and employment from the
+Governor. There is hardly a native family of rank
+or credit within the three provinces whom he has not
+some time or other distressed and afflicted; scarce
+a zemindary that he has not dismembered and plundered.&mdash;Were
+you in a situation to know this to be
+true?&mdash;I certainly was.&mdash;What was the general opinion,
+and your own, concerning his wealth?&mdash;It is almost
+impossible to form a competent judgment, his
+means of acquiring it have been so extensive. I had
+an account shown to me, about July, 1785, stating his
+acquisitions at three hundred and twenty lacs of rupees,&mdash;that
+is, 3,200,000<i>l.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have only to add, that, from the best
+inquiries I have been able to make, those who speak
+highest of his wealth are those who obtain the greatest
+credit. The estimate of any man's wealth is un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">{121}</a></span>certain;
+but the enormity of his wealth is universally
+believed. Yet Mr. Hastings seemed to act as if he
+needed a reward; and it is therefore necessary to
+inquire what recommended him particularly to Mr.
+Hastings. Your Lordships have seen that he was on
+the point of being dismissed for misbehavior and oppression
+by that Calcutta Committee his services to
+which Mr. Hastings gives as one proof of his constant
+and uniform good behavior. "He had executed," he
+says, "the duties of his office with fidelity, diligence,
+and ability." These are his public merits; but he
+has private merits. "To myself," says he, "he has
+given proofs of constancy and attachment."</p>
+
+<p>Now we, who have been used to look very diligently
+over the Company's records, and to compare one part
+with another, ask what those services were, which
+have so strongly recommended him to Mr. Hastings,
+and induced him to speak so favorably of his public
+services. What those services are does not appear;
+we have searched the records for them, (and those
+records are very busy and loquacious,) about that period
+of time during which Mr. Hastings was laboring
+under an eclipse, and near the dragon's mouth,
+and all the drums of Bengal beating to free him from
+this dangerous eclipse. During this time there is
+nothing publicly done, there is nothing publicly said,
+by Gunga Govind Sing. There were, then, some
+services of Gunga Govind Sing that lie undiscovered,
+which he takes as proofs of attachment. What could
+they be? They were not public; nobody knows anything
+of them; they must, by reference to the time,
+as far as we can judge of them, be services of concealment:
+otherwise, in the course of this business, it will
+be necessary, and Mr. Hastings will find occasion, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">{122}</a></span>
+show what those personal services of Gunga Govind
+Sing to him were. <i>His</i> services to Gunga Govind
+Sing were pretty conspicuous: for, after he was turned
+out for peculation, Mr. Hastings restored him to his
+office; and when he had imprisoned fifteen persons
+illegally and oppressively, and when the Council were
+about to set them at liberty, they were set at liberty
+themselves, they were dismissed their offices. Your
+Lordships see, then, what his public services were.
+His private services are unknown: they must be, as
+we conceive from their being unknown, of a suspicious
+nature; and I do not go further than suspicion, because
+I never heard, and I have not been without attempts
+to make the discovery, what those services were
+that recommended him to Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>Having looked at his public services, which are
+well-known scenes of wickedness, barbarity, and corruption,
+we next come to see what his reward is.
+Your Lordships hear what reward he thought proper
+to secure for himself; and I believe a man who has
+power like Gunga Govind Sing, and a disposition like
+Gunga Govind Sing, can hardly want the means of
+rewarding himself; and if every virtue rewards itself,
+and virtue is said to be its own reward, the virtue of
+Gunga Govind Sing was in a good way of seeking its
+own reward. Mr. Hastings, however, thought it was
+not right that such a man should reward himself, but
+that it was necessary for the honor and justice of government
+to find him a reward. Then the next thing
+is, what that reward shall be. It is a grant of lands.
+Your Lordships will observe, that Mr. Hastings declares
+some of these lands to be unoccupied, others
+occupied, but not by the just owners. Now these
+were the very lands of the Rajah of Dinagepore from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>
+whence he had taken the bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> My Lords,
+this was a monstrous thing. Mr. Hastings had the
+audacity, as his parting act, when he was coming to
+England, and ought to have expected (whatever he
+did expect) the responsibility of this day,&mdash;he was,
+I say, shameless enough not only to give this recommendation,
+but to perpetuate the mischiefs of his
+reign, as he has done, to his successors: for he has
+really done so, by making it impossible, almost, to
+know anything of the true state of that country; and
+he has thereby made them much less responsible and
+criminal than before in any ill acts they may have
+done since his time. But Mr. Hastings not only
+recommends and backs the petition of Gunga Govind
+Sing with his parting authority, which authority he
+made the people there believe would be greater in
+England than it was in India, but he is an evidence;
+he declares, that, "to his own knowledge, these lands
+are vacant, and confessedly, therefore, by the laws of
+this as well as of most other countries, in the absolute
+gift of government."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, as I said, Mr. Hastings becomes a witness,
+and I believe in the course of the proceedings
+you will find a false witness, for Gunga Govind Sing.
+"To my own knowledge," says he, "they are vacant."
+Why, I cannot find that Mr. Hastings had ever been
+in Dinagepore; or if he had, it must have been only
+as a passenger. He had not the supervision of the
+district, in any other sense than with that kind of
+eagle eye which he must have had over all Bengal,
+and which he had for no other purposes than those
+for which eagles' eyes are commonly used. He becomes,
+you see, a witness for Gunga Govind Sing, and
+orders to be given him, as a recompense for all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">{124}</a></span>
+iniquitous acts this man committed, the lands of that
+very Rajah who through the hands of Gunga Govind
+Sing had given an enormous bribe to Mr. Hastings.
+These lands were not without an ownership, but
+were lands in the hands of the Rajah, and were to
+be severed from the zemindary, and given to Gunga
+Govind Sing. The manner of obtaining them is something
+so shocking, and contains such a number of
+enormities completed in one act, that one can scarce
+imagine how such a compound could exist.</p>
+
+<p>This man, besides his office of dewan to the Calcutta
+Committee, which gave him the whole management
+and power of the revenue, was, as I have stated, at the
+head of all the registers in the kingdom, whose duty
+it was to be a control upon him as dewan. As Mr.
+Hastings destroyed every other constitutional settlement
+of the country, so the office which was to be a
+check upon Gunga Govind Sing, namely, the register
+of the country, had been superseded, and revived in
+another shape, and given to the own son of this very
+man. God forbid that a son should not be under
+a certain and reasonable subordination! But though
+in this country we know a son may possibly be free
+from the control of his father, yet the meanest slave
+is not in a more abject condition of slavery than a son
+is in that country to his father; for it extends to the
+power of a Roman parent. The office of register is to
+take care that a full and fair rent is secured to government;
+and above all, it is his business to take care
+of the body of laws, the <i>Rawaj-ul-Mulk</i>, or custom
+of the country, of which he is the guardian as the
+head of the law. It was his business to secure that
+fundamental law of the government, and fundamental
+law of the country, that a zemindary cannot be split,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">{125}</a></span>
+or any portion of it separated, without the consent of
+the government. This man betrayed his trust, and
+did privately, contrary to the duty of his office, get
+this minor Rajah, who was but an infant, who was
+but nine years old at the time, to make over to him a
+part of his zemindary, to a large amount, under color
+of a fraudulent and fictitious sale. By the laws of that
+country, by the common laws of Nature, the act of
+this child was void. The act was void as against the
+government, by giving a zemindary without the consent
+of the government to the very man who ought to
+have prevented such an act. He has the same sacred
+guardianship of minors that the Chancellor of England
+has. This man got to himself those lands by a
+fraudulent, and probably forged deed,&mdash;for that is
+charged too; but whether it was forged or not, this
+miserable minor was obliged to give the lands to him:
+he did not dare to quarrel with him upon such an
+article; because he who would purchase could take.
+The next step was to get one of his nearest relations
+to seem to give a consent; because taking it of the
+minor was too gross. The relation, who could no
+more consent by the law of that country than the law
+of this, gave apparently his consent. And these were
+the very lands that Mr. Hastings speaks of as "lands
+entirely at the disposal of government."</p>
+
+<p>All this came before the Council. The moment
+Mr. Hastings was gone, India seemed a little to respire;
+there was a vast, oppressive weight taken off it,
+there was a mountain removed from its breast; and
+persons did dare then, for the first time, to breathe
+their complaints. And accordingly, this minor Rajah
+got some person kind enough to tell him that he was
+a minor, that he could not part with his estate; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">{126}</a></span>
+this, with the other shocking and illegal parts of the
+process, was stated by him to the Council, who had
+Mr. Hastings's recommendation of Gunga Govind
+Sing before them. The Council, shocked to see a minor
+attempted to be dispossessed in such a manner
+by him who was the natural guardian of all minors,
+shocked at such an enormous, daring piece of iniquity,
+began to inquire further, and to ask, "How
+came this his near relation to consent?" He was apparently
+partner in the fraud. Partner in the fraud
+he was, but not partner in the profit; for he was to do
+it without getting anything for it: the wickedness
+was in him, and the profit in Gunga Govind Sing.
+In consequence of this inquiry, the man comes down
+to account for his conduct, and declares another atrocious
+iniquity, that shows you the powers which Gunga
+Govind Sing possessed. "Gunga Govind Sing,"
+says he, "is master of the country; he had made a
+great festival for the burial of his mother; all those
+of that caste ought to be invited to the funeral festival;
+he would have disgraced me forever, if I had not
+been invited to that funeral festival." These funeral
+festivals, you should know, are great things in that
+country, and celebrated in this manner, and, you may
+depend upon it, in a royal manner by him, upon burying
+his mother: any person left out was marked, despised,
+and disgraced. "But he had it in his power,
+and I was threatened to be deprived of my caste by
+his register, who had the caste in his absolute disposition."
+Says he, "I was under terror, I was under
+duress, and I did it."</p>
+
+<p>Gunga Govind Sing was fortified by the opinion,
+that the Governor, though departed, virtually resided
+in that country. God grant that his power may<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">{127}</a></span>
+be extirpated out of it now! I doubt it; but, most
+assuredly, it was residing in its plenitude when he
+departed from thence; and there was not a man in
+India who was not of opinion, either that he was
+actually to return to govern India again, or that his
+power is such in England as that he might govern it
+here. And such were the hopes of those who had intentions
+against the estates of others. Gunga Govind
+Sing, therefore, being pressed to the wall by this declaration
+of the Rajah's relation, when he could say
+nothing against it, when it was clear and manifest,
+and there were only impudent barefaced denials, and
+asseverations against facts which carried truth with
+themselves, did not in his answer pretend to say that
+a zemindary might be parted without the consent of
+the government, that a minor might be deprived of
+it, that the next relation had a power of disposing
+of it. He did indeed say, but nobody believed him,
+that he had used no force upon this relation; but as
+every one knew the act would be void, he was driven
+to Mr. Hastings's great refuge,&mdash;he was driven to
+say, "The government in this country has arbitrary
+power; the power of government is everything, the
+right of the subject nothing; they have at all times
+separated zemindaries from their lawful proprietors.
+Give me what Mr. Hastings has constantly given to
+other people without any right, or shadow or semblance
+of right at all." God knows, it is well that
+I walk with my authority in my hand; for there are
+such crimes, such portentous, incredible crimes, to be
+brought before your Lordships, that it would hardly
+be believed, were it not that I am constantly, as I
+hope I shall constantly be, guarded with evidence, and
+that the strongest that can be, even the evidence of
+the parties themselves.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">{128}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"From your inquiry," Gunga Govind Sing says
+to the Council, "every circumstance will appear in
+its true colors. With respect to the alienation of
+parts of zemindaries, the extent and consequence of
+the great zemindars depend in a great measure on
+the favor and countenance of the ruling powers.
+By what means did this zemindar of Dinagepore get
+possession of Purgunnah Buttassim after the death
+of Rycobad Chowdry in 1158, of Purgunnah Coolygong
+after the death of Sahebrance Chowderanne
+in the same year, notwithstanding his heirs existed,
+and of Purgunnah Suntoe, &amp;c., during the lifetime
+of Sumboonant, the zemindar, in 1167, all without
+right, title, or pecuniary consideration? This has
+been the case with many purgunnahs in his zemindary,
+and indeed exists in many other zemindaries
+besides since the Company's accession. Ramkissen,
+in 1172, got possession of Nurrulloor, the zemindary
+of Mahomed Ali. The purgunnah of Ichanguipore,
+&amp;c., was in three divisions in 1173. The petition
+of Govind Deo Sheopersaud was made over to the
+son of Bousser Chowdry, possessor of the third share.
+Purgunnah Baharbund belonged to the zemindary
+of Ranny Bhowanny, and in 1180 was made over
+to Lucknaut Nundy. All these changes took place
+in the lifetime of the rightful possessors, without
+right, title, or purchase."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships have not heard before of Lucknaut
+Nundy. He was the son of a person of whom your
+Lordships have heard before, called Cantoo Baboo, the
+banian of Mr. Hastings. Mr. Hastings has proved
+in abundance of other cases that a grant to father
+and son is the same thing. The fathers generally
+take out grants in the names of their sons: and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">{129}</a></span>
+the Ranny Bhowanny, possessing the zemindary of
+Radshi, an old lady of the first rank and family in
+India, was stripped of part of her zemindary, and it
+was given to Lucknaut Nundy, the son of Mr. Hastings's
+banian; and then (you see the consequence of
+good examples) comes Gunga Govind Sing, and says,
+"I am as good a man as he; there is a zemindary
+given; then do as much for Gunga Govind Sing as
+you have done for Cantoo Baboo." Here is an argument
+drawn from the practice of Mr. Hastings. And
+this shows your Lordships the necessity of suppressing
+such iniquities by punishing the author of them.
+You will punish Mr. Hastings, and no man will hereafter
+dare to rob minors, no man will hereafter dare
+to rob widows, to give to the vilest of mankind, their
+own base instruments for their own nefarious purposes,
+the lands of others, without right, title, or purchase.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will not after this state to you the false
+representation of the value of these lands which this
+man gave in to government. He represented it to be
+much less than it was, when he desired the grant of
+them,&mdash;as shall be stated, when it comes before your
+Lordships, at the proper time. But at present I am
+only touching upon principles, and bringing examples
+so far as they illustrate principles, and to show how
+precedents spread.</p>
+
+<p>I believe your Lordships will conceive better of the
+spirit of these transactions by my intermixing with
+them, as I shall endeavor to do, as much as possible
+of the grounds of them. I will venture to say, that
+no description that I can give, no painting, if I was
+either able or willing to paint, could make these transactions
+appear to your Lordships with the strength<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>
+which they have in themselves; and your Lordships
+will be convinced of this, when you see, what nobody
+could hardly believe, that a man can say, "It was
+given to others without right, title, or purchase,&mdash;give
+it to me without right, title, or purchase; give
+me the estates of minors without right, title, or purchase,
+because Mr. Hastings gave the estates of widows
+without right, title, or purchase."</p>
+
+<p>Of this exemplary grant, of this pattern for future
+proceedings, I will show your Lordships the consequence.
+I will read to your Lordships part of the
+examination of a witness, taken from a report of a
+committee of the House of Commons.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you acquainted with the situation of the
+zemindary of Baharbund?&mdash;It lies to the eastward
+of Dinagepore and Rungpore. I was stationed in that
+neighborhood.&mdash;To whom did it originally belong?&mdash;I
+believe, to the zemindary of Radshi, belonging
+to Ranny Bhowanny.&mdash;For what reason was it taken
+from the Ranny of Radshi and given to Cantoo Baboo?&mdash;I
+do not exactly recollect: I believe, on some
+plea of incapacity or insufficiency in her to manage it,
+or some pretended decline in the revenue, owing to
+mismanagement.&mdash;On what terms was it granted to
+Cantoo Baboo or his son?&mdash;I believe it was a grant in
+perpetuity, at the revenue of Rupees 82,000 or 83,000
+per annum.&mdash;What amount did he collect from the
+country?&mdash;I cannot tell. The year I was in that
+neighborhood, the settlement with his under-tenants
+was something above 3,53,000 rupees. The inhabitants
+of the country objected to it. They assembled in
+a body of about five thousand, and were proceeding to
+Calcutta to make known their grievances to the Committee
+of Revenue. They were stopped at Cossim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">{131}</a></span>bazar
+by Noor Sing Baboo, the brother of Cantoo
+Baboo, and there the matter was compromised,&mdash;in
+what manner I cannot say."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings's banian got
+this zemindary belonging to this venerable lady; unable
+to protect herself; that it was granted to him
+without right, title, or purchase. To show you that
+Mr. Hastings had been in a constant course of such
+proceeding, here is a petition from a person called
+&mdash;&mdash; for some favor from government which it is
+not necessary now to state. In order to make good
+his claim, he states what nobody denied, but which
+is universally known in fact. Says he, "I have
+never entertained any such intention or idea," that
+is, of seizing upon other people's zemindaries; "neither
+am I at all desirous of acquiring any other
+person's zemindary in this country," &amp;c....</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>[<i>The document read here is wanting, ending</i>] "as
+several Calcutta banians have done," &amp;c.</p></div>
+
+<p>He states it as a kind of constant practice, by
+which the country had been robbed under Mr. Hastings,
+known and acknowledged to be so, to seize upon
+the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless. In
+this manner did Gunga Govind Sing govern himself,
+upon the direct precedent of Cantoo Baboo, the banian
+of Mr. Hastings; and this other instrument of
+his in like manner calls upon government for favor
+of some kind or other, upon the same principle and
+the same precedent.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships now see how necessary it was to
+say something about arbitrary power. For, first, the
+wicked people of that country (Mr. Hastings's instru<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">{132}</a></span>ments,
+I mean) pretend right, title, purchase, grant;
+and when their frauds in all these legal means are
+discovered, then they fly off, and have recourse to
+arbitrary power, and say, "It is true I can make out
+no right, title, grant, or purchase; the parties are
+minors; I am bound to take care of their right: but
+you have arbitrary power; you have exercised it upon
+other occasions; exercise it upon this; give me the
+rights of other people." This was the last act, and I
+hope will be the last act, of Mr. Hastings's wicked
+power, done by the wickedest man in favor of the
+wickedest man, and by the wickedest means, which
+failed upon his own testimony.</p>
+
+<p>To bring your Lordships to the end of this business,
+which I hope will lead me very near to the end of
+what I have to trouble your Lordships with, I will
+now state the conduct of the Council, and the resolution
+about Gunga Govind Sing. I am to inform your
+Lordships that there was a reference made by the
+Council to the Committee of Revenue, namely, to
+Gunga Govind Sing himself,&mdash;a reference with regard
+to the right, title, mode, and proceeding, and
+many other circumstances; upon which the Committee,
+being such as I have described, very naturally
+were silent. Gunga Govind Sing <i>loquitur solus</i>,&mdash;in
+the manner you have just heard; the Committee
+were the chorus,&mdash;they sometimes talk, fill up a vacant
+part,&mdash;but Gunga Govind Sing was the great
+actor, the sole one. The report of this Committee
+being laid before the Council, Mr. Stables, one of the
+board, entered the following minute on the 15th of
+May, 1785.</p>
+
+<p>"I have perused the several papers upon this subject,
+and am sorry to observe that the Committee of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">{133}</a></span>
+Revenue are totally silent on the most material points
+therein, and sending the petition to them has only
+been so much time thrown away: I mean, on the
+actual value of the lands in question, what the
+amount derived from them has been in the last year,
+and what advantages or disadvantages to government
+by the sale, and whether, in their opinion, the supposed
+sale was compulsive or not. But it is not necessary
+for the discussion of the question respecting
+the regularity or irregularity of the pretended sale
+of Salbarry to Gunga Govind Sing, the dewan, to
+enter into the particular assertions of each party.</p>
+
+<p>"The representations of the Rajah's agent, confirmed
+by the petitions of his principal, positively
+assert the sale to have been compulsive and violent;
+and the dewan as positively denies it, though the fears
+he expresses, 'that their common enemies would set
+aside the act before it was complete,' show clearly
+that they were sensible the act was unjustifiable, if
+they do not tend to falsify his denial.</p>
+
+<p>"But it is clearly established and admitted by the
+language and writings of both parties, that there has
+been a most unwarrantable collusion in endeavoring
+to alienate the rights of government, contrary to the
+most positive original laws of the constitution of
+these provinces, 'that no zemindar and other landholder,
+paying revenue to government, shall be permitted
+to alienate his lands without the express
+authority of that government.'</p>
+
+<p>"The defence set up by Gunga Govind Sing does
+not go to disavow the transaction; for, if it did, the
+deed of sale, &amp;c., produced by himself, and the petition
+to the board for its confirmation, would detect
+him: on the contrary, he openly admits its existence,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">{134}</a></span>
+and only strives to show that it was a voluntary one
+on the part of the Ranny and the servants of the
+Rajah. Whether voluntary or not, it was equally
+criminal in Gunga Govind Sing, as the public officer
+of government: because diametrically opposite to the
+positive and repeated standing orders of that government
+for the rule of his conduct, as dewan, and native
+guardian of the public rights intrusted especially
+to his care; because it was his duty, not only not
+to be guilty of a breach of those rules himself, but,
+as dewan, and exercising the efficient office of <i>kanungo</i>,
+to prevent, detect, expose, and apprise his employers
+of every instance attempted to the contrary;
+because it was his duty to prevent the government
+being defrauded, and the Rajah, a child of nine years
+old, robbed of his hereditary possessions, as he would
+have been, if this transaction had not been detected:
+whereas, on the contrary, the dewan is himself the
+principal mover and sole instrument in that fraud and
+robbery, if I am rightly informed, to the amount
+of 42,474 rupees<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor" title="Vakeel states Mofussil Jumma, of Salbarry, for 1,191
+">[1]</a> in perpetuity, by which he alone
+was to benefit; and because he has even dared to
+stand forward in an attempt to obtain our sanction,
+and thereby make us parties to (in my opinion) a
+false deed and fraudulent transaction, as his own
+defence now shows the bill of sale and all its collateral
+papers to be.</p>
+
+<p>"If offences of this dark tendency and magnitude
+were not to be punished in a public manner, the high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">{135}</a></span>
+example here set the natives employed under the government
+by their first native officer would very soon
+render our authority contemptible, and operate to
+the destruction of the public revenues. I will not
+dwell further on the contradictions in these papers
+before us on this subject.</p>
+
+<p>"But I beg leave to point out how tenacious the
+government have been of insuring implicit obedience
+to their rules on this subject in particular, and in
+prohibiting conduct like that here exhibited against
+their public officer, and how sacredly they have
+viewed the public institutes on this subject, which
+have been violated and trampled on; and it will suffice
+to show their public orders on a similar instance
+which happened some time ago, and which the dewan,
+from his official situation, must have been a party in
+detecting.</p>
+
+<p>"I desire the board's letter to the Committee on
+this subject, dated the 31st May, 1782, may be read,
+and a copy be annexed to this minute.</p>
+
+<p>"I therefore move the board that Gunga Govind
+Sing may be forthwith required to surrender the
+original deeds produced by him as a title to the grant
+of Salbarry, in order that they may be returned to
+the Rajah's agents, to be made null and void.</p>
+
+<p>"I further move the board, that the dewan, Gunga
+Govind Sing, together with his naib, Prawn Kishin
+Sing, his son, and all his dependants, be removed
+from their offices, and that the Roy Royan, Rajah
+Rajebullub, whose duty only Gunga Govind Sing virtually
+is to perform, be reinstated in the exercise of
+the duties of his department; and that Gunga Govind
+Sing be ordered to deliver up all official papers of
+the circar to the Committee of Revenue and the Roy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>
+Royan, and that they be ordered accordingly to take
+charge of them, and finally settle all accounts."</p>
+
+<p>This motion was overruled, and no final proceeding
+appears.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you have heard the proceedings of the
+court before which Gunga Govind Sing thought proper
+to appeal, in consequence of the power and protection
+of Mr. Hastings being understood to exist after he
+left India, and authenticated by his last parting deed.
+Your Lordships will judge by that last act of Mr.
+Hastings what the rest of his whole life was.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than
+just to remind your Lordships of this, that Mr. Hastings's
+government was one whole system of oppression,
+of robbery of individuals, of destruction of the
+public, and of suppression of the whole system of the
+English government, in order to vest in the worst of
+the natives all the powers that could possibly exist in
+any government,&mdash;in order to defeat the ends which
+all governments ought in common to have in view.
+Thus, my Lords, I show you at one point of view
+what you are to expect from him in all the rest. I
+have, I think, made out as clear as can be to your
+Lordships, so far as it was necessary to go, that his
+bribery and peculation was not occasional, but habitual,&mdash;that
+it was not urged upon him at the moment,
+but was regular and systematic. I have shown
+to your Lordships the operation of such a system on
+the revenues.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, Mr. Hastings pleads one constant merit
+to justify those acts,&mdash;namely, that they produce an
+increase of the public revenue; and accordingly he
+never sells to any of those wicked agents any trusts
+whatever in the country, that you do not hear that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">{137}</a></span>
+will considerably tend to the increase of the revenue.
+Your Lordships will see, when he sold to wicked men
+the province of Bahar in the same way in which Debi
+Sing had this province of Dinagepore, that consequences
+of a horrid and atrocious nature, though not to
+so great an extent, followed from it. I will just beg
+leave to state to your Lordships, that the kingdom
+of Bahar is annexed to the kingdom of Bengal; that
+this kingdom was governed by another Provincial
+Council; that he turned out that Provincial Council,
+and sold that government to two wicked men: one of
+no fortune at all, and the other of a very suspicious
+fortune; one a total bankrupt, the other justly excommunicated
+for his wickedness in his country, and then
+in prison for misdemeanors in a subordinate situation
+of government. Mr. Hastings destroyed the Council
+that imprisoned him; and, instead of putting one of
+the best and most reputable of the natives to govern
+it, he takes out of prison this excommunicated
+wretch, hated by God and man,&mdash;this bankrupt, this
+man of evil and desperate character, this mismanager
+of the public revenue in an inferior station; and, as
+he had given Bengal to Gunga Govind Sing, he gave
+this province to Rajahs Kelleram and Cullian Sing.
+It was done upon this principle, that they would increase
+and very much better the revenue. These men
+seemed to be as strange instruments for improving
+a revenue as ever were chosen, I suppose, since the
+world began. Perhaps their merit was giving a bribe
+of 40,000<i>l.</i> to Mr. Hastings. How he disposed of it
+I don't know. He says, "I disposed of it to the public,
+and it was in a case of emergency." You will
+see in the course of this business the falsehood of that
+pretence; for you will see, though the obligation is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">{138}</a></span>
+given for it as a round sum of money, that the payment
+was not accomplished till a year after; that
+therefore it could not answer any immediate exigence
+of the Company. Did it answer in an increase of the
+revenue? The very reverse. Those persons who
+had given this bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> at the end of that
+year were found 80,000<i>l.</i> in debt to the Company.
+The Company always loses, when Mr. Hastings takes
+a bribe; and when he proposes an increase of the revenue,
+the Company loses often double. But I hope
+and trust your Lordships will consider this idea of a
+monstrous rise of rent, given by men of desperate fortunes
+and characters, to be one of the grievances instead
+of one of the advantages of this system.</p>
+
+<p>It has been necessary to lay these facts before you,
+(and I have stated them to your Lordships far short
+of their reality, partly through my infirmity, and
+partly on account of the odiousness of the task of
+going through things that disgrace human nature,)
+that you may be enabled fully to enter into the dreadful
+consequences which attend a system of bribery
+and corruption in a Governor-General. On a transient
+view, bribery is rather a subject of disgust than
+horror,&mdash;the sordid practice of a venal, mean, and
+abject mind; and the effect of the crime seems to end
+with the act. It looks to be no more than the corrupt
+transfer of property from one person to another,&mdash;at
+worst a theft. But it will appear in a very different
+light, when you regard the consideration for
+which the bribe is given,&mdash;namely, that a Governor-General,
+claiming an arbitrary power in himself, for
+that consideration delivers up the properties, the liberties,
+and the lives of an whole people to the arbitrary
+discretion of any wicked and rapacious person,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>
+who will be sure to make good from their blood the
+purchase he has paid for his power over them. It is
+possible that a man may pay a bribe merely to redeem
+himself from some evil. It is bad, however, to
+live under a power whose violence has no restraint
+except in its avarice. But no man ever paid a bribe
+for a power to charge and tax others, but with a view
+to oppress them. No man ever paid a bribe for the
+handling of the public money, but to peculate from
+it. When once such offices become thus privately
+and corruptly venal, the very worst men will be chosen
+(as Mr. Hastings has in fact constantly chosen
+the very worst); because none but those who do not
+scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently
+with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands
+of a severe public revenue and the private bribes of a
+rapacious chief magistrate. Not only the worst men
+will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no
+dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions.
+Their protection is sure. The authority
+that is to restrain, to control, to punish them is previously
+engaged; he has his retaining fee for the support
+of their crimes. Mr. Hastings never dared,
+because he could not, arrest oppression in its course,
+without drying up the source of his own corrupt
+emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the
+fact, to punish extortion in others, because he could
+not, without risking the discovery of bribery in himself.
+The same corruption, the same oppression, and
+the same impunity will reign through all the subordinate
+gradations.</p>
+
+<p>A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of
+wicked, violent, and unjust instruments. But when
+once the line of just and legal demand is trans<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">{140}</a></span>gressed,
+such instruments are of absolute necessity;
+and they comport themselves accordingly. When we
+know that men must be well paid (and they ought to
+be well paid) for the performance of honorable duty,
+can we think that men will be found to commit wicked,
+rapacious, and oppressive acts with fidelity and
+disinterestedness for the sole emolument of dishonest
+employers? No: they must have their full share of
+the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer
+and more necessary instruments of the general extortion.
+We must not, therefore, flatter ourselves,
+when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000<i>l.</i> in bribes for Dinagepore
+and its annexed provinces, that from the
+people nothing more than 40,000<i>l.</i> is extorted. I
+speak within compass, four times forty must be levied
+on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent
+purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable
+tortures, imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general
+despair, general insurrection, the massacre of the
+officers of revenue by the people, the massacre of the
+people by the soldiery, and the total waste and destruction
+of the finest provinces in India, are things
+of course,&mdash;and all a necessary consequence involved
+in the very substance of Mr. Hastings's bribery.</p>
+
+<p>I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed,
+for private purposes, the whole system of
+government by the six Provincial Councils, which
+he had no right to destroy.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having delegated to others that
+power which the act of Parliament had directed him
+to preserve unalienably in himself.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having formed a committee to
+be mere instruments and tools, at the enormous expense
+of 62,000<i>l.</i> per annum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">{141}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having appointed a person their
+dewan to whom these Englishmen were to be subservient
+tools,&mdash;whose name, to his own knowledge,
+was, by the general voice of India, by the general
+recorded voice of the Company, by recorded official
+transactions, by everything that can make a man
+known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy;
+and with giving him the whole power which he
+had thus separated from the Council-General, and
+from the Provincial Councils.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind
+Sing.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with not having done that bribe-service
+which fidelity even in iniquity requires at the
+hands of the worst of men.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having robbed those people of
+whom he took the bribes.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having fraudulently alienated
+the fortunes of widows.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having, without right, title, or
+purchase, taken the lands of orphans, and given them
+to wicked persons under him.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having removed the natural
+guardians of a minor Rajah, and with having given
+that trust to a stranger, Debi Sing, whose wickedness
+was known to himself and all the world, and by
+whom the Rajah, his family, and dependants were
+cruelly oppressed.</p>
+
+<p>I charge him with having committed to the management
+of Debi Sing three great provinces; and
+thereby with having wasted the country, ruined the
+landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt
+their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded
+their persons, and destroyed the honor of the
+whole female race of that country.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">{142}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In the name of the Commons of England, I charge
+all this villany upon Warren Hastings, in this last
+moment of my application to you.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great
+act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my
+Lords? You have the cause of oppressed princes,
+of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces,
+and of wasted kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was
+there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any
+one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish
+any other such delinquent from India. Warren
+Hastings has not left substance enough in India to
+nourish such another delinquent.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have
+before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors;
+and I believe, my Lords, that the sun, in his
+beneficent progress round the world, does not behold
+a more glorious sight than that of men, separated
+from a remote people by the material bounds and
+barriers of Nature, united by the bond of a social
+and moral community,&mdash;all the Commons of England
+resenting, as their own, the indignities and
+cruelties that are offered to all the people of India.</p>
+
+<p>Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example
+of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing
+in the range of human imagination, can supply us
+with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see
+virtually, in the mind's eye, that sacred majesty of
+the crown, under whose authority you sit, and whose
+power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority,
+what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent
+powers and protecting justice of his Majesty. We
+have here the heir-apparent to the crown, such as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>
+the fond wishes of the people of England wish an
+heir-apparent of the crown to be. We have here all
+the branches of the royal family, in a situation between
+majesty and subjection, between the sovereign
+and the subject,&mdash;offering a pledge in that situation
+for the support of the rights of the crown and the liberties
+of the people, both which extremities they
+touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage
+here,&mdash;those who have their own honor, the
+honor of their ancestors and of their posterity to
+guard, and who will justify, as they have always
+justified, that provision in the Constitution by which
+justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we
+have here a new nobility, who have risen and exalted
+themselves by various merits,&mdash;by great military services
+which have extended the fame of this country
+from the rising to the setting sun. We have those
+who, by various civil merits and various civil talents,
+have been exalted to a situation which they well deserve,
+and in which they will justify the favor of their
+sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects,
+and make them rejoice to see those virtuous
+characters that were the other day upon a level
+with them now exalted above them in rank, but
+feeling with them in sympathy what they felt in common
+with them before. We have persons exalted
+from the practice of the law, from the place in which
+they administered high, though subordinate, justice,
+to a seat here, to enlighten with their knowledge and
+to strengthen with their votes those principles which
+have distinguished the courts in which they have
+presided.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you have here also the lights of our religion,
+you have the bishops of England. My Lords,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">{144}</a></span>
+you have that true image of the primitive Church, in
+its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified
+from the superstitions and the vices which a long succession
+of ages will bring upon the best institutions.
+You have the representatives of that religion which
+says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit
+of their institution is charity,&mdash;a religion which so
+much hates oppression, that, when the God whom we
+adore appeared in human form, He did not appear in
+a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with
+the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm
+and ruling principle that their welfare was the object
+of all government, since the Person who was the Master
+of Nature chose to appear Himself in a subordinate
+situation. These are the considerations which influence
+them, which animate them, and will animate
+them, against all oppression,&mdash;knowing that He who
+is called first among them, and first among us all,
+both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it,
+made Himself "the servant of all."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, these are the securities which we have
+in all the constituent parts of the body of this House.
+We know them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and
+commit safely the interests of India and of humanity
+into your hands. Therefore it is with confidence,
+that, ordered by the Commons,</p>
+
+<p>I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high
+crimes and misdemeanors.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of the Commons of
+Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary
+trust he has betrayed.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of
+Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">{145}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of the people of India,
+whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted,
+whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he
+has laid waste and desolate.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those
+eternal laws of justice which he has violated.</p>
+
+<p>I impeach him in the name of human nature itself,
+which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed,
+in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition
+of life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">{146}</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Vakeel states Mofussil Jumma, of Salbarry, for 1,191
+</p>
+
+
+
+<div class='ctr'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='center'>S* R*</td><td align='left'>96,229</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Purchase money</td><td align='left'>53,755</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Per annum, loss</td><td align='left' class="bt">42,474</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">{147}</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="SPEECH_ON_THE_SIXTH_ARTICLE_OF_CHARGE" id="SPEECH_ON_THE_SIXTH_ARTICLE_OF_CHARGE"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECHES<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">IN</span><br />
+<br />
+THE IMPEACHMENT<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">OF</span><br />
+<br />
+WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.</span></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+
+<h2>SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">April and May, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">{148}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>NOTE.</h2>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>After Mr. Burke had concluded the opening speeches, the
+first article of the impeachment was brought forward, on the 22d
+of February, 1788, by Mr. Fox, and supported by Mr. Grey on
+the 25th. After the evidence upon this article had been adduced,
+it was summed up and enforced by Mr. Anstruther, on the 11th
+day of April following.</p>
+
+<p>The next article with which the Commons proceeded was
+brought forward on the 15th of April, 1788, by Mr. Adam, and
+supported by Mr. Pelham; and the evidence, in part upon the
+second article of charge, was summed up and enforced, on the 3d
+of June, by Mr. Sheridan.</p>
+
+<p>On the 21st of April, 1789, Mr. Burke opened the sixth charge,
+bribery and corruption, in the following speech, which was continued
+on the 25th of April, and on the 6th and 7th May, in
+the same session.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">{149}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="FIRST_DAY_TUESDAY_APRIL_21_1789" id="FIRST_DAY_TUESDAY_APRIL_21_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;An event which had spread for a
+considerable time an universal grief and consternation
+through this kingdom, and which in its issue
+diffused as universal and transcendent a joy, has
+in the circumstances both of our depression and of our
+exaltation produced a considerable delay, if not a total
+suspension, of the most important functions of
+government.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, we now resume our office,&mdash;and we
+resume it with new and redoubled alacrity, and, we
+trust, under not less propitious omens than when we
+left it, in this House, at the end of the preceding session.
+We come to this duty with a greater degree
+of earnestness and zeal, because we are urged to it by
+many and very peculiar circumstances. This day we
+come from an House where the last steps were taken
+(and I suppose something has happened similar in
+this) to prepare our way to attend with the utmost
+solemnity, in another place, a great national thanksgiving
+for having restored the sovereign to his Parliament
+and the Parliament to its sovereign.</p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, it is not only in the house of prayer
+that we offer to the First Cause the acceptable homage
+of our rational nature,&mdash;my Lords, in this House, at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">{150}</a></span>
+this bar, in this place, in every place where His commands
+are obeyed, His worship is performed. And,
+my Lords, I must boldly say, (and I think I shall
+hardly be contradicted by your Lordships, or by any
+persons versed in the law which guides us all,) that
+the highest act of religion, and the highest homage
+which we can and ought to pay, is an imitation of
+the Divine perfections, as far as such a nature can
+imitate such perfections, and that by this means alone
+we can make our homage acceptable to Him.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in His temple we shall not forget that
+His most distinguished attribute is justice, and that
+the first link in the chain by which we are held to the
+Supreme Judge of All is justice; and that it is in this
+solemn temple of representative justice we may best
+give Him praise, because we can here best imitate His
+divine attributes. If ever there was a cause in which
+justice and mercy are not only combined and reconciled,
+but incorporated, it is in this cause of suffering
+nations, which we now bring before your Lordships
+this second session of Parliament, unwearied and unfatigued
+in our persevering pursuit; and we feel it
+to be a necessary preliminary, a necessary fact, a necessary
+attendant and concomitant of every public
+thanksgiving, that we should express our gratitude
+by our virtues, and not merely with our mouths, and
+that, when we are giving thanks for acts of mercy,
+we should render ourselves worthy of them by doing
+acts of mercy ourselves. My Lords, these considerations,
+independent of those which were our first movers
+in this business, strongly urge us at present to
+pursue with all zeal and perseverance the great cause
+we have now in hand. And we feel this to be the
+more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">{151}</a></span>
+light, unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious
+minds soon tire in any pursuit that requires
+strength, steadiness, and perseverance. Such persons,
+who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not
+resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say,
+How long is this business to continue? Our answer
+is, It is to continue till its ends are obtained.</p>
+
+<p>We know, that, by a mysterious dispensation of
+Providence, injury is quick and rapid, and justice
+slow; and we may say that those who have not patience
+and vigor of mind to attend the tardy pace of
+justice counteract the order of Providence, and are
+resolved not to be just at all. We, therefore, instead
+of bending the order of Nature to the laxity of our
+characters and tempers, must rather confirm ourselves
+by a manly fortitude and virtuous perseverance to
+continue within those forms, and to wrestle with injustice,
+until we have shown that those virtues which
+sometimes wickedness debauches into its cause, such
+as vigor, energy, activity, fortitude of spirit, are called
+back and brought to their true and natural service,&mdash;and
+that in the pursuit of wickedness, in the following
+it through all the winding recesses and mazes of
+its artifices, we shall show as much vigor, as much
+constancy, as much diligence, energy, and perseverance,
+as any others can do in endeavoring to elude the
+laws and triumph over the justice of their country.
+My Lords, we have thought it the more necessary to
+say this, because it has been given out that we might
+faint in this business. No: we follow, and trust we
+shall always follow, that great emblem of antiquity, in
+which the person who held out to the end of a long
+line of labors found the reward of all the eleven in the
+twelfth. Our labor, therefore, will be our reward;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">{152}</a></span>
+and we will go on, we will pursue with vigor and
+diligence, in a manner suitable to the Commons of
+Great Britain, every mode of corruption, till we have
+thoroughly eradicated it.</p>
+
+<p>I think it necessary to say a word, too, upon another
+circumstance, of which there is some complaint,
+as if some injustice had arisen from voluntary delay
+on our part.</p>
+
+<p>I have already alluded to, first, the melancholy,
+then the joyful occasion of this delay; and I shall
+now make one remark on another part of the complaint,
+which I understand was formally made to
+your Lordships soon after we had announced our
+resolution to proceed in this great cause of suffering
+nations before you. It has been alleged, that the
+length of the pursuit had already very much distressed
+the person who is the object of it,&mdash;that it leaned
+upon a fortune unequal to support it,&mdash;and that
+30,000<i>l.</i> had been already spent in the preliminary
+preparations for the defence.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and
+unadulterated justice considers with a certain degree
+of tenderness the person whom it is called to punish,
+and never oppresses those by the process who ought
+not to be oppressed but by the sentence of the court
+before which they are brought. The Commons have
+heard, indeed, with some degree of astonishment, that
+30,000<i>l.</i> hath been laid out by Mr. Hastings in this
+business. We, who have some experience in the
+conduct of affairs of this nature, we, who profess to
+proceed with regard not to the economy so much as
+to the rigor of this prosecution, (and we are justified
+by our country in so doing,) upon a collation and
+comparison of the public expenses with those which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">{153}</a></span>
+the defendant is supposed to have incurred, are much
+surprised to hear it. We suppose that his solicitors
+can give a good account to him of those expenses,&mdash;that
+the thing is true,&mdash;and that he has actually,
+through them, incurred this expense. We have nothing
+to do with this: but we shall remove any degree
+of uneasiness from your Lordships' minds, and from
+our own, when we show you in the charge which we
+shall bring before you this day, that one bribe only
+received by Mr. Hastings, the smallest of his bribes,
+or nearly the smallest, the bribe received from Rajah
+Nobkissin, is alone more than equal to have paid all
+the charges Mr. Hastings is stated to have incurred;
+and if this be the case, your Lordships will not be
+made very uneasy in a case of bribery by finding that
+you press upon the sources of peculation.</p>
+
+<p>It has also been said that we weary out the public
+patience in this cause. The House of Commons do
+not call upon your Lordships to do anything of which
+they do not set the example. They have very lately
+sat in the Colchester Committee as many, within one
+or two, days successively as have been spent in this
+trial interruptedly in the course of two years. Every
+cause deserves that it should be tried according to
+its nature and circumstances; and in the case of the
+Colchester Committee, in the trial of paltry briberies
+of odd pounds, shillings, and pence, in the corruption
+of a returning officer, who is but a miller, they spent
+nearly the same number of days that we have been
+inquiring into the ruin of kingdoms by the peculation
+and bribery of the chief governor of the provinces of
+Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Therefore God forbid
+that we should faint at thrice thirty days, if the proceedings
+should be drawn into such a length, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">{154}</a></span>
+for a small crime as much time has been spent as has
+yet been spent in this great cause!</p>
+
+<p>Having now cleared the way with regard to the
+local and temporary circumstances of this case,&mdash;having
+shown your Lordships that too much time has
+not been spent in it,&mdash;having no reason to think,
+from the time which has hitherto been spent, that
+time will be unnecessarily spent in future,&mdash;I trust
+your Lordships will think that time ought neither to
+be spared nor squandered in this business: we will
+therefore proceed, article by article, as far as the discretion
+of the House of Commons shall think fit, for
+the justice of the case, to limit the inquiry, or to
+extend it.</p>
+
+<p>We are now going to bring before your Lordships
+the sixth article. It is an article of charge of bribery
+and corruption against Mr. Hastings; but yet
+we must confess that we feel some little difficulty <i>in
+limine</i>. We here appear in the name and character
+not only of representatives of the Commons of Great
+Britain, but representatives of the inhabitants of Bengal:
+and yet we have had lately come into our hands
+such ample certificates, such full testimonials, from
+every person in whose cause we complain, that we
+shall appear to be in the strangest situation in the
+world,&mdash;the situation of persons complaining, who
+are disavowed by the persons in whose name and
+character they complain. This would have been a
+very great difficulty in the beginning, especially as it
+is come before us in a flood-tide of panegyric. No
+encomium can be more exalted or more beautifully
+expressed. No language can more strongly paint
+the perfect satisfaction, the entire acquiescence, of
+all the nations of Bengal, and their wonderful ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">{155}</a></span>miration
+of the character of the person whom we
+have brought as a criminal to your bar upon their
+part. I do admit that it is a very awkward circumstance;
+but yet, at the same time, the same candor
+which has induced the House of Commons to bring
+before you the bosom friends and confidants of Mr.
+Hastings as their evidence will not suffer them to
+suppress or withhold for a moment from your Lordships
+this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation
+in Mr. Hastings's favor, and we shall produce it as a
+part of our evidence. Oh, my Lords, consider the
+situation of a people who are forced to mix their
+praises with their groans, who are forced to sign,
+with hands which have been in torture, and with
+the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an attestation
+in favor of the person from whom all their
+sufferings have been derived! When we prove to
+you the things that we shall prove, this will, I hope,
+give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory
+proof of the misery to which these people have
+been reduced. You will see before you, what is so
+well expressed by one of our poets as the homage
+of tyrants, "that homage with the mouth which the
+heart would fain deny, but dares not." Mr. Hastings
+has received that homage, and that homage we
+mean to present to your Lordships: we mean to present
+it, because it will show your Lordships clearly,
+that, after Mr. Hastings has ransacked Bengal from
+one end to the other, and has used all the power which
+he derives from having every friend and every dependant
+of his in every office from one end of that government
+to the other, he has not, in all those panegyrics,
+those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums, got one
+word of refutation or one word of evidence against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">{156}</a></span>
+any charge whatever which we produce against him.
+Every one knows, that, in the course of criminal
+trials, when no evidence of <i>alibi</i> can be brought,
+when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted,
+the last thing produced is evidence to character.
+His cause, therefore, is gone, when, having ransacked
+Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at
+length appeals to his character. In those little papers
+which are given us of our proceedings in our
+criminal courts, it is always an omen of what is to
+follow: after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or
+robbery, it ends in his character: "He has an admirable
+character; I have known him from a boy; he
+is wonderfully good; he is the best of men; I would
+trust him with untold gold": and immediately follows,
+"Guilty,&mdash;Death." This is the way in which,
+in our courts, character is generally followed by sentence.
+The practice is not modern. Undoubtedly
+Mr. Hastings has the example of criminals of high
+antiquity; for Caius Verres, Antonius, and every
+other man who has been famous for the pillage and
+destruction of provinces, never failed to bring before
+their judges the attestations of the injured to their
+character. Voltaire says, "<i>Les bons mots sont toujours
+redits</i>." A similar occasion has here produced
+a similar conduct. He has got just the same character
+as Caius Verres got in another cause; and the
+<i>laudationes</i>, which your Lordships know always followed,
+to save trouble, we mean ourselves to give
+your Lordships; we mean to give them with this
+strong presumption of guilt, that in all this panegyric
+there is not one word of defence to a single
+article of charge; they are mere lip-honors: but we
+think we derive from those panegyrics, which Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">{157}</a></span>
+Hastings has had sent over as evidence to supply
+the total want of it, an indication of the impossibility
+of attaining it. Mr. Hastings has brought them
+here, and I must say we are under some difficulty
+about them, and the difficulty is this. We think we
+can produce before your Lordships proofs of barbarity
+and peculation by Mr. Hastings; we have the proofs
+of them in specific provinces, where those proofs may
+be met by contrary proofs, or may lose their weight
+from a variety of circumstances. We thought we
+had got the matter sure, that everything was settled,
+that he could not escape us, after he had himself confessed
+the bribes he had taken from the specific provinces.
+But in what condition are we now? We
+have from those specific provinces the strongest attestations
+that there is not any credit to be paid to
+his own acknowledgments. In short, we have the
+complaints, concerning these crimes of Mr. Hastings,
+of the injured persons themselves; we have his own
+confessions; we shall produce both to your Lordships.
+But these persons now declare, that not only their own
+complaints are totally unfounded, but that Mr. Hastings's
+confessions are not true, and not to be credited.
+These are circumstances which your Lordships will
+consider in the view you take of this wonderful body
+of attestation.</p>
+
+<p>It is a pleasant thing to see in these addresses the
+different character and modes of eloquence of different
+countries. In those that will be brought before your
+Lordships you will see the beauty of chaste European
+panegyric improved by degrees into high, Oriental,
+exaggerated, and inflated metaphor. You will see
+how the language is first written in English, then
+translated into Persian, and then retranslated into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">{158}</a></span>
+English. There may be something amusing to your
+Lordships in this, and the beauty of these styles may,
+in this heavy investigation, tend to give a little gayety
+and pleasure. We shall bring before you the European
+and Asiatic incense. You will have the perfume-shops
+of the two countries.</p>
+
+<p>One of the accusations which we mean to bring
+against Mr. Hastings is upon the part of the Zemindar
+Radanaut, of the country of Dinagepore. Now
+hear what the Zemindar says himself. "As it has
+been learned by me, the mutsuddies, and the respectable
+officers of my zemindary, that the ministers
+of England are displeased with the late Governor,
+Warren Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that
+he oppressed us, took money from us by deceit and
+force, and ruined the country, therefore we, upon the
+strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent
+on and necessary for us to abide by, following the
+rules laid down in giving evidence, declare the particulars
+of the acts and deeds of Warren Hastings,
+Esquire, full of circumspection and caution, civility
+and justice, superior to the conduct of the most
+learned, and, by representing what is fact, wipe away
+the doubts that have possessed the minds of the ministers
+of England; that Mr. Hastings is possessed of
+fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to us;
+that he is clear of the contamination of mistrust and
+wrong, and his mind is free of covetousness or avarice.
+During the time of his administration no one
+saw other conduct than that of protection to the husbandman,
+and justice. No inhabitant ever experienced
+afflictions, no one ever felt oppression from him;
+our reputations have always been guarded from attacks
+by his prudence, and our families have always<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">{159}</a></span>
+been protected by his justice. He never omitted the
+smallest instance of kindness towards us, but healed
+the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation
+by means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never
+permitting one of us to sink in the pit of despondence.
+He supported every one by his goodness, overset the
+designs of evil-minded men by his authority, tied the
+hand of oppression with the strong bandage of justice,
+and by these means expanded the pleasing appearance
+of happiness and joy over us. He re&euml;stablished
+justice and impartiality. We were during his government
+in the enjoyment of perfect happiness and
+ease, and many of us are thankful and satisfied. As
+Mr. Hastings was well acquainted with our manners
+and customs, he was always desirous, in every respect,
+of doing whatever would preserve our religious rites,
+and guard them against every kind of accident and injury,
+and at all times protected us. Whatever we have
+experienced from him, and whatever happened from
+him, we have written without deceit or exaggeration."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is a panegyric; and, directly contrary
+to the usual mode of other accusers, we begin
+by producing the panegyrics made upon the person
+whom we accuse. We shall produce along with the
+charge, and give as evidence, the panegyric and certificate
+of the persons whom we suppose to have suffered
+these wrongs. We suffer ourselves even to
+abandon, what might be our last resource, his own
+confession, by showing that one of the princes from
+whom he confesses that he took bribes has given a
+certificate of the direct contrary.</p>
+
+<p>All these things will have their weight upon your
+Lordships' minds; and when we have put ourselves
+under this disadvantage, (what disadvantage it is your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">{160}</a></span>
+Lordships will judge,) at least we shall stand acquitted
+of unfairness in charging him with crimes directly
+contrary to the panegyrics in this paper contained.
+Indeed, I will say this for him, that general charge
+and loose accusation may be answered by loose and
+general panegyric, and that, if ours were of that
+nature, this panegyric would be sufficient to overset
+our accusation. But we come before your Lordships
+in a different manner and upon different grounds.
+I am ordered by the Commons of Great Britain to
+support the charge that they have made, and persevere
+in making, against Warren Hastings, Esquire,
+late Governor-General of Bengal, and now a culprit
+at your bar: First, for having taken corruptly several
+bribes, and extorted by force, or under the power
+and color of his office, several sums of money from
+the unhappy natives of Bengal. The next article
+which we shall bring before you is, that he is not only
+personally corrupted, but that he has personally corrupted
+all the other servants of the Company,&mdash;those
+under him, whose corruptions he ought to have controlled,
+and those above him, whose business it was to
+control his corruptions.</p>
+
+<p>We purpose to make good to your Lordships the
+first of these, by submitting to you, that part of those
+sums which are specified in the charge were taken by
+him with his own hand and in his own person, but
+that much the greater part have been taken from the
+natives by the instrumentality of his black agents,
+banians, and other dependants,&mdash;whose confidential
+connection with him, and whose agency on his part
+in corrupt transactions, if his counsel should be bold
+enough to challenge us to the proof, we shall fully
+prove before you. The next part, and the second<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">{161}</a></span>
+branch of his corruption, namely, what is commonly
+called his active corruption, distinguishing the personal
+under the name of passive, will appear from his
+having given, under color of contracts, a number of
+corrupt and lucrative advantages from a number of
+unauthorized and unreasonable grants, pensions, and
+allowances, by which he corrupted actively the whole
+service of the Company. And, lastly, we shall show,
+that, by establishing a universal connivance from one
+end of the service to the other, he has not only corrupted
+and contaminated it in all its parts, but bound
+it in a common league of iniquity to support mutually
+each other against the inquiry that should detect and
+the justice that should punish their offences. These
+two charges, namely, of his active and passive corruption,
+we shall bring one after the other, as strongly
+and clearly illustrating and as powerfully confirming
+each other.</p>
+
+<p>The first which we shall bring before you is his own
+passive corruption,&mdash;so we commonly call it. Bribes
+are so little known in this country that we can hardly
+get clear and specific technical names to distinguish
+them; but in future, I am afraid, the conduct of Mr.
+Hastings will improve our law vocabulary. The first,
+then, of these offences with which Mr. Hastings stands
+charged here is receiving bribes himself, or through
+his banians. Every one of these are overt acts of the
+general charge of bribery, and they are every one
+of them, separately taken, substantive crimes. But
+whatever the criminal nature of these acts was, (and
+the nature was very criminal, and the consequences
+to the country very dreadful,) yet we mean to prove
+to your Lordships that they were not single acts, that
+they were not acts committed as opportunity offered,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>
+or as necessity tempted or urged upon the occasion,
+but that they are parts of a general systematic plan
+of corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense
+of his integrity; that he has, for that purpose, not
+only taken the opportunity of his own power, but
+made whole establishments, altered and perverted
+others, and created complete revolutions in the country's
+government, for the purpose of making the power
+which ought to be subservient to legal government
+subservient to corruption; that, when he could no
+longer cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice,
+he endeavored to justify them by principle. These
+artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean
+to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish,
+destroy, and subvert forever.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which
+is a matter of collusion, concealment, and deceit, your
+Lordships will, perhaps, not feel the same degree of
+interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had before
+you crimes of dignity: you have had before you
+the ruin and expulsion of great and illustrious families,
+the breach of solemn public treaties, the merciless
+pillage and total subversion of the first houses in
+Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to
+the imagination are not always the most pernicious
+in their effects: in these high, eminent acts of domineering
+tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort
+of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on
+which they can be exercised are rare; the persons
+upon whom they can be exercised few; the persons
+who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are
+not many. These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing
+tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the
+unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">{163}</a></span>guished
+and incommunicable attributes, of superior
+wickedness in eminent station.</p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and
+illiberal minds infect that high situation,&mdash;when theft,
+bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication,
+falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery&mdash;when
+all these follow in one train,&mdash;when these
+vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are
+nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their
+slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity
+and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate
+daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable,
+and it will be imitated, and will be improved,
+from the highest to the lowest, through all
+the gradations of a corrupt government. They are
+reptile vices. There are situations in which the acts
+of the individual are of some moment, the example
+comparatively of little importance. In the other, the
+mischief of the example is infinite.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives
+bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the
+inferior parts of the service. The bridles upon hard-mouthed
+passion are removed; they are taken away;
+they are broken. Fear and shame, the great guards
+to virtue next to conscience, are gone. Shame! how
+can it exist?&mdash;it will soon blush away its awkward
+sensibility. Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long,
+when it is seen that crimes which naturally bring
+disgrace are attended with all the outward symbols,
+characteristics, and rewards of honor and of virtue,&mdash;when
+it is seen that high station, great rank, general
+applause, vast wealth follow the commission of
+peculation and bribery. Is it to be believed that men
+can long be ashamed of that which they see to be the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>
+road to honor? As to fear, let a Governor-General
+once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service.
+What have they to fear? Is it the man whose
+example they follow that is to bring them before a
+tribunal for their punishment? Can he open any inquiry?
+He cannot: he that opens a channel of inquiry
+under these circumstances opens a high-road
+to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent
+it? None: for he can make no laws to restrain
+that practice without the breach of his own laws immediately
+in his own conduct. If we once can admit,
+for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle,
+however defended, upon any pretence whatever,
+to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is
+an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope
+left in the supreme justice of the country. We are
+sensible of all these difficulties; we have felt them;
+and perhaps it has required no small degree of exertion
+for us to get the better of these difficulties
+which are thrown in our way by a Governor-General
+accepting bribes, and thereby screening and protecting
+the whole service in such iniquitous proceedings.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to this matter, we are to state to your
+Lordships, in order to bring it fully and distinctly before
+you, what the nature of this distemper of bribery
+is in the Indian government. We are to state
+what the laws and rules are which have been opposed
+to prevent it, and the utter insufficiency of all that
+have been proposed: to state the grievance, the instructions
+of the Company and government, the acts
+of Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of
+Parliament. We are to state to your Lordships the
+particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are to
+state the trust the Company had in him for the pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">{165}</a></span>vention
+of all those evils; and then we are to prove
+that every evil, that all those grievances which the law
+intended to prevent, which there were covenants to
+restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements
+to smooth and make easy the path of duty,
+Mr. Hastings was invested with a special, direct, and
+immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your
+Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person
+collectively, has done more mischief than all those
+persons whose evil practices have produced all those
+laws, those regulations, and even his own appointment.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which
+we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery
+was the ancient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper
+of the Company's affairs in India, from the
+time of their first establishment there. Very often
+there are no words nor any description which can
+adequately convey the state of a thing like the direct
+evidence of the thing itself: because the former might
+be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that
+which was really fact to be nothing but the coloring
+of the person that explained it; and therefore I think
+that it will be much better to give to your Lordships
+here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when
+the Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings
+entered into, and when they took those measures
+to prevent the very evils from persons placed in those
+very stations and in those very circumstances in which
+we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the
+offences we now bring before you.</p>
+
+<p>I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to
+read a consultation of Lord Clive's, who was sent out
+for the express purpose of reforming the state of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">{166}</a></span>
+Company, in order to show the magnitude of the pecuniary
+corruptions that prevailed in it.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>"It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and
+profess to your interests and to our own honor, that
+we think it indispensably necessary to lay open to your
+view a series of transactions too notoriously known
+to be suppressed, and too affecting to your interest,
+to the national character, and to the existence of the
+Company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured,&mdash;transactions
+which seem to demonstrate that
+every spring of this government was smeared with
+corruption, that principles of rapacity and oppression
+universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment
+and public spirit was lost and extinguished in
+the unbounded lust of unmerited wealth.</p>
+
+<p>"To illustrate these positions, we must exhibit to
+your view a most unpleasing variety of complaints,
+inquiries, accusations, and vindications, the particulars
+of which are entered in our Proceedings and the
+Appendix,&mdash;assuring you that we undertake this task
+with peculiar reluctance, from the personal regard we
+entertain for some of the gentlemen whose characters
+will appear to be deeply affected.</p>
+
+<p>"At Fort St. George we received the first advices
+of the demise of Mir Jaffier and of Sujah Dowlah's
+defeat. It was there firmly imagined that no definite
+measures would be taken, either in respect to a peace
+or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our arrival,&mdash;as
+the 'Lapwing' arrived in the month of January
+with your general letter, and the appointment
+of a committee with express powers to that purpose,
+for the successful exertion of which the happiest occasion
+now offered. However, a contrary resolution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">{167}</a></span>
+prevailed in the Council. The opportunity of acquiring
+immense fortunes was too inviting to be neglected,
+and the temptation too powerful to be resisted. A
+treaty was hastily drawn up by the board, or rather
+transcribed, with few unimportant additions, from
+that concluded with Mir Jaffier,&mdash;and a deputation,
+consisting of Messrs. Johnstone, senior, Middleton, and
+Leycester, appointed to raise the natural son of the deceased
+Nabob to the subahdarry, in prejudice of the
+claim of the grandson; and for this measure such
+reasons are assigned as ought to have dictated a diametrically
+opposite resolution. Meeran's son was a
+minor, which circumstance alone would have naturally
+brought the whole administration into our hands,
+at a juncture when it became indispensably necessary
+we should realize that shadow of power and influence
+which, having no solid foundation, was exposed
+to the danger of being annihilated by the first stroke
+of adverse fortune. But this inconsistence was not
+regarded; nor was it material to the views for precipitating
+the treaty, which was pressed on the young
+Nabob at the first interview, in so earnest and indelicate
+a manner as highly disgusted him and chagrined
+his ministers; while not a single rupee was stipulated
+for the Company, whose interests were sacrificed, that
+their servants might revel in the spoils of a treasury
+before impoverished, but now totally exhausted.</p>
+
+<p>"This scene of corruption was first disclosed, at
+a visit the Nabob was paid, to Lord Clive and the
+gentlemen of the Committee, a few days after our
+arrival. He there delivered to his Lordship a letter
+filled with bitter complaints of the insults and indignities
+he had been exposed to, and the embezzlement
+of near twenty lacs of rupees, issued from his treas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">{168}</a></span>ury
+for purposes unknown, during the late negotiations.
+So public a complaint could not be disregarded,
+and it soon produced an inquiry. We referred
+the letter to the board, in expectation of obtaining
+a satisfactory account of the application of
+this money, and were answered only by a warm remonstrance
+entered by Mr. Leycester against that
+very Nabob in whose elevation he boasts of having
+been a principal agent.</p>
+
+<p>"Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, the Naib Subah, was then
+called upon to account for this large disbursement
+from the treasury; and he soon delivered to the
+Committee the very extraordinary narrative entered
+in our Proceedings the 6th of June, wherein he specifies
+the several names and sums, by whom paid, and
+to whom, whether in cash, bills, or obligations. So
+precise, so accurate an account as this of money for
+secret and venal services was never, we believe, before
+this period, exhibited to the Honorable Court of Directors,&mdash;at
+least, never vouched by such undeniable
+testimony and authentic documents: by Juggut Seet,
+who himself was obliged to contribute largely to the
+sums demanded; by Muley Ram, who was employed
+by Mr. Johnstone in all those pecuniary transactions;
+by the Nabob and Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, who were
+the heaviest sufferers; and, lastly, by the confession
+of the gentlemen themselves whose names are specified
+in the distribution list.</p>
+
+<p>"Juggut Seet expressly declared in his narrative,
+that the sum which he agreed to pay the deputation,
+amounting to 125,000 rupees, was extorted by menaces;
+and since the close of our inquiry, and the
+opinions we delivered in the Proceedings of the 21st
+June, it fully appears that the presents from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">{169}</a></span>
+Nabob and Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, exceeding the immense
+sum of seventeen lacs, were not the voluntary
+offerings of gratitude, but contributions levied on the
+weakness of the government, and violently exacted
+from the dependent state and timid disposition of the
+minister. The charge, indeed, is denied on the one
+hand, as well as affirmed on the other. Your honorable
+board must therefore determine how far the circumstance
+of extortion may aggravate the crime of
+disobedience to your positive orders, the exposing the
+government in a manner to sale, and receiving the
+infamous wages of corruption from opposite parties
+and contending interests. We speak with boldness,
+because we speak from conviction founded upon indubitable
+facts, that, besides the above sums specified
+in the distribution account to the amount of 228,125
+pounds sterling, there was likewise to the value of
+several lacs of rupees procured from Nundcomar and
+Roydullub, each of whom aspired at and obtained a
+promise of that very employment it was predetermined
+to bestow on Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n.</p>
+
+<p>(Signed at the end)</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"CLIVE.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">W<sup>M</sup> B. SUMNER.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">JOHN CARNAC.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">H. VERELST.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">FRA<sup>S</sup> SYKES."<br /></span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This paper cannot be denied to be a paper of
+weight and authenticity, because it is signed by a
+gentleman now in this House, who sits on one side
+of the gentleman at your bar, as his bail. This
+grievance, therefore, so authenticated, so great, and
+described in so many circumstances, I think it might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">{170}</a></span>
+be sufficient for me, in this part of the business, to
+show was, when Mr. Hastings was sent to India, a
+prevalent evil.</p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, it is necessary that I should show
+to you something more, because, <i>prima fronte</i>, this
+is some exculpation of Mr. Hastings: for, if he was
+only a partaker in a general misconduct, it was
+rather <i>vitium loci et vitium temporis</i> than <i>vitium
+hominis</i>. This might be said in his exculpation.
+But I am next to show your Lordships the means
+which the Company took for removing this grievance;
+and that Mr. Hastings's peculiar trust, the
+great specific ground of his appointment, was a confidence
+that he would eradicate this very evil, of
+which we are going to prove that he has been one
+of the principal promoters. I wish your Lordships
+to advert to one particular circumstance,&mdash;namely,
+that the two persons who were bidders at this time,
+and at this auction of government, for the favor and
+countenance of the Presidency at Calcutta, were
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n and Rajah Nundcomar. I
+wish your Lordships to recollect this by-and-by, when
+we shall bring before you the very same two persons,
+who, in the same sort of transaction, and in circumstances
+exactly similar, or very nearly so, were candidates
+for the favor of Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, our next step will be to show you that
+the Company in 1768 had made a covenant expressly
+forbidding the taking of presents of above 400<i>l.</i> value
+in each present by the Governor-General. I take it
+for granted, this will not be much litigated. They renewed
+and enforced that with other covenants and
+other instructions; and at last came an act of Parliament,
+in the clearest, the most definite, the most spe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">{171}</a></span>cific
+words that all the wisdom of the legislature, intent
+upon the eradication of this evil, could use, to
+prevent the receiving of presents.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I think it is necessary to state, that
+there has been some little difficulty concerning this
+word, <i>presents</i>. Bribery and extortion have been
+covered by the name of presents, and the authority
+and practice of the East has been adduced as a palliation
+of the crime. My Lords, no authority of the
+East will be a palliation of the breach of laws enacted
+in the West: and to those laws of the West, and not
+the vicious customs of the East, we insist upon making
+Mr. Hastings liable. But do not your Lordships
+see that this is an entire mistake? that there never
+was any custom of the East for it? I do not mean
+vicious practices and customs, which it is the business
+of good laws and good customs to eradicate. There
+are three species of presents known in the East,&mdash;two
+of them payments of money known to be legal, and
+the other perfectly illegal, and which has a name exactly
+expressing it in the manner our language does.
+It is necessary that your Lordships should see that
+Mr. Hastings has made use of a perversion of the
+names of authorized gifts to cover the most abominable
+and prostituted bribery. The first of those presents is
+known in the country by the name of <i>peshcush</i>: this
+<i>peshcush</i> is a fine paid, upon the grant of lands, to
+the sovereign, or whoever grants them. The second
+is the <i>nuzzer</i>, or <i>nuzzerana</i>, which is a tribute of acknowledgment
+from an inferior to a superior. The
+last is called <i>reshwat</i>, in the Persian language,&mdash;that
+is to say, a bribe, or sum of money clandestinely
+and corruptly taken,&mdash;and is as much distinguished
+from the others as, in the English language, a fine or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">{172}</a></span>
+acknowledgment is distinguished from a bribe. To
+show your Lordships this, we shall give in evidence,
+that, whenever a peshcush or fine is paid, it is a sum
+of money publicly paid, and paid in proportion to the
+grant,&mdash;and that the sum is entered upon the very
+grant itself. We shall prove the nuzzer is in the
+same manner entered, and that all legal fees are indorsed
+upon the body of the grant for which they are
+taken: and that they are no more in the East than
+in the West any kind of color or pretence for corrupt
+acts, which are known by the circumstance of their
+being clandestinely taken, and which are acknowledged
+and confessed to be illegal and corrupt. Having
+stated that Mr. Hastings, in some of the evidence
+that we shall produce, endeavors to confound these
+three things, I am only to remark that the nuzzer is
+generally a very small sum of money, that it sometimes
+amounts to one gold mohur, that sometimes it
+is less, and that, in all the records of the Company, I
+have never known it exceed one gold mohur, or about
+thirty-five shillings,&mdash;passing by the fifty gold mohurs
+which were given to Mr. Hastings by Cheyt Sing,
+and a hundred gold mohurs which were given to the
+Mogul, as a nuzzer, by Mahomed Ali, Nabob of Arcot.</p>
+
+<p>The Company, seeing that this nuzzer, though
+small in each sum, might amount at last to a large
+tax upon the country, (and it did so in fact,) thought
+proper to prohibit any sum of money to be taken upon
+any pretext whatever; and the Company in the
+year 1775 did expressly explode the whole doctrine
+of peshcush, nuzzer, and every other private lucrative
+emolument, under whatever name, to be taken by
+the Governor-General, and did expressly send out an
+order that that was the construction of the act, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>
+that he was not even to take a nuzzer. Thus we
+shall show that that act had totally cut up the whole
+system of bribery and corruption, and that Mr. Hastings
+had no sort of color whatever for taking the
+money which we shall prove he has taken.</p>
+
+<p>I know that positive prohibitions, that acts of Parliament,
+that covenants, are things of very little validity
+indeed, as long as all the means of corruption
+are left in power, and all the temptations to corrupt
+profit are left in poverty. I should really think that
+the Company deserved to be ill served, if they had
+not annexed such appointments to great trusts as
+might secure the persons intrusted from the temptations
+of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases
+is the greatest security, given a lawful gratification
+to the natural passions of men. Matrimony is to be
+used, as a true remedy against a vicious course of
+profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and
+the just profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful
+means which might be made use of to supply them.
+For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any man
+to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in
+blessings, to expect labor without a prospect of reward,
+and fatigue without any means of securing
+rest, is an unreasonable demand in any human creature
+from another. Those who trust that they shall
+find in men uncommon and heroic virtues are themselves
+endeavoring to have nothing paid them but the
+common returns of the worst parts of human infirmity.
+And therefore I shall show your Lordships that
+the Company did provide large, ample, abundant
+means for supporting the Governor-General,&mdash;that
+Lord Clive, in the year 1765, and the Council with
+him, of which Mr. Sumner, I am glad and proud to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">{174}</a></span>
+say, was one, did fix such an allowance as they
+thought a sufficient security to the Governor-General
+against the temptations attendant upon his situation;
+and therefore, after they had fixed this sum, they
+say, "that, although by this means the Governor will
+not be able to amass a million or half a million in
+the space of two or three years, yet he will acquire
+a very handsome independency, and be in that very
+situation which a man of honor and true zeal for
+the service would wish to possess. Thus situated, he
+may defy all opposition in Council; he will have
+nothing to ask, nothing to propose, but what he wishes
+for the advantage of his employers; he may defy
+the law, because there can be no foundation for a bill
+of discovery; and he may defy the obloquy of the
+world, because there can be nothing censurable in
+his conduct. In short, if stability can be insured to
+such a government as this, where riches have been
+acquired in abundance in a small space of time, by
+all ways and means, and by men with or without capacities,
+it must be effected by a Governor thus restricted,"&mdash;that
+is, a Governor restricted from every
+emolument but that of his salary. I must remark,
+that this salary and these emoluments were not settled
+upon the vague speculations of men taking the
+measure of their necessities for India from the manners
+of England; but it was fixed by the Council
+themselves,&mdash;fixed in India,&mdash;fixed by those who
+knew and were in the situation of the Governor-General,
+and who knew what was necessary to support
+his dignity and to preserve him from the temptation
+of corruption: and they have laid open to you such a
+body of advantages arising from it as would lead any
+man, who had a regard to his honor or conscience, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">{175}</a></span>
+think himself happy in having such a provision made
+for him, and at the same time every temptation to
+act corruptly removed far from him.</p>
+
+<p>The emoluments of the office, though reduced from
+the original plan which Lord Clive had proposed,
+may be computed at near 30,000<i>l.</i> a year, when Mr.
+Hastings was President: 22,000<i>l.</i> in certain money,
+and the rest in other advantages. Whatever it was,
+I have shown that it was thought sufficient by those
+who were the best judges, and who, in carving for
+others, were carving for themselves their own allowance
+at the time. But, my Lords, I am to give a
+better opinion of the sufficiency of that provision to
+guard against the temptation, out of Mr. Hastings's
+own mouth. He says, in his letter to the Court of
+Directors, "Although I disclaim the consideration of
+my own interest in these speculations, and flatter myself
+that I proceed upon more liberal grounds, yet I
+am proud to avow the feelings of an honest ambition
+that stimulates me to aspire at the possession of my
+present station for years to come. Those who know
+my natural turn of mind will not ascribe this to sordid
+views. A very few years' possession of the government
+would undoubtedly enable me to retire with
+a fortune amply fitted to the measure of my desires,
+were I to consult only my ease: but in my present
+situation I feel my mind expand to something greater;
+I have catched the desire of applause in public
+life."</p>
+
+<p>Here Mr. Hastings confesses that the emoluments
+affixed to office were not only sufficient for the purposes
+and ends which the nature of his office demanded,
+and the support of present dignity, but that they
+were sufficient to secure him, in a very few years, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>
+comfortable retreat; but his object in wishing to hold
+his office long was <i>to catch applause in public life</i>.
+What an unfortunate man is he, who has so often
+told us, in so many places, and through so many
+mouths, that, after fourteen years' possession of an
+office which was to make him a comfortable fortune
+in a few years, he is at length bankrupt in fortune,
+and for his applause in public life is now at your
+Lordships' bar, and his accuser is his country! This,
+my Lords, is to be unfortunate: but there are some
+misfortunes that never do or ever can arrive but
+through crimes. He was a deserter from the path
+of honor. At the turning of the two ways he made a
+glorious choice,&mdash;he caught at the applause of ambition:
+which though I am ready to consent is not virtue,
+yet surely a generous ambition for applause for
+public services in life is one of the best counterfeits
+of virtue, and supplies its place in some degree; and
+it adds a lustre to real virtue, where it exists as the
+substratum of it. Human nature, while it is made
+as it is, never can wholly repudiate it for its imperfection,
+because there is something yet more perfect.
+But what shall we say to the deserter of that cause,
+who, having glory and honor before him, has chosen
+to plunge himself into the downward road to sordid
+riches?</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have shown the grievances that existed.
+I have shown the means that existed to put Mr.
+Hastings beyond a temptation to those practices of
+which we accuse him, even in his own opinion,&mdash;if
+he will not follow his example in the House of Commons,
+and disavow this letter, as he has done his defence
+before them, and say he never wrote it. That
+situation which was to afford him a comfortable for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">{177}</a></span>tune
+in a few years he has held for many years, and
+therefore he has not one excuse to make for himself;
+but I shall show your Lordships much greater and
+stronger proofs, that will lean heavy upon him in the
+day of your sentence. The first, the peculiar, trust
+that was put in him, was to redress all those grievances.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have stated to you the condition of
+India in 1765. You may suppose that the means
+that were taken, the regulations that were made by
+the Company at that period of time, had operated
+their effect, and that by the beginning of the year
+1772, when Mr. Hastings came first to his government,
+these evils did not then require, perhaps, so
+vigorous an example, or so much diligence in putting
+an end to them; but, my Lords, I have to show you
+a very melancholy truth, that, notwithstanding all
+these means, the Company was of opinion that all
+these disorders had increased, and accordingly they
+say, without entering into all the grievous circumstances
+of this letter, which was wrote on the 10th
+of April, 1773, "We wish we could refute the observation,
+that almost every attempt made by us and
+our administration at your Presidency for reforming
+abuses has rather increased them, and added to the
+misery of a country we are so anxious to protect and
+cherish." They say, that, "when oppression pervades
+the whole country, when youths have been suffered
+with impunity to exercise sovereign jurisdiction
+over the natives, and to acquire rapid fortunes by monopolizing
+of commerce, it cannot be a wonder to us
+or yourselves that Dadney merchants do not come
+forward to contract with the Company, that the manufactures
+find their way through foreign channels, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">{178}</a></span>
+that our investments are at once enormously dear
+and of a debased quality. It is evident, then, that
+the evils which have been so destructive to us lie too
+deep for any partial plans to reach or correct; it is
+therefore our resolution to aim at the root of those
+evils, and we are happy in having reason to believe
+that in every just and necessary regulation we shall
+meet with the approbation and support of the legislature,
+who consider the public as materially interested
+in the Company's prosperity."</p>
+
+<p>This is to show your Lordships that Mr. Hastings
+was armed with great powers to correct great abuses,
+and that there was reposed in him a special trust for
+that purpose. And now I shall show, by the twenty-fifth
+paragraph of the same letter, that they intrusted
+Mr. Hastings with this very great power from some
+particular hope they had, not only of his abstaining
+himself, which is a thing taken for granted, but of his
+restraining abuses through every part of the service;
+and therefore they say, "that, in order to effectuate
+this great end, the first step must be to restore perfect
+obedience and due subordination to your administration.
+Our Governor and Council must reassume and
+exercise their delegated powers upon every just occasion,&mdash;punish
+delinquents, cherish the meritorious,
+discountenance that luxury and dissipation which, to
+the reproach of government, prevailed in Bengal.
+Our President, Mr. Hastings, we trust, will set the
+example of temperance, economy, and application;
+and upon this, we are sensible, much will depend.
+And here we take occasion to indulge the pleasure
+we have in acknowledging Mr. Hastings's services
+upon the coast of Coromandel, in constructing with
+equal labor and ability the plan which has so much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">{179}</a></span>
+improved our investments there; and as we are persuaded
+he will persevere in the same laudable pursuit
+through every branch of our affairs in Bengal,
+he, in return, may depend on the steady support and
+favor of his employers." Here are not only laws to
+restrain abuse, here are not only salaries to prevent
+the temptation to it, but here are praises to animate
+and encourage him, here is what very few men, even
+bad in other respects, have resisted,&mdash;here is a great
+trust put in him, to call upon him with particular
+vigor and exertion to prevent all abuses through the
+settlement, and particularly these abuses of corruption.
+Much trust is put in his frugality, his order, his
+management of his private affairs; and from thence
+they hope that he would not ruin his own fortune, but
+improve it by honorable means, and teach the Company's
+servants the same order and management, in
+order to free them from temptation to rapacity in
+their own particular situations. There have been
+known to be men, otherwise corrupt and vicious, who,
+when great trust was put in them, have called forth
+principles of honor latent in their minds; and men
+who were nursed, in a manner, in corruption have
+been not only great reformers by institution, but
+greater reformers by the example of their own conduct.
+Then I am to show, that, soon after his coming
+to that government, there were means given him
+instantly of realizing those hopes and expectations, by
+putting into his hands several arduous and several
+difficult commissions.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in the year 1772 the Company had received
+alarming advices of many disorders throughout
+the country: there were likewise, at the same
+time, circumstances in the state of the government<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">{180}</a></span>
+upon which they thought it necessary to make new
+regulations. The famine which prevailed in and
+devastated Bengal, and the ill use that was made of
+that calamity to aggravate the distress for the advantage
+of individuals, produced a great many complaints,
+some true, some exaggerated, but universally spread,
+as I believe is in the memory of those who are not very
+young among us. This obliged the Company to a
+very serious consideration of an affair which dishonored
+and disgraced their government, not only at
+home, but through all the countries in Europe, much
+more than perhaps even more grievous and real oppressions
+that were exercised under them. It had
+alarmed their feelings, it had been marked, and had
+called the attention of the public upon them in an
+eminent manner.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships remember the death of Jaffier Ali
+Kh&acirc;n, the first of those subahs who introduced the
+English power into Bengal. He died about four or
+five years before this period. He was succeeded by
+two of his sons, who succeeded to one another in a
+very rapid succession. The first was the person of
+whom we have read an account to you. He was the
+natural son of the Nabob by a person called Munny
+Begum, who, for the corrupt gifts the circumstances
+of which we have recited, had, in prejudice of the lawful
+issue of the Nabob, been raised to the <i>musnud</i>;
+but as bastard slips, it is said in King Richard, (an
+abuse of a Scripture phrase,) do not take deep root,
+this bastard slip, Nujim ul Dowlah, shortly died, and
+the legitimate son, Syef ul Dowlah, succeeded him.
+After him another legitimate son, Mobarek ul Dowlah,
+succeeded in a minority. When I say <i>succeeded</i>, I
+wish your Lordships to understand that there is no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">{181}</a></span>
+regular succession in the office of subah or viceroy
+of the kingdom; but, in general, succession has been
+considered, and persons have been put in that place
+upon some principles resembling a regular succession.
+That regular succession had been broken in favor of
+a natural son, and the mother of that natural son did
+obtain the superiority in the female part of the family
+for a time.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of these two circumstances, namely,
+the famine, and the abuses that were supposed to
+arise from it, and from the circumstance of the minority
+of Mobarek ul Dowlah, who now reigns or
+appears to reign,&mdash;in consequence of these two circumstances,
+the Company gave two sets of orders.</p>
+
+<p>The first order related to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n,
+who was (as your Lordships remember I took, in the
+beginning of this affair, means of explaining) lord-deputy
+of the province under the native government,
+the English holding the dewanny,&mdash;and deputy dewan,
+or high-steward, under the name of the English,
+and had the command of the whole revenue;
+and who was accused before the Company (the channel
+of which accusation we now learn) of having
+aggravated that famine by a monopoly for his own
+benefit. The Company, upon these loose and general
+charges, ordered that he should be divested of his
+office, that he should be brought down to Calcutta,
+and there be obliged to render an account of his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>The next regulation they made was concerning the
+effective government of the country, which was become
+vacant by the removal of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n. The
+offices which he held were in effect these: he was
+guardian to the Nabob by the appointment of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">{182}</a></span>
+Company; he had the care and management of his
+family; he had the care of the public justice; and he
+represented that shadow of government to foreign
+nations which it was the policy of the Company, at
+that time, to keep up. This was the person whom
+Mr. Hastings was ordered to remove; in consequence
+of which removal all these offices were to be supplied,&mdash;of
+guardian of the Nabob's person and manager of
+his family, of chief magistrate, and of representative
+of the fallen dignity of the native government to the
+foreign nations which traded to Bengal.</p>
+
+<p>To these orders was added an instruction of a very
+remarkable nature, which was a third trust that was
+given to Mr. Hastings: that during the Nabob's minority
+he should reduce the annual allowance, which
+was thirty-two lacs, to sixteen; and that to prevent
+the abuse of this restricted sum, and to prevent its
+being directed by the minister's authority to other
+purposes than that for which the Company allowed
+it, (that is to say, allowed him out of what was his
+own,) of these sixteen lacs an account was to be
+regularly kept, as a check upon the person so appointed,
+which account was ordered to be transmitted
+to Calcutta, and to be sent to England.</p>
+
+<p>Now we are to show your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's
+conduct was upon all these occasions; and for
+this we mean to produce testimony recorded in the
+Company's books, and authentic documents taken
+from the public offices of that country. At the same
+time I do admit that there never was a positive testimony
+that did not stand something in need of the support
+of presumption: for, as we know that witnesses
+may be perjured, and as we know that documents
+can be forged, we have recourse to a known principle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">{183}</a></span>
+in the laws of all countries, that circumstances cannot
+lie; and therefore, if the testimony that is given was
+ever so clear and positive, yet, if it is contrary to the
+circumstances of the country, if it is contrary to the
+circumstances of the facts to which it alludes, if the
+deposition is totally adverse and alien to the characters
+of the persons, then I will say, that, though the
+testimonies should be many, though they should be
+consistent, and though they should be clear, yet they
+will still leave some degree of hesitation and doubt
+upon every mind timorous in the execution of justice,
+as every mind ought to be. If, for instance, ten witnesses
+were to swear that the Chief-Justice of England,
+that the Lord High-Chancellor, or the Archbishop
+of Canterbury, was seen, in the robes of his
+function, at noonday, robbing upon the highway, it
+is not the clearness, the weight, the authority of testimonies,
+that could make me believe it; I should
+attribute it to any cause, either corruption, mistake,
+error, or madness, rather than believe that fact.
+Why? Because it is totally alien to the character of
+the persons, the situation, the circumstances, and to
+all the rules of probability. But if, on the contrary,
+the crime charged has a perfect relation with the person,
+with his known conduct, with his known habits,
+with the situation and circumstances of the place that
+he is in, and with the very corrupt inherent nature of
+the act that he does, then much less proof than we
+are able to produce will serve; and according to the
+nature and strength of the presumptions arising from
+the inherent nature of a vicious principle and vicious
+motives in the act, will be strengthened the weakest
+evidence, or, if it comes to a sufficient height, the
+whole burden of proof will be turned upon the party<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>
+accused. And thus we shall think ourselves bound
+to show your Lordships, in every step of this proceeding,
+that there is an inherent presumption of corruption
+in every act. We shall show the presumptions
+which preceded, we shall show the presumptions which
+accompanied the proof; and these, with the subsequent
+presumptions, will make it impossible to disbelieve
+them. Such a body of proof was never given
+upon any such occasion: and it is such proof as will
+prevail against the whole voice of corruption, that
+amazing, active, diligent, spreading voice, which has
+been made, by buzzing in every part of this country,
+sometimes to sound like the public voice; it will put
+it to silence, by showing that your Lordships have
+proceeded upon the strongest evidence, active and
+passive.</p>
+
+<p>First, Mr. Hastings received a positive order to
+seize upon Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n. That order he
+executed with a military promptitude of obedience,
+which will show your Lordships what are the services
+which are congenial to his own mind, and which find
+in him always a ready acquiescence, a faithful agent,
+and a spirited instrument in the execution. The very
+day after he received the order, he sent up, privately,
+without communicating with the Council, from whom
+he was not ordered to keep this proceeding a secret,&mdash;he
+sent up, and found that great and respectable man
+and respectable magistrate, who was in all those high
+offices which I have stated: and if I was to compare
+them to circumstances and situations in this country,
+I should say he had united in himself the character
+of First Lord of the Treasury, the character of Chief-Justice,
+the character of Lord High-Chancellor, and
+the character of Archbishop of Canterbury: a man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">{185}</a></span>
+of great gravity, dignity, and authority, and advanced
+in years; had once 100,000<i>l.</i> a year for the support
+of his dignity, and had at that time 50,000<i>l.</i> This
+man, sitting in his garden, reposing himself after the
+toils of his situation, (for he was one of the most
+laborious men in the world,) was suddenly arrested,
+and, without a moment's respite, dragged down to
+Calcutta, and there by Mr. Hastings (exceeding the
+orders of the Company) confined near two years
+under a guard of soldiers. Mr. Hastings kept this
+great man for several months without even attempting
+the trial upon him. How he tried him afterwards
+your Lordships may probably in the course of this
+business inquire; and you will then judge, from the
+circumstances of that trial, that, as he was not tried
+for his crime, so neither was he acquitted for his
+innocence;&mdash;but at present I leave him in that situation.
+Mr. Hastings, unknown to the Council, having
+executed the orders of the Company in the last
+degree of rigor to this unhappy man, keeps him in
+that situation, without a trial, under a guard, separated
+from his country, disgraced and dishonored, and
+by Mr. Hastings's express order not suffered either to
+make a visit or receive a visitor.</p>
+
+<p>There was another commission for Mr. Hastings
+contained in these orders. The Company, because
+they were of opinion that justice could not be easily
+obtained while the first situations of the country were
+filled with this man's adherents, desired Mr. Hastings
+to displace them: leaving him a very large power,
+and confiding in his justice, prudence, and impartiality
+not to abuse a trust of such delicacy. But
+we shall prove to your Lordships that Mr. Hastings
+thought it necessary to turn out, from the highest to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">{186}</a></span>
+the lowest, several hundreds of people, for no other
+reason than that they had been put in their employments
+by that very man whom the English government
+had formerly placed there. If <i>we</i> were to insist that
+we could not possibly try Mr. Hastings, or come at
+his wickedness, until we had eradicated his influence
+in Bengal, and left not one man in it who was during
+his government in any place or office whatever, yet,
+though we should readily admit that we could not do
+the whole without it, at the same time, rather than
+make a general massacre of every person presumed to
+be under his influence, we would leave some of his
+crimes unproved. He did avow and declare, that,
+unless he turned all these persons out of their offices,
+he could never hope to come at the truth of any
+charges against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, against whom
+no specific charge had been made. Yet, upon loose
+and general charges, did he seize upon this man,
+confine him in this manner, and every person who
+derived any place or authority from him, high or low,
+was turned out. Mr. Hastings had in the Company's
+orders something to justify him in rigor, but he had
+likewise a prudential power over that rigor; and he
+not only treated this man in the manner described,
+but every human creature connected with him, as if
+they had been all guilty, without any charge whatever
+against them. These are his reasons for taking
+this extraordinary step.</p>
+
+<p>"I pretend not to enter into the views of others.
+My own were these. Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n's influence
+still prevailed generally throughout the country. In
+the Nabob's household, and at the capital, it was scarce
+affected by his present disgrace. His favor was still
+courted, and his anger dreaded. Who, under such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">{187}</a></span>
+discouragements, would give information or evidence
+against him? His agents and creatures filled every
+office of the nizamut and dewanny. How was the
+truth of his conduct to be investigated by these?
+It would be superfluous to add other arguments to
+show the necessity of prefacing the inquiry by breaking
+his influence, removing his dependants, and putting
+the direction of all the affairs which had been
+committed to his care into the hands of the most
+powerful or active of his enemies."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, if <i>we</i> of the House of Commons were to
+desire and to compel the East India Company, or to
+address the crown, to remove, according to their several
+situations and several capacities, every creature
+that had been put into office by Mr. Hastings, because
+we could otherwise make no inquiry into his conduct,
+should we not be justified by his own example
+in insisting upon the removal of every creature of the
+reigning power before we could inquire into his conduct?
+We have not done that, though we feel, as he
+felt, great disadvantages in proceeding in the inquiry
+while every situation in Bengal is notoriously held by
+his creatures,&mdash;always excepting the first of all, but
+which we could show is nothing under such circumstances.
+Then what do I infer from this,&mdash;from his
+obedience to the orders of the Company, carried so
+much beyond necessity, and prosecuted with so much
+rigor,&mdash;from the inquiry being suspended for so long
+a time,&mdash;from every person in office being removed
+from his situation,&mdash;from all these precautions being
+used as prefatory to the inquiry, when he himself says,
+that, after he had used all these means, he found not
+the least benefit and advantage from them? The use
+I mean to make of this is, to let your Lordships see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">{188}</a></span>
+the great probability and presumption that Mr. Hastings,
+finding himself in the very selfsame situation
+that had occurred the year before, when Nundcomar
+was sold to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, of selling Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n to Nundcomar, made a corrupt use of it,
+and that, as Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was not treated
+with severity for his crimes, so neither was he acquitted
+for his innocence. The Company had given
+Mr. Hastings severe orders, and very severely had he
+executed them. The Company gave him no orders
+not to institute a present inquiry; but he, under pretence
+of business, neglected that inquiry, and suffered
+this man to languish in prison to the utter ruin of his
+fortune.</p>
+
+<p>We have in part shown your Lordships what Mr.
+Hastings's own manner of proceeding with regard to
+a public delinquent is; but at present we leave Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n where he was. Do your Lordships
+think that there is no presumption of Mr. Hastings
+having a corrupt view in this business, and of his
+having put this great man, who was supposed to be
+of immense wealth, under contributions? Mr. Hastings
+never trusted his colleagues in this proceeding;
+and what reason does he give? Why, he supposed
+that they must be bribed by Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n.
+"For," says he, "as I did not know their characters
+at that time, I did not know whether Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n had not secured them to his interest by
+the known ways in which great men in the East secure
+men to their interest." He never trusted his
+colleagues with the secret; and the person that he
+employed to prosecute Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was his
+bitter enemy, Nundcomar. I will not go the length
+of saying that the circumstance of enmity disables a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">{189}</a></span>
+person from being a prosecutor; under some circumstances
+it renders a man incompetent to be a witness;
+but this I know, that the circumstance of having no
+other person to rely upon in a charge against any
+man but his enemy, and of having no other principle
+to go upon than what is supposed to be derived out
+of that enmity, must form some considerable suspicion
+against the proceeding. But in this he was justified
+by the Company; for Nundcomar, the great rival
+of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, was in the worst situation
+with the Company as to his credit. This Nundcomar's
+politics in the country had been by Mr. Hastings
+himself, and by several persons joined with him,
+cruelly represented to the Company; and accordingly
+he stood so ill with them, by reason of Mr. Hastings's
+representations and those of his predecessors, that the
+Company ordered and directed, that, if he could be
+of any use in the inquiry into Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n's
+conduct, some reward should be given him suitable
+to his services; but they caution Mr. Hastings at the
+same time against giving him any trust which he
+might employ to the disadvantage of the Company.
+Now Mr. Hastings began, before he could experience
+any service from him, by giving him his reward, and
+not the base reward of a base service, <i>money</i>, but
+every trust and power which he was prohibited from
+giving him. Having turned out every one of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n's dependants, he filled every office, as he
+avows, with the creatures of Nundcomar. Now when
+he uses a cruel and rigorous obedience in the case of
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, when he breaks through the
+principles of his former conduct with regard to Nundcomar,
+when he gives <i>him</i>, Nundcomar, trust, whom
+he was cautioned not to trust, and when he gives him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">{190}</a></span>
+that reward before any service could be done,&mdash;I say,
+when he does this, in violation of the Company's orders
+and his own principles, it is the strongest evidence
+that he now found them in the situation in
+which they were in 1765, when bribes were notoriously
+taken, and that each party was mutually sold
+to the other, and faith kept with neither. The situation
+in which Mr. Hastings thus placed himself should
+have been dreaded by him of all things, because he
+knew it was a situation in which the most outrageous
+corruption had taken place before.</p>
+
+<p>There is another circumstance which serves to
+show that in the persecution of these great men, and
+the persons employed by them, he could have no
+other view than to extort money from them. There
+was a person of the name of Shitab Roy, who had a
+great share in the conduct of the revenues of Bahar.
+Mr. Hastings, in the letter to the Company, complaining
+of the state of their affairs, and saying that there
+were great and suspicious balances in the kingdom
+of Bahar, does not even name the name of Shitab Roy.
+There was an English counsellor, a particular friend
+of Mr. Hastings's, there, under whose control Shitab
+Roy acted. Without any charges, without any orders
+from the Company, Mr. Hastings dragged down
+that same Shitab Roy, and in the same ignominious
+prison he kept him the same length of time, that is,
+one year and three months, without trial; and when
+the trial came on, there was as much appearance of
+collusion in the trial as there was of rigor in the previous
+process. This is the manner in which Mr. Hastings
+executed the command of the Company for removing
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n.</p>
+
+<p>When a successor to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">{191}</a></span>
+be appointed, your Lordships naturally expect, from
+the character I have given of him, and from the
+nature of his functions, that Mr. Hastings would be
+particularly precise, would use the utmost possible
+care in nominating a person to succeed him, who
+might fulfil the ends and objects of his employment,
+and be at the same time beyond all doubt and suspicion
+of corruption in any way whatever. Let us
+now see how he fills up that office thus vacant.
+When the Company ordered Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to
+be dispossessed of his office, they ordered at the same
+time that the salary of his successor should be reduced:
+that 30,000<i>l.</i> was a sufficient recompense for
+that office. Your Lordships will see by the allowance
+for the office, even reduced as it was, that they
+expected some man of great eminence, of great consequence,
+and fit for those great and various trusts.
+They cut off the dewanny from it, that is, the collection
+of the revenues; and having lessened his labors,
+they lessened his reward.&mdash;They ordered that
+this person, who was to be guardian of the Nabob in
+his minority, and who was to represent the government,
+should have but 30,000<i>l.</i> The order they give
+is this.</p>
+
+<p>"And that as Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n can no longer
+be considered by us as one to whom such a power can
+safely be committed, we trust to your local knowledge
+the selection of some person well qualified for the
+affairs of government, and of whose attachment to
+the Company you shall be well assured. Such person
+you will recommend to the Nabob, to succeed
+Mahomed Reza, as minister of the government, and
+guardian of the Nabob's minority; and we persuade
+ourselves that the Nabob will pay such regard to your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">{192}</a></span>
+recommendation as to invest him with the necessary
+power and authority.</p>
+
+<p>"As the advantages which the Company may receive
+from the appointment of such minister will
+depend on his readiness to promote our views and
+advance our interest, we are willing to allow him so
+liberal a gratification as may excite his zeal and insure
+his attachment to the Company; we therefore
+empower you to grant to the person whom you shall
+think worthy of this trust an annual allowance not
+exceeding three lacs of rupees, which we consider not
+only as a munificent reward for any services he shall
+render the Company, but sufficient to enable him to
+support his station with suitable rank and dignity.
+And here we must add, that, in the choice you shall
+make of a person to be the active minister of the Nabob's
+government, we hope and trust that you will
+show yourselves worthy of the confidence we have
+placed in you by being actuated therein by no other
+motives than those of the public good and the safety
+and interest of the Company."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here they have given a reward, and they
+have described a person fit to succeed in all capacities
+the man whom they had thought fit to depose. Now,
+as we have seen how Mr. Hastings obeyed the Company's
+orders in the manner of removing Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n from his office, let us see how he obeyed
+their order for filling it up. Your Lordships will
+naturally suppose that he made all the orders of
+Mahometan and Hindoo princes to pass in strict review
+before him; that he had considered their age,
+authority, dignity, the goodness of their manners;
+and upon the collation of all these circumstances had
+chosen a person fit to be a regent to guard the Na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>bob's
+minority from all rapacity whatever, and fit to
+instruct him in everything. I will give your Lordships
+Mr. Hastings's own idea of the person necessary
+to fill such offices.</p>
+
+<p>"That his rank ought to be such as at least ought
+not to wound the Nabob's honor, or lessen his credit
+in the estimation of the people, by the magisterial
+command which the new guardian must exercise
+over him,&mdash;with abilities and vigor of mind equal
+to the support of that authority; and the world will
+expect that the guardian be especially qualified by
+his own acquired endowments to discharge the duties
+of that relation in the education of his young pupil,
+to inspire him with sentiments suitable to his
+birth, and to instruct him in the principles of his religion."</p>
+
+<p>This, upon another occasion, is Mr. Hastings's
+sense of the man who ought to be placed in that situation
+of trust in which the Company ordered him to
+place him. Did Mr. Hastings obey that order? No,
+my Lords, he appointed no man to fill that office.
+What, no man at all? No, he appointed no person
+at all in the sense which is mentioned there, which
+constantly describes a person at least of the male sex:
+he appointed a woman to fill that office; he appointed
+a woman, in a country where no woman can be seen,
+where no woman can be spoken to by any one without
+a curtain between them; for all these various
+duties, requiring all these qualifications described by
+himself, he appointed a woman. Do you want more
+proof than this violent transgression of the Company's
+orders upon that occasion that some corrupt motive
+must have influenced him?</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, it is necessary for me to state the situa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">{194}</a></span>tion
+of the family, that you may judge from thence
+of the corrupt motives of Mr. Hastings's proceedings.
+The Nabob Jaffier Ali Kh&acirc;n had among the women
+of his seraglio a person called Munny Begum. She
+was a dancing-girl, whom he had seen at some entertainment;
+and as he was of a licentious turn, this
+dancing-girl, in the course of her profession as a prostitute,
+so far inveigled the Nabob, that, having a child
+or pretending to have had a child by him, he brought
+her into the seraglio; and the Company's servants
+sold to that son the succession of that father. This
+woman had been sold as a slave,&mdash;her profession a
+dancer, her occupation a prostitute. And, my Lords,
+this woman having put her natural son, as we state,
+and shall prove, in the place of the legitimate offspring
+of the Nabob, having got him placed by the Company's
+servants on the musnud, she came to be at the head
+of that part of the household which relates to the
+women: which is a large and considerable trust in
+a country where polygamy is admitted, and where
+women of great rank may possibly be attended by two
+thousand of the same sex in inferior situations. As
+soon as the legitimate son of the Nabob came to the
+musnud, there was no ground for keeping this woman
+any longer in that situation; and upon an application
+of the Company to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to know who
+ought to have the right of superiority, he answered,
+as he ought to have done, that, though all the women
+of the seraglio ought to have honor, yet the mother
+of the Nabob ought to have the superiority of it.
+Therefore this woman was removed, and the mother
+of the Nabob was placed in her situation. In that
+situation Mr. Hastings found the seraglio. If his duties
+had gone no further than the regulation of an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">{195}</a></span>
+Eastern household, he ought to have kept the Nabob's
+mother there by the rules of that country.</p>
+
+<p>What did he do? Not satisfied with giving to this
+prostitute every favor that she could desire, (and
+money must be the natural object of such a person,)
+Mr. Hastings deposes the Nabob's own mother, turns
+her out of the employment, and puts at the head of
+the seraglio this prostitute, who at the best, in relation
+to him, could only be a step-mother. If you heard no
+more, do your Lordships want anything further to
+convince you that this must be a violent, atrocious,
+and corrupt act,&mdash;suppose it had gone no further
+than the seraglio? But when I call this woman a
+dancing-girl, I state something lower than Europeans
+have an idea of respecting that situation. She was
+born a slave, bred a dancing-girl. Her dancing was
+not any of those noble and majestic movements which
+make part of the entertainment of the most wise, of
+the education of the most virtuous, which improve the
+manners without corrupting the morals of all civilized
+people, and of which, among uncivilized people, the
+professors have their due share of admiration; but
+these dances were not decent to be seen nor fit to be
+related. I shall pass them by. Your Lordships are
+to suppose the lowest degree of infamy in occupation
+and situation, when I tell you that Munny Begum
+was a slave and a dancing-girl.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the Munny Begum is this. "At a
+village called Balkonda, near Sekundra, there lived a
+widow, who, from her great poverty, not being able to
+bring up her daughter Munny, gave her to a slave-girl
+belonging to Summin Ali Kh&acirc;n, whose name was
+Bissoo. During the space of five years she lived at
+Shahjehanabad, and was educated by Bissoo after the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>
+manner of a dancing-girl. Afterwards the Nabob
+Shamut Jung, upon the marriage of Ikram ul Dowlah,
+brother to the Nabob Surajah ul Dowlah, sent for
+Bissoo Beg's set of dancing-girls from Shahjehanabad,
+of which Munny Begum was one, and allowed them
+ten thousand rupees for their expenses, to dance at
+the wedding. While the ceremony was celebrating,
+they were kept by the Nabob; but some months afterwards
+he dismissed them, and they took up their residence
+in this city. Mir Mahomed Jaffier Kh&acirc;n then
+took them into keeping, and allowed Munny and her
+set five hundred rupees per month, till at length,
+finding that Munny was pregnant, he took her into
+his own house. She gave birth to the Nabob Nujim
+ul Dowlah, and in this manner has she remained in
+the Nabob's family ever since."</p>
+
+<p>Now it required a very peculiar mode of selection
+to take such a woman, so circumstanced, (resembling
+whom there was not just such another,) to depose
+the Nabob's own mother from the superiority of the
+household, and to substitute this woman. It would
+have been an abominable abuse, and would have implied
+corruption in the grossest degree, if Mr. Hastings
+had stopped there. He not only did this, but he
+put <i>her</i>, this woman, in the very place of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n: he made her guardian, he made her
+regent, he made her viceroy, he made her the representative
+of the native government of the country in
+the eyes of strangers. There was not a trust, not a
+dignity in the country, which he did not put, during
+the minority of this unhappy person, her step-son, into
+the hands of this woman.</p>
+
+<p>Reject, if you please, the strong presumption of
+corruption in disobeying the order of the Company<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">{197}</a></span>
+directing him to select a <i>man</i> fit to supply the place
+of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, to exercise all the great and
+arduous functions of government and of justice, as
+well as the regulation of the Nabob's household; and
+then I will venture to say, that neither your Lordships,
+nor any man living, when he hears of this
+appointment, does or can hesitate a moment in concluding
+that it is the result of corruption, and that
+you only want to be informed what the corruption
+was. Here is such an arrangement as I believe never
+was before heard of: a secluded woman in the place
+of a man of the world; a fantastic dancing-girl in the
+place of a grave magistrate; a slave in the place of a
+woman of quality; a common prostitute made to superintend
+the education of a young prince; and a
+step-mother, a name of horror in all countries, made
+to supersede the natural mother from whose body the
+Nabob had sprung.</p>
+
+<p>These are circumstances that leave no doubt of
+the grossest and most flagrant corruption. But was
+there no application made to Mr. Hastings upon that
+occasion? The Nabob's uncle, whom Mr. Hastings
+declares to be a man of no dangerous ambition, no
+alarming parts, no one quality that could possibly exclude
+him from that situation, makes an application
+to Mr. Hastings for that place, and was by Mr. Hastings
+rejected. The reason he gives for his rejection
+is, because he cannot put any man in it without danger
+to the Company, who had ordered him to put
+a man into it. One would imagine the trust to be
+placed in him was such as enabled him to overturn
+the Company in a moment. Now the situation in
+which the Nabob's uncle, Yeteram ul Dowlah, would
+have been placed was this: he would have had no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>
+troops, he would have had no treasury, he would have
+had no collections of revenue, nothing, in short, that
+could have made him dangerous, but he would have
+been an absolute pensioner and dependant upon the
+Company, though in high office; and the least attempt
+to disturb the Company, instead of increasing,
+would have been subversive of his own power. If
+Mr. Hastings should still insist that there might be
+danger from the appointment of a man, we shall prove
+that he was of opinion that there could be no danger
+from any one,&mdash;that the Nabob himself was a mere
+shadow, a cipher, and was kept there only to soften
+the English government in the eyes and opinion of
+the natives.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will detail these circumstances no
+further, but will bring some collateral proofs to show
+that Mr. Hastings was at that very time conscious of
+the wicked and corrupt act he was doing. For, besides
+this foolish principle of policy, which he gives
+as a reason for defying the orders of the Company,
+and for insulting the country, that had never before
+seen a woman in that situation, and <i>his</i> declaration
+to the Company, that their government cannot
+be supported by private justice, (a favorite maxim,
+which he holds upon all occasions,) besides these
+reasons which he gave for his politic injustice, he
+gives the following. The Company had ordered that
+30,000<i>l.</i> should be given to the person appointed.
+He knew that the Company could never dream of
+giving this woman 30,000<i>l.</i> a year, and he makes use
+of that circumstance to justify him in putting her
+in that place: for he says, the Company, in the distressed
+state of its affairs, could never mean to give
+30,000<i>l.</i> a year for the office which they order to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">{199}</a></span>
+filled; and accordingly, upon principles of economy,
+as well as upon principles of prudence, he sees there
+could be no occasion for giving this salary, and that
+it will be saved to the Company. But no sooner had
+he given her the appointment than that appointment
+became a ground for giving her that money. The
+moment he had appointed her, he overturns the very
+principle upon which he had appointed her, and gives
+the 30,000<i>l.</i> to her, and the officers under her, saving
+not one shilling to the Company by this infamous
+measure, which he justified only upon the principle
+of economy. The 30,000<i>l.</i> was given, the principle
+of economy vanished, a shocking arrangement was
+made, and Bengal saw a dancing-girl administering
+its justice, presiding over all its remaining power,
+wealth, and influence, exhibiting to the natives of the
+country their miserable state of degradation, and the
+miserable dishonor of the English Company in Mr.
+Hastings's abandonment of all his own pretences.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a still stronger presumption. The
+Company ordered that this person, who was to have
+the management of the Nabob's revenue, and who
+was to be his guardian, should keep a strict account,
+which account should be annually transmitted to the
+Presidency, and by the Presidency to Europe; and
+the purpose of it was, to keep a control upon the reduced
+expenses of the sixteen lac which were ordered
+in the manner I mentioned. Your Lordships will
+naturally imagine that that control was kept safe.
+No, here is the order of the Directors, and you will
+see how Mr. Hastings obeyed it.</p>
+
+<p>"As the disbursement of the sums allotted to the
+Nabob for the maintenance of his household and family
+and the support of his dignity will pass through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">{200}</a></span>
+the hands of the minister who shall be selected by
+you, conformable to our preceding orders, we expect
+that you will require such minister to deliver annually
+to your board a regular and exact account of the
+application of the several sums paid by the Company
+to the Nabob. This you will strictly examine; and we
+trust that you will not suffer any part of the Nabob's
+stipend to be appropriated to the minister's own use,
+or wasted among the unnecessary dependants of the
+court, but that the whole amount be applied to the
+purposes for which it was assigned by us."</p>
+
+<p>One would have imagined, that, after Mr. Hastings
+had made so suspicious an arrangement, (I will not
+call it by any worse name,) he would have removed
+all suspicion with regard to money,&mdash;that he would
+have obeyed the Company by constituting the control
+which they had ordered to be placed over a man,
+even a fit man, and a man worthy of the trust committed
+to him. But what is his answer, when three
+years after he is desired to produce this account?
+His answer is,&mdash;"I can save the board the trouble
+of this reference by acquainting them that no such
+accounts have ever been transmitted, nor, as I can
+affirm with most certain knowledge, any orders given
+for that purpose, either to Gourdas, to whose office it
+did not properly belong, nor to the Begum, who had
+the actual charge and responsibility of those disbursements."</p>
+
+<p>He has given to this woman the charge of all the
+disbursements of the Company; the officer whom
+you would imagine would be responsible was not responsible,
+but to this prostitute and dancing-girl the
+whole of the revenue was given; when he was ordered
+to transmit that account, he not only did not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">{201}</a></span>
+produce that account, but had given no order that it
+should be kept: so that no doubt can be left upon
+your Lordships' minds, that the sixteen lac, which
+were reserved for the support of the dignity of the
+government of that country, were employed for the
+purpose of Mr. Hastings's having a constant bank,
+from which he should draw every corrupt emolument
+he should think fit for himself and his associates.
+Thus your Lordships see that he appointed an improper
+person to the trust without any control, and
+that the very accounts which were to be the guardians
+of his purity, and which were to remove suspicion
+from him, he never so much as directed or ordered.
+If any one can doubt that that transaction
+was in itself corrupt, I can only say that his mind
+must be constituted in a manner totally different
+from that which prevails in any of the higher or lower
+branches of judicature in any country in the world.
+The suppression of an account is a proof of corruption.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Hastings committed these acts of violence
+against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, when he proceeded
+to make arrangements in the Company's affairs of
+the same kind with those in which corruption had
+been before exercised, he was bound by a particular
+responsibility that there should be nothing mysterious
+in his own conduct, and that at least all the accounts
+should be well kept. He appointed a person nominally
+for that situation,&mdash;namely, the Rajah Gourdas.
+Who was he? A person acting, he says, under
+the influence of Rajah Nundcomar, whom he had
+declared was not fit to be employed or trusted: all
+the offices were filled by him. But had Rajah Gourdas,
+whose character is that of an excellent man,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">{202}</a></span>
+against whom there could lie no reasonable objection
+on account of his personal character, and whose want
+of talents was to be supplied by those of Nundcomar,
+(and of <i>his</i> parts Mr. Hastings spoke as highly as
+possible,)&mdash;had he, I say, the management? No:
+but Munny Begum. Did she keep any accounts?
+No.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings was ordered, and a very disagreeable
+and harsh order it was, to take away one half of the
+Nabob's allowance which he had by treaty. I do
+not charge Mr. Hastings with this reduction: he had
+nothing to do with that. Sixteen lac were cut off,
+and sixteen left; these two sums had been distributed,
+one for the support of the seraglio and the dignity
+of the state, the other for the court establishment
+and the household. The sixteen lac which was left,
+therefore, required to be well economized, and well
+administered. There was a rigor in the Company's
+order relative to it, which was, that it should take
+place from an antedated time, that is, a whole year
+prior to the communication of their order to the
+Nabob. The order was, that the Nabob's stipend
+should be reduced to sixteen lac a year from the
+month of January. Mr. Hastings makes this reflection
+upon it, in order to leave no doubt upon your
+mind of his integrity in administering that great
+trust: he says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Your order for the reduction of the Nabob's stipend
+was communicated to him in the month of December,
+1771. He remonstrated against it, and desired
+it might be again referred to the Company.
+The board entirely acquiesced in his remonstrance,
+and the subsequent payments of his stipend were paid
+as before. I might easily have availed myself of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">{203}</a></span>
+plea. I might have treated it as an act of the past
+government, with which I had no cause to interfere,
+and joined in asserting the impossibility of his defraying
+the vast expense of his court and household without
+it, which I could have proved by plausible arguments,
+drawn from the actual amount of the nizamut
+and bhela establishments; and both the Nabob and
+Begum would have liberally purchased my forbearance.
+Instead of pursuing this plan, I carried your
+orders rigidly and literally into execution. I undertook
+myself the laborious and reproachful task of
+limiting his charges, from an excess of his former
+stipend, to the sum of his reduced allowance."</p>
+
+<p>He says in another place,&mdash;"The stoppage of the
+king's tribute was an act of mine, and I have been
+often reproached with it. It was certainly in my power
+to have continued the payment of it, and to have
+made my terms with the king for any part of it which
+I might have chosen to reserve for my own use. He
+would have thanked me for the remainder."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I believe it is a singular thing, and what
+your Lordships have been very little used to, to see a
+man in the situation of Mr. Hastings, or in any situation
+like it, so ready in knowing all the resources
+by which sinister emolument may be made and concealed,
+and which, under pretences of public good,
+may be transferred into the pocket of him who uses
+those pretences. He is resolved, if he is innocent, that
+his innocence shall not proceed from ignorance. He
+well knows the ways of falsifying the Company's accounts;
+he well knows the necessities of the natives,
+and he knows that by paying a part of their dues they
+will be ready to give an acquittance of the whole.
+These are parts of Mr. Hastings's knowledge of which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">{204}</a></span>
+your Lordships will see he also well knows how to
+avail himself.</p>
+
+<p>But you would expect, when he reduced the allowance
+to sixteen lac, and took credit to himself as if
+he had done the thing which he professed, and had
+argued from his rigor and cruelty his strict and literal
+obedience to the Company, that he had in reality
+done it. The very reverse: for it will be in proof,
+that, after he had pretended to reduce the Company's
+allowance, he continued it a twelvemonth from the
+day in which he said he had entirely executed it, to
+the amount of 90,000<i>l.</i>, and entered a false account
+of the suppression in the Company's accounts; and
+when he has taken a credit as under pretence of reducing
+that allowance, he paid 90,000<i>l.</i> more than he
+ought. Can you, then, have a doubt, after all these
+false pretences, after all this fraud, fabrication, and
+suppression which he made use of, that that 90,000<i>l.</i>,
+of which he kept no account and transmitted no account,
+was money given to himself for his own private
+use and advantage?</p>
+
+<p>This is all that I think necessary to state to your
+Lordships upon this monstrous part of the arrangement;
+and therefore, from his rigorous obedience in
+cases of cruelty, and, where control was directed,
+from his total disobedience, and from his choice of
+persons, from his suppression of the accounts that
+ought to have been produced, and falsifying the accounts
+that were kept, there arises a strong inference
+of corruption. When your Lordships see all this in
+proof, your Lordships will justify me in saying that
+there never was (taking every part of the arrangement)
+such a direct, open violation of any trust.&mdash;I
+shall say no more with regard to the appointment of
+Munny Begum.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">{205}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here ended the first scene, and here ends
+that body of presumption arising from the transaction
+and inherent in it. My Lords, the next scene
+that I am to bring before you is the positive proof of
+corruption in this transaction, in which I am sure
+you already see that corruption must exist. The
+charge was brought by a person in the highest trust
+and confidence with Mr. Hastings, a person employed
+in the management of the whole transaction, a person
+to whom the management, subordinate to Munny Begum,
+of all the pecuniary transactions, and all the arrangements
+made upon that occasion, was intrusted.</p>
+
+<p>On the 11th day of March, 1775, Nundcomar gives
+to Mr. Francis, a member of the Council, a charge
+against Mr. Hastings, consisting of two parts. The
+first of these charges was a vast number of corrupt
+dealings, with respect to which he was the informer,
+not the witness, but to which he indicated the modes
+of inquiry; and they are corrupt dealings, as Mr.
+Hastings himself states them, amounting to millions
+of rupees, and in transactions every one of which implies
+in it the strongest degree of corruption. The
+next part was of those to which he was not only an
+informer, but a witness, in having been the person
+who himself transmitted the money to Mr. Hastings
+and the agents of Mr. Hastings; and accordingly,
+upon this part, which is the only part we charge, his
+evidence is clear and full, that he gave the money
+to Mr. Hastings,&mdash;he and the Begum (for I put
+them together). He states, that Mr. Hastings received
+for the appointment of Munny Begum to the
+rajahship two lacs of rupees, or about 22,000<i>l.</i>, and
+that he received in another gross sum one lac and
+a half of rupees: in all making three lac and a half,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">{206}</a></span>
+or about 36,000<i>l.</i> This charge was signed by the
+man, and accompanied with the account.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, on that day, made no reflection or
+observation whatever upon this charge, except that
+he attempted to excite some suspicion that Mr. Francis,
+who had produced it, was concerned in the
+charge, and was the principal mover in it. He asks
+Mr. Francis that day this question:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The Governor-General observes, as Mr. Francis
+has been pleased to inform the board that he was unacquainted
+with the contents of the letter sent in to
+the board by Nundcomar, that he thinks himself justified
+in carrying his curiosity further than he should
+have permitted himself without such a previous intimation,
+and therefore begs leave to ask Mr. Francis
+whether he was before this acquainted with Nundcomar's
+intention of bringing such charges against him
+before the board.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Mr. Francis.</i>&mdash;As a member of this Council, I
+do not deem myself obliged to answer any question
+of mere curiosity. I am willing, however, to inform
+the Governor-General, that, though I was totally unacquainted
+with the contents of the paper I have now
+delivered in to the board till I heard it read, I did
+apprehend in general that it contained some charge
+against him. It was this apprehension that made
+me so particularly cautious in the manner of receiving
+the Rajah's letter. I was not acquainted with
+Rajah Nundcomar's intention of bringing in such
+charges as are mentioned in the letter.</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">"WARREN HASTINGS.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">J. CLAVERING.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">GEO. MONSON.<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 12.5em;">P. FRANCIS."<br /></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">{207}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now what the duty of Mr. Hastings and the Council
+was, upon receiving such information, I shall beg
+leave to state to your Lordships from the Company's
+orders; but, before I read them, I must observe,
+that, in pursuance of an act of Parliament, which was
+supposed to be made upon account of the neglect of
+the Company, as well as the neglects of their servants,
+and for which general neglects responsibility
+was fixed upon the Company for the future, while
+for the present their authority was suspended, and a
+Parliamentary commission sent out to regulate their
+affairs, the Company did, upon that occasion, send
+out a general code and body of instructions to be
+observed by their servants, in the 35th paragraph of
+which it is said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"We direct that you immediately cause the strictest
+inquiry to be made into all oppressions which may
+have been committed either against the natives or
+Europeans, and into all abuses that may have prevailed
+in the collection of the revenues, or any part
+of the civil government of the Presidency: and that
+you communicate to us all information which you
+may be able to learn relative thereto, or to any dissipation
+or embezzlement of the Company's money."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see here that there is a direct duty
+fixed upon them to forward, to promote, to set on foot,
+without exception of any persons whatever, an inquiry
+into all manner of corruption, peculation, and oppression.
+Therefore this charge of Nundcomar's was a
+case exactly within the Company's orders; such a
+charge was not sought out, but was actually laid before
+them; but if it had not been actually laid before
+them, if they had any reason to suspect that such corruptions
+existed, they were bound by this order to
+make an active inquiry into them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">{208}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Upon that day (11th March, 1775) nothing further
+passed; and, on the part of Mr. Hastings, that charge,
+as far as we can find, might have stood upon the records
+forever, without his making the smallest observation
+upon it, or taking any one step to clear his
+own character. But Nundcomar was not so inattentive
+to his duties as an accuser as Mr. Hastings was
+to his duties as an inquirer; for, without a moment's
+delay, upon the first board-day, two days after, Nundcomar
+came and delivered the following letter.</p>
+
+<p>"I had the honor to lay before you, in a letter of
+the 11th instant, an abstracted, but true account of
+the Honorable Governor in the course of his administration.
+What is there written I mean not the least
+to alter: far from it. I have the strongest written
+vouchers to produce in support of what I have advanced;
+and I wish and entreat, for my honor's
+sake, that you will suffer me to appear before you,
+to establish the fact by an additional, incontestable
+evidence."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I will venture to say, if ever there was
+an accuser that appeared well and with weight before
+any court, it was this man. He does not shrink from
+his charge; he offered to meet the person he charged
+face to face, and to make good his charge by his own
+evidence, and further evidence that he should produce.
+Your Lordships have also seen the conduct
+of Mr. Hastings on the first day; you have seen his
+acquiescence under it; you have seen the suspicion he
+endeavored to raise. Now, before I proceed to what
+Mr. Hastings thought of it, I must remark upon this
+accusation, that it is a specific accusation, coming
+from a person knowing the very transaction, and
+known to be concerned in it,&mdash;that it was an accusa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">{209}</a></span>tion
+in writing, that it was an accusation with a signature,
+that it was an accusation with a person to make
+it good, that it was made before a competent authority,
+and made before an authority bound to inquire
+into such accusation. When he comes to produce his
+evidence, he tells you, first, the sums of money given,
+the species in which they were given, the very bags
+in which they were put, the exchange that was made
+by reducing them to the standard money of the country;
+he names all the persons through whose hands
+the whole transaction went, eight in number, besides
+himself, Munny Begum, and Gourdas, being eleven,
+all referred to in this transaction. I do believe that
+since the beginning of the world there never was an
+accusation which was more deserving of inquiry, because
+there never was an accusation which put a false
+accuser in a worse situation, and that put an honest
+defendant in a better; for there was every means of
+collation, every means of comparison, every means of
+cross-examining, every means of control. There was
+every way of sifting evidence, in which evidence could
+be sifted. Eleven witnesses to the transaction are
+referred to; all the particulars of the payment, every
+circumstance that could give the person accused the
+advantage of showing the falsehood of the accusation,
+were specified. General accusations may be treated
+as calumnies; but particular accusations, like these,
+afford the defendant, if innocent, every possible means
+for making his defence: therefore the very making
+no defence at all would prove, beyond all doubt, a
+consciousness of guilt.</p>
+
+<p>The next thing for your Lordships' consideration
+is the conduct of Mr. Hastings upon this occasion.
+You would imagine that he would have treated the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">{210}</a></span>
+accusation with a cold and manly disdain; that he
+would have challenged and defied inquiry, and desired
+to see his accuser face to face. This is what
+any man would do in such a situation. I can conceive
+very well that a man composed, firm, and collected
+in himself, conscious of not only integrity, but
+known integrity, conscious of a whole life beyond the
+reach of suspicion,&mdash;that a man placed in such a
+situation might oppose general character to general
+accusation, and stand collected in himself, poised on
+his own base, and defying all the calumnies in the
+world. But as it shows a great and is a proof of a
+virtuous mind to despise calumny, it is the proof of
+a guilty mind to despise a specific accusation, when
+made before a competent authority, and with competent
+means to prove it. As Mr. Hastings's conduct
+was what no man living expected, I will venture to
+say that no expression can do it justice but his own.
+Upon reading the letter, and a motion being made
+that Rajah Nundcomar be brought before the board
+to prove the charge against the Governor-General,
+the Governor-General enters the following minute.</p>
+
+<p>"Before the question is put, I declare that I will
+not suffer Nundcomar to appear before the board as
+my accuser. I know what belongs to the dignity and
+character of the first member of this administration.
+I will not sit at this board in the character of a criminal,
+nor do I acknowledge the members of this board
+to be my judges. I am reduced on this occasion to
+make the declaration, that I look upon General Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis as my accusers.
+I cannot prove this in the direct letter of the
+law, but in my conscience I regard them as such, and
+I will give my reasons for it. On their arrival at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">{211}</a></span>
+place, and on the first formation of the Council, they
+thought proper to take immediate and decisive measures
+in contradiction and for the repeal of those which
+were formed by me in conjunction with the last administration.
+I appealed to the Court of Directors
+from their acts. Many subsequent letters have been
+transmitted both by them and by me to the Court of
+Directors: by me, in protestation against their conduct;
+by them, in justification of it. Quitting this
+ground, they since appear to me to have chosen other
+modes of attack, apparently calculated to divert my
+attention and to withdraw that of the public from the
+subject of our first differences, which regarded only
+the measures that were necessary for the good of the
+service, to attacks directly and personally levelled at
+me for matters which tend to draw a personal and
+popular odium upon me: and fit instruments they
+have found for their purpose,&mdash;Mr. Joseph Fowke,
+Mahrajah Nundcomar, Roopnarain Chowdry, and the
+Ranny of Burdwan.</p>
+
+<p>"It appears incontestably upon the records that the
+charges preferred by the Ranny against me proceeded
+from the office of Mr. Fowke. All the papers transmitted
+by her came in their original form written in
+the English language,&mdash;some with Persian papers, of
+which they were supposed to be translations, but all
+strongly marked with the character and idiom of the
+English language. I applied on Saturday last for Persian
+originals of some of the papers sent by her, and
+I was refused: I am justified in declaring my firm
+belief that no such originals exist.</p>
+
+<p>"With respect to Nundcomar's accusations, they
+were delivered by the hands of Mr. Francis, who has
+declared that he was called upon by Rajah Nund<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">{212}</a></span>comar,
+as a duty belonging to his office as a councillor
+of this state, to lay the packet which contained
+them before the board,&mdash;that he conceived that he
+could not, consistent with his duty, refuse such a letter
+at the instance of a person of the Rajah's rank,
+and did accordingly receive it, and laid it before the
+board,&mdash;declaring at the same time that he was unacquainted
+with the contents of it. I believe that
+the Court of Directors, and those to whom those proceedings
+shall be made known, will think differently
+of this action of Mr. Francis: that Nundcomar was
+guilty of great insolence and disrespect in the demand
+which he made of Mr. Francis; and that it was not
+a duty belonging to the office of a councillor of this
+state to make himself the carrier of a letter, which
+would have been much more properly committed to
+the hands of a peon or hircarra, or delivered by the
+writer of it to the secretary himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Francis has acknowledged that he apprehended
+in general that it contained some charge against
+me. If the charge was false, it was a libel. It might
+have been false for anything that Mr. Francis could
+know to the contrary, since he was unacquainted
+with the contents of it. In this instance, therefore,
+he incurred the hazard of presenting a libel to the
+board: this was not a duty belonging to his office
+as a councillor of this state. I must further inform
+the board that I have been long since acquainted
+with Nundcomar's intentions of making this attack
+upon me. Happily, Nundcomar, among whose talents
+for intrigue that of secrecy is not the first, has been
+ever too ready to make the first publication of his
+own intentions. I was shown a paper containing
+many accusations against me, which I was told was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">{213}</a></span>
+carried by Nundcomar to Colonel Monson, and that
+he himself was employed for some hours in private
+with Colonel Monson, explaining the nature of those
+charges.</p>
+
+<p>"I mention only what I was told; but as the rest
+of the report which was made to me corresponds
+exactly with what has happened since, I hope I shall
+stand acquitted to my superiors and to the world in
+having given so much credit to it as to bring the circumstance
+upon record. I cannot recollect the precise
+time in which this is said to have happened, but
+I believe it was either before or at the time of the
+dispatch of the 'Bute' and 'Pacific.' The charge
+has since undergone some alteration; but of the copy
+of the paper which was delivered to me, containing the
+original charge, I caused a translation to be made;
+when, suspecting the renewal of the subject in this
+day's consultation, I brought it with me, and I desire
+it may be recorded, that, when our superiors, or the
+world, if the world is to be made the judge of my
+conduct, shall be possessed of these materials, they
+may, by comparing the supposed original and amended
+list of accusations preferred against me by Nundcomar,
+judge how far I am justified in the credit
+which I give to the reports above mentioned. I do
+not mean to infer from what I have said that it makes
+any alteration in the nature of the charges, whether
+they were delivered immediately from my ostensible
+accusers, or whether they came to the board through
+the channel of patronage; but it is sufficient to authorize
+the conviction which I feel in my own mind,
+that those gentlemen are parties in the accusations of
+which they assert the right of being the judges.</p>
+
+<p>"From the first commencement of this administra<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">{214}</a></span>tion,
+every means have been tried both to deprive me
+of the legal authority with which I have been trusted,
+and to proclaim the annihilation of it to the world;
+but no instance has yet appeared of this in so extraordinary
+a degree as in the question now before the
+board. The chief of the administration, your superior,
+Gentlemen, appointed by the legislature itself, shall I
+sit at this board to be arraigned in the presence of a
+wretch whom you all know to be one of the basest of
+mankind? I believe I need not mention his name;
+but it is Nundcomar. Shall I sit here to hear men
+collected from the dregs of the people give evidence,
+at his dictating, against my character and conduct?
+I will not. You may, if you please, form yourselves
+into a committee for the investigation of these matters
+in any manner which you may think proper; but
+I will repeat, that I will not meet Nundcomar at the
+board, nor suffer Nundcomar to be examined at the
+board; nor have you a right to it, nor can it answer
+any other purpose than that of vilifying and insulting
+me to insist upon it.</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry to have found it necessary to deliver
+my sentiments on a subject of so important a nature
+in an unpremeditated minute, drawn from me at the
+board, which I should have wished to have had leisure
+and retirement to have enabled me to express myself
+with that degree of caution and exactness which the
+subject requires. I have said nothing but what I
+believe and am morally certain I shall stand justified
+for in the eyes of my superiors and the eyes of the
+world; but I reserve to myself the liberty of adding
+my further sentiments in such a manner and form as
+I shall hereafter judge necessary."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you see here the picture of Nundcomar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">{215}</a></span>
+drawn by Mr. Hastings himself; you see the hurry,
+the passion, the precipitation, the confusion, into which
+Mr. Hastings is thrown by the perplexity of detected
+guilt; you see, my Lords, that, instead of defending
+himself, he rails at his accuser in the most indecent
+language, calling him a wretch whom they all knew
+to be the basest of mankind,&mdash;that he rails at the
+Council, by attributing their conduct to the worst of
+motives,&mdash;that he rails at everybody, and declares
+the accusation to be a libel: in short, you see plainly
+that the man's head is turned. You see there is not
+a word he says upon this occasion which has common
+sense in it; you see one great leading principle in it,&mdash;that
+he does not once attempt to deny the charge.
+He attempts to vilify the witness, he attempts to vilify
+those he supposes to be his accusers, he attempts
+to vilify the Council; he lags upon the accusation, he
+mixes it with other accusations, which had nothing
+to do with it, and out of the whole he collects a resolution&mdash;to
+do what? To meet his adversary and
+defy him? No,&mdash;that he will not suffer him to
+appear before him: he says, "I will not sit at this
+board in the character of a criminal, nor do I acknowledge
+the board to be my judges."</p>
+
+<p>He was not called upon to acknowledge them to be
+his judges. Both he and they were called upon to inquire
+into all corruptions without exception. It was
+his duty not merely [not?] to traverse and oppose
+them while inquiring into acts of corruption, but he
+was bound to take an active part in it,&mdash;that if they
+had a mind to let such a thing sleep upon their records,
+it was his duty to have brought forward the inquiry.
+They were not his judges, they were not his
+accusers; they were his fellow-laborers in the inquiry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">{216}</a></span>
+ordered by the Court of Directors, their masters, and
+by which inquiry he might be purged of that corruption
+with which he stood charged.</p>
+
+<p>He says, "Nundcomar is a wretch whom you all
+know to be the basest of mankind." I believe they
+did not know the man to be a wretch, or the basest of
+mankind; but if he was a wretch, and if he was the
+basest of mankind, if he was guilty of all the crimes
+with which we charge Mr. Hastings, (not one of which
+was ever proved against him,)&mdash;if any of your Lordships
+were to have the misfortune to be before this tribunal,
+before any inquest of the House of Commons,
+or any other inquest of this nation, would you not say
+that it was the greatest possible advantage to you that
+the man who accused you was a miscreant, the vilest
+and basest of mankind, by the confession of all the
+world? Do mankind really, then, think that to be accused
+by men of honor, of weight, of character, upon
+probable charges, is an advantage to them, and that
+to be accused by the basest of mankind is a disadvantage?
+No: give me, if ever I am to have accusers,
+miscreants, as he calls him,&mdash;wretches, the basest and
+vilest of mankind. "The board," says he, "are my
+accusers." If they were, it was their duty; but they
+were not his accusers, but were inquiring into matters
+which it was equally his duty to inquire into.
+He would not suffer Nundcomar to be produced; he
+would not suffer Nundcomar to be examined; he
+rather suffered such an accusation to stand against
+his name and character than permit it to be inquired
+into. Do I want any other presumption of his guilt,
+upon such an occasion, than such conduct as this?</p>
+
+<p>This man, whom he calls a wretch, the basest and
+vilest of mankind, was undoubtedly, by himself, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">{217}</a></span>
+records of the Company, declared to be one of the
+first men of that country, everything that a subject
+could be, a person illustrious for his birth, sacred with
+regard to his caste, opulent in fortune, eminent in
+situation, who had filled the very first offices in that
+country; and that he was, added to all this, a man
+of most acknowledged talents, and of such a superiority
+as made the whole people of Bengal appear to
+be an inferior race of beings compared to him,&mdash;a
+man whose outward appearance and demeanor used
+to cause reverence and awe, and who at that time was
+near seventy years of age, which, without any other
+title, generally demands respect from mankind. And
+yet this man he calls the basest of mankind, a name
+which no man is entitled to call another till he has
+proved something to justify him in so doing; and
+notwithstanding his opulence, his high rank, station,
+and birth, he despises him, and will not suffer him to
+be heard as an accuser before him. I will venture to
+say that Mr. Hastings, in so doing, whether elevated
+by philosophy or inflated by pride, is not like the rest
+of mankind. We do know, that, in all accusations,
+a great part of their weight and authority comes from
+the character, the situation, the name, the description,
+the office, the dignity of the persons who bring them;
+mankind are so made, we cannot resist this prejudice;
+and it has weight, and ever will have <i>prim&acirc; facie</i>
+weight, in all the tribunals in the world. If, therefore,
+Rajah Nundcomar was a man who (it is not degrading
+to your Lordships to say) was equal in rank,
+according to the idea of his country, to any peer in
+this House, as sacred as a bishop, of as much gravity
+and authority as a judge, and who was prime-minister
+in the country in which he lived, with what face can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">{218}</a></span>
+Mr. Hastings call this man a wretch, and say that he
+will not suffer him to be brought before him? If, indeed,
+joined with such circumstances, the accuser be
+a person of bad morals, then, I admit, those bad morals
+take away from their weight; but for a proof of that
+you must have some other grounds than the charges
+and the railing of the culprit against him.</p>
+
+<p>I might say that his passion is a proof of his guilt;
+and there is an action which is more odious than the
+crimes he attempts to cover,&mdash;<i>for he has murdered
+this man by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey</i>; and if his
+counsel should be unwise enough to endeavor to detract
+from the credit of this man by the pretended
+punishment to which he was brought, we will open
+that dreadful scene to your Lordships, and you will
+see that it does not detract from his credit, but brings
+an eternal stain and dishonor upon the justice of
+Great Britain: I say nothing further of it. As he
+stood there, as he gave that evidence that day, the
+evidence was to be received; it stands good, and is
+a record against Mr. Hastings,&mdash;with this addition,
+that he would not suffer it to be examined. He
+railed at his colleagues. He says, if the charge was
+false, they were guilty of a libel. No: it might have
+been the effect of conspiracy, it might be punished in
+another way; but if it was false, it was no libel.
+And all this is done to discountenance inquiry, to
+bring odium upon his colleagues for doing their duty,
+and to prevent that inquiry which could alone clear
+his character.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings had himself forgotten the character
+which he had given of Nundcomar; but he says that
+his colleagues were perfectly well acquainted with
+him, and knew that he was a wretch, the basest of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">{219}</a></span>
+mankind. But before I read to you the character
+which Mr. Hastings gave of him, when he recommended
+him to the Presidency, (to succeed Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n,) I am to let your Lordships understand fully
+the purpose for which Mr. Hastings gave it. Upon
+that occasion, all the Council, whom he stated to lie
+under suspicion of being bought by Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n, all those persons with one voice cried out
+against Nundcomar; and as Mr. Hastings was known
+to be of the faction the most opposite to Nundcomar,
+they charged him with direct inconsistency in raising
+Nundcomar to that exalted trust,&mdash;a charge which
+Mr. Hastings could not repel any other way than by
+defending Nundcomar. The weight of their objections
+chiefly lay to Nundcomar's political character;
+his moral character was not discussed in that proceeding.
+Mr. Hastings says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The President does not take upon him to vindicate
+the moral character of Nundcomar; his sentiments
+of this man's former political conduct are not
+unknown to the Court of Directors, who, he is persuaded,
+will be more inclined to attribute his present
+countenance of him to motives of zeal and fidelity to
+the service, in repugnance perhaps to his own inclinations,
+than to any predilection in his favor. He is
+very well acquainted with most of the facts alluded
+to in the minute of the majority, having been a principal
+instrument in detecting them: nevertheless he
+thinks it but justice to make a distinction between
+the violation of a trust and an offence committed
+against our government by a man who owed it no
+allegiance, nor was indebted to it for protection, but,
+on the contrary, was the minister and actual servant
+of a master whose interest naturally suggested that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">{220}</a></span>
+kind of policy which sought, by foreign aids, and the
+diminution of the power of the Company, to raise his
+own consequence, and to re&euml;stablish his authority.
+He has never been charged with any instance of infidelity
+to the Nabob Mir Jaffier, the constant tenor
+of whose politics, from his first accession to the nizamut
+till his death, corresponded in all points so exactly
+with the artifices which were detected in his minister
+that they may be as fairly ascribed to the one
+as to the other: their immediate object was beyond
+question the aggrandizement of the former, though
+the latter had ultimately an equal interest in their
+success. The opinion which the Nabob himself entertained
+of the services and of the fidelity of Nundcomar
+evidently appeared in the distinguished marks
+which he continued to show him of his favor and confidence
+to the latest hour of his life.</p>
+
+<p>"His conduct in the succeeding administration appears
+not only to have been dictated by the same
+principles, but, if we may be allowed to speak favorably
+of any measures which opposed the views of our
+own government and aimed at the support of an adverse
+interest, surely it was not only not culpable,
+but even praiseworthy. He endeavored, as appears
+by the abstracts before us, to give consequence to his
+master, and to pave the way to his independence, by
+obtaining a firman from the king for his appointment
+to the subahship; and he opposed the promotion
+of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, because he looked upon
+it as a supersession of the rights and authority of the
+Nabob. He is now an absolute dependant and subject
+of the Company, on whose favor he must rest all
+his hopes of future advancement."</p>
+
+<p>The character here given of him is that of an excel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">{221}</a></span>lent
+patriot, a character which all your Lordships, in
+the several situations which you enjoy or to which you
+may be called, will envy,&mdash;the character of a servant
+who stuck to his master against all foreign encroachments,
+who stuck to him to the last hour of his life, and
+had the dying testimony of his master to his services.</p>
+
+<p>Could Sir John Clavering, could Colonel Monson,
+could Mr. Francis know that this man, of whom Mr.
+Hastings had given that exalted character upon the
+records of the Company, was the basest and vilest of
+mankind? No, they ought to have esteemed him the
+contrary: they knew him to be a man of rank, they
+knew him to be a man perhaps of the first capacity
+in the world, and they knew that Mr. Hastings had
+given this honorable testimony of him on the records
+of the Company but a very little time before; and
+there was no reason why they should think or know,
+as he expresses it, that he was the basest and vilest of
+mankind. From the account, therefore, of Mr. Hastings
+himself, he was a person competent to accuse, a
+witness fit to be heard; and that is all I contend for.
+Mr. Hastings would not hear him, he would not suffer
+the charge he had produced to be examined into.</p>
+
+<p>It has been shown to your Lordships that Mr.
+Hastings employed Nundcomar to inquire into the
+conduct and to be the principal manager of a prosecution
+against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n. Will you suffer
+this man to qualify and disqualify witnesses and
+prosecutors agreeably to the purposes which his own
+vengeance and corruption may dictate in one case,
+and which the defence of those corruptions may dictate
+in another? Was Nundcomar a person fit to be
+employed in the greatest and most sacred trusts in
+the country, and yet not fit to be a witness to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">{222}</a></span>
+sums of money which he paid Mr. Hastings for those
+trusts? Was Nundcomar a fit witness to be employed
+and a fit person to be used in the prosecution of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, and yet not fit to be employed
+against Mr. Hastings, who himself had employed him
+in the very prosecution of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n?</p>
+
+<p>If Nundcomar was an enemy to Mr. Hastings, he
+was an enemy to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n; and Mr.
+Hastings employed him, avowedly and professedly on
+the records of the Company, on account of the very
+qualification of that enmity. Was he a wretch, the
+basest of mankind, when opposed to Mr. Hastings?
+Was he not as much a wretch, and as much the basest
+of mankind, when Mr. Hastings employed him in
+the prosecution of the first magistrate and Mahometan
+of the first descent in Asia? Mr. Hastings
+shall not qualify and disqualify men at his pleasure;
+he must accept them such as they are; and it is a
+presumption of his guilt accompanying the charge,
+(which I never will separate from it,) that he would
+not suffer the man to be produced who made the accusation.
+And I therefore contend, that, as the accusation
+was so made, so witnessed, so detailed, so specific,
+so entered upon record, and so entered upon
+record in consequence of the inquiries ordered by the
+Company, his refusal and rejection of inquiry into it
+is a presumption of his guilt.</p>
+
+<p>He is full of his idea of dignity. It is right for
+every man to preserve his dignity. There is a dignity
+of station, which a man has in trust to preserve;
+there is a dignity of personal character, which every
+man by being made man is bound to preserve. But
+you see Mr. Hastings's idea of dignity has no connection
+with integrity; it has no connection with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">{223}</a></span>
+honest fame; it has no connection with the reputation
+which he is bound to preserve. What, my
+Lords, did he owe nothing to the Company that had
+appointed him? Did he owe nothing to the legislature,&mdash;did
+he owe nothing to your Lordships, and
+to the House of Commons, who had appointed him?
+Did he owe nothing to himself? to the country that
+bore him? Did he owe nothing to the world, as to
+its opinion, to which every public man owes a reputation?
+What an example was here held out to the
+Company's servants!</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings says, "This may come into a court
+of justice; it will come into a court of justice: I reserve
+my defence on the occasion till it comes into a
+court of justice, and here I make no opposition to it."
+To this I answer, that the Company did not order
+him so to reserve himself, but ordered him to be an
+inquirer into those things. Is it a lesson to be taught
+to the inferior servants of the Company, that, provided
+they can escape out of a court of justice by the
+back-doors and sally-ports of the law, by artifice of
+pleading, by those strict and rigorous rules of evidence
+which have been established for the protection
+of innocence, but which by them might be turned to
+the protection and support of guilt, that such an escape
+is enough for them? that an Old Bailey acquittal
+is enough to establish a fitness for trust? and if a
+man shall go acquitted out of such a court, because
+the judges are bound to acquit him against the conviction
+of their own opinion, when every man in the
+market-place knows that he is guilty, that he is fit
+for a trust? Is it a lesson to be held out to the servants
+of the Company, that, upon the first inquiry
+which is made into corruption, and that in the high<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">{224}</a></span>est
+trust, by the persons authorized to inquire into it,
+he uses all the powers of that trust to quash it,&mdash;vilifying
+his colleagues, vilifying his accuser, abusing
+everybody, but never denying the charge? His associates
+and colleagues, astonished at this conduct,
+so wholly unlike everything that had ever appeared
+of innocence, request him to consider a little better.
+They declare they are not his accusers; they tell him
+they are not his judges; that they, under the orders
+of the Company, are making an inquiry which he
+ought to make. He declares he will not make it.
+Being thus driven to the wall, he says, "Why do you
+not form yourselves into a committee? I won't suffer
+these proceedings to go on as long as I am present."
+Mr. Hastings plainly had in view, that, if the proceedings
+had been before a committee, there would
+have been a doubt of their authenticity, as not being
+before a regular board; and he contended that there
+could be no regular board without his own presence
+in it: a poor, miserable scheme for eluding this inquiry;
+partly by saying that it was carried on when he
+was not present, and partly by denying the authority
+of this board.</p>
+
+<p>I will have nothing to do with the great question
+that arose upon the Governor-General's resolution to
+dissolve a board, whether the board have a right to
+sit afterwards; it is enough that Mr. Hastings would
+not suffer them, as a Council, to examine into what,
+as a Council, they were bound to examine into. He
+absolutely declared the Council dissolved, when they
+did not accept his committee, for which they had
+many good reasons, as I shall show in reply, if necessary,
+and which he could have no one good reason
+for proposing;&mdash;he then declares the Council dis<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">{225}</a></span>solved.
+The Council, who did not think Mr. Hastings
+had a power to dissolve them while proceeding
+in the discharge of their duty, went on as a Council.
+They called in Nundcomar to support his charge: Mr.
+Hastings withdrew. Nundcomar was asked what he
+had to say further in support of his own evidence.
+Upon which he produces a letter from Munny Begum,
+the dancing-girl that I have spoken of, in which
+she gives him directions and instructions relative to
+his conduct in every part of those bribes; by which
+it appears that the corrupt agreement for her office
+was made with Mr. Hastings through Nundcomar,
+before he had quitted Calcutta. It points out the
+execution of it, and the manner in which every part
+of the sum was paid: one lac by herself in Calcutta;
+one lac, which she ordered Nundcomar to borrow,
+and which he did borrow; and a lac and a half which
+were given to him, Mr. Hastings, besides this purchase
+money, under color of an entertainment. This
+letter was produced, translated, examined, criticized,
+proved to be sealed with the seal of the Begum, acknowledged
+to have no marks but those of authenticity
+upon it, and as such was entered upon the
+Company's records, confirming and supporting the
+evidence of Nundcomar, part by part, and circumstance
+by circumstance. And I am to remark, that,
+since this document, so delivered in, has never been
+litigated or controverted in the truth of it, from that
+day to this, by Mr. Hastings, so, if there was no
+more testimony, here is enough, upon this business.
+Your Lordships will remark that this charge consisted
+of two parts: two lacs that were given explicitly
+for the corrupt purchase of the office; and
+one lac and a half given in reality for the same pur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">{226}</a></span>pose,
+but under the color of what is called an entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Now in the course of these proceedings it was
+thought necessary that Mr. Hastings's banian, Cantoo
+Baboo, (a name your Lordships will be well acquainted
+with, and who was the minister in this and all the
+other transactions of Mr. Hastings,) should be called
+before the board to explain some circumstances in
+the proceedings. Mr. Hastings ordered his banian,
+a native, not to attend the sovereign board appointed
+by Parliament for the government of that country,
+and directed to inquire into transactions of this nature.
+He thus taught the natives not only to disobey
+the orders of the Court of Directors, enforced by an
+act of Parliament, but he taught his own servant to
+disobey, and ordered him not to appear before the
+board. Quarrels, duels, and other mischiefs arose.
+In short, Mr. Hastings raised every power of heaven
+and of hell upon this subject: but in vain: the inquiry
+went on.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings does not meet Nundcomar: he was
+afraid of him. But he was not negligent of his own
+defence; for he flies to the Supreme Court of Justice.
+He there prosecuted an inquiry against Nundcomar
+for a conspiracy. Failing in that, he made other attempts,
+and disabled Nundcomar from appearing before
+the board by having him imprisoned, and thus
+utterly crippled that part of the prosecution against
+him. But as guilt is never able thoroughly to escape,
+it did so happen, that the Council, finding monstrous
+deficiencies in the Begum's affairs, finding the Nabob's
+allowance totally squandered, that the most sacred
+pensions were left unpaid, that nothing but disorder
+and confusion reigned in all his affairs, that the Na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">{227}</a></span>bob's
+education was neglected, that he could scarcely
+read or write, that there was scarcely any mark of a
+man left in him except those which Nature had at
+first imprinted,&mdash;I say, all these abuses being produced
+in a body before them, they thought it necessary
+to send up to inquire into them; and a considerable
+deficiency or embezzlement appearing in the Munny
+Begum's account of the young Nabob's stipend, she
+voluntarily declared, by a writing under her seal, that
+she had given 15,000<i>l.</i> to Mr. Hastings for an entertainment.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, finding that the charge must come
+fully against him, contrived a plan which your Lordships
+will see the effects of presently, and this was,
+to confound this lac and an half, or 15,000<i>l.</i>, with the
+two lacs given directly and specifically as a bribe,&mdash;intending
+to avail himself of this finesse whenever
+any payment was to be proved of the two lacs, which
+he knew would be proved against him, and which he
+never did deny; and accordingly your Lordships will
+find some confusion in the proofs of the payment of
+those sums. The receipt of two lacs is proved by
+Nundcomar, proved with all the means of detection
+which I have stated; the receipt of the lac and a half
+is proved by Munny Begum's letter, the authenticity
+of which was established, and never denied by Mr.
+Hastings. In addition to these proofs, Rajah Gourdas,
+who had the management of the Nabob's treasury,
+verbally gave an account perfectly corresponding
+with that of Nundcomar and the Munny Begum's
+letter; and he afterwards gave in writing an attestation,
+which in every point agrees correctly with the
+others. So that there are three witnesses upon this
+business. And he shall not disqualify Rajah Gour<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">{228}</a></span>das,
+because, whatever character he thought fit to
+give Nundcomar, he has given the best of characters
+to Rajah Gourdas, who was employed by Mr. Hastings
+in occupations of trust, and therefore any objections
+to his competency cannot exist. Having got
+thus far, the only thing that remained was to examine
+the records of the public offices, and see whether
+any trace of these transactions was to be found there.
+These offices had been thrown into confusion in the
+manner you will hear; but, upon strict inquiry, there
+was a <i>shomaster</i>, or office paper, produced, from which
+it appears that the officer of the treasury, having
+brought to the Nabob an account of one lac and a
+half which he said had been given to Mr. Hastings,
+desired to know from him under what head of expense
+it should be entered, and that he, the Nabob, desired
+him to put it under the head of expenses for entertaining
+Mr. Hastings. If there had been a head of
+entertainment established as a regular affair, the officer
+would never have gone to the Nabob and asked
+under what name to enter it; but he found an irregular
+affair, and he did not know what head to put it
+under. And from the whole of the proceedings it appears
+that three lacs and a half were paid: two lac
+by way of bribe, one lac and a half under the color of
+an entertainment. Mr. Hastings endeavors to invalidate
+the first obliquely, not directly, for he never directly
+denied it; and he partly admits the second, in
+hopes that all the proof of payment of the first charge
+should be merged and confounded in the second.
+And therefore your Lordships will see from the beginning
+of that business till it came into the hands of
+Mr. Smith, his agent, then appearing in the name and
+character of agent and solicitor to the Company, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">{229}</a></span>
+this was done to give some appearance and color to it
+by a false representation, as your Lordships will see,
+of every part of the transaction.</p>
+
+<p>The proof, then, of the two lacs rests upon the evidence
+of Nundcomar, the letter of Munny Begum,
+and the evidence of Rajah Gourdas. The evidence
+of the lac and a half, by way of entertainment, was at
+first the same; and afterwards begins a series of proofs
+to which Mr. Hastings has himself helped us. For, in
+the first place, he produces this office paper in support
+of his attempt to establish the confusion between
+the payment of the two lacs and of the lac and a half.
+He did not himself deny that he received a lac and a
+half, because with respect to that lac and a half he had
+founded some principle of justification. Accordingly
+this office paper asserts and proves this lac and a half
+to have been given, in addition to the other proofs.
+Then Munny Begum herself is inquired of. There is
+a commission appointed to go up to her residence;
+and the fact is proved to the satisfaction of Mr. Goring,
+the commissioner. The Begum had put a paper
+of accounts, through her son, into his hands, which
+shall be given at your Lordships' bar, in which she
+expressly said that she gave Mr. Hastings a lac and a
+half for entertainment. But Mr. Hastings objects to
+Mr. Goring's evidence upon this occasion. He wanted
+to supersede Mr. Goring in the inquiry; and he
+accordingly appoints, with the consent of the Council,
+two creatures of his own to go and assist in that
+inquiry. The question which he directs these commissioners
+to put to Munny Begum is this:&mdash;"Was
+the sum of money charged by you to be given to Mr.
+Hastings given under an idea of entertainment customary,
+or upon what other ground, or for what other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">{230}</a></span>
+reason?" He also desires the following questions
+may be proposed to the Begum:&mdash;"Was any application
+made to you for the account which you have
+delivered of three lacs and a half of rupees said to
+have been paid to the Governor and Mr. Middleton?
+or did you deliver the account of your own free will,
+and unsolicited?" My Lords, you see that with regard
+to the whole three lacs and a half of rupees the
+Begum had given an account which tended to confirm
+the payment of them; but Mr. Hastings wanted to invalidate
+that account by supposing she gave it under
+restraint. The second question is,&mdash;"In what manner
+was the application made to you, and by whom?"
+But the principal question is this:&mdash;"On what account
+was the one lac and a half given to the Governor-General
+which you have laid to his account?
+Was it in consequence of any requisition from him,
+or of any previous agreement, or of any established
+usage?" When a man asks concerning a sum of
+money, charged to be given to him by another person,
+on what account it was given, he does indirectly
+admit that that money actually was paid, and wants
+to derive a justification from the mode of the payment
+of it; and accordingly that inference was drawn
+from the question so sent up, and it served as an
+instruction to Munny Begum; and her answer was,
+that it was given to him, as an ancient usage and
+custom, for an entertainment. So that the fact of
+the gift of the money is ascertained by the question
+put by Mr. Hastings to her, and her answer.
+And thus at last comes his accomplice in this business,
+and gives the fullest testimony to the lac and
+a half.</p>
+
+<p>I must beg leave, before I go further, to state the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">{231}</a></span>
+circumstances of the several witnesses examined upon
+this business. They were of two kinds: voluntary
+witnesses, and accomplices forced by inquiry and examination
+to discover their own guilt. Of the first
+kind were Nundcomar and Rajah Gourdas: these
+were the only two that can be said to be voluntary
+in the business, and who gave their information without
+much fear, though the last unwillingly, and with
+a full sense of the danger of doing it. The other
+was the evidence of his accomplice, Munny Begum,
+wrung from her by the force of truth, in which she
+confessed that she gave the lac and a half, and justifies
+it upon the ground of its being a customary entertainment.
+Besides this, there is the evidence of Chittendur,
+who was one of Mr. Hastings's instruments,
+and one of the Begum's servants. He, being prepared
+to confound the two lacs with the one lac and
+a half, says, upon his examination, that a lac and a
+half was given; but upon examining into the particulars
+of it, he proves that the sum he gave was two
+lacs, and not a lac and a half: for he says that there
+was a dispute about the other half lac; Nundcomar
+demanded interest, which the Begum was unwilling
+to allow, and consequently that half lac remained
+unpaid. Now this half lac can be no part of the lac
+and a half, which is admitted on all hands, and proved
+by the whole body of concurrent testimony, to have
+been given to Mr. Hastings in one lumping sum.
+When Chittendur endeavors to confound it with the
+lac and a half, he clearly establishes the fact that it
+was a parcel of the two lacs, and thus bears evidence,
+in attempting to prevaricate in favor of Mr. Hastings,
+that one lac and a half was paid, which Mr. Hastings
+is willing to allow; but when he enters into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">{232}</a></span>
+particulars of it, he proves by the subdivision of the
+payment, and by the non-payment of part of it, that
+it accords with the two lacs, and not with the lac and
+a half.</p>
+
+<p>There are other circumstances in these accounts
+highly auxiliary to this evidence. The lac and a half
+was not only attested by Rajah Gourdas, by the Begum,
+by Chittendur, by the Begum again upon Mr.
+Hastings's own question, indirectly admitted by Mr.
+Hastings, proved by the orders for it to be written off
+to expense, (such a body of proof as perhaps never
+existed,) but there is one proof still remaining, namely,
+a paper, which was produced before the Committee,
+and which we shall produce to your Lordships.
+It is an authentic paper, delivered in favor of Mr.
+Hastings by Major Scott, who acted at that time as
+Mr. Hastings's agent, to a committee of the House
+of Commons, and authenticated to come from Munny
+Begum herself. All this body of evidence we mean
+to produce; and we shall prove, first, that he received
+the two lacs,&mdash;and, secondly, that he received one lac
+and a half under the name of entertainment. With
+regard to the lac and a half, Mr. Hastings is so far
+from controverting it, even indirectly, that he is
+obliged to establish it by testimonies produced by himself,
+in order to sink in that, if he can, the two lacs,
+which he thinks he is not able to justify, but which he
+fears will be proved against him. The lac and a half,
+I do believe, he will not be advised to contest; but
+whether he is or no, we shall load him with it, we
+shall prove it beyond all doubt. But there are
+other circumstances further auxiliary in this business,
+which, from the very attempts to conceal it,
+prove beyond doubt the fraudulent and wicked na<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">{233}</a></span>ture
+of the transaction. In the account given by the
+Begum, a lac, which is for Mr. Hastings's entertainment,
+is entered in a suspicious neighborhood; for
+there is there entered a lac of rupees paid for the
+subahdarry sunnuds to the Mogul through the Rajah
+Shitab Roy. Upon looking into the account, and comparing
+it with another paper produced, the first thing
+we find is, that this woman charges the sum paid to
+be a sum due; and then she charges this one lac to
+have been paid when the Mogul was in the hands of
+the Mahrattas, when all communication with him was
+stopped, and when Rajah Shitab Roy, who is supposed
+to have paid it, was under confinement in the hands
+of Mr. Hastings. Thus she endeavors to conceal the
+lac of rupees paid to Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>In order to make this transaction, which, though
+not in itself intricate, is in some degree made so by
+Mr. Hastings, clear to your Lordships, we pledge ourselves
+to give to your Lordships, what must be a great
+advantage to the culprit himself, a syllabus, the heads
+of all this charge, and of the proofs themselves, with
+their references, to show how far the proof goes to
+the two lacs, and then to the one lac and a half singly.
+This we shall put in writing, that you may not
+depend upon the fugitive memory of a thing not so
+well, perhaps, or powerfully expressed as it ought to
+be, and in order to give every advantage to the defendant,
+and to give every facility to your Lordships'
+judgment: and this will, I believe, be thought a clear
+and fair way of proceeding. Your Lordships will
+then judge whether Mr. Hastings's conduct at the
+time, his resisting an inquiry, preventing his servant
+appearing as an evidence, discountenancing and discouraging
+his colleagues, raising every obstruction to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">{234}</a></span>
+the prosecution, dissolving the Council, preventing
+evidence and destroying it as far as lay in his power
+by collateral means, be not also such presumptive
+proofs as give double force to all the positive
+proof we produce against him.</p>
+
+<p>The lac and a half, I know, he means to support
+upon the custom of entertainment; and your Lordships
+will judge whether or not a man who was ordered
+and had covenanted never to take more than
+400<i>l.</i> could take 16,000<i>l.</i> under color of an entertainment.
+That which he intends to produce as a
+justification we charge, and your Lordships and the
+world will think, to be the heaviest aggravation of his
+crime. And after explaining to your Lordships the
+circumstances under which this justification is made,
+and leaving a just impression of them upon your
+minds, I shall beg your Lordships' indulgence to finish
+this member of the business to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>It is stated and entered in the account, that an
+entertainment was provided for Mr. Hastings at the
+rate of 200<i>l.</i> a day. He stayed at Moorshedabad for
+near three months; and thus you see that visits from
+Mr. Hastings are pretty expensive things: it is at the
+rate of 73,000<i>l.</i> a year for his entertainment. We
+find that Mr. Middleton, an English gentleman who
+was with him, received likewise (whether under the
+same pretence I know not, and it does not signify)
+another sum equal to it; and if these two gentlemen
+had stayed in that country a year, their several allowances
+would have been 146,000<i>l.</i> out of the Nabob's
+allowance of 160,000<i>l.</i> a year: they would have eat
+up nearly the whole of it. And do you wonder, my
+Lords, that such guests and such hosts are difficult to
+be divided? Do you wonder that such visits, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">{235}</a></span>
+so well paid for and well provided for, were naturally
+long? There is hardly a prince in Europe who would
+give to another prince of Europe from his royal hospitality
+what was given upon this occasion to Mr.
+Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now see what was Mr. Hastings's business
+during this long protracted visit. First, he tells you
+that he came there to reduce all the state and dignity
+of the Nabob. He tells you that he felt no compunction
+in reducing that state; that the elephants, the
+menagerie, the stables, all went without mercy, and
+consequently all the persons concerned in them were
+dismissed also. When he came to the abolition of the
+pensions, he says,&mdash;"I proceeded with great pain,
+from the reflection that I was the instrument in depriving
+whole families, all at once, of their bread, and
+reducing them to a state of penury: convinced of the
+necessity of the measure, I endeavored to execute it
+with great impartiality." Here he states the work
+he was employed in, when he took this two hundred
+pounds a day for his own pay. "It was necessary to
+begin with reforming the useless servants of the court,
+and retrenching the idle parade of elephants, menageries,
+&amp;c., which loaded the civil list. This cost
+little regret in performing; but the Resident, who
+took upon himself the chief share in this business,
+acknowledges that he suffered considerably in his
+feelings, when he came to touch on the pension list.
+Some hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of
+the country, excluded, under our government, from
+almost all employments, civil or military, had, ever
+since the revolution, depended on the bounty of the
+Nabob; and near ten lacs were bestowed that way.
+It is not that the distribution was always made with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">{236}</a></span>
+judgment or impartial, and much room was left for a
+reform; but when the question was to cut off entirely
+the greatest part, it could not fail to be accompanied
+with circumstances of real distress. The Resident
+declares, that, even with some of the highest rank,
+he could not avoid discovering, under all the pride
+of Eastern manners, the manifest marks of penury
+and want. There was, however, no room left for hesitation:
+to confine the Nabob's expenses within the
+limited sum, it was necessary that pensions should
+be set aside."</p>
+
+<p>Here, my Lords, is a man sent to execute one of the
+most dreadful offices that was ever executed by man,&mdash;to
+cut off, as he says himself, with a bleeding heart,
+the only remaining allowance made for hundreds of
+the decayed nobility and gentry of a great kingdom,
+driven by our government from the offices upon which
+they existed. In this moment of anxiety and affliction,
+when he says he felt pain and was cut to the heart to
+do it,&mdash;at this very moment, when he was turning
+over fourteen hundred of the ancient nobility and
+gentry of this country to downright want of bread,&mdash;just
+at that moment, while he was doing this act, and
+feeling this act in this manner, from the collected
+morsels forced from the mouths of that indigent and
+famished nobility he gorged his own ravenous maw
+with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for
+his entertainment. As we see him in this business,
+this man is unlike any other: he is also never corrupt
+but he is cruel; he never dines without creating a
+famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity
+of standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent,
+the oppressed, and ruined; he takes to himself double
+what would maintain them. His is unlike the gen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">{237}</a></span>erous
+rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a
+living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like
+that of the ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed,
+the sickly, the dying, and the dead, and only
+anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.
+His cruelty is beyond his corruption: but there is
+something in his hypocrisy which is more terrible
+than his cruelty; for, at the very time when with
+double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription,
+and sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility
+and gentry of a great country, his eyes overflow
+with tears, and he turns the precious balm that
+bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine,
+into fatal, rancorous, mortal poison to the human
+race.</p>
+
+<p>You have seen, that, when he takes two hundred
+pounds a day for his entertainment, he tells you that
+in this very act he is starving fourteen hundred of the
+ancient nobility and gentry. My Lords, you have the
+blood of nobles,&mdash;if not, you have the blood of men
+in your veins: you feel as nobles, you feel as men.
+What would you say to a cruel Mogul exactor, by
+whom after having been driven from your estates, driven
+from the noble offices, civil and military, which
+you hold, driven from your bishoprics, driven from
+your places at court, driven from your offices as
+judges, and, after having been reduced to a miserable
+flock of pensioners, your very pensions were at
+last wrested from your mouths, and who, though at
+the very time when those pensions were wrested from
+you he declares them to have been the only bread of a
+miserable decayed nobility, takes himself two hundred
+pounds a day for his entertainment, and continues
+it till it amounts to sixteen thousand pounds? I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">{238}</a></span>
+do think, that, of all the corruptions which he has not
+owned, but has not denied, or of those which he does
+in effect own, and of which he brings forward the
+evidence himself, the taking and claiming under color
+of an entertainment is ten times the most nefarious.</p>
+
+<p>I shall this day only further trouble your Lordships
+to observe that he has never directly denied this transaction.
+I have tumbled over the records, I have
+looked at every part, to see whether he denies it.
+He did not deny it at the time, he did not deny it
+to the Court of Directors: on the contrary, he did
+in effect acknowledge it, when, without directly acknowledging
+it, he promised them a full and liberal
+explanation of the whole transaction. He never did
+give that explanation. Parliament took up the business;
+this matter was reported at the end of the
+Eleventh Report; but though the House of Commons
+had thus reported it, and made that public which before
+was upon the Company's records, he took no notice
+of it. Then another occasion arises: he comes
+before the House of Commons; he knows he is about
+to be prosecuted for those very corruptions; he well
+knows these charges exist against him; he makes his
+defence (if he will allow it to be his defence); but,
+though thus driven, he did not there deny it, because
+he knew, that, if he had denied it, it could be proved
+against him. I desire your Lordships will look at
+that paper which we have given in evidence, and see
+if you find a word of denial of it: there is much discourse,
+much folly, much insolence, but not one word
+of denial. Then, at last, it came before this tribunal
+against him. I desire to refer your Lordships to that
+part of his defence to the article in which this bribe is
+specifically charged: he does not deny it there; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">{239}</a></span>
+only thing which looks like a denial is one sweeping
+clause inserted, (in order to put us upon the proof,)
+that all the charges are to be conceived as denied;
+but a specific denial to this specific charge in no stage
+of the business, from beginning to end, has he once
+made.</p>
+
+<p>And therefore here I close that part of the charge
+which relates to the business of Nundcomar. Your
+Lordships will see such a body of presumptive proof
+and positive proof as never was given yet of any
+secret corrupt act of bribery; and there I leave it
+with your Lordships' justice. I beg pardon for
+having detained you so long; but your Lordships
+will be so good as to observe that no business ever
+was covered with more folds of iniquitous artifice
+than this which is now brought before you.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">{240}</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="SECOND_DAY_SATURDAY_APRIL_25_1789" id="SECOND_DAY_SATURDAY_APRIL_25_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;When I last had the honor of addressing
+your Lordships, I endeavored to state
+with as much perspicuity as the nature of an intricate
+affair would admit, and as largely as in so intricate
+an affair was consistent with the brevity which I
+endeavored to preserve, the proofs which had been
+adduced against Warren Hastings upon an inquiry
+instituted by an order of the Court of Directors into
+the corruption and peculation of persons in authority
+in India. My Lords, I have endeavored to
+show you by anterior presumptive proofs, drawn from
+the nature and circumstances of the acts themselves
+inferring guilt, that such actions and such conduct
+could be referable only to one cause, namely, <i>corruption</i>;
+I endeavored to show you afterwards, my Lords,
+what the specific nature and extent of the corruption
+was, as far as it could be fully proved; and lastly,
+the great satisfactory presumption which attended
+the inquiry with regard to Mr. Hastings,&mdash;namely,
+that, contrary to law, contrary to his duty, contrary
+to what is owed by innocence to itself, Mr. Hastings
+resisted that inquiry, and employed all the power of
+his office to prevent the exercise of it, either in himself
+or in others. These presumptions and these proofs<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">{241}</a></span>
+will be brought before your Lordships, distinctly and
+in order, at the end of this opening.</p>
+
+<p>The next point on which I thought it necessary to
+proceed was relative to the presumptions which his
+subsequent conduct gave with regard to his guilt:
+because, my Lords, his uniform tenor of conduct, such
+as must attend guilt, both in the act, at the time of
+the inquiry, and subsequent to it, will form such a
+body of satisfactory evidence as I believe the human
+mind is not made to resist.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, there is another reason why I choose to
+enter into the presumptions drawn from his conduct
+and the fact, taking his conduct in two parts, if it
+may be so expressed, <i>omission</i> and <i>commission</i>, in order
+that your Lordships should more fully enter into
+the consequences of this system of bribery. But before
+I say anything upon that, I wish your Lordships
+to be apprised, that the Commons, in bringing this
+bribe of three lac and a half before your Lordships, do
+not wish by any means to have it understood that this
+is the whole of the bribe that was received by Mr.
+Hastings in consequence of delivering up the whole
+management of the government of the country to
+that improper person whom he nominated for it. My
+Lords, from the proofs that will be adduced before
+you, there is great probability that he received very
+nearly a hundred thousand pounds; there is positive
+proof of his receiving fifty; and we have chosen
+only to charge him with that of which there is
+such an accumulated body of proof as to leave no
+doubt upon the minds of your Lordships. All this I
+say, because we are perfectly apprised of the sentiments
+of the public upon this point: when they hear
+of the enormity of Indian peculation, when they see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">{242}</a></span>
+the acts done, and compare them with the bribes received,
+the acts seem so enormous and the bribes comparatively
+so small, that they can hardly be got to
+attribute them to that motive. What I mean to state
+is this: that, from a collective view of the subject,
+your Lordships will be able to judge that enormous
+offences have been committed, and that the bribe
+which we have given in proof is a specimen of the
+nature and extent of those enormous bribes which extend
+to much greater sums than we are able to prove
+before you in the manner your Lordships would like
+and expect.</p>
+
+<p>I have already remarked to your Lordships, that,
+after this charge was brought and recorded before
+the Council in spite of the resistance made by Mr.
+Hastings, in which he employed all the power and
+authority of his station, and the whole body of his partisans
+and associates in iniquity, dispersed through
+every part of these provinces,&mdash;after he had taken
+all these steps, finding himself pressed by the proof
+and pressed by the presumption of his resistance to
+the inquiry, he did think it necessary to make something
+like a defence. Accordingly he has made what
+he calls a justification, which did not consist in the
+denial of that fact, or any explanation of it. The
+mode he took for his defence was abuse of his colleagues,
+abuse of the witnesses, and of every person
+who in the execution of his duty was inquiring into
+the fact, and charging them with things which, if
+true, were by no means sufficient to support him,
+either in defending the acts themselves, or in the
+criminal means he used to prevent inquiry into them.
+His design was to mislead their minds, and to carry
+them from the accusation and the proof of it. With<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">{243}</a></span>
+respect to the passion, violence, and intemperate heat
+with which he charged them, they were proceeding in
+an orderly, regular manner; and if on any occasion
+they seem to break out into warmth, it was in consequence
+of that resistance which he made to them, in
+what your Lordships, I believe, will agree with them
+in thinking was one of the most important parts of
+their functions. If they had been intemperate in their
+conduct, if they had been violent, passionate, prejudiced
+against him, it afforded him only a better means
+of making his defence; because, though in a rational
+and judicious mind the intemperate conduct of the
+accuser certainly proves nothing with regard to the
+truth or falsehood of his accusation, yet we do know
+that the minds of men are so constituted that an improper
+mode of conducting a right thing does form
+some degree of prejudice against it. Mr. Hastings,
+therefore, unable to defend himself upon principle, has
+resorted as much as he possibly could to prejudice.
+And at the same time that there is not one word of
+denial, or the least attempt at a refutation of the
+charge, he has loaded the records with all manner of
+minutes, proceedings, and letters relative to everything
+but the fact itself. The great aim of his policy, both
+then, before, and ever since, has been to divert the
+mind of the auditory, or the persons to whom he addressed
+himself, from the nature of his cause, to some
+collateral circumstance relative to it,&mdash;a policy to
+which he has always had recourse; but that trick,
+the last resource of despairing guilt, I trust will now
+completely fail him.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, however, began to be pretty sensible
+that this way of proceeding had a very unpromising
+and untoward look; for which reason he next declared<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">{244}</a></span>
+that he reserved his defence for fear of a legal prosecution,
+and that some time or other he would give a
+large and liberal explanation to the Court of Directors,
+to whom he was answerable for his conduct, of his
+refusing to suffer the inquiry to proceed, of his omitting
+to give them satisfaction at the time, of his omitting
+to take any one natural step that an innocent
+man would have taken upon such an occasion. Under
+this promise he has remained from that time to the
+time you see him at your bar, and he has neither
+denied, exculpated, explained, or apologized for his
+conduct in any one single instance.</p>
+
+<p>While he accuses the intemperance of his adversaries,
+he shows a degree of temperance in himself
+which always attends guilt in despair: for struggling
+guilt may be warm, but guilt that is desperate has
+nothing to do but to submit to the consequences of it,
+to bear the infamy annexed to its situation, and to try
+to find some consolation in the effects of guilt with regard
+to private fortune for the scandal it brings them
+into in public reputation. After the business had
+ended in India, the causes why he should have given
+the explanation grew stronger and stronger: for not
+only the charges exhibited against him were weighty,
+but the manner in which he was called upon to inquire
+into them was such as would undoubtedly tend to stir
+the mind of a man of character, to rouse him to some
+consideration of himself, and to a sense of the necessity
+of his defence. He was goaded to make this
+defence by the words I shall read to your Lordships
+from Sir John Clavering.</p>
+
+<p>"In the late proceedings of the Revenue Board it
+will appear that there is no species of peculation from
+which the Honorable Governor-General has thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">{245}</a></span>
+it reasonable to abstain." He further says, in answer
+to Mr. Hastings, "The malicious view with which this
+innuendo" (an innuendo of Mr. Hastings) "is thrown
+out is only worthy of a man who, having disgraced
+himself in the eyes of every man of honor both in
+Asia and in Europe, and having no imputation to
+lay to our charge, has dared to attempt in the dark
+what malice itself could not find grounds to aim at
+openly."</p>
+
+<p>These are the charges which were made upon him,&mdash;not
+loosely, in the heat of conversation, but deliberately,
+in writing, entered upon record, and sent to his
+employers, the Court of Directors, those whom the
+law had set over him, and to whose judgment and
+opinion he was responsible. Do your Lordships believe
+that it was conscious innocence that made him
+endure such reproaches, so recorded, from his own
+colleague? Was it conscious innocence that made
+him abandon his defence, renounce his explanation,
+and bear all this calumny, (if it was calumny,) in such
+a manner, without making any one attempt to refute
+it? Your Lordships will see by this, and by other
+minutes with which the books are filled, that Mr.
+Hastings is charged quite to the brim with corruptions
+of all sorts, and covered with every mode of possible
+disgrace. For there is something so base and contemptible
+in the crimes of peculation and bribery, that,
+when they come to be urged home and strongly against
+a man, as here they are urged, nothing but a consciousness
+of guilt can possibly make a person so charged
+support himself under them. Mr. Hastings considered
+himself, as he has stated, to be under the necessity
+of bearing them. What is that necessity? Guilt.
+Could he say that Sir John Clavering (for I say noth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">{246}</a></span>ing
+now of Colonel Monson and Mr. Francis, who were
+joined with him) was a man weak and contemptible?
+I believe there are those among your Lordships who
+remember that Sir John Clavering was known before
+he went abroad, and better known by his conduct
+after, to be a man of the most distinguished honor
+that ever served his Majesty; he served his Majesty
+in a military situation for many years, and afterwards
+in that high civil situation in India. It is known
+that through every step and gradation of a high military
+service, until he arrived at the highest of all,
+there never was the least blot upon him, or doubt or
+suspicion of his character; that his temper for the
+most part, and his manners, were fully answerable to
+his virtues, and a noble ornament to them; that he
+was one of the best natured, best bred men, as well as
+one of the highest principled men to be found in his
+Majesty's service; that he had passed the middle
+time of life, and come to an age which makes men
+wise in general; so that he could be warmed by
+nothing but that noble indignation at guilt which is
+the last thing that ever was or will be extinguished
+in a virtuous mind. He was a man whose voice was
+not to be despised; but if his character had been
+personally as contemptible as it was meritorious and
+honorable in every respect, yet his situation as a
+commissioner named by an act of Parliament for the
+express purpose of reforming India gave him a weight
+and consequence that could not suffer Mr. Hastings,
+without a general and strong presumption of
+his guilt, to acquiesce in such recorded minutes from
+him. But if he had been a weak, if he had been an
+intemperate man, (in reality he was as cool, steady,
+temperate, judicious a man as ever was born,) the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">{247}</a></span>
+Court of Directors, to whom Mr. Hastings was responsible
+by every tie and every principle, and was
+made responsible at last by a positive act of Parliament
+obliging him to yield obedience to their commands
+as the general rule of his duty,&mdash;the Court
+of Directors, I say, perfectly approved of every part
+of General Clavering's, Colonel Monson's, and Mr.
+Francis's conduct; they approved of this inquiry
+which Mr. Hastings rejected; and they have declared,
+"that the powers and instructions vested in and
+given to General Clavering and the other gentlemen
+were such as fully authorized them in every inquiry
+that seems to have been their object ...
+Europeans."<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[2]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now after the supreme authority, to which they
+were to appeal in all their disputes, had passed this
+judgment upon this very inquiry, the matter no longer
+depended upon Mr. Hastings's opinion; nor could he
+be longer justified in attributing that to evil motives
+either of malice or passion in his colleagues. When
+the judges who were finally to determine who was
+malicious, who was passionate, who was or was not
+justified either in setting on foot the inquiry or resisting
+it, had passed that judgment, then Mr. Hastings
+was called upon by all the feelings of a man, and by
+his duty in Council, to give satisfaction to his masters,
+the Directors, who approved of the zeal and diligence
+shown in that very inquiry, the passion of
+which he only reprobated, and upon which he grounded
+his justification.</p>
+
+<p>If anything but conscious guilt could have possibly
+influenced him to such more than patience under this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">{248}</a></span>
+accusation, let us see what was his conduct when
+the scene was changed. General Clavering, fatigued
+and broken down by the miseries of his situation,
+soon afterwards lost a very able and affectionate colleague,
+Colonel Monson, (whom Mr. Hastings states
+to be one of the bitterest of his accusers,) a man one
+of the most loved and honored of his time, a person
+of your Lordships' noble blood, and a person who did
+honor to it, and if he had been of the family of a
+commoner, well deserved to be raised to your distinction.
+When that man died,&mdash;died of a broken heart,
+to say nothing else,&mdash;and General Clavering felt
+himself in a manner without help, except what he
+derived from the firmness, assiduity, and patience of
+Mr. Francis, sinking like himself under the exertion
+of his own virtues, he was resolved to resign his employment.
+The Court of Directors were so alarmed
+at this attempt of his to resign his employment, that
+they wrote thus: "When you conceived the design of
+quitting our service, we imagine you could not have
+heard of the resignation of Mr. Hastings ...
+your zeal and ability."<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[3]</a></p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in this struggle, and before he could
+resign finally, another kind of resignation, the resignation
+of Nature, took place, and Sir John Clavering
+died. The character that was given Sir John
+Clavering at that time is a seal to the whole of his
+proceedings, and the use that I shall make of it your
+Lordships will see presently. "The abilities of General
+Clavering, the comprehensive knowledge he had
+attained of our affairs ...
+to the East India Company."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[4]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">{249}</a></span></p><p>And never had it a greater loss. There is the concluding
+funeral oration made by his masters, upon a
+strict, though by no means partial, view of his conduct.
+My Lords, here is the man who is the great
+accuser of Mr. Hastings, as he says. What is he? a
+slight man, a man of mean situation, a man of mean
+talents, a man of mean character? No: of the highest
+character. Was he a person whose conduct was
+disapproved by their common superiors? No: it was
+approved when living, and ratified when dead. This
+was the man, a man equal to him in every respect,
+upon the supposed evil motives of whom alone was
+founded the sole justification of Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>But be it, then, that Sir John Clavering, Colonel
+Monson, and Mr. Francis were all of them the evil-minded
+persons that he describes them to be, and
+that from dislike to them, from a kind of manly
+resentment, if you please, against such persons, an
+hatred against malicious proceedings, and a defiance
+of them, he did not think proper, as he states, to
+make his defence during that period of time, and
+while oppressed by that combination,&mdash;yet, when he
+got rid of the two former persons, and when Mr.
+Francis was nothing, when the whole majority was
+in his hand, and he was in full power, there was a
+large, open, full field for inquiry; and he was bound
+to re-institute that inquiry, and to clear his character
+before his judges and before his masters. Mr. Hastings
+says, "No: they have threatened me with a prosecution,
+and I reserve myself for a court of justice."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings has now at length taken a ground, as
+you will see from all his writings, which makes all
+explanation of his conduct in this business absolutely
+impossible. For, in the first place, he says, "As a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">{250}</a></span>
+prosecution is meditated against me, I will say nothing
+in explanation of my conduct, because I might
+disclose my defence, and by that means do myself a
+prejudice." On the other hand, when the prosecution
+is dropped, as we all know it was dropped in this
+case, then he has a direct contrary reason, but it
+serves him just as well: "Why, as no prosecution
+is intended, no defence need be made." So that,
+whether a prosecution is intended or a prosecution
+dropped, there is always cause why Mr. Hastings
+should not give the Court of Directors the least satisfaction
+concerning his conduct, notwithstanding, as
+we shall prove, he has reiteratedly promised, and
+promised it in the most ample and liberal manner.
+But let us see if there be any presumption in his
+favor to rebut the presumption which he knew was
+irresistible, and which, by making no defence for his
+conduct, and stopping the inquiry, must necessarily
+lie upon him. He reserves his defence, but he promises
+both defence and explanation.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will remark that there is nowhere
+a clear and positive denial of the fact. Promising
+a defence, I will admit, does not directly and <i>ex vi
+termini</i> suppose that a man may not deny the fact,
+because it is just compatible with the defence; but it
+does by no means exclude the admission of the fact,
+because the admission of the fact may be attended
+with a justification: but when a man says that he
+will explain his conduct with regard to a fact, then
+he admits that fact, because there can be no explanation
+of a fact which has no existence. Therefore Mr.
+Hastings admits the fact by promising an explanation,
+and he shows he has no explanation nor justification
+to give by never having given it. Goaded,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">{251}</a></span>
+provoked, and called upon for it, in the manner I
+have mentioned, he chooses to have a feast of disgrace,
+(if I may say so,) to have a riot of infamy,
+served up to him day by day for a course of years, in
+every species of reproach that could be given by his
+colleagues, and by the Court of Directors, "from
+whom," he says, "I received nothing but opprobrious
+and disgraceful epithets," and he says "that his predecessors
+possessed more of their confidence than he
+had." Yet for years he lay down in that sty of disgrace,
+fattening in it, feeding upon that offal of disgrace
+and excrement, upon everything that could be
+disgustful to the human mind, rather than deny the
+fact and put himself upon a civil justification. Infamy
+was never incurred for nothing. We know very
+well what was said formerly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noindent">And never did a man submit to infamy for anything
+but its true reward, <i>money</i>. Money he received; the
+infamy he received along with it: he was glad to
+take his wife with all her goods; he took her with
+her full portion, with every species of infamy that
+belonged to her; and your Lordships cannot resist
+the opinion that he would not have suffered himself
+to be disgraced with the Court of Directors, disgraced
+with his colleagues, disgraced with the world, disgraced
+upon an eternal record, unless he was absolutely
+guilty of the fact that was charged upon him.</p>
+
+<p>He frequently expresses that he reserves himself
+for a court of justice. Does he, my Lords? I am
+sorry that Mr. Hastings should show that he always
+mistakes his situation; he has totally mistaken it:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">{252}</a></span>
+he was a servant, bound to give a satisfactory account
+of his conduct to his masters, and, instead of that, he
+considers himself and the Court of Directors as litigant
+parties,&mdash;them as the accusers, and himself as
+the culprit. What would your Lordships, in private
+life, conceive of a steward who was accused of embezzling
+the rents, robbing and oppressing the tenants,
+and committing a thousand misdeeds in his stewardship,
+and who, upon your wishing to make inquiry
+into his conduct, and asking an explanation of it,
+should answer, "I will give no reply: you may intend
+to prosecute me and convict me as a cheat, and
+therefore I will not give you any satisfaction": what
+would you think of that steward? You could have
+no doubt that such a steward was a person not fit to
+be a steward, nor fit to live.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings reserves himself for a court of justice:
+that single circumstance, my Lords, proves that
+he was guilty. It may appear very odd that his
+guilt should be inferred from his desire of trial in
+a court in which he could be acquitted or condemned.
+But I shall prove to you from that circumstance
+that Mr. Hastings, in desiring to be tried
+in a court of justice, convicts himself of presumptive
+guilt.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Hastings went to Bengal in the year
+1772, he had a direction exactly similar to this which
+he has resisted in his own case: it was to inquire
+into grievances and abuses. In consequence of this
+direction, he proposes a plan for the regulation of the
+Company's service, and one part of that plan was just
+what you would expect from him,&mdash;that is, the power
+of destroying every Company's servant without the
+least possibility of his being heard in his own defence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">{253}</a></span>
+or taking any one step to justify himself, and of dismissing
+him at his own discretion: and the reason
+he gives for it is this. "I shall forbear to comment
+upon the above propositions: if just and proper, their
+utility will be self-apparent. One clause only in the
+last article may require some explanation, namely,
+the power proposed for the Governor of recalling any
+person from his station without assigning a reason
+for it. In the charge of oppression," (now here you
+will find the reason why Mr. Hastings wishes to appeal
+to a court of justice, rather than to give satisfaction
+to his employers,) "though supported by the
+cries of the people and the most authentic representations,
+it is yet impossible in most cases to obtain
+legal proofs of it; and unless the discretionary power
+which I have recommended be somewhere lodged,
+the assurance of impunity from any formal inquiry
+will baffle every order of the board, as, on the other
+hand, the fear of the consequence will restrain every
+man within the bounds of his duty, if he knows himself
+liable to suffer by the effects of a single control."
+You see Mr. Hastings himself is of opinion that the
+cries of oppression, though extorted from a whole
+people by the iron hand of severity,&mdash;that these
+cries of a whole people, attended even with authentic
+documents sufficient to satisfy the mind of any man,
+may be totally insufficient to convict the oppressor in
+a court; and yet to that court, whose competence he
+denies, to that very court, he appeals, in that he puts
+his trust, and upon that ground he refuses to perform
+the just promise he had given of any explanation to
+those who had employed him.</p>
+
+<p>Now I put this to your Lordships: if a man is of
+opinion that no public court can truly and properly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">{254}</a></span>
+bring him to any account for his conduct, that the
+forms observable in courts are totally adverse to it,
+that there is a general incompetency with regard to
+such a court, and yet shuns a tribunal capable and
+competent, and applies to that which he thinks is incapable
+and incompetent, does not that man plainly
+show that he has rejected what he thinks will
+prove his guilt, and that he has chosen what he
+thinks will be utterly insufficient to prove it? And
+if this be the case, as he asserts it to be, with an
+under servant, think what must be the case of the
+upper servant of all: for, if an inferior servant is not
+to be brought to justice, what must be the situation
+of a Governor-General? It is impossible not to see,
+that, as he had conceived that a court of justice had
+not sufficient means to bring his crimes to light and
+detection, nor sufficient to bring him to proper and
+adequate punishment, therefore he flew to a court of
+justice, not as a place to decide upon him, but as a
+sanctuary to secure his guilt. Most of your Lordships
+have travelled abroad, and have seen in the
+unreformed countries of Europe churches filled with
+persons who take sanctuary in them. You do not
+presume that a man is innocent because he is in a
+sanctuary: you know, that, so far from demonstrating
+his innocence, it demonstrates his guilt. And in
+this case, Mr. Hastings flies not to a court for trial,
+but as a sanctuary to secure him from it.</p>
+
+<p>Let us just review the whole of his conduct; let
+us hear how Mr. Hastings has proceeded with regard
+to this whole affair. The court of justice dropped;
+the prosecution in Bengal ended. With Sir Elijah
+Impey as chief-justice, who, as your Lordships have
+seen, had a most close and honorable connection<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">{255}</a></span>
+with the Governor-General, (all the circumstances of
+which I need not detail to you, as it must be fresh
+in your Lordships' memory,) he had not much to
+fear from the impartiality of the court. He might
+be sure the forms of law would not be strained to do
+him mischief; therefore there was no great terror in
+it. But whatever terror there might be in it was
+overblown, because his colleagues refused to carry
+him into it, and therefore that opportunity of defence
+is gone. In Europe he was afraid of making any defence,
+but the prosecution here was also soon over;
+and in the House of Commons he takes this ground
+of justification for not giving any explanation, that
+the Court of Directors had received perfect satisfaction
+of his innocence; and he named persons of great
+and eminent character in the profession, whose names
+certainly cannot be mentioned without highly imposing
+upon the prejudices and weighing down almost
+the reason of mankind. He quotes their opinions in
+his favor, and argues that the exculpation which they
+give, or are supposed to give him, should excuse him
+from any further explanation.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I believe I need not say to great men of
+the profession, many of the first ornaments of which
+I see before me, that they are very little influenced
+in the seat of judgment by the opinions which they
+have given in the chamber, and they are perfectly in
+the right: because while in the chamber they hear
+but one part of the cause; it is generally brought
+before them in a very partial manner, and they have
+not the lights which they possess when they sit deliberately
+down upon the tribunal to examine into it;
+and for this reason they discharge their minds from
+every prejudice that may have arisen from a foregone<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">{256}</a></span>
+partial opinion, and come uninfluenced by it as to
+a new cause. This, we know, is the glory of the
+great lawyers who have presided and do preside in
+the tribunals of this country; but we know, at the
+same time, that those opinions (which they in their
+own mind reject, unless supported afterwards by
+clear and authentic testimony) do weigh upon the
+rest of mankind at least: for it is impossible to separate
+the opinion of a great and learned man from
+some consideration of the person who has delivered
+that opinion.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings, being conscious of this, and not fearing
+the tribunal abroad for the reason that I gave
+you, namely, his belief that it was not very adverse
+to him, and also knowing that the prosecution there
+was dropped, had but one thing left for his consideration,
+which was, how he should conflict with the tribunal
+at home: and as the prosecution must originate
+from the Court of Directors, and be authorized
+by some great law opinions, the great point with him
+was, some way or other, by his party, I will not say
+by what means or circumstances, but by some party
+means, to secure a strong interest in the executive
+part of the India House. My Lords, was that interest
+used properly and fairly? I will not say that
+friendship and partiality imply injustice; they certainly
+do not; but they do not imply justice. The
+Court of Directors took up this affair with great
+warmth; they committed it to their solicitor, and the
+solicitor would naturally (as most solicitors do) draw
+up a case a little favorably for the persons that employed
+him; and if there was any leaning, which
+upon my word I do not approve in the management
+of any cause whatever, yet, if there was a leaning, it
+must be a leaning for the client.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">{257}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now the counsel did not give a decided opinion
+against the prosecution, but upon the face of the case
+they expressed great doubts upon it; for, with such
+a strange, disorderly, imperfect, and confused case as
+was laid before them, they could not advise a prosecution;
+and in my opinion they went no further.
+And, indeed, upon that case that went before them,
+I, who am authorized by the Commons to prosecute,
+do admit that a great doubt might lie upon the most
+deciding mind, whether, under the circumstances
+there stated, a prosecution could be or ought to be
+pursued. I do not say which way my mind would
+have turned, upon that very imperfect state of the
+case; but I still allow so much to their very great
+ability, great minds, and sound judgment, that I
+am not sure, if it was <i>res integra</i>, I would not have
+rather hesitated myself (who am now here an accuser)
+what judgment to give.</p>
+
+<p>It does happen that there are very singular circumstances
+in this business, to which your Lordships
+will advert; and you will consider what weight they
+ought to have upon your Lordships' minds. The
+person who is now the solicitor of the Company is a
+very respectable man in the profession,&mdash;Mr. Smith;
+he was at that time also the Company's solicitor, and
+he has since appeared in this cause as Mr. Hastings's
+solicitor. Now there is something particular in a
+man's being the solicitor to a party who was prosecuting
+another, and continuing afterwards in his
+office, and becoming the solicitor to the party prosecuted.
+It would be nearly as strange as if our solicitor
+were to be the solicitor of Mr. Hastings in this
+prosecution and trial before your Lordships. It is
+true, that we cannot make out, nor do we attempt to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">{258}</a></span>
+prove, that Mr. Smith was at that time actually Mr.
+Hastings's solicitor: all that we shall attempt to
+make out is, that the case he produced was just such
+a case as a solicitor anxious for the preservation of
+his client, and not anxious for the prosecution, would
+have made out.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have next to remark, that the opinion
+which the counsel gave in this case, namely, a very
+doubtful opinion, accompanied with strong censure of
+the manner in which the case was stated, was drawn
+from them by a case in which I charge that there
+were <i>misrepresentation</i>, <i>suppression</i>, and <i>falsification</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, in making this charge I am in a
+very awkward and unpleasant situation; but it is a
+situation in which, with all the disagreeable circumstances
+attending it, I must proceed. I am, in this
+business, obliged to name many men: I do not name
+them wantonly, but from the absolute necessity, as
+your Lordships will see, of the case. I do not mean
+to reflect upon this gentleman: I believe, at the time
+when he made this case, and especially the article
+which I state as a <i>falsification</i>, he must have trusted
+to some of the servants of the Company, who were
+but young in their service at that time. There was
+a very great error committed; but by whom, or how,
+your Lordships in the course of this inquiry will find.
+What I charge first is, that the case was improperly
+stated; secondly, that it was partially stated; and
+that afterwards a further report was made upon reference
+to the same officer in the committee. Now,
+my Lords, of the three charges which I have made,
+the two former, namely, the misrepresentation and
+suppression, were applicable to the case; but all the
+three, misrepresentation, suppression, and falsification,
+were applicable to the report.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">{259}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This I say in vindication of the opinions given,
+and for the satisfaction of the public, who may be
+imposed upon by them. I wish the word to be understood.
+When I say <i>imposed</i>, I always mean by it
+the weight and authority carried: a meaning which
+this word, perhaps, has not got yet thoroughly in the
+English language; but in a neighboring language <i>imposing</i>
+means, that it weighs upon men's minds with
+a sovereign authority. To say that the opinions of
+learned men, though even thus obtained, may not
+have weight with this court, or with any court, is
+a kind of compliment I cannot pay to them at the
+expense of that common nature in which I and all
+human beings are involved.</p>
+
+<p>He states in the case the covenants and the salary
+of Mr. Hastings, and his emoluments, very fairly.
+I do not object to any part of that. He then proceeds
+to state very partially the business upon which
+the Committee of Circuit went, and without opening
+whose conduct we cannot fully bring before you this
+charge of bribery. He then states, "that, an inquiry
+having been made by the present Supreme Council
+of Bengal respecting the conduct of the members of
+the last administration, several charges have been
+made, stating moneys very improperly received by
+Mr. Hastings during the time of the late administration:
+amongst these is one of his having received
+150,000 rupees of Munny Begum, the guardian of
+the Nabob, who is an infant."</p>
+
+<p>In this statement of the case everything is put
+out of its true place. Mr. Hastings was not charged
+with receiving a lac and a half of rupees from
+Munny Begum, the guardian of the Nabob,&mdash;for she
+was not then his guardian; but he was charged with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">{260}</a></span>
+receiving a lac and a half of rupees for removing
+the Nabob's own mother, who was his natural guardian,
+and substituting this step-mother, who was a
+prostitute, in her place; whereas here it supposes he
+found her a guardian, and that she had made him a
+present, which alters the whole nature of the case.
+The case, in the recital of the charge, sets out with
+what every one of your Lordships knows now not to
+be the truth of the fact, nor the thing that in itself
+implies the criminality: he ought to have stated that
+in the beginning of the business. The suppressions
+in the recital are amazing. He states an inquiry
+having been made by the Supreme Council of Bengal
+respecting the conduct of the members of the
+last administration. That inquiry was made in consequence
+of the charge, and not the charge brought
+forward, as they would have it believed, in consequence
+of the inquiry. There is no mention that
+that inquiry had been expressly ordered by the Court
+of Directors; but it is stated as though it was a
+voluntary inquiry. Now there is always something
+doubtful in voluntary inquiries with regard to the
+people concerned. He then supposes, upon this inquiry,
+that to be the charge which is not the charge
+at all. The crime, as I have stated, consisted of
+two distinct parts, but both inferring the same corruption:
+the first, two lac of rupees taken expressly
+for the nomination of this woman to this place; and
+the other, one lac and a half of rupees, in effect for
+the same purpose, but under the name and color of
+an entertainment. The drawer of the case, finding
+that in the one case, namely, the two lac of rupees,
+the evidence was more weak, but that no justification
+could be set up,&mdash;finding in the other, the lac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">{261}</a></span>
+and a half of rupees, the proof strong and not to be
+resisted, but that some justification was to be found
+for it, lays aside the charge of the two lac totally;
+and the evidence belonging to it, which was considered
+as rather weak, is applied to the other charge
+of a lac and a half, the proof of which upon its own
+evidence was irresistible.</p>
+
+<p>My speech I hope your Lordships consider as only
+pointing out to your attention these particulars.
+Your Lordships will see it exemplified throughout
+the whole, that, when there is evidence (for some
+evidence is brought) that does belong to the lac and
+a half, it is entirely passed by, the most material circumstances
+are weakened, the whole strength and
+force of them taken away. Every one knows how
+true it is of evidence, <i>juncta juvant</i>: but here everything
+is broken and smashed to pieces, and nothing
+but disorder appears through the whole. For your
+Lordships will observe that the proof that belongs
+to one thing is put as belonging to another, and the
+proof of the other brought in a weak and imperfect
+manner in the rear of the first, and with every kind
+of observation to rebut and weaken it; and when
+this evidence is produced, which appears inapplicable
+almost in all the parts, in many doubtful, confused,
+and perplexed, and in some even contradictory,
+(which it will be when the evidence to one thing
+is brought to apply and bear upon another,) good
+hopes were entertained in consequence that that
+would happen which in part did happen, namely,
+that the counsel, distracted and confused, and finding
+no satisfaction in the case, could not advise a
+prosecution.</p>
+
+<p>But what is still more material and weighty, many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">{262}</a></span>
+particulars are suppressed in this case, and still more
+in the report; and turning from the case to the proceedings
+of the persons who are supposed to have the
+management of the inquiry, they bring forward, as
+an appendix to this case, Mr. Hastings's own invectives
+and charge against these persons, at the very
+same time that they suppress and do not bring forward,
+either in the charge or upon the report, what
+the other party have said in their own justification.
+The consequence of this management was, that a
+body of evidence which would have made this case
+the clearest in the world, and which I hope we shall
+make to appear so to your Lordships, was rendered
+for the most part inapplicable, and the whole puzzled
+and confused: I say, for the most part, for some
+parts did apply, but miserably applied, to the case.
+From their own state of the case they would have it
+inferred that the fault was not in their way of representing
+it, but in the infirmity, confusion, and disorder
+of the proofs themselves; but this, I trust we
+shall satisfy you, is by no means the case. I rest,
+however, upon the proof of partiality in this business,
+of the imposition upon the counsel, whether
+designed or not, and of the bias given by adding an
+appendix with Mr. Hastings's own remarks upon the
+case, without giving the reasons of the other parties
+for their conduct. Now, if there was nothing else
+than the fallacious recital, and afterwards the suppression,
+I believe any rational and sober man would
+see perfect, good, and sufficient ground for laying
+aside any authority that can be derived from the
+opinions of persons, though of the first character
+(and I am sure no man living does more homage to
+their learning, impartiality, and understanding than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">{263}</a></span>
+I do): first, because the statement of the case has
+thrown the whole into confusion; and secondly, as to
+the matter added as an appendix, which gives the
+representation of the delinquent and omits the representation
+of his prosecutors, it is observed very
+properly and very wisely by one of the great men
+before whom this evidence was laid, that "the evidence,
+as it is here stated, is still more defective, if
+the appendix is adopted by the Directors and meant
+to make a part of the case; for that throws discredit
+upon all the information so collected." Certainly it
+does; for, if the delinquent party, who is to be prosecuted,
+be heard with his own representation of the
+case, and that of his prosecutors be suppressed, he
+is master both of the lawyers and of the mind of
+mankind.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have here attempted to point out the
+extreme inconsistencies and defects of this proceeding;
+and I wish your Lordships to consider, with respect
+to these proceedings of the India House in
+their prosecutions, that it is in the power of some
+of their officers to make statements in the manner
+that I have described, then to obtain the names of
+great lawyers, and under their sanction to carry the
+accused through the world as acquitted.</p>
+
+<p>These are the material circumstances which will
+be submitted to your Lordships' sober consideration
+in the course of this inquiry. I have now stated
+them on these two accounts: first, to rebut the reason
+which Mr. Hastings has assigned for not giving
+any satisfaction to the Court of Directors, namely,
+because they did not want it, having dropped a prosecution
+upon great authorities and opinions; and
+next, to show your Lordships how a business begun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">{264}</a></span>
+in bribery is to be supported only by fraud, deceit,
+and collusion, and how the receiving of bribes by a
+Governor-General of Bengal tends to taint the whole
+service from beginning to end, both at home and
+abroad.</p>
+
+<p>But though upon the partial case that was presented
+to them these great lawyers did not advise
+a prosecution, and though even upon a full representation
+of a case a lawyer might think that a man
+ought not to be prosecuted, yet he may consider him
+to be the vilest man upon earth. We know men
+are acquitted in the great tribunals in which several
+Lords of this country have presided, and who
+perhaps ought not to have been brought there and
+prosecuted before them, and yet about whose delinquency
+there could be no doubt. But though we
+have here sufficient reason to justify the great lawyers
+whose names and authorities are produced, yet
+Mr. Hastings has extended that authority beyond the
+length of their opinions. For, being no longer under
+the terror of the law, which, he said, restrained
+him from making his defence, he was then bound to
+give that satisfaction to his masters and the world
+which every man in honor is bound to do, when a
+grave accusation is brought against him. But this
+business of the law I wish to sleep from this moment,
+till the time when it shall come before you;
+though I suspect, and have had reason (sitting in
+committees in the House of Commons) to believe,
+that there was in the India House a bond of iniquity,
+somewhere or other, which was able to impose
+in the first instance upon the solicitor, the guilt of
+which, being of another nature, I shall state hereafter,
+that your Lordships may be able to discover through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">{265}</a></span>
+whose means and whose fraud Mr. Hastings obtained
+these opinions.</p>
+
+<p>If, however, all the great lawyers had been unanimous
+upon that occasion, still it would have been
+necessary for Mr. Hastings to say, "I cannot, according
+to my opinion, be brought to give an account in
+a court of justice, and I have got great lawyers to
+declare, that, upon the case laid before them, they
+cannot advise a prosecution; but now is the time
+for me to come forward, and, being no longer in
+fear that my defence may be turned against me, I
+will produce my defence for the satisfaction of my
+masters and the vindication of my own character."
+But besides this doubtful opinion (for I believe your
+Lordships will find it no better than a doubtful opinion)
+given by persons for whom I have the highest
+honor, and given with a strong censure upon the
+state of the case, there were also some great lawyers,
+men of great authority in the kingdom, who gave a
+full and decided opinion that a prosecution ought to
+be instituted against him; but the Court of Directors
+decided otherwise, they overruled those opinions,
+and acted upon the opinions in favor of Mr. Hastings.
+When, therefore, he knew that the great men
+in the law were divided upon the propriety of a prosecution,
+but that the Directors had decided in his
+favor, he was the more strongly bound to enter into
+a justification of his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>But there was another great reason which should
+have induced him to do this. One great lawyer,
+known to many of your Lordships, Mr. Sayer, a very
+honest, intelligent man, who had long served the Company
+and well knew their affairs, had given an opinion
+concerning Mr. Hastings's conduct in stopping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">{266}</a></span>
+these prosecutions. There was an abstract question
+put to Mr. Sayer, and other great lawyers, separated
+from many of the circumstances of this business, concerning
+a point which incidentally arose; and this
+was, whether Mr. Hastings, as Governor-General, had
+a power so to dissolve the Council, that, if he declared
+it dissolved, they could not sit and do any legal and
+regular act. It was a great question with the lawyers
+at the time, and there was a difference of opinion on
+it. Mr. Sayer was one of those who were inclined to
+be of opinion that the Governor-General had a power
+of dissolving the Council, and that the Council could
+not legally sit after such dissolution. But what was
+his remark upon Mr. Hastings's conduct?&mdash;and you
+must suppose his remark of more weight, because,
+upon the abstract question, he had given his opinion
+in favor of Mr. Hastings's judgment. "The meeting
+of the Council depends on the pleasure of the Governor;
+and I think the duration of it must do so,
+too. But it was as great a crime to dissolve the
+Council upon base and sinister motives as it would
+be to assume the power of dissolving, if he had it not.
+I believe he is the first Governor that ever dissolved
+a Council inquiring into his behavior, when he was
+innocent. Before he could summon three Councils
+and dissolve them, he had time fully to consider what
+would be the result of such conduct, <i>to convince everybody,
+beyond a doubt, of his conscious guilt</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Sayer, then, among other learned people, (and
+if he had not been the man that I have described, yet,
+from his intimate connection with the Company, his
+opinion must be supposed to have great weight,) having
+used expressions as strong as the persons who
+have ever criminated Mr. Hastings most for the worst<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">{267}</a></span>
+of his crimes have ever used to qualify and describe
+them, and having ascribed his conduct to base and
+sinister motives, he was bound upon that occasion to
+justify that strong conduct, allowed to be legal, and
+charged at the same time to be violent. Mr. Hastings
+was obliged then to produce something in his justification.
+He never did. Therefore, for all the reasons
+assigned by himself, drawn from the circumstances of
+prosecution and non-prosecution, and from opinions
+of lawyers and colleagues, the Court of Directors at
+the same time censuring his conduct, and strongly applauding
+the conduct of those who were adverse to
+him, Mr. Hastings was, I say, from those accumulated
+circumstances, bound to get rid of the infamy of
+a conduct which could be attributed to nothing but
+base and sinister motives, and which could have no
+effect but to convince men of his consciousness that
+he was guilty. From all these circumstances I infer
+that no man could have endured this load of infamy,
+and to this time have given no explanation of his conduct,
+unless for the reason which this learned counsel
+gives, and which your Lordships and the world will
+give, namely, his conscious guilt.</p>
+
+<p>After leaving upon your minds that presumption,
+not to operate without proof, but to operate along
+with the proof, (though, I take it, there are some presumptions
+that go the full length of proof,) I shall
+not press it to the length to which I think it would go,
+but use it only as auxiliary, assisting, and compurgatory
+of all the other evidences that go along with it.</p>
+
+<p>There is another circumstance which must come
+before your Lordships in this business. If you find
+that Mr. Hastings has received the two lac of rupees,
+then you will find that he was guilty, without color or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">{268}</a></span>
+pretext of any kind whatever, of acting in violation of
+his covenant, of acting in violation of the laws, and
+all the rules of honor and conscience. If you find
+that he has taken the lac and a half, which he admits,
+but which he justifies under the pretence of an entertainment,
+I shall beg to say something to your Lordships
+concerning that justification.</p>
+
+<p>The justification set up is, that he went up from
+Calcutta to Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three
+months, and that there an allowance was made to him
+of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an entertainment.
+Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine,
+if there was such a custom, whether or no his covenant
+justifies his conformity with it. I remember
+Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland, says
+it is no law, but a lewd custom. A governor is to
+conform himself to the laws of his own country, to
+the stipulations of those that employ him, and not to
+the lewd customs of any other country: those customs
+are more honored in the breach than in the observance.
+If Mr. Hastings was really feasted and entertained
+with the magnificence of the country, if there
+was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to
+amuse him in his leisure hours, if he was feasted with
+the hookah and every other luxury, there is something
+to be said for him, though I should not justify
+a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner.
+But in fact here was no entertainment that could
+amount to such a sum; and he has nowhere proved
+the existence of such a custom.</p>
+
+<p>But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is
+more honored in the breach than in the observance,
+that custom is capable of being abused to the grossest
+extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">{269}</a></span>
+Lordships' minds in such a manner that I hardly need
+detail the circumstances of it. What! two hundred
+pounds to be given to a man for one day's entertainment?
+If there is an end of it there, it ruins nobody,
+and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt
+anybody; but when that entertainment is renewed
+day after day for three months, it is no longer a compliment
+to the man, but a great pecuniary advantage,
+and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a
+grievous, an intolerable burden. It then becomes a
+matter of the most serious and dreadful extortion,
+tending to hinder the people who give it not only
+from giving entertainment, but from having bread to
+eat themselves. Therefore, if any such entertainment
+was customary, the custom was perverted by the
+abuse of its being continued for three months together.
+It was longer than Ahasuerus's feast. There is
+a feast of reason and a flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings's
+feast was a feast of avarice and a flow of money.
+No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table:
+he continued to sit at that table for three months.</p>
+
+<p>In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take
+any allowance above 400<i>l.</i>, and forbidden to take
+any allowance above 100<i>l.</i>, without the knowledge,
+consent, and approbation of the Council to which he
+belongs. Now he takes 16,000<i>l.</i>, not only without
+the consent of the Council, but without their knowledge,&mdash;without
+the knowledge of any other human
+being: it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret
+recesses of his own black agents and confidants, and
+those of Munny Begum. Why is it a secret? Hospitality,
+generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of
+display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them;
+they want to be shown to the world, not concealed.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">{270}</a></span>
+The concealment of acts of charity is what makes
+them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to
+whom there can be no concealment; but acts of corruption
+are kept secret, not to keep them secret from
+the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the
+secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to
+keep them secret from the eyes of mankind, whose
+opinions he does fear, in the immediate effect of
+them, and in their future consequences. Therefore
+he had but one reason to keep this so dark and profound
+a secret, till it was dragged into day in spite
+of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret, but his
+knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the
+light. Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard
+of that derives from its retirement any part of its
+lustre; the others require to be spread abroad in the
+face of day. Such candles should not be hid under
+a bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light
+up when they mean to express great joy and great
+magnificence for a great event, their very splendor is
+a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light
+up this whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all
+the world to partake them. Mr. Hastings feasts in
+the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr. Hastings
+feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over
+the dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country,
+who drag their prey into the jungles. Nobody
+knows of it, till he is brought into judgment for the
+flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of
+Tantalus; it is an entertainment from which the sun
+hid his light.</p>
+
+<p>But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was
+Mr. Hastings upon a visit? No: he was executing
+a commission for the Company in a village in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">{271}</a></span>
+neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon
+a visit to the Nabob. On the contrary, he was upon
+something that might be more properly called a
+<i>visitation</i>. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine
+or a pestilence on a country; he came there to
+do the severest act in the world,&mdash;as he himself expresses,
+to take the bread, literally the bread, from
+above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to
+reduce them to a situation which no man can hear
+of without shuddering. When you consider, that,
+while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing
+fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry
+of the country, you will not conceive it to be any
+extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not upon
+a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could
+be executed, both to the persons who executed and
+the people who suffered from it.</p>
+
+<p>It is mentioned and supposed in the observations
+upon this case, though no circumstances relative to
+the persons or the nature of the visit are stated, that
+this expense was something which he might have
+charged to the Company and did not. It is first supposed
+by the learned counsel who made the observation,
+that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged
+thing; then, that he had not charged the
+Company anything for it. I have looked into that
+business. In the first place, I see no such custom;
+and if there was such a custom, there was the most
+abusive misemployment of it. I find that in that
+year there was paid from the Company's cash account
+to the Governor's travelling charges (and he
+had no other journey at that end of the year)
+thirty thousand rupees, which is about 3,000<i>l.</i>; and
+when we consider that he was in the receipt of near<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">{272}</a></span>
+30,000<i>l.</i>, besides the nuzzers, which amount to several
+thousand a year, and that he is allowed 3,000<i>l.</i>
+by the Company for his travelling expenses, is it
+right to charge upon the miserable people whom he
+was defrauding of their bread 16,000<i>l.</i> for his entertainment?</p>
+
+<p>I find that there are also other great sums relative
+to the expenses of the Committee of Circuit, which
+he was upon. How much of them is applicable to
+him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three
+thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not
+above a day or two's journey to Moorshedabad, and
+by his taking his road by Kishenagur he could not
+be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he
+must live somewhere; and he was actually paid three
+thousand pounds for travelling charges for three
+months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand
+pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.</p>
+
+<p>If you once admit that a man for an entertainment
+shall take sixteen thousand pounds, there never will
+be any bribe, any corruption, that may not be justified:
+the corrupt man has nothing to do but to make a
+visit, and then that very moment he may receive any
+sum under the name of this entertainment; that moment
+his covenants are annulled, his bonds and obligations
+destroyed, the act of Parliament repealed,
+and it is no longer bribery, it is no longer corruption,
+it is no longer peculation; it is nothing but thanks
+for obliging inquiries, and a compliment according to
+the mode of the country, by which he makes his fortune.</p>
+
+<p>What hinders him from renewing that visit? If
+you support this distinction, you will teach the Governor-General,
+instead of attending his business at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">{273}</a></span>
+the capital, to make journeys through the country,
+putting every great man of that country under the
+most ruinous contributions; and as this custom is in
+no manner confined to the Governor-General, but
+extends, as it must upon that principle, to every
+servant of the Company in any station whatever,
+then, if each of them were to receive an entertainment,
+I will venture to say that the greatest ravage
+of an hostile army could not, indeed, destroy the
+country more entirely than the Company's servants
+by such visits.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will see that there are grounds for
+suspicion, not supported with the same evidence, but
+with evidence of great probability, that there was another
+entertainment given at the expense of another
+lac of rupees; and there is also great probability that
+Mr. Hastings received two lac of rupees, and Mr.
+Middleton another lac. The whole of the Nabob's
+revenues would have been exhausted by these two
+men, if they had stayed there a whole year: and they
+stayed three months. Nothing will be secured from
+the Company's servants, so long as they can find,
+under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt
+custom of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt
+practice. The excuse is worse than the thing
+itself. I leave it, then, with your judgment to decide
+whether you will or not, if this justification comes
+before you, establish a principle which would put all
+Bengal in a worse situation than an hostile army could
+do, and ruin all the Company's servants by sending
+them from their duty to go round robbing the whole
+country under the name of entertainments.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have now done with this first part,&mdash;namely,
+the presumption arising from his refusal to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">{274}</a></span>
+make any defence, on pretence that the charge brought
+against him might be referred to a court of justice,
+and from the non-performance of his promise to give
+satisfaction to his employers,&mdash;and when that pretence
+was removed, still refusing to give that satisfaction,
+though suffering as he did under a load of infamy
+and obloquy, and though urged to give it by persons
+of the greatest character. I have stated this to your
+Lordships as the strongest presumption of guilt, and
+that this presumption is strengthened by the very
+excuse which he fabricated for a part of his bribes,
+when he knew that the proof of them was irresistible,
+and that this excuse is a high aggravation of his
+guilt,&mdash;that this excuse is not supported by law,
+that it is not supported by reason, that it does not
+stand with his covenant, but carries with it a manifest
+proof of corruption, and that it cannot be justified
+by any principle, custom, or usage whatever. My
+Lords, I say I have done with the presumption arising
+from his conduct as it regarded the fact specifically
+charged against him, and with respect to the relation
+he stood in to the Court of Directors, and from the
+attempt he made to justify that conduct. I believe
+your Lordships will think both one and the other
+strong presumptions of his criminality, and of his
+knowledge that the act he was doing was criminal.</p>
+
+<p>I have another fact to lay before your Lordships,
+which affords a further presumption of his guilt, and
+which will show the mischievous consequences of it;
+and I trust your Lordships will not blame me for
+going a little into it. Your Lordships know we
+charge that the appointment of such a woman as
+Munny Begum to the guardianship of the Nabob, to
+the superintendency of the civil justice of the coun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">{275}</a></span>try,
+and to the representation of the whole government,
+was made for no other purpose than that
+through this corrupt woman sixteen thousand pounds
+a year, the whole tattered remains of the Nabob's
+grandeur, might be a prey to Mr. Hastings: it could
+be for no other. Now your Lordships would imagine,
+that, after this, knowing he was already grievously suspected,
+he would have abstained from giving any further
+ground for suspicion by a repetition of the same
+acts through the same person; as no other reason
+could be furnished for such acts, done directly contrary
+to the order of his superiors, but that he was
+actuated by the influence of bribery. Your Lordships
+would imagine, that, when this Munny Begum
+was removed upon a charge of corruption, Mr. Hastings
+would have left her quiet in tranquil obscurity,
+and that he would no longer have attempted to elevate
+her into a situation which furnished against
+himself so much disgrace and obloquy to himself,
+and concerning which he stood charged with a direct
+and positive act of bribery. Your Lordships well
+know, that, upon the deposition of that great magistrate,
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, this woman was appointed
+to supply his place. The Governor-General and
+Council (the majority of them being then Sir John
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis) had
+made a provisional arrangement for the time, until
+they should be authorized to fill up the place in a
+proper manner. Soon after, there came from Europe
+a letter expressing the satisfaction which the Court
+of Directors had received in the acquittal of Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n, expressing a regard for his character, an
+high opinion of his abilities, and a great disposition
+to make him some recompense for his extreme suffer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">{276}</a></span>ings;
+and accordingly they ordered that he should be
+again employed. Having no exact ideas of the state
+of employments in that country, they made a mistake
+in the specific employment for which they
+named him; for, being a Mahometan, and the head
+of the Mahometans in that country, he was named to
+an office which must be held by a Gentoo. But the
+majority I have just named, who never endeavored
+by any base and delusive means to fly from their
+duty, or not to execute it at all, because they were
+desired to execute it in a way in which they could
+not execute it, followed the spirit of the order; and
+finding that Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, before his imprisonment
+and trial, had been in possession of another
+employment, they followed the spirit of the instructions
+of the Directors and replaced him in that employment:
+by which means there was an end put
+to the government of Munny Begum, the country
+reverted to its natural state, and men of the first
+rank in the country were placed in the first situations
+in it. The seat of judicature was filled with wisdom,
+gravity, and learning, and Munny Begum sunk into
+that situation into which a woman who had been
+engaged in the practices that she had been engaged
+in naturally would sink at her time of life. Mr.
+Hastings resisted this appointment. He trifled with
+the Company's orders on account of the letter of
+them, and endeavored to disobey the spirit of them.
+However, the majority overbore him; they put Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n into his former situation; and as
+a proof and seal to the honor and virtue of their
+character, there was not a breath of suspicion that
+they had any corrupt motive for this conduct. They
+were odious to many of the India House here; they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">{277}</a></span>
+were odious to that corrupt influence which had
+begun and was going on to ruin India; but in the
+face of all this odium, they gave the appointment to
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, because the act contained in
+itself its own justification. Mr. Hastings made a violent
+protest against it, and resisted it to the best
+of his power, always in favor of Munny Begum, as
+your Lordships will see. Mr. Hastings sent this protest
+to the Directors; but the Directors, as soon as
+the case came before them, acknowledged their error,
+and praised the majority of the Council, Sir John
+Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, for the
+wise and honorable part they had taken upon the occasion,
+by obeying the spirit and not the letter,&mdash;commended
+the act they had done,&mdash;confirmed Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n in his place,&mdash;and to prevent
+that great man from being any longer the sport of
+fortune, any longer the play of avarice between corrupt
+governors and dancing-girls, they gave him the
+pledged faith of the Company that he should remain
+in that office as long as his conduct deserved their
+protection: it was a good and an honorable tenure.
+My Lords, soon afterwards there happened two
+lamentable deaths,&mdash;first of Colonel Monson, afterwards
+of General Clavering. Thus Mr. Hastings
+was set loose: there was an inspection and a watch
+upon his conduct, and no more. He was then just
+in the same situation in which he had stood in 1772.
+What does he do? Even just what he did in 1772.
+He deposes Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, notwithstanding
+the Company's orders, notwithstanding their pledged
+faith; he turns him out, and makes a distribution of
+two lacs and a half of rupees, the salary of that great
+magistrate, in the manner I will now show your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">{278}</a></span>
+Lordships. He made an arrangement consisting of
+three main parts: the first was with regard to the
+women, the next with regard to the magistracy, the
+last with regard to the officers of state of the household.</p>
+
+<p>The first person that occurred to Mr. Hastings was
+Munny Begum; and he gave her, not out of that part
+of the Nabob's allowance which was to support the
+seraglio, but out of the allowance of this very magistrate,
+just as if such a thing had been done here out
+of the salary of a Lord Chancellor or a Lord Chief-Justice,&mdash;out
+of these two lacs and a half of rupees,
+that is, about twenty-four or twenty-five thousand
+pounds a year, he ordered an allowance to be made
+to Munny Begum of 72,000 rupees per annum, or
+7,200<i>l.</i> a year; for the Nabob's own mother, whom
+he thrust, as usual, into a subordinate situation, he
+made an allowance of 3,000<i>l.</i>; to the Sudder ul Huk
+Kh&acirc;n, which is, translated into English, the Lord
+Chief-Justice, he allowed the same sum that he did
+to the dancing-girl, (which was very liberal in him,
+and I am rather astonished to find it,) namely,
+7,200<i>l.</i> a year. And who do you think was the next
+public officer he appointed? It was the Rajah Gourdas,
+the son of Nundcomar, and whose testimony he
+has attempted both before and since this occasion to
+weaken. To him, however, he gave an employment
+of 6,000<i>l.</i> a year, as if to make through the son some
+compensation to the manes of the father. And in
+this manner he distributes, with a wild and liberal
+profusion, between magistrates and dancing-girls, the
+whole spoil of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, notwithstanding
+the Company's direct and positive assurance given
+to him. Everything was done, at the same time, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">{279}</a></span>
+put, as it was before, into the hands of this dancing-girl
+the miserable Nabob's whole family; and that
+the fund for corruption might be large enough, he
+did not take the money for this dancing-girl out of
+the Nabob's separate revenue, of which he and the
+dancing-girl had the private disposal between them.</p>
+
+<p>Now upon what pretence did he do all this? The
+Nabob had represented to Mr. Hastings that he was
+now of age,&mdash;that he was an independent, sovereign
+prince,&mdash;that, being independent and sovereign in
+his situation, and being of full age, he had a right to
+manage his own concerns himself; and therefore he
+desired to be admitted to that management. And,
+indeed, my Lords, ostensibly, and supposing him to
+have been this independent prince, and that the
+Company had no authority or had never exercised
+any authority over him through Mr. Hastings, there
+might be a good deal said in favor of this request.
+But what was the real state of the case? The Nabob
+was a puppet in the hands of Mr. Hastings and Munny
+Begum; and you will find, upon producing the
+correspondence, that he confesses that she was the
+ultimate object and end of this request.</p>
+
+<p>I think this correspondence, wherein a son is made
+to petition, in his own name, for the elevation of a
+dancing-girl, his step-mother, above himself and everybody
+else, will appear to your Lordships such a curiosity
+as, I believe, is not to be found in the state correspondence
+of the whole world. The Nabob begins
+thus:&mdash;"The excellency of that policy by which her
+Highness the Begum" (meaning Munny Begum)
+"(may her shadow be far extended!) formerly, during
+the time of her administration, transacted the
+affairs of the nizamut in the very best and most ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">{280}</a></span>vantageous
+manner, was, by means of the delusions of
+enemies disguised under the appearance of friends,
+hidden from me. Having lately seriously reflected
+on my own affairs, I am convinced that it was the
+effect of maternal affection, was highly proper, and
+for my interest,&mdash;and that, except the said Begum is
+again invested with the administration, the regulation
+and prosperity of this family, which is in fact her
+own, cannot be effected. For this cause, from the
+time of her suspension until now, I have passed my
+time, and do so still, in great trouble and uneasiness.
+As all affairs, and particularly the happiness and
+prosperity of this family, depend on your pleasure, I
+now trouble you, in hopes that you, likewise concurring
+in this point, will be so kind as to write in fit
+and proper terms to her Highness the Begum, that
+she will always, as formerly, employ her authority in
+the administration of the nizamut and the affairs of
+this family."</p>
+
+<p>This letter, my Lords, was received upon the 23d
+of August; and your Lordships may observe two
+things in it: first, that, some way or other, this Nabob
+had been (as the fact was) made to express his
+desire of being released from his subjection to the
+Munny Begum, but that now he has got new lights,
+all the mists are gone, and he now finds that Munny
+Begum is not only the fittest person to govern
+him, but the whole country. This young man, whose
+incapacity is stated, and never denied, by Mr. Hastings,
+and by Lord Cornwallis, and by all the rest
+of the world who know him, begins to be charmed
+with the excellency of the policy of Munny Begum.
+Such is his violent impatience, such the impossibility
+of his existing an hour but under the govern<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">{281}</a></span>ment
+of Munny Begum, that he writes again on the
+25th of August, (he had really the impatience of a
+lover,) and within five days afterwards writes again,&mdash;so
+impatient, so anxious and jealous is this young
+man to be put under the government of an old dancing-woman.
+He is afraid lest Mr. Hastings should
+imagine that some sinister influence had prevailed
+upon him in so natural and proper a request. He
+says, "Knowing it for my interest and advantage
+that the administration of the affairs of the nizamut
+should be restored to her Highness the Munny Begum,
+I have already troubled you with my request,
+that, regarding my situation with an eye of favor,
+you will approve of this measure. I am credibly
+informed that some one of my enemies, from selfish
+views, has, for the purpose of oversetting this measure,
+written you that the said Begum procured from
+me by artifice the letter I wrote you on this subject.
+This causes me the greatest astonishment. Please to
+consider, that artifice and delusion are confined to
+cheats and impostors, and can never proceed from
+a person of such exalted rank, who is the head and
+patron of all the family of the deceased Nabob, my
+father,&mdash;and that to be deluded, being a proof of
+weakness and folly, can have no relation to me, except
+the inventor of this report considers me as void
+of understanding, and has represented me to the gentlemen
+as a blockhead and an idiot. God knows how
+harshly such expressions appear to me; but, as the
+truth or falsehood has not yet been fully ascertained,
+I have therefore suspended my demand of satisfaction.
+Should it be true, be so kind as to inform me
+of it, that the person may be made to answer for it."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is a very proper demand. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">{282}</a></span>
+Nabob is astonished at the suspicion, that such a
+woman as Munny Begum, whose trade in youth had
+been delusion, should be capable of deluding anybody.
+Astonishing it certainly was, that a woman who had
+been a deluder in youth should be suspected to be
+the same in old age, and that he, a young man,
+should be subject to her artifices. "They must suspect
+me to be a great blockhead," he says, "if a man
+of my rank is to be deluded." There he forgot
+that it is the unhappy privilege of great men to be
+cheated, to be deluded, much more than other persons;
+but he thought it so impossible in the case
+of Munny Begum, that he says, "Produce me the
+traitor that could suppose it possible for me to be deluded,
+when I call for this woman as the governor of
+the country. I demand satisfaction." I rather wonder
+that Mr. Hastings did not inform him who it was
+that had reported so gross and improbable a tale,
+and deliver him up to the fury of the Nabob.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings is absolutely besieged by him; for
+he receives another letter upon the 3d of September.
+Here are four letters following one another quick as
+post expresses with horns sounding before them. "Oh,
+I die, I perish, I sink, if Munny Begum is not put
+into the government of the country!&mdash;I therefore
+desire to have her put into the government of the
+country, and that you will not keep me longer in this
+painful suspense, but will be kindly pleased to write
+immediately to the Munny Begum, that she take on
+herself the administration of the affairs of the nizamut,
+which is, in fact, her own family, without the
+interference of any other person whatever: by this
+you will give me complete satisfaction." Here is a
+correspondence more like an amorous than a state<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">{283}</a></span>
+correspondence. What is this man so eager about,
+what in such a rage about, that he cannot endure
+the smallest delay of the post with common patience?
+Why, lest this old woman (who is not his mother, and
+with whom he had no other tie of blood) should not
+be made mistress of himself and the whole country!
+However, in a very few months afterwards he himself
+is appointed by Mr. Hastings to the government; and
+you may easily judge by the preceding letters who
+was to govern. It would be an affront to your Lordships'
+judgment to attempt to prove who was to govern,
+after he had desired to put the whole government
+of affairs into the hands of Munny Begum.</p>
+
+<p>Now, Munny Begum having obtained this salary,
+and being invested with this authority, and made in
+effect the total and entire governor of the country,
+as I have proved by the Nabob's letters, let us see
+the consequences of it; and then I desire to know
+whether your Lordships can believe that in all this
+haste, which, in fact, is Mr. Hastings's haste and impatience,
+(for we shall prove that the Nabob never did or
+could take a step but by his immediate orders and
+directions,)&mdash;whether your Lordships can believe that
+Mr. Hastings would incur all the odium attending
+such transactions, unless he had some corrupt consideration.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, very soon after these appointments were
+made, consisting of Munny Begum at the head of the
+affairs, the Lord Chief-Justice under her, and under
+her direction, and Rajah Gourdas as steward of the
+household, the first thing we hear is, just what your
+Lordships expect to hear upon such a case, that this
+unfortunate chief-justice, who was a man undoubtedly
+of but a poor, low disposition, but, I believe, a per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">{284}</a></span>fectly
+honest, perfectly well-intentioned man, found it
+absolutely impossible for him to execute his office under
+the direction of Munny Begum; and accordingly,
+in the month of September following, he sends a
+complaint to Mr. Hastings, "that certain bad men
+had gained an ascendency over the Nabob's temper, by
+whose instigation he acts." After complaining of the
+slights he receives from the Nabob, he adds, "Thus
+they cause the Nabob to treat me, sometimes with indignity,
+at others with kindness, just as they think
+proper to advise him: their view is, that, by compelling
+me to displeasure at such unworthy treatment,
+they may force me either to relinquish my station, or
+to join with them, and act by their advice, and appoint
+creatures of their recommendation to the different
+offices, from which they might draw profit to themselves."
+This is followed by another letter, in which
+he shows who those corrupt men were that had gained
+the ascendency over the Nabob's temper,&mdash;namely,
+the eunuchs of Munny Begum: one of them her
+direct instrument in bribery with Mr. Hastings.
+What you would expect from such a state of things
+accordingly happened. Everything in the course of
+justice was confounded; all official responsibility destroyed;
+and nothing but a scene of forgery, peculation,
+and knavery of every kind and description prevailed
+through the country, and totally disturbed all
+order and justice in it. He says, "The Begum's ministers,
+before my arrival, with the advice of their
+counsellors, caused the Nabob to sign a receipt, in
+consequence of which they received at two different
+times near fifty thousand rupees, in the name of the
+officers of the Adawlut, Foujdarry, &amp;c., from the
+Company's circar; and having drawn up an account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">{285}</a></span>-current
+in the manner they wished, they got the Nabob
+to sign it, and then sent it to me." In the same
+letter he asserts "that these people have the Nabob
+entirely in their power."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you see here Mr. Hastings enabling the
+corrupt eunuchs of this wicked old woman to draw
+upon the Company's treasury at their pleasure, under
+forged papers of the Nabob, for just such moneys as
+they please, under the name and pretence of giving
+it to the officers of justice, but which they distribute
+among themselves as they think fit. This complaint
+was soon followed by another, and they furnish, first,
+the strongest presumptive proof of the corrupt motives
+of Mr. Hastings; and, secondly, they show the horrible
+mischievous effects of his conduct upon the country.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence of the first complaint, Mr. Hastings
+directs this independent Nabob not to concern himself
+any longer with the Foujdarry. The Nabob, who
+had before declared that the superintendence of all
+the offices belonged to him, and was to be executed
+by himself, or under his orders, instantly obeys
+Mr. Hastings, and declares he will not interfere in
+the business of the courts any more. Your Lordships
+will observe further that the complaint is not against
+the Nabob, but against the creatures and the menial
+servants of Munny Begum: and yet it is the Nabob
+he forbids to interfere in this business; of the others
+he takes no notice; and this is a strong proof of the
+corrupt dealings of Mr. Hastings with this woman.
+When the whole country was fallen into confusion
+under the administration of this woman, and under
+her corrupt ministers, men base-born and employed
+in the basest offices, (the men of the household train
+of the women of rank in that country are of that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">{286}</a></span>
+description,) he writes to the Nabob again, and himself
+confesses the mischiefs that had arisen from his
+corrupt arrangements.</p>
+
+<p>"At your Excellency's request, I sent Sudder ul
+Huk Kh&acirc;n to take on him the administration of the
+affairs of the Adawlut and Foujdarry, and hoped by
+that means not only to have given satisfaction to
+your Excellency, but that through his abilities and
+experience these affairs would have been conducted
+in such manner as to have secured the peace of the
+country and the happiness of the people; and it is
+with the greatest concern I learn that this measure is
+so far from being attended with the expected advantages,
+that the affairs both of the Foujdarry and Adawlut
+are in the greatest confusion imaginable, and daily
+robberies and murders are perpetrated throughout
+the country. This is evidently owing to the want of
+a proper authority in the person appointed to superintend
+them. I therefore addressed your Excellency
+on the importance and delicacy of the affairs in question,
+and of the necessity of lodging full power in
+the hands of the person chosen to administer them.
+In reply to which your Excellency expressed sentiments
+coincident with mine. Notwithstanding which,
+your dependants and people, actuated by selfish and
+avaricious views, have by their interference so impeded
+the business as to throw the whole country into a
+state of confusion, from which nothing can retrieve it
+but an unlimited power lodged in the hands of the
+superintendent. I therefore request that your Excellency
+will give the strictest injunctions to all your
+dependants not to interfere in any manner with any
+matter relative to the affairs of the Adawlut and
+Foujdarry, and that you will yourself relinquish all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">{287}</a></span>
+interference therein, and leave them entirely to the
+management of Sudder ul Huk Kh&acirc;n. This is absolutely
+necessary to restore the country to a state of
+tranquillity."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, what evidence do we produce to your
+Lordships of the consequences of Mr. Hastings's corrupt
+measures? His own. He here gives you the
+state into which the country was thrown by the criminal
+interference of the wicked woman whom he had
+established in power, totally superseding the regular
+judicial authority of the country, and throwing everything
+into confusion. As usual, there is such irregularity
+in his conduct, and his crimes are so multiplied,
+that all the contrivances of ingenuity are unable to
+cover them. Now and then he comes and betrays himself;
+and here he confesses you his own weakness, and
+the effects of his own corruption: he had appointed
+Munny Begum to this office of power, he dare not
+say a word to her upon her abuse of it, but he lays
+the whole upon the Nabob. When the Chief-Justice
+complains that these crimes were the consequence of
+Munny Begum's interference, and were committed
+by her creatures, why did he not say to the Nabob,
+"The Begum must not interfere; the Begum's eunuchs
+must not interfere"? He dared not: because
+that woman had concealed all the bribes but one from
+public notice to gratify him; she and Yatibar Ali
+Kh&acirc;n, her minister, who had the principal share in
+this destruction of justice and perversion of all the
+principal functions of government, had it in their
+power to discover the whole. Mr. Hastings was
+obliged, in consequence of that concealment, to support
+her and to support him. Every evil principle
+was at work. He bought a mercenary silence to pay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">{288}</a></span>
+the same back to them. It was a wicked silence, the
+concealment of their common guilt. There was at
+once a corrupt gratitude operating mutually by a corrupt
+influence on both, and a corrupt fear influencing
+the mind of Mr. Hastings, which did not permit him
+to put an end to this scene of disorder and confusion,
+bought at the expense of twenty-four thousand pounds
+a year to the Company. You will hereafter see what
+use he makes of the evidence of Yatibar Ali Kh&acirc;n,
+and of this woman, for concealing their guilt.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will observe that the virtuous majority,
+whose reign was but short, and two of whom
+died of grief and vexation under the impediments
+which they met with from the corruptions and oppositions
+of Mr. Hastings, (their indirect murderer,&mdash;for
+it is well known to the world that their hearts
+were thus broken,) put their conduct out of all suspicion.
+For they ordered an exact account to be
+kept by Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n,&mdash;though, certainly,
+if any person in the country could be trusted, he,
+upon his character, might; but they did not trust
+him, because they knew the Company did not suffer
+them to trust any man: they ordered an exact account
+to be kept by him of the Nabob's expenses,
+which finally must be the Company's expenses; they
+ordered the account to be sent down yearly, to be
+controlled, if necessary, whilst the means of control
+existed.&mdash;What was Mr. Hastings's conduct? He
+did not give the persons whom he appointed any
+order to produce any account, though their character
+and circumstances were such as made an account
+ten thousand times more necessary from them than
+from those from whom it had been in former times
+by the Company strictly exacted. So that his not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">{289}</a></span>
+ordering any account to be given of the money that
+was to be expended leaves no doubt that the appointment
+of Munny Begum was in pursuance of his old
+system of bribery, and that he maintained her in office,
+to the subversion of public justice, for the purpose
+of robbing, and of continuing in the practice of
+robbing, the country.</p>
+
+<p>But though this continued longer than was for the
+good of the country, yet it did not continue absolutely
+and relatively long; because the Court of Directors,
+as soon as they heard of this iniquitous appointment,
+which glared upon them in all the light of its infamy,
+immediately wrote the strongest, the most decided,
+and the most peremptory censure upon him, attributing
+his acts, every one of them, to the same causes to
+which I attribute them. As a proof that the Court
+of Directors saw the thing in the very light in which
+I represent it to your Lordships, and indeed in which
+every one must see it, you will find that they reprobate
+all his idle excuses,&mdash;that they reprobate all the
+actors in the scene,&mdash;that they consider everything
+to have been done, not by the Nabob, but by himself,&mdash;that
+the object of the appointment of Munny Begum
+was <i>money</i>, and that the consequence of that appointment
+was the robbery of the Nabob's treasury.
+"We by no means approve your late proceedings,
+on the application of the Nabob Mobarek ul Dowlah
+for the removal of the Naib Subahdar. The requisition
+of Mobarek ul Dowlah was improper and
+unfriendly; because he must have known that the
+late appointment of Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to the office
+of Naib Subahdar had been marked with the
+Company's special approbation, and that the Court
+of Directors had assured him of their favor so long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">{290}</a></span>
+as a firm attachment to the Company's interest and a
+proper discharge of the duties of his station should
+render him worthy of their protection. We therefore
+repeat our declaration, that to require the dismission
+of a prime-minister thus circumstanced, without
+producing the smallest proof of his infidelity to
+the Company, or venturing to charge him with one
+instance of maladministration in the discharge of his
+public duty, was improper and inconsistent with the
+friendship subsisting between the Nabob of Bengal
+and the Company." And further on they say,&mdash;"The
+Nabob having intimated that he had repeatedly
+stated the trouble and uneasiness which he had suffered
+from the naibship of the nizamut being vested
+in Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, we observe one of the members
+of your board desired the Nabob's repeated letters
+on the subject might be read, but this reasonable
+request was overruled, on a plea of saving the board's
+time, which we can by no means admit as a sufficient
+objection. The Nabob's letters of the 25th and 30th
+August, of the 3d September and 17th November,
+leave us no doubt of the true design of this extraordinary
+business being to bring forward Munny Begum,
+and again to invest her with improper power and influence,
+notwithstanding our former declaration, that
+so great a part of the Nabob's allowance had been
+embezzled or misapplied under her superintendence."</p>
+
+<p>At present I do not think it necessary, because it
+would be doing more than enough, it would be slaying
+the slain, to show your Lordships what Mr. Hastings's
+motives were in acting against the sense of the
+East India Company, appointed by an act of Parliament
+to control him,&mdash;that he did it for a corrupt
+purpose, that all his pretences were false and fraudu<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">{291}</a></span>lent,
+and that he had his own corrupt views in the
+whole of the proceeding. But in the statement which
+I have given of this matter, I beg your Lordships
+to observe the instruments with which Mr. Hastings
+acts. The great men of that country, and particularly
+the Subahdar himself, the Nabob, are and is in so
+equivocal a situation, that it afforded him two bolting-holes,
+by which he is enabled to resist the authority
+of the Company, and exercise an arbitrary authority
+of his own: for, though the Nabob has the titles of
+high sovereignty, he is the lowest of all dependants;
+he appears to be the master of the country,&mdash;he is a
+pensioner of the Company's government.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. Hastings wants him to obey and answer
+his corrupt purposes, he finds him in the character of
+a pensioner: when he wants his authority to support
+him in opposition to the authority of the Company,
+immediately he invests him with high sovereign powers,
+and he dare not execute the orders of the Company
+for fear of doing some act that will make him
+odious in the eyes of God and man. We see how he
+appointed all officers for him, and forbade his interference
+in all affairs. When the Company see the impropriety
+and the guilt of these acts, and order him
+to rescind them, and appoint again Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n, he declares he will not, that he cannot do
+it in justice, but that he will consent to send him the
+order of the Company, but without backing it with
+any order of the board: which, supposing even there
+had been no private communication, was, in other
+words, commanding him to disobey it. So this poor
+man, who a short time before was at the feet of Mr.
+Hastings, whom Mr. Hastings declared to be a pageant,
+and swore in a court of justice that he was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">{292}</a></span>
+but a pageant, and followed that affidavit with long
+declarations in Council that he was a pageant in sovereignty,
+and ought in policy ever to be held out as
+such,&mdash;this man he sets up in opposition to the
+Company, and refuses to appoint Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n to the office which was guarantied to him by
+the express faith of the Company, pledged to his support.
+Will any man tell me that this resistance,
+under such base, though plausible pretences, could
+spring from any other cause than a resolution of persisting
+systematically in his course of corruption and
+bribery through Munny Begum?</p>
+
+<p>But there is another circumstance that puts this in
+a stronger light. He opposes the Nabob's mock authority
+to the authority of the Company, and leaves
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n unemployed, because, as he
+says, he cannot in justice execute orders from the
+Company (though they are his undoubted masters)
+contrary to the rights of the Nabob. You see what
+the rights of the Nabob were: the rights of the Nabob
+were, to be governed by Munny Begum and her
+scandalous ministers. But, however, we now see
+him exalted to be an independent sovereign; he defies
+the Company at the head of their armies and
+their treasury; that name that makes all India shake
+was defied by one of its pensioners. My Lords, human
+greatness is an unstable thing. This man, so
+suddenly exalted, was as soon depressed; and the
+manner of his depression is as curious as that of his
+exaltation by Mr. Hastings, and will tend to show
+you the man most clearly.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Francis, whose conduct all along was directed
+by no other principles than those which were in conformity
+with the plan adopted by himself and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">{293}</a></span>
+virtuous colleagues, namely, an entire obedience to
+the laws of his country, and who constantly had
+opposed Mr. Hastings, upon principles of honor, and
+principles of obedience to the authority of the Company
+under which he acted, had never contended for
+any one thing, in any way, or in any instance, but
+obedience to them, and had constantly asserted that
+Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n ought to be put into employment.
+Mr. Hastings as constantly opposed him; and
+the reason he gave for it was, that it was against
+the direct rights of the Nabob, and that they were
+rights so sacred that they could not be infringed
+even by the sovereign authority of the Company ordering
+him to do it. He had so great an aversion
+to the least subtraction of the Nabob's right, that,
+though expressly commanded by the Court of Directors,
+he would not suffer Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n to be
+invested with his office under the Company's authority.
+The Nabob was too sovereign, too supreme, for
+him to do it. But such is the fate of human grandeur,
+that a whimsical event reduced the Nabob to his
+state of pageant again, and made him the mere subject
+of&mdash;you will see whom. Mr. Hastings found he
+was so embarrassed by his disobedience to the spirit
+of the orders of the Company, and by the various
+wild projects he had formed, as to make it necessary
+for him, even though he had a majority in the Council,
+to gain over at any price Mr. Francis. Mr.
+Francis, frightened by the same miserable situation
+of affairs, (for this happened at a most dangerous period,&mdash;the
+height of the Mahratta war,) was willing
+likewise to give up his opposition to Mr. Hastings, to
+suspend the execution of many rightful things, and to
+concede them to the public necessity. Accordingly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">{294}</a></span>
+he agreed to terms with Mr. Hastings. But what
+was the price of that concession? Any base purpose,
+any desertion of public duty? No: all that he desired
+of Mr. Hastings was, that he should obey the
+orders of the Company; and among other acts of
+the obedience required was this, that Mahomed Reza
+Kh&acirc;n should be put into his office.</p>
+
+<p>You have heard how Mr. Hastings opposed the
+order of the Company, and on what account he opposed
+it. On the 1st of September he sent an order
+to the Nabob, now become his subject, to give up
+this office to Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n: an act which he
+had before represented as a dethroning of the Nabob.
+The order went on the 1st of September, and on the
+3d this great and mighty prince, whom all earth
+could not move from the assertion of his rights, gives
+them all up, and Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n is invested
+with them. So there all his pretences were gone.
+It is plain that what had been done before was for
+Munny Begum, and that what he now gave up was
+from necessity: and it shows that the Nabob was the
+meanest of his servants; for in truth he ate his daily
+bread out of the hands of Mr. Hastings, through
+Munny Begum.</p>
+
+<p>Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n was now invested again with
+his office; but such was the treachery of Mr. Hastings,
+that, though he wrote to the Nabob that this
+was done in consequence of the orders of the Company,
+he did clandestinely, according to his usual
+mode, assure the Nabob that Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n
+should not hold the place longer than till he heard
+from England. He then wrote him another letter,
+that he should hold it no longer than while he submitted
+to his present necessity, (thus giving up to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">{295}</a></span>
+his colleague what he refused to the Company,) and
+engaged, privately, that he would dismiss Mahomed
+Reza Kh&acirc;n again. And accordingly, the moment he
+thought Mr. Francis was not in a condition to give
+him trouble any longer, that moment he again turned
+out Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n from that general superintendence
+of affairs which the Company gave him,
+and deposed him as a minister, leaving him only a
+very confined authority as a magistrate.</p>
+
+<p>All these changes, no less than four great revolutions,
+if I may so call them, were made by Mr. Hastings
+for his own corrupt purposes. This is the manner
+in which Mr. Hastings has played with the most
+sacred objects that man ever had a dealing with:
+with the government, with the justice, with the order,
+with the dignity, with the nobility of a great country:
+he played with them to satisfy his own wicked and
+corrupt purposes through the basest instrument.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, I have done with these presumptions
+of corruption with Munny Begum, and have
+shown that it is not a slight crime, but that it is
+attended with a breach of public faith, with a breach
+of his orders, with a breach of the whole English government,
+and the destruction of the native government,
+of the police, the order, the safety, the security,
+and the justice of the country,&mdash;and that all these
+are much concerned in this cause. Therefore the
+Commons stand before the face of the world, and say,
+We have brought a cause, a great cause, a cause
+worthy the Commons of England to prosecute, and
+worthy the Lords to judge and determine upon.</p>
+
+<p>I have now nothing further to state than what the
+consequences are of Mr. Hastings taking bribes,&mdash;that
+Mr. Hastings's taking of bribes is not only his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">{296}</a></span>
+own corruption, but the incurable corruption of the
+whole service. I will show, first, that he was named
+in 1773 to put an end to that corruption. I will
+show that he did not,&mdash;that he knowingly and willingly
+connived at it,&mdash;and that that connivance was
+the principal cause of all the disorders that have hitherto
+prevailed in that country. I will show you that
+he positively refused to obey the Company's order
+to inquire into and to correct the corruptions that
+prevailed in that country; next, that he established
+an avowed system of connivance, in order to gain
+over everything that was corrupt in the country;
+and that, lastly, to secure it, he gave up all the
+prosecutions, and enervated and took away the sole
+arm left to the Company for the assertion of authority
+and the preservation of good morals and purity in
+their service.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is a letter, in the year 1773, in
+which the Court of Directors had, upon his own
+representation, approved some part of his conduct.
+He is charmed with their approbation; he promises
+the greatest things; but I believe your Lordships
+will see, from the manner in which he proceeds at
+that very instant, that a more deliberate system, for
+not only being corrupt himself, but supporting corruption
+in others, never was exhibited in any public
+paper.</p>
+
+<p>"While I indulge the pleasure which I receive
+from the past successes of my endeavors, I own I
+cannot refrain from looking back with a mixture of
+anxiety on the omissions by which I am sensible I
+may since have hazarded the diminution of your esteem.
+All my letters addressed to your Honorable
+Court, and to the Secret Committee, repeat the stron<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">{297}</a></span>gest
+promises of prosecuting the inquiries into the conduct
+of your servants which you had been pleased to
+commit particularly to my charge. You will readily
+perceive that I must have been sincere in those declarations;
+since it would have argued great indiscretion
+to have made them, had I foreseen my inability
+to perform them. I find myself now under the disagreeable
+necessity of avowing that inability; at the
+same time I will boldly take upon me to affirm,
+that, on whomsoever you might have delegated that
+charge, and by whatever powers it might have been
+accompanied, it would have been sufficient to occupy
+the entire attention of those who were intrusted with
+it, and, even with all the aids of leisure and authority,
+would have proved ineffectual. I dare appeal to the
+public records, to the testimony of those who have
+opportunities of knowing me, and even to the detail
+which the public voice can report of the past acts of
+this government, that my time has been neither idly
+nor uselessly employed: yet such are the cares and
+embarrassments of this various state, that, although
+much may be done, much more, even in matters of
+moment, must necessarily remain neglected. To select
+from the miscellaneous heap which each day's exigencies
+present to our choice those points on which
+the general welfare of your affairs most essentially
+depends, to provide expedients for future advantages
+and guard against probable evils, are all that your administration
+can faithfully promise to perform for your
+service with their united labors most diligently exerted.
+They cannot look back without sacrificing the
+objects of their immediate duty, which are those of
+your interests, to endless researches, which can produce
+no real good, and may expose your affairs to all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">{298}</a></span>
+the ruinous consequences of personal malevolence,
+both here and at home."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, this is the first man, I believe, that ever
+took credit for his sincerity from his breach of his
+promises. "I could not," he says, "have made these
+promises, if I had not thought that I could perform
+them. Now I find I cannot perform them, and you
+have in that non-performance and in that profession
+a security for my sincerity when I promised them."
+Upon this principle, any man who makes a promise
+has nothing to do afterwards, but to say that he finds
+himself (without assigning any particular cause for
+it) unable to perform it,&mdash;not only to justify himself
+for his non-performance, but to justify himself
+and claim credit for sincerity in his original profession.
+The charge was given him specially, and he
+promised obedience, over and over, upon the spot,
+and in the country, in which he was no novice, for
+he had been bred in it: it was his native country in
+one sense, it was the place of his renewed nativity
+and regeneration. Yet this very man, as if he was a
+novice in it, now says, "I promised you what I now
+find I cannot perform." Nay, what is worse, he
+declares no man could perform it, if he gave up his
+whole time to it. And lastly, he says, that the inquiry
+into these corruptions, even if you succeeded
+in it, would do more harm than good. Now was
+there ever an instance of a man so basely deserting
+a duty, and giving so base a reason for it? His duty
+was to put an end to corruption in every channel of
+government. It cannot be done. Why? Because
+it would expose our affairs to malignity and enmity,
+and end, perhaps, to our disadvantage. Not only
+will he connive himself, but he advises the Company<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">{299}</a></span>
+to do it. For fear of what? For fear that their
+service was so abandoned and corrupt, that the display
+of the evil would tend more to their disreputation
+than all their attempts to reform it would tend
+to their service.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings should naturally have imagined that
+the law was a resource in this desperate case of bribery.
+He tells you, that in "that charge of oppression,
+though they were supported by the cries of the
+people and the most authentic representations, it is
+yet impossible in most cases to obtain legal proofs."
+Here is a system of total despair upon the business,
+which I hope and believe is not a desperate one,
+and has not proved a desperate one, whenever a
+rational attempt has been made to pursue it. Here
+you find him corrupt, and you find, in consequence
+of that corruption, that he screens the whole body of
+corruption in India, and states an absolute despair of
+any possibility, by any art or address, of putting an
+end to it. Nay, he tells you, that, if corruption did
+not exist, if it was not connived at, that the India
+Company could not exist. Whether that be a truth
+or not I cannot tell; but this I know, that it is the
+most horrible picture that ever was made of any
+country. It might be said that these were excuses
+for omissions,&mdash;sins of omission he calls them. I
+will show that they were systematic, that Mr. Hastings
+did uniformly profess that he would connive at
+abuses, and contend that abuses ought to be connived
+at. When the whole mystery of the iniquity,
+in which he himself was deeply concerned, came to
+light,&mdash;when it appeared that all the Company's orders
+were contravened,&mdash;that contracts were given
+directly contrary to their orders, and upon principles<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">{300}</a></span>
+subversive of their government, leading to all manner
+of oppression and ruin to the country,&mdash;what was
+Mr. Hastings's answer? "I must here remark, that
+the majority ... I had not the power of
+establishing it."<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[5]</a> Then he goes on and states other
+cases of corruption, at every one of which he winks.
+Here he states another reason for his connivance.
+"Suppose again," (for he puts another supposition,
+and these suppositions are not hypotheses laid down
+for argument, but real facts then existing before
+the Council examining into grievances,)&mdash;"suppose
+again, that any person had benefited himself ...
+unprofitable discussion."<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[6]</a></p>
+
+<p>Here is a direct avowal of his refusing to examine
+into the conduct of persons in the Council, even in
+the highest departments of government, and the best
+paid, for fear he should dissatisfy them, and should
+lose their votes, by discovering those peculations and
+corruptions, though he perfectly knew them. Was
+there ever, since the world began, any man who
+would dare to avow such sentiments, until driven
+to the wall? If he could show that he himself abhorred
+bribes, and kept at a distance from them, then
+he might say, "I connive at the bribes of others";
+but when he acknowledges that he takes bribes, how
+can you doubt that he buys a corrupt confederacy,
+and puts an end to any hope through him of reformation
+of the abuses at Bengal? But your Lordships
+will see that he not only connived at abuse, but patronized
+it and supported it for his own political purposes;
+since he here confesses, that, if inquiry into it
+created him ill-humor, and produced him an opposi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">{301}</a></span>tion
+in Council, he sacrificed it to the power of the
+Company, and the constitution of their government.
+Did he so? The Company ordered him to prosecute
+those people, and their constitution required that
+they should be prosecuted. "No," says Mr. Hastings,
+"the conniving at it procures a majority of
+votes." The very thing that he bought was not
+worth half the price he paid for it. He was sent
+to reform corruptions, and, in order that he might
+reform corruptions, he winked at, countenanced, and
+patronized them, to get a majority of votes; and
+what was, in fact, a sacrifice to his own interest,
+ambition, and corruption, he calls a sacrifice to the
+Company. He puts, then, this alternative: "Either
+give everything into my hand, suffer me to go on,
+and have no control, or else I wink at every species
+of corruption." It is a remarkable and stupendous
+thing, that, when all the world was alarmed at the
+disorders of the Company, when that alarm occasioned
+his being sent out, and when, in consequence
+of that alarm, Parliament suspended the constitution
+of the Company, and appointed another government,
+Mr. Hastings should tell that Company that Parliament
+had done wrong, and that the person put at
+the head of that government was to wink at those
+abuses. Nay, what is more, not only does Mr. Hastings
+declare, upon general principles, that it was
+impossible to pursue all the delinquencies of India,
+and that, if possible to pursue them, mischief would
+happen from it, but your Lordships will observe that
+Mr. Hastings, in this business, during the whole period
+of the administration of that body which was
+sent out to inquire into and reform the corruptions
+of India, did not call one person to an account; nor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">{302}</a></span>
+except Mr. Hastings, this day, has any one been
+called to an account, or punished for delinquency.
+Whether he will be punished or no, time will show.
+I have no doubt of your Lordships' justice, and of the
+goodness of our cause.</p>
+
+<p>The table of the House of Commons groaned under
+complaints of the evils growing in India under this
+systematic connivance of Mr. Hastings. The Directors
+had set on foot prosecutions, to be conducted
+God knows how; but, such as they were, they were
+their only remedy; and they began to consider at last
+that these prosecutions had taken a long oblivious
+nap of many years; and at last, knowing that they
+were likely, in the year 1782, to be called to a strict
+account about their own conduct, the Court of Directors
+began to rouse themselves, and they write thus:
+"Having in several of our letters to you very attentively
+perused all the proceedings referred to in these
+paragraphs, relative to the various forgeries on the
+Company's treasuries, we lament exceedingly that
+the parties should have been so long in confinement
+without being brought to trial."</p>
+
+<p>Here, my Lords, after justice had been asleep
+awhile, it revived. They directed two things: first,
+that those suits should be pursued; but whether
+pursued or not, that an account of the state of them
+should be given, that they might give orders concerning
+them.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see the orders of the Company. Did
+they not want to pursue and to revive those dormant
+prosecutions? They want to have a state of them,
+that they may know how to direct the future conduct
+of them with more effect and vigor than they had yet
+been pursued with. You will naturally imagine that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">{303}</a></span>
+Mr. Hastings did not obey their orders, or obeyed
+them languidly. No, he took another part. He says,
+"Having attentively read and weighed the arguments
+... for withdrawing them."<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor" title=" Document wanting.">[7]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus he begins with the general principle of connivance;
+he directly avows he does it for a political
+purpose; and when the Company directs he shall proceed
+in the suits, instead of deferring to their judgment,
+he takes the judgment on himself, and says
+theirs is untenable; he directly discharges the prosecutions
+of the Company, supersedes the authority of
+his masters, and gives a general release to all the persons
+who were still suffering by the feeble footsteps
+of justice in that country. He gave them an act of
+indemnity, and that was the last of his acts.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery,
+the presumptions that arise from his own bribes, his
+attention to secure others from the punishment of
+theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his discharging
+it,&mdash;when we see all this, can we avoid judging
+and forming our opinions upon two grand points:
+first, that no man would proceed in that universal patronage
+of guilt, unless he was guilty himself; next,
+that, by a universal connivance for fourteen years, he
+is himself the cause and mainspring of all the evils,
+calamities, extortion, and bribery, that have prevailed
+and ravaged that country for so long a time? There
+is, indeed, no doubt either of his guilt, or of the consequences
+of it, by which he has extinguished the last
+expiring hope and glimpse that remained of procuring
+a remedy for India of the evils that exist in it.</p>
+
+<p>I would mention, that, as a sort of postscript, when<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">{304}</a></span>
+he could no longer put the government into the hands
+of that infamous woman, Munny Begum, he sent an
+amorous, sentimental letter to the Company, describing
+her miserable situation, and advising the Company
+to give her a pension of seventy-two thousand
+rupees a year, to maintain her. He describes her
+situation in such a moving way as must melt every
+heart. He supposes her to be reduced to want by
+the cruel orders of the Company, who retain from her
+money which they were never obliged to give her.
+This representation, which he makes with as much
+fairness as he represents himself to be in a state of
+the most miserable poverty and distress, he alone
+made to the Company, because his colleagues would
+not countenance him in it; and we find, upon looking
+over Lord Cornwallis's last examination into the
+whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman
+was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty
+thousand pounds. Mr. Hastings, however, could not
+avoid making this representation; because he knew,
+that, if he quitted the country without securing that
+woman, by giving her a hope that she could procure
+by his credit here that money which by his authority
+he had before procured for her, she might then make
+a discovery of all the corruption that had been carried
+on between them; and therefore he squanders away
+the treasures of the Company, in order to secure himself
+from any such detection, and to procure for himself
+<i>razinamas</i> and all those fine things. He knew
+that Munny Begum, that the whole seraglio, that all
+the country, whom he had put under the dominion of
+Sir John D'Oyly, that all those people might have
+made a discovery of all his corrupt proceedings; he
+therefore gets the Nabob to appoint Sir John D'Oyly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">{305}</a></span>
+his agent here, with a view of stopping his mouth,
+and by the hope of another 160,000<i>l.</i> a year to prevent
+his giving an account of the dilapidation and
+robbery that was made of the 160,000<i>l.</i> which had
+been left him.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>I have now finished what I proposed to say relative
+to his great fund of bribery, in the first instance
+of it,&mdash;namely, the administration of justice in the
+country. There is another system of bribery which I
+shall state before my friends produce the evidence.
+He put up all the great offices of the country to sale;
+he makes use of the trust he had of the revenues in
+order to destroy the whole system of those revenues,
+and to bind them and make them subservient to his
+system of bribery: and this will make it necessary
+for your Lordships to couple the consideration of the
+charge of the revenues, in some instances, with that
+of bribery.</p>
+
+<p>The next day your Lordships meet (when I hope
+I shall not detain you so long) I mean to open the
+second stage of his bribery, the period of discovery:
+for the first stage was the period of concealment.
+When he found his bribes could no longer be concealed,
+he next took upon him to discover them himself,
+and to take merit from them.</p>
+
+<p>When I shall have opened the second scene of his
+peculation, and his new principles of it, when you
+see him either treading in old corruptions, and excelling
+the examples he imitated, or exhibiting new ones
+of his own, in which of the two his conduct is the
+most iniquitous, and attended with most evil to the
+Company, I must leave your Lordships to judge.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Document wanting.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">{306}</a></span></p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="THIRD_DAY_TUESDAY_MAY_5_1789" id="THIRD_DAY_TUESDAY_MAY_5_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;Agreeably to your Lordships'
+proclamation, which I have just heard, and
+the duty enjoined me by the House of Commons, I
+come forward to make good their charge of high
+crimes and misdemeanors against Warren Hastings,
+Esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal, and now
+a prisoner at your bar.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, since I had last the honor of standing
+in this place before your Lordships, an event has happened
+upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible
+to be silent. My Lords, I have been disavowed
+by those who sent me here to represent them. My
+Lords, I have been disavowed in a material part
+of that engagement which I had pledged myself to
+this House to perform. My Lords, that disavowal
+has been followed by a censure. And yet, my Lords,
+so censured and so disavowed, and by such an authority,
+I am sent here again, to this the place of
+my offence, under the same commission, by the same
+authority, to make good the same charge, against the
+same delinquent.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, the situation is new and awful: the
+situation is such as, I believe, and I am sure, has
+nothing like it on the records of Parliament, nor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">{307}</a></span>
+probably, in the history of mankind. My Lords, it is
+not only new and singular, but, I believe, to many persons,
+who do not look into the true interior nature of
+affairs, it may appear that it would be to me as mortifying
+as it is unprecedented. But, my Lords, I have
+in this situation, and upon the consideration of all the
+circumstances, something more to feed my mind with
+than mere consolation; because, my Lords, I look upon
+the whole of these circumstances, considered together,
+as the strongest, the most decisive, and the
+least equivocal proof which the Commons of Great
+Britain can give of their sincerity and their zeal in
+this prosecution. My Lords, is it from a mistaken
+tenderness or a blind partiality to me, that, thus censured,
+they have sent me to this place? No, my
+Lords, it is because they feel, and recognize in their
+own breasts, that active principle of justice, that zeal
+for the relief of the people of India, that zeal for the
+honor of Great Britain, which characterizes me and
+my excellent associates, that, in spite of any defects,
+in consequence of that zeal which they applaud, and
+while they censure its mistakes, and, because they
+censure its mistakes, do but more applaud, they have
+sent me to this place, instructed, but not dismayed,
+to pursue this prosecution against Warren Hastings,
+Esquire. Your Lordships will therefore be pleased
+to consider this, as I consider it, not as a thing honorable
+to me, in the first place, but as honorable to
+the Commons of Great Britain, in whose honor the
+national glory is deeply concerned; and I shall suffer
+myself with pleasure to be sacrificed, perhaps, in what
+is dearer to me than my life, my reputation, rather
+than let it be supposed that the Commons should for
+one moment have faltered in their duty. I, my Lords,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">{308}</a></span>
+on the one hand, feeling myself supported and encouraged,
+feeling protection and countenance from
+this admonition and warning which has been given to
+me, will show myself, on the other hand, not unworthy
+so great and distinguished a mark of the favor of
+the Commons,&mdash;a mark of favor not the consequence
+of flattery, but of opinion. I shall feel animated and
+encouraged by so noble a reward as I shall always consider
+the confidence of the Commons to be: the only
+reward, but a rich reward, which I have received for
+the toils and labors of a long life.</p>
+
+<p>The Commons, then, thus vindicated, and myself
+thus encouraged, I shall proceed to make good the
+charge in which the honor of the Commons, that is,
+the national honor, is so deeply concerned. For,
+my Lords, if any circumstance of weakness, if any
+feebleness of nerve, if any yielding to weak and popular
+opinions and delusions were to shake us, consider
+what the situation of this country would be. This
+prosecution, if weakly conceived, ill digested, or
+intemperately pursued, ought never to have been
+brought to your Lordships' bar: but being brought
+to your Lordships' bar, the nation is committed to it,
+and the least appearance of uncertainty in our minds
+would disgrace us forever. <i>Esto perpetua</i>, has been
+said. To the glory of this nation, much more be it
+said, <i>Esto perpetua</i>; and I will say, that, as we have
+raised and exhibited a theatre of justice which has
+excited the admiration of all Europe, there would be
+a sort of lustre in our infamy, and a splendor in the
+disgrace that we should bring upon ourselves, if we
+should, just at that moment, turn that theatre of
+our glory into a spectacle of dishonor beyond what
+has ever happened to any country of the world.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">{309}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Commons of Great Britain, whilst willing to
+keep a strong and firm hand over all those who represent
+them in any business, do at the same time encourage
+them in the prosecution of it, by allowing
+them a just discretion and latitude wherever their
+own orders have not marked a distinction. I shall
+therefore go on with the more cheerful confidence,
+not only for the reasons that I have stated, but for
+another and material reason. I know and am satisfied,
+that, in the nobleness of your judgment, you
+will always make a distinction between the person
+that gives the order and the organ that is to execute
+it. The House of Commons know no such thing as
+indiscretion, imprudence, or impropriety: it is otherwise
+with their instruments. Your Lordships very
+well know, that, if you hear anything that shall appear
+to you to be regular, apt to bring forward the
+charge, just, prudent, cogent, you are to give it
+to the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled;
+if you should hear from me (and it must
+be from me alone, and not from any other member
+of the Committee) anything that is unworthy of that
+situation, that comes feeble, weak, indigested, or ill-prepared,
+you are to attribute that to the instrument.
+Your Lordships' judgment would do this without my
+saying it. But whilst I claim it on the part of the
+Commons for their dignity, I claim for myself the
+necessary indulgence that must be given to all weakness.
+Your Lordships, then, will impute it where
+you would have imputed it without my desire. It
+is a distinction you would naturally have made, and
+the rather because what is alleged by us at the bar
+is not the ground upon which you are to give judgment.
+If not only I, but the whole body of mana<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">{310}</a></span>gers,
+had made use of any such expressions as I
+made use of,&mdash;even if the Commons of Great Britain
+in Parliament assembled, if the collective body
+of Parliament, if the voice of Europe, had used
+them,&mdash;if we had spoken with the tongues of men
+and angels, you, in the seat of judicature, are not to
+regard what we say, but what we prove; you are to
+consider whether the charge is well substantiated,
+and proof brought out by legal inference and argument.
+You know, and I am sure the habits of judging
+which your Lordships have acquired by sitting
+in judgment must better inform you than any other
+men, that the duties of life, in order to be well performed,
+must be methodized, separated, arranged, and
+harmonized in such a manner that they shall not
+clash with one another, but each have a department
+assigned and separated to itself. My Lords, in that
+manner it is that we, the prosecutors, have nothing
+to do with the principles which are to guide the judgment,
+that we have nothing to do with the defence
+of the prisoner. Your Lordships well know, that,
+when we come before you, you hear a party; that,
+when the accused come before you, you hear a party:
+that it is for you to doubt, and wait till you come
+to the close, before you decide; that it is for us, the
+prosecutors, to have decided before we came here.
+To act as prosecutors, we ought to have no doubt
+or hesitation, nothing trembling or quivering in our
+minds upon the occasion. We ought to be fully
+convinced of guilt, before we come to you. It is,
+then, our business to bring forward the proofs,&mdash;to
+enforce them with all the clearness, illustration,
+example, that we can bring forward,&mdash;that we are
+to show the circumstances that can aggravate the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">{311}</a></span>
+guilt,&mdash;that we are to go further, show the mischievous
+consequences and tendency of those crimes
+to society,&mdash;and that we are, if able so to do, to
+arouse and awaken in the minds of all that hear us
+those generous and noble sympathies which Providence
+has planted in the breasts of all men, to be the true
+guardians of the common rights of humanity. Your
+Lordships know that this is the duty of the prosecutors,
+and that therefore we are not to consider the
+defence of the party, which is wisely and properly
+left to himself; but we are to press the accusation
+with all the energy of which it is capable, and to
+come with minds perfectly convinced before an august
+and awful tribunal which at once tries the accuser
+and the accused.</p>
+
+<p>Having stated thus much with respect to the Commons,
+I am to read to your Lordships the resolution
+which the Commons have come to upon this great
+occasion, and upon which I shall take the liberty to
+say a very few words.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, the Commons have resolved last night,
+and I did not see the resolution till this morning,
+"that no direction or authority was given by this
+House to the committee appointed to manage the
+impeachment against Warren Hastings, Esquire, to
+make any charge or allegation against the said Warren
+Hastings respecting the condemnation or execution
+of Nundcomar; and that the words spoken by
+the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, one of the said
+managers, <i>videlicet</i>, that he (meaning Mr. Hastings)
+murdered that man (meaning Nundcomar) by the
+hands of Sir Elijah Impey, ought not to have been
+spoken."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, this is the resolution of the House of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">{312}</a></span>
+Commons. Your Lordships well know and remember
+my having used such or similar words, and the end
+and purpose for which I used them. I owe a few
+words of explanation to the Commons of Great Britain,
+who attend in a committee of the whole House to
+be the observers and spectators of my conduct. I owe
+it to your Lordships, I owe it to this great auditory,
+I owe it to the present times and to posterity, to make
+some apology for a proceeding which has drawn upon
+me the disavowal of the House which I represent.
+Your Lordships will remember that this charge
+which I have opened to your Lordships is primarily a
+charge founded upon the evidence of the Rajah Nundcomar;
+and consequently I thought myself obliged,
+I thought it a part of my duty, to support the credit
+of that person, who is the principal evidence to support
+the direct charge that is brought before your
+Lordships. I knew that Mr. Hastings, in his anticipated
+defence before the House of Commons, had
+attempted to shake the credit of that witness. I
+therefore thought myself justified in informing your
+Lordships, and in warning him, that, if he did attempt
+to shake the credit of an important witness against
+him by an allegation of his having been condemned
+and executed for a forgery, I would endeavor to support
+his credit by attacking that very prosecution
+which brought on that condemnation and that execution;
+and that I did consider it, and would lay
+grounds before your Lordships to prove it, to be a
+murder committed, instead of a justification set up,
+or that ought to be set up.</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, I am ordered by the Commons no
+longer to persist in that declaration; and I, who know
+nothing in this place, and ought to know nothing in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">{313}</a></span>
+this place, but obedience to the Commons, do mean,
+when Mr. Hastings makes that objection (if he shall
+be advised to make it) against the credit of Rajah
+Nundcomar, not thus to support that credit; and
+therefore that objection to the credit of the witness
+must go unrefuted by me. My Lords, I must admit,
+perhaps against my private judgment, (but that
+is of no consideration for your Lordships, when opposed
+to the judgment of the House of Commons,)
+or, at least, not contest, that a first minister of state,
+in a great kingdom, who had the benefit of the administration,
+and of the entire and absolute command of
+a revenue of fifteen hundred thousand pounds a year,
+had been guilty of a paltry forgery in Calcutta; that
+this man, who had been guilty of this paltry forgery,
+had waited for his sentence and his punishment, till a
+body of English judges, armed with an English statute,
+came to Calcutta; and that this happened at the
+very happy nick and moment when he was accusing
+Mr. Hastings of the bribery with which we now in
+the name of the Commons charge him; that it was
+owing to an entirely fortuitous concurrence of circumstances,
+in which Mr. Hastings had no share, or that
+it was owing to something beyond this, something that
+is rather pious than fortuitous, namely, that, as Mr.
+Hastings tells you himself, "all persuasions of men
+were impressed with a superstitious belief that a fortunate
+influence directed all my actions to their destined
+ends." I, not being at that time infected with
+the superstition, and considering what I thought Mr.
+Hastings's guilt to be, and what I must prove it to be
+as well as I can, did not believe that Providence did
+watch over Mr. Hastings, so as in the nick of time,
+like a god in a machine, to come down to save him in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">{314}</a></span>
+the moment of his imminent peril and distress: I did
+not think so, but I must not say so.</p>
+
+<p>But now, to show that it was not weakly, loosely,
+or idly, that I took up this business, or that I anticipated
+a defence which it was not probable for Mr.
+Hastings to make, (and I wish to speak to your
+Lordships in the first instance, but to the Commons
+in the next,) I will read part of Mr. Hastings's defence
+before the House of Commons: it is in evidence
+before your Lordships. He says,&mdash;"My accuser"
+(meaning myself, then acting as a private
+member of Parliament) "charges me with 'the receipt
+of large sums of money, corruptly taken before
+the promulgation of the Regulating Act of 1773,
+contrary to my covenants with the Company, and
+with the receipt of very large sums taken since, in
+defiance of that law, and contrary to my declared
+sense of its provisions.' And he ushers in this
+charge in the following pompous diction: 'That
+in March, 1775, the late Rajah Nundcomar, a native
+Hindoo of the highest caste in his religion, and of
+the highest rank in society, by the offices which he
+had held under the country government, did lay
+before the Council an account of various sums of
+money,' &amp;c. It would naturally strike every person
+ignorant of the character of Nundcomar, that an accusation
+made by a person of the highest caste in
+his religion and of the highest rank by his offices
+demanded particular notice, and acquired a considerable
+degree of credit, from a prevalent association
+of ideas that a nice sense of honor is connected with
+an elevated rank of life: but when this honorable
+House is informed that my accuser knew (though he
+suppressed the facts) that this person, of high rank<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">{315}</a></span>
+and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to
+honor, veracity, and credit,&mdash;that there are facts
+recorded on the very Proceedings which my accuser
+partially quotes, proving this man to have been
+guilty of a most flagrant forgery of letters from
+Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah,
+(independent of the forgery for which he suffered
+death,) of the most deliberate treachery to the state,
+for which he was confined, by the orders of the
+Court of Directors, to the limits of the town of
+Calcutta, in order to prevent his dangerous intrigues,
+and of having violated every principle of
+common honesty in private life,&mdash;I say, when this
+honorable House is acquainted it is from mutilated
+and garbled assertions, founded on the testimony of
+such an evidence, without the whole matter being
+fairly stated, I do hope and trust it will be sufficient
+for them to reject <i>now</i> these vague and unsupported
+charges, in like manner as they were <i>before</i> rejected
+by the Court of Directors and his Majesty's ministers,
+when they were first made by General Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis.&mdash;I must here
+interrupt the course of my defence to explain on
+what grounds I employed or had any connection
+with a man of so flagitious a character as Nundcomar."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I hope this was a good and reasonable
+ground for me to anticipate the defence which Mr.
+Hastings would make in this House,&mdash;namely, on
+the known, recognized, infamous character of Nundcomar,
+with regard to certain proceedings there
+charged at large, with regard to one forgery for
+which he suffered and two other forgeries with
+which Mr. Hastings charged him. I, who found that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">{316}</a></span>
+the Commons of Great Britain had received that very
+identical charge of Nundcomar, and given it to me
+in trust to make it good, did naturally, I hope excusably,
+(for that is the only ground upon which I
+stand,) endeavor to support that credit upon which
+the House acted. I hope I did so; and I hope that
+the goodness of that intention may excuse me, if I
+went a little too far on that occasion. I would have
+endeavored to support that credit, which it was
+much Mr. Hastings's interest to shake, and which he
+had before attempted to shake.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will have the goodness to suppose
+me now making my apology, and by no manner of
+means intending to persist either in this, or in anything
+which the House of Commons shall desire me
+not to declare in their name. But the House of
+Commons has not denied me the liberty to make
+you this just apology: God forbid they should! for
+they would be guilty of great injustice, if they did.
+The House of Commons, whom I represent, will
+likewise excuse me, their representative, whilst I
+have been endeavoring to support their characters
+in the face of the world, and to make an apology,
+and only an humble apology, for my conduct, for
+having considered that act in the light that I represented
+it,&mdash;and which I did merely from my private
+opinion, without any formal instruction from
+the House. For there is no doubt that the House is
+perfectly right, inasmuch as the House did neither
+formally instruct me nor at all forbid my making
+use of such an argument; and therefore I have
+given your Lordships the reason why it was fit to
+make use of such argument,&mdash;if it was right to
+make use of it. I am in the memory of your Lord<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">{317}</a></span>ships
+that I did conceive it to be relevant, and it
+was by the poverty of the language I was led to
+express my private feelings under the name of a
+<i>murder</i>. For, if the language had furnished me,
+under the impression of those feelings, with a word
+sufficient to convey the complicated atrocity of that
+act, as I felt it in my mind, I would not have made
+use of the word <i>murder</i>. It was on account of the
+language furnishing me with no other I was obliged
+to use that word. Your Lordships do not imagine,
+I hope, that I used that word in any other than a
+moral and popular sense, or that I used it in the
+legal and technical sense of the word <i>murder</i>. Your
+Lordships know that I could not bring before this
+bar any commoner of Great Britain on a charge for
+murder. I am not so ignorant of the laws and
+constitution of my country. I expressed an act
+which I conceived to be of an atrocious and evil
+nature, and partaking of some of the moral evil
+consequences of that crime. What led me into that
+error? Nine years' meditation upon that subject.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, the prisoner at the bar in the year 1780
+sent a petition to the House of Commons complaining
+of that very chief-justice, Sir Elijah Impey. The
+House of Commons, who then had some trust in me,
+as they have some trust still, did order me, along with
+persons more wise and judicious than myself, several
+of whom stand near me, to make an inquiry into the
+state of the justice of that country. The consequence
+of that inquiry was, that we began to conceive a very
+bad opinion both of the complainant and defendant in
+that business,&mdash;that we found the English justice to
+be, as we thought it, and reported it to the House, a
+grievance, instead of a redress, to the people of India.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">{318}</a></span>
+I could bring before your Lordships, if I did not spare
+your patience, whole volumes of reports, whole bodies
+of evidence, which, in the progress we have made in
+the course of eight or nine years, brought to my mind
+such a conviction as will never be torn from my heart
+but with my life; and I should have no heart that
+was fit to lodge any honest sentiment, if I departed
+from my opinion upon that occasion. But when I
+declare my own firm opinion upon it,&mdash;when I declare
+the reasons that led me to it,&mdash;when I mention
+the long meditation that preceded my founding a
+judgment upon it, the strict inquiry, the many hours
+and days spent in consideration, collation, and comparison,&mdash;I
+trust that infirmity which could be actuated
+by no malice to one party or the other may
+be excused; I trust that I shall meet with this indulgence,
+when your Lordships consider, that, as far as
+you know me, as far as my public services for many
+years account for me, I am a man of a slow, laborious,
+inquisitive temper, that I do seldom leave a pursuit
+without leaving marks, perhaps of my weakness, but
+leaving marks of that labor, and that, in consequence
+of that labor, I made that affirmation, and thought the
+nature of the cause obliged me to support and substantiate
+it. It is true that those who sent me here
+have sagacity to decide upon the subject in a week;
+they can in one week discover the errors of my labors
+for nine years.</p>
+
+<p>Now that I have made this apology to you, I assure
+you, you shall never hear me, either in my own name
+here, much less in the name of the Commons, urge
+one thing to you in support of the credit of Nundcomar
+grounded upon that judgment, until the House
+shall instruct and order me otherwise; because I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">{319}</a></span>
+know, that, when I can discover their sentiments, I
+ought to know nothing here but what is in strict and
+literal obedience to them.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, another thing might make me, perhaps,
+a little willing to be admitted to the proof of what I
+advanced, and that is, the very answer of Mr. Hastings
+to this charge, which the House of Commons, however,
+have adopted, and therefore in some degree purified.
+"To the malicious part of this charge, which
+is the condemnation of Nundcomar for a forgery, I do
+declare, in the most solemn and unreserved manner,
+that I had no concern, either directly or indirectly, in
+the apprehending, prosecuting, or executing of Nundcomar.
+He suffered for a crime of forgery which he
+had committed in a private trust that was delegated
+to him, and for which he had been prosecuted in the
+dewanny courts of the country before the institution
+of the Supreme Court of Judicature. To adduce this
+circumstance, therefore, as a confirmation of what was
+before suspicious from his general depravity of character,
+is just as reasonable as to assert that the accusations
+of Empson and Dudley were confirmed because
+they suffered death for their atrocious acts."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, this was Mr. Hastings's defence before
+the House of Commons, and it is now in evidence
+before your Lordships. In this defence, he supposes
+the charge which was made originally before the Commons,
+and which the Commons voted, (though afterwards,
+for the convenience of shortening it, the affair
+was brought before your Lordships in the way in which
+it is,)&mdash;he supposes, I say, the whole to proceed from
+a malicious intention; and I hope your Lordships will
+not think, and I hope the Commons, reconsidering this
+matter, will not think, that, when such an imputation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">{320}</a></span>
+of malice was made for the purpose of repelling this
+corroborating argument which was used in the House
+of Commons to prove his guilt, I was wrong in attempting
+to support the House of Commons against his imputation
+of malice.</p>
+
+<p>I must observe where I am limited and where I am
+not. I am limited, strictly, fully, (and your Lordships
+and my country, who hear me, will judge how faithfully
+I shall adhere to that limitation,) not to support
+the credit of Nundcomar by any allegation against
+Mr. Hastings respecting his condemnation or execution;
+but I am not at all limited from endeavoring to
+support his credit against Mr. Hastings's charges of
+other forgeries, and from showing you, what I hope
+to show you clearly in a few words, that Nundcomar
+cannot be presumed guilty of forgery with more probability
+than Mr. Hastings is guilty of bringing forward
+a light and dangerous (for I use no other words than
+a light and dangerous) charge of forgery, when it
+serves his purpose. Mr. Hastings charges Nundcomar
+with two other forgeries. "These two forgeries,"
+he says, "are facts recorded in the very Proceedings
+which my accuser partially quotes, proving this man
+to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery of a
+letter from Munny Begum, and of a letter from the
+Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah"; and therefore he infers
+malice in those who impute anything improper to
+him, knowing that the proof stood so. Here he asserts
+that there are records before the House of Commons,
+and on the Company's Proceedings and Consultations,
+proving Nundcomar to have been guilty of these two
+forgeries. Turn over the next page of his printed
+defence, and you find a very extraordinary thing.
+You would have imagined that this forgery of a letter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">{321}</a></span>
+from Munny Begum, which, he says, is recognized
+and proved on the Journals, was a forgery charged by
+Munny Begum herself, or by somebody on her part,
+or some person concerned in this business. There is
+no other charge of it whatever, but the charge of
+Warren Hastings himself. He wants you to discredit
+a man for forgery upon no evidence under heaven but
+that of his own, who thinks proper, without any sort
+of authority, without any sort of reference, without
+any sort of collateral evidence, to charge a man with
+that very direct forgery. "You are," he says, "well
+informed of the reasons which first induced me to give
+any share of my confidence to Nundcomar, with whose
+character I was acquainted by an experience of many
+years. The means which he himself took to acquire
+it were peculiar to himself. He sent a messenger to
+me at Madras, on the first news of my appointment
+to this Presidency, with pretended letters from Munny
+Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah, the brother
+of the Nabob Jaffier Ali Kh&acirc;n, filled with bitter
+invectives against Mahomed Reza Kh&acirc;n, and of as
+warm recommendations, as I recollect, of Nundcomar.
+I have been since informed by the Begum that the
+letter which bore her seal was a complete forgery,
+and that she was totally unacquainted with the use
+which had been made of her name till I informed her
+of it. Juggut Chund, Nundcomar's son-in-law, was
+sent to her expressly to entreat her not to divulge it.
+Mr. Middleton, whom she consulted on the occasion,
+can attest the truth of this story."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Middleton is dead, my Lords. This is not the
+Mr. Middleton whom your Lordships have heard and
+know well in this House, but a brother of that Mr.
+Middleton, who is since dead. Your Lordships find,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">{322}</a></span>
+when we refer to the records of the Company for the
+proof of this forgery, that there is no other than the
+unsupported assertion of Mr. Hastings himself that
+he was guilty of it. Now that was bad enough; but
+then hear the rest. Mr. Hastings has charged this
+unhappy man, whom we must not defend, with another
+forgery; he has charged him with a forgery of
+a letter from Yeteram ul Dowlah to Mr. Hastings.
+Now you would imagine that he would have given
+his own authority at least for that assertion, which he
+says was proved. He goes on and says, "I have not
+yet had the curiosity to inquire of the Nabob Yeteram
+ul Dowlah whether his letter was of the same stamp;
+but I cannot doubt it."</p>
+
+<p>Now here he begins, in this very defence which is
+before your Lordships, to charge a forgery upon the
+credit of Munny Begum, without supporting it even
+by his own testimony,&mdash;and another forgery in the
+name of Yeteram ul Dowlah, which he said he had
+not even the curiosity to inquire into, and yet desires
+you, at the same time, to believe it to be proved.
+Good God! in what condition do men of the first
+character and situation in that country stand, when
+we have here delivered to us, as a record of the Company,
+Mr. Hastings's own assertions, saying that these
+forgeries were proved, though you have for the first
+nothing but his own unsupported assertion, and for
+the second his declaration only that he had not the
+curiosity to inquire into it! I am not forbidden by
+the Commons to state how and on what slight grounds
+Warren Hastings charges the natives of the country
+with forgery; neither am I forbidden to bring forward
+the accusation which Mr. Hastings made against
+Nundcomar for a conspiracy, nor the event of it, nor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">{323}</a></span>
+any circumstance relative to it. I shall therefore proceed
+in the best manner I can. There was a period,
+among the revolutions of philosophy, when there
+was an opinion, that, if a man lost one limb or organ,
+the strength of that which was lost retired into
+what was left. My Lords, if we are straitened in
+this, then our vigor will be redoubled in the rest,
+and we shall use it with double force. If the top and
+point of the sword is broken off, we shall take the
+hilt in our hand, and fight with whatever remains
+of the weapon against bribery, corruption, and peculation;
+and we shall use double diligence under any
+restraint which the wisdom of the Commons may lay
+upon us, or your Lordships' wisdom may oblige us to
+submit to.</p>
+
+<p>Having gone through this business, and shown in
+what manner I am restrained, where I am not to repel
+Mr. Hastings's defence, and where I am left at
+large to do it, I shall submit to the strict injunction
+with the utmost possible humility, and enjoy the liberty
+which is left to me with vigor, with propriety, and
+with discretion, I trust.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Lords, when the circumstance happened which
+has given occasion to the long parenthesis by which
+my discourse has been interrupted, I remember I was
+beginning to open to your Lordships the second period
+of Mr. Hastings's scheme and system of bribery.
+My Lords, his bribery is so extensive, and has had
+such a variety in it, that it must be distinguished not
+only with regard to its kind, but must be likewise distinguished
+according to the periods of bribery and the
+epochas of peculation committed by him. In the first
+of those periods we shall prove to your Lordships, I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">{324}</a></span>
+believe, without the aids that we hoped for, (your Lordships
+allowing, as I trust you will do, a good deal for
+our situation,)&mdash;we shall be able, I say, to prove that
+Mr. Hastings took, as a bribe for appointing Munny
+Begum, three lac and an half of rupees; we shall prove
+the taking at the same time the Rajeshaye bribes.
+Mr. Hastings at that time followed bribery in a natural
+manner: he took a bribe; he took it as large as he
+could; he concealed it as well as he could; and he got
+out of it by artifice or boldness, by use of trick or use
+of power, just as he was enabled: he acted like a wild,
+natural man, void of instruction, discipline, and art.</p>
+
+<p>The second period opened another system of bribery.
+About this time he began to think (from what communication
+your Lordships may guess) of other means
+by which, when he could no longer conceal any bribe
+that he had received, he not only might exempt himself
+from the charge and the punishment of guilt, but
+might convert it into a kind of merit, and, instead of
+a breaker of laws, a violator of his trust, a receiver of
+scandalous bribes, a peculator of the first magnitude,
+might make himself to be considered as a great, distinguishing,
+eminent financier, a collector of revenue
+in new and extraordinary ways, and that we should
+thus at once praise his diligence, industry, and ingenuity.
+The scheme he set on foot was this: he pretended
+that the Company could not exist upon principles
+of strict justice, (for so he expresses it,) and
+that their affairs, in many cases, could not be so well
+accommodated by a regular revenue as by privately
+taking money, which was to be applied to their service
+by the person who took it, at his discretion. This
+was the principle he laid down. It would hardly be
+believed, I imagine, unless strong proof appeared, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">{325}</a></span>
+any man could be so daring as to hold up such a resource
+to a regular government, which had three million
+of known, avowed, a great part of it territorial,
+revenue. But it is necessary, it seems, to piece out
+the lion's skin with a fox's tail,&mdash;to tack on a little
+piece of bribery and a little piece of peculation, in
+order to help out the resources of a great and flourishing
+state; that they should have in the knavery of
+their servants, in the breach of their laws, and in the
+entire defiance of their covenants, a real resource applicable
+to their necessities, of which they were not
+to judge, but the persons who were to take the bribes;
+and that the bribes thus taken were, by a mental
+reservation, a private intention in the mind of the
+taker, unknown to the giver, to be some time or other,
+in some way or other, applied to the public service.
+The taking such bribes was to become a justifiable
+act, in consequence of that reservation in the mind
+of the person who took them; and he was not to be
+called to account for them in any other way than as
+he thought fit.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, an act of Parliament passed in the year
+1773, the whole drift of which, I may say, was to prevent
+bribery, peculation, and extortion in the Company's
+servants; and the act was penned, I think, with
+as much strictness and rigor as ever act was penned.
+The 24th clause of Chap. 63, 13 Geo. III., has the
+following enactment: "And be it further enacted
+by the authority aforesaid, that, from and after the
+first day of August, 1774, no person holding or exercising
+any civil or military office under the crown, or
+the said United Company, in the East Indies, shall accept,
+receive, or take, directly or indirectly, by himself,
+or any other person or persons on his behalf, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">{326}</a></span>
+for his use or benefit, of and from any of the Indian
+princes or powers, or their ministers or agents, or
+any of the natives of Asia, any present, gift, donation,
+gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise, upon any
+account, or on any pretence whatsoever, or any promise
+or engagement for any present, gift, donation, gratuity,
+or reward: and if any person, holding or exercising
+any such civil or military office, shall be guilty
+of any such offence, and shall be thereof legally convicted,"
+&amp;c., &amp;c. It then imposes the penalties: and
+your Lordships see that human wisdom cannot pen
+an act more strongly directed against taking bribes
+upon any pretence whatever.</p>
+
+<p>This act of Parliament was in affirmance of the covenant
+entered into by the servants of the Company,
+and of the explicit orders of the Company, which forbid
+any person whatever in trust, "directly or indirectly,
+to accept, take, or receive, or agree to accept, take,
+or receive, any gift, reward, gratuity, allowance, donation,
+or compensation, in money, effects, jewels, <i>or
+otherwise howsoever</i>, from any of the Indian princes,
+sovereigns, subahs, or nabobs, or any of their ministers,
+servants, or agents, exceeding the value of four thousand
+rupees, &amp;c., &amp;c. And that he, the said Warren
+Hastings, shall and will convey, assign, and make over
+to the said United Company, for their sole and proper
+use and benefit, all and every such gifts, rewards, gratuities,
+allowances, donations, or compensations whatsoever,
+which, contrary to the true intent and meaning
+of these presents, shall come into the hands, possession,
+or power of the said Warren Hastings, or any other
+person or persons in trust for him or for his use."</p>
+
+<p>The nature of the covenant, the act of Parliament,
+and the Company's orders are clear. First,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">{327}</a></span>
+they have not forbidden their Governor-General, nor
+any of their Governors, to take and accept from the
+princes of the country, openly and publicly, for their
+use, any territories, lands, sums of money, or other
+donations, which may be offered in consequence of
+treaty or otherwise. It was necessary to distinguish
+this from every other species of acceptance, because
+many occasions occurred in which fines were paid
+to the Company in consequence of treaties; and it
+was necessary to authorize the receipt of the same
+in the Company's treasury, as an open and known
+proceeding. It was never dreamed that this should
+justify the taking of bribes, privately and clandestinely,
+by the Governor, or any other servant of the
+Company, for the purpose of its future application
+to the Company's use. It is declared that all such
+bribes and money received should be the property of
+the Company. And why? As a means of recovering
+them out of the corrupt hands that had taken
+them. And therefore this was not a license for
+bribery, but a prohibitory and penal clause, providing
+the means of coercion, and making the prohibition
+stronger. Now Mr. Hastings has found out that this
+very coercive clause, which was made in order to enable
+his superiors to get at him and punish him for
+bribery, is a license for him to receive bribes. He
+is not only a practitioner of bribery, but a professor,
+a doctor upon the subject. His opinion is, that he
+might take presents or bribes to himself; he considers
+the penal clause which the Company attached to
+their prohibition, and by which all such bribes are
+constructively declared to be theirs, in order to recover
+them out of his hands, as a license to receive
+bribes, to extort money; and he goes with the very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">{328}</a></span>
+prohibition in his hand, the very means by which he
+was to be restrained, to exercise an unlimited bribery,
+peculation, and extortion over the unhappy natives
+of the country.</p>
+
+<p>The moment he finds that the Company has got a
+scent of any one of his bribes, he comes forward and
+says, "To be sure, I took it as a bribe; I admit the
+party gave me it as a bribe: I concealed it for a time,
+because I thought it was for the interest of the
+Company to conceal it; but I had a secret intention,
+in my own mind, of applying it to their service: you
+shall have it; but you shall have it as I please, and
+when I please; and this bribe becomes sanctified the
+moment I think fit to apply it to your service." Now
+can it be supposed that the India Company, or that
+the act of Parliament, meant, by declaring that the
+property taken by a corrupt servant, contrary to the
+true intent of his covenant, was theirs, to give a license
+to take such property,&mdash;and that one mode
+of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very
+covenants which were meant to prevent extortion,
+peculation, and corruption? What sort of body is
+the India Company, which, coming to the verge of
+bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards
+to subsist upon the alms of peculation and bribery,
+to have its strength recruited by the violation
+of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? It
+is an odd sort of body to be so fed and so supported.
+This new constitution of revenue that he has made is
+indeed a very singular contrivance. It is a revenue
+to be collected by any officer of the Company, (for
+they are all alike forbidden, and all alike permitted,)&mdash;to
+be collected by any person, from any person, at
+any time, in any proportion, by any means, and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">{329}</a></span>
+any way he pleases; and to be accounted for, or not
+to be accounted for, at the pleasure of the collector,
+and, if applied to their use, to be applied at his discretion,
+and not at the discretion of his employers.
+I will venture to say that such a system of revenue
+never was before thought of. The next part is an
+exchequer, which he has formed, corresponding with
+it. You will find the board of exchequer made up
+of officers ostensibly in the Company's service, of
+their public accountant and public treasurer, whom
+Mr. Hastings uses as an accountant and treasurer of
+bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to himself,
+acting in no public manner, and never acting
+but upon his requisition, concealing all his frauds
+and artifices to prevent detection and discovery. In
+short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may be permitted
+to repeat the words I made use of on a
+former occasion, extortion is the assessor, in which
+fraud is the treasurer, confusion the accountant, oblivion
+the remembrancer. That these are not mere
+words, I will exemplify as I go through the detail: I
+will show you that every one of the things I have
+stated are truths, in fact, and that these men are
+bound by the condition of their recognized fidelity to
+Mr. Hastings to keep back his secrets, to change the
+accounts, to alter the items, to make him debtor or
+creditor at pleasure, and by that means to throw the
+whole system of the Company's accounts into confusion.</p>
+
+<p>I have shown the impossibility of the Company's
+having intended to authorize such a revenue, much
+less such a constitution of it as Mr. Hastings has
+drawn from the very prohibitions of bribery, and such
+an exchequer as he has formed upon the principles I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">{330}</a></span>
+have stated. You will not dishonor the legislature
+or the Company, be it what it may, by thinking that
+either of them could give any sanction to it. Indeed,
+you will not think that such a device could ever enter
+into the head of any rational man. You are, then,
+to judge whether it is not a device to cover guilt, to
+prevent detection by destroying the means of it; and
+at the same time your Lordships will judge whether
+the evidence we bring you to prove that revenue is a
+mere pretext be not stronger than the strange, absurd
+reasons which he has produced for forming this new
+plan of an exchequer of bribery.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I am now going to read to you a letter
+in which Mr. Hastings declares his opinion upon the
+operation of the act, which he now has found the
+means, as he thinks, of evading. My Lords, I will
+tell you, to save you a good deal of reading, that
+there was certain prize-money given by Sujah ul
+Dowlah to a body of the Company's troops serving in
+the field,&mdash;that this prize-money was to be distributed
+among them; but upon application being made
+to Mr. Hastings for his opinion and sanction in the
+distribution, Mr. Hastings at first seemed inclined to
+give way to it, but afterwards, upon reading and considering
+the act of Parliament, before he allowed the
+soldiery to receive this public donation, he thus describes
+his opinion of the operation of the act.</p>
+
+
+<h3><i>Extract of a Letter from Mr. Hastings to Colonel
+Champion, 31 August, 1774.</i></h3>
+
+<p>"Upon a reference to the new act of Parliament,
+I was much disappointed and sorry to find that our
+intentions were entirely defeated by a clause in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">{331}</a></span>
+act, (to be in force after the 1st of August, 1774,)
+which divests us of the power to grant, and expressly
+prohibits the army to receive, the Nabob's intended
+donation. Agreeable to the positive sense of this
+clause, notwithstanding it is expressed individually,
+there is not a doubt but the army is included with all
+other persons in the prohibition from receiving presents
+or donations; a confirmation of which is, that in
+the clause of exceptions, wherein 'counsellors-at-law,
+physicians, surgeons, and chaplains are permitted to
+receive the fees annexed to their profession,' no mention
+whatever is made of any latitude given to the
+army, or any circumstances wherein it would be allowable
+for them to receive presents.... This
+unlucky discovery of an exclusion by act of Parliament,
+which admits of no abatement or evasion wherever
+its authority extends, renders a revisal of our
+proceedings necessary, and leaves no option to our
+decision. It is not like the ordinances of the Court
+of Directors, where a favorable construction may be
+put, and some room is left for the interposition of the
+authority vested in ourselves,&mdash;but positive and decisive,
+admitting neither of refinement nor misconstruction.
+I should be happy, if in this instance a
+method could be devised of setting the act aside,
+which I should most willingly embrace; but, in my
+opinion, an opposition would be to incur the penalty."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings considered this
+act to be a most unlucky discovery: indeed, as long
+as it remained in force, it would have been unlucky
+for him, because it would have destroyed one of the
+principal sources of his illegal profits. Why does he
+consider it unlucky? Because it admits of no reser<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">{332}</a></span>vation,
+no exception, no refinement whatever, but is
+clear, positive, decisive. Now in what case was it
+that Mr. Hastings made this determination? In the
+case of a donation publicly offered to an army serving
+in the field by a prince then independent of the Company.
+If ever there was a circumstance in which
+any refinement, any favorable construction of the act
+could be used, it was in favor of a body of men serving
+in the field, fighting for their country, spilling
+their blood for it, suffering all the inconveniences of
+that climate. It was undoubtedly voluntarily offered
+to them by the party, in the height of victory, and
+enriched by the plunder of whole provinces. I believe
+your Lordships will agree with me, that, if any
+relaxation, any evasion, of an act of Parliament
+could be allowed, if the intention of the legislature
+could for a moment be trifled with, or supposed for
+a moment doubtful, it was in this instance; and yet,
+upon the rigor of the act, Mr. Hastings refuses that
+army the price of their blood, money won solely almost
+by their arms for a prince who had acquired
+millions by their bravery, fidelity, and sufferings.
+This was the case in which Mr. Hastings refused a
+public donation to the army; and from that day to
+this they have never received it.</p>
+
+<p>If the receipt of this public donation could be thus
+forbidden, whence has Mr. Hastings since learned
+that he may privately take money, and take it not
+only from princes, and persons in power, and abounding
+in wealth, but, as we shall prove, from persons
+in a comparative degree of penury and distress? that
+he could take it from persons in office and trust,
+whose power gave them the means of ruining the
+people for the purpose of enabling themselves to pay<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">{333}</a></span>
+it? Consider in what a situation the Company must
+be, if the Governor-General can form such a secret
+exchequer of direct bribes, given <i>eo nomine</i> as bribes,
+and accepted as such, by the parties concerned in the
+transaction, to be discovered only by himself, and
+with only the inward reservation that I have spoken
+of.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, if Mr. Hastings should die without
+having made a discovery of all his bribes, or
+if any other servant of the Company should imitate
+his example without his heroic good intentions in
+doing such villanous acts, how is the Company to recover
+the bribe-money? The receivers need not divulge
+it till they think fit; and the moment an informer
+comes, that informer is ruined. He comes,
+for instance, to the Governor-General and Council,
+and charges, say, not Mr. Hastings, but the head of
+the Board of Revenue, with receiving a bribe. "Receive
+a bribe? So I did; but it was with an intention
+of applying it to the Company's service. There
+I nick the informer: I am beforehand with him: the
+bribe is sanctified by my inward jesuitical intention.
+I will make a merit of it with the Company. I have
+received 40,000<i>l.</i> as a bribe; there it is for you: I
+am acquitted; I am a meritorious servant: let the
+informer go and seek his remedy as he can." Now,
+if an informer is once instructed that a person who
+receives bribes can turn them into merit, and take
+away his action from him, do you think that you
+ever will or can discover any one bribe? But what
+is still worse, by this method disclose but one bribe,
+and you secure all the rest that you possibly can receive
+upon any occasion. For instance, strong report
+prevails that a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> has been given,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">{334}</a></span>
+and the receiver expects that information will be laid
+against him. He acknowledges that he has received
+a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i>, but says that it was for the service
+of the Company, and that it is carried to their
+account. And thus, by stating that he has taken
+some money which he has accounted for, but concealing
+from whom that money came, which is exactly
+Mr. Hastings's case, if at last an information should
+be laid before the Company of a specific bribe having
+been received of 40,000<i>l.</i>, it is said by the receiver,
+"Lord! this is the 40,000<i>l.</i> I told you of: it is
+broken into fragments, paid by instalments; and you
+have taken it and put it into your own coffers."</p>
+
+<p>Again, suppose him to take it through the hand
+of an agent, such as Gunga Govind Sing, and that
+this agent, who, as we have lately discovered, out of
+a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i>, which Mr. Hastings was to have
+received, kept back half of it, falls into their debt
+like him: I desire to know what the Company can
+do in such a case. Gunga Govind Sing has entered
+into no covenants with the Company. There is no
+trace of his having this money, except what Mr.
+Hastings chooses to tell. If he is called upon to
+refund it to the Company, he may say he never received
+it, that he was never ordered to extort this
+money from the people; or if he was under any
+covenant not to take money, he may set up this defence:
+"I am forbidden to receive money; and I
+will not make a declaration which will subject me
+to penalties": or he may say in India, before the
+Supreme Court, "I have paid the bribe all to Mr.
+Hastings"; and then there must be a bill and suit
+there, a bill and suit here, and by that means, having
+one party on one side the water and the other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">{335}</a></span>
+party on the other, the Company may never come
+to a discovery of it. And that in fact this is the
+way in which one of his great bribe-agents has acted
+I shall prove to your Lordships by evidence.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings had squeezed out of a miserable
+country a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i>, of which he was enabled
+to bring to the account of the Company only 20,000<i>l.</i>,
+and of which we should not even have known the
+existence, if the inquiries pursued with great diligence
+by the House of Commons had not extorted
+the discovery: and even now that we know the fact,
+we can never get at the money; the Company can
+never receive it; and before the House had squeezed
+out of him that some such money had been received,
+he never once told the Court of Directors that his
+black bribe-agent, whom he recommended to their
+service, had cheated both them and him of 20,000<i>l.</i>
+out of the fund of the bribe-revenue. If it be asked,
+Where is the record of this? Record there is none.
+In what office is it entered? It is entered in no
+office; it is mentioned as privately received for the
+Company's benefit: and you shall now further see
+what a charming office of receipt and account this
+new exchequer of Mr. Hastings's is.</p>
+
+<p>For there is another and a more serious circumstance
+attending this business. Every one knows,
+that, by the law of this, and, I believe, of every country,
+any money which is taken illegally from any
+person, as every bribe or sum of money extorted
+or paid without consideration is, belongs to the person
+who paid it, and he may bring his action for it,
+and recover it. Then see how the Company stands.
+The Company receives a bribe of 40,000<i>l.</i> by Mr.
+Hastings; it is carried to its account; it turns brib<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">{336}</a></span>ery
+into a revenue; it sanctifies it. In the mean
+time, the man from whom this money is illegally
+taken sues Mr. Hastings. Must not he recover of
+Mr. Hastings? Then, if so, must not Mr. Hastings
+recover it again from the Company? The Company
+undoubtedly is answerable for it. And here is a
+revenue which every man who has paid it may drag
+out of the treasury again. Mr. Hastings's donations
+of his bribes to the treasury are liable to be torn
+from it at pleasure by every man who gives the
+money. First it may be torn from him who receives
+it; and then he may recover it from the treasury, to
+which he has given it.</p>
+
+<p>But admitting that the taking of bribes can be
+sanctified by their becoming the property of the
+Company, it may still be asked, For what end and
+purpose has the Company covenanted with Mr. Hastings
+that money taken extorsively shall belong to
+the Company? Is it that satisfaction and reparation
+may be awarded against the said Warren Hastings
+to the said Company for their own benefit? No:
+it is for the benefit of the injured persons; and it
+is to be carried to the Company's account, "but in
+trust, nevertheless, and to the intent that the said
+Company may and do render and pay over the moneys
+received or recovered by them to the parties
+injured or defrauded, which the said Company accordingly
+hereby agree and covenant to do." Now
+here is a revenue to be received by Mr. Hastings for
+the Company's use, applied at his discretion to that
+use, and which the Company has previously covenanted
+to restore to the persons that are injured
+and damaged. This is a revenue which is to be torn
+away by the action of any person,&mdash;a revenue which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">{337}</a></span>
+they must return back to the person complaining,
+as they in justice ought to do: for no nation ever
+avowed making a revenue out of bribery and peculation.
+They are, then, to restore it back again.
+But how can they restore it? Mr. Hastings has
+applied it: he has given it in presents to princes,&mdash;laid
+it out in budgeros,&mdash;in pen, ink, and wax,&mdash;in
+salaries to secretaries: he has laid it out just in
+any way he pleased: and the India Company, who
+have covenanted to restore all this money to the persons
+from whom it came, are deprived of all means of
+performing so just a duty. Therefore I dismiss the
+idea that any man so acting could have had a good
+intention in his mind: the supposition is too weak,
+senseless, and absurd. It was only in a desperate
+cause that he made a desperate attempt: for we shall
+prove that he never made a disclosure without thinking
+that a discovery had been previously made or
+was likely to be made, together with an exposure
+of all the circumstances of his wicked and abominable
+concealment.</p>
+
+<p>You will see the history of this new scheme of
+bribery, by which Mr. Hastings contrived by avowing
+some bribes to cover others, attempted to outface
+his delinquency, and, if possible, to reconcile a weak
+breach of the laws with a sort of spirited observance
+of them, and to become infamous for the good of his
+country.</p>
+
+<p>The first appearance of this practice of bribery
+was in a letter of the 29th of November, 1780. The
+cause which led to the discovery was a dispute between
+him and Mr. Francis at the board, in consequence
+of a very handsome offer made by Mr. Hastings
+to the board relative to a measure proposed by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">{338}</a></span>
+him, to which he found one objection to be the money
+that it would cost. He made the most generous and
+handsome offer, as it stands upon record, that perhaps
+any man ever made,&mdash;namely, that he would defray
+the expense out of his own private cash, and that he
+had deposited with the treasurer two lac of rupees.
+This was in June, 1780, and Mr. Francis soon after
+returned to Europe. I need not inform your Lordships,
+that Mr. Hastings had before this time been
+charged with bribery and peculation by General Clavering,
+Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis. He suspected
+that Mr. Francis, then going to Europe, would
+confirm this charge by the suspicious nature and circumstances
+of this generous offer; and this suspicion
+was increased by the connection which he supposed,
+and which we can prove he thought, Mr. Francis had
+with Cheyt Sing. Apprehending, therefore, that he
+might discover and bring the bribe to light some way
+or other, he resolved to anticipate any such discovery
+by declaring, upon the 29th of November, that this
+money was not his own. I will mention to your Lordships
+hereafter the circumstances of this money. He
+says, "My present reason for adverting to my conduct,"
+(that is, his offer of two lac of rupees out of
+his own private cash for the Company's service, upon
+the 26th of June, 1780,) "on the occasion I have mentioned,
+is to obviate the false conclusions or purposed
+misrepresentations which may be made of it, either as
+an artifice of ostentation or as the effect of corrupt
+influence, by assuring you that the money, by whatever
+means it came into your possession, was not my
+own,&mdash;that I had myself no right to it, nor would
+or could have received it, but for the occasion, which
+prompted me to avail myself of the accidental means<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">{339}</a></span>
+which were at that instant afforded me of accepting
+and converting it to the property and use of the Company:
+and with this brief apology I shall dismiss the
+subject."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you see what an account Mr. Hastings
+has given of some obscure transaction by which he
+contradicts the record. For, on the 26th of June, he
+generously, nobly, full of enthusiasm for their service,
+offers to the Company money of his own. On the
+29th of November he tells the Court of Directors that
+the money he offered on the former day was not his
+own,&mdash;that his assertion was totally false,&mdash;that the
+money was not his,&mdash;that he had no right to receive
+it,&mdash;and that he would not have received it, but for
+the occasion, which prompted him to avail himself of
+the accidental means which at that instant offered.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the account sent by their Governor in India,
+acting as an accountant, to the Company,&mdash;a
+company with whom everything is matter of account.
+He tells them, indeed, that the sum he had offered
+was not his own,&mdash;that he had no right to it,&mdash;and
+that he would not have taken it, if he had not been
+greatly tempted by the occasion; but he never tells
+them by what means he came at it, the person from
+whom he received it, the occasion upon which he
+received it, (whether justifiable or not,) or any one
+circumstance under heaven relative to it. This is
+a very extraordinary account to give to the public of
+a sum which we find to be somewhere above twenty
+thousand pounds, taken by Mr. Hastings in some way
+or other. He set the Company blindly groping in
+the dark by the very pretended light, the ignis-fatuus,
+which he held out to them: for at that time all was
+in the dark, and in a cloud: and this is what Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">{340}</a></span>
+Hastings calls <i>information</i> communicated to the Company
+on the subject of these bribes.</p>
+
+<p>You have heard of obscurity illustrated by a further
+obscurity,&mdash;<i>obscurum per obscurius</i>. He continues
+to tell them,&mdash;"Something of affinity to this
+anecdote may appear in the first aspect of another
+transaction, which I shall proceed to relate, and of
+which it is more immediately my duty to inform
+you." He then tells them that he had contrived to
+give a sum of money to the Rajah of Berar, and the
+account he gives of that proceeding is this. "We
+had neither money to spare, nor, in the apparent state
+of that government in its relation to ours, would it
+have been either prudent or consistent with our public
+credit to have afforded it. It was, nevertheless,
+my decided opinion that some aid should be given,
+not less as a necessary relief than as an indication of
+confidence, and a return for the many instances of
+substantial kindness which we had within the course
+of the two last years experienced from the government
+of Berar. I had an assurance that such a proposal
+would receive the acquiescence of the board;
+but I knew that it would not pass without opposition,
+and it would have become public, which might have
+defeated its purpose. Convinced of the necessity of
+the expedient, and assured of the sincerity of the government
+of Berar, from evidences of stronger proof to
+me than I could make them appear to the other members
+of the board, I resolved to adopt it and take the
+entire responsibility of it upon myself. In this mode
+a less considerable sum would suffice. I accordingly
+caused three lac of rupees to be delivered to the
+minister of the Rajah of Berar resident in Calcutta.
+He has transmitted it to Cuttack. Two thirds of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">{341}</a></span>
+sum I have raised by my own credit, and shall charge
+it in my official accounts; the other third I have
+supplied from the cash in my hands belonging to the
+Honorable Company."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships see in this business another mode
+which he has of accounting with the Company, and
+informing them of his bribe. He begins his account
+of this transaction by saying that it has something of
+affinity to the last anecdote,&mdash;meaning the account
+of the first bribe. An anecdote is made a head of
+an account; and this, I believe, is what none of your
+Lordships ever have heard of before,&mdash;and I believe
+it is yet to be learned in this commercial nation, a nation
+of accurate commercial account. The account
+he gives of the first is an anecdote; and what is his
+account of the second? A relation of an anecdote:
+not a near relation, but something of affinity,&mdash;a remote
+relation, cousin three or four times removed, of
+the half-blood, or something of that kind, to this anecdote:
+and he never tells them any circumstance of
+it whatever of any kind, but that it has some affinity
+to the former anecdote. But, my Lords, the thing
+which comes to some degree of clearness is this, that
+he did give money to the Rajah of Berar. And your
+Lordships will be so good as to advert carefully to the
+proportions in which he gave it. He did give him
+two lac of rupees of money raised by his own credit,
+his own money; and the third he advanced out of
+the Company's money in his hands. He might have
+taken the Company's money undoubtedly, fairly,
+openly, and held it in his hands, for a hundred purposes;
+and therefore he does not tell them that even
+that third was money he had obtained by bribery and
+corruption. No: he says it is money of the Com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">{342}</a></span>pany's,
+which he had in his hand. So that you must
+get through a long train of construction before you
+ascertain that this sum was what it turns out to be,
+a bribe, which he retained for the Company. Your
+Lordships will please to observe, as I proceed, the nature
+of this pretended generosity in Mr. Hastings.
+He is always generous in the same way. As he offered
+the whole of his first bribe as his own money,
+and afterward acknowledged that no part of it was
+his own, so he is now generous again in this latter
+transaction,&mdash;in which, however, he shows that he is
+neither generous nor just. He took the first money
+without right, and he did not apply it to the very
+service for which it was pretended to be taken. He
+then tells you of another anecdote, which, he says,
+has an affinity to that anecdote, and here he is generous
+again. In the first he appears to be generous
+and just, because he appears to give his own money,
+which he had a right to dispose of; then he tells you
+he is neither generous nor just, for he had taken money
+he had no right to, and did not apply it to the service
+for which he pretended to have received it. And
+now he is generous again, because he gives two lac
+of his own money,&mdash;and just, because he gives one
+lac which belonged to the Company; but there is not
+an idea suggested from whom he took it.</p>
+
+<p>But to proceed, my Lords. In this letter he tells
+you he had given two thirds his own money and one
+third the Company's money. So it stood upon the
+29th of November, 1780. On the 5th of January following
+we see the business take a totally different
+turn; and then Mr. Hastings calls for three Company's
+bonds, upon two different securities, antedated
+to the 1st and 2d of October, for the three lac, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">{343}</a></span>
+he before told them was two thirds his own money
+and one third the Company's. He now declares the
+whole of it to be his own, and he thus applies by letter
+to the board, of which he himself was a majority.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Honorable Sir and Sirs,&mdash;Having had occasion to
+disburse the sum of three lacs of sicca rupees on account
+of secret services, which having been advanced
+from my own private cash, I request that the same
+may be repaid to me in the following manner.</p>
+
+<p>"A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the
+second loan, bearing date from 1st October, for one
+lac of sicca rupees.</p>
+
+<p>"A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the
+first loan, bearing date from 1st October, for one lac
+of sicca rupees."</p>
+
+<p>"A bond to be granted me upon the terms of the
+first loan, bearing date from the 2d October, for one
+lac of sicca rupees."</p></div>
+
+<p>Here are two accounts, one of which must be directly
+and flatly false: for he could not have given
+two thirds his own, and have supplied the other third
+from money of the Company's, and at the same time
+have advanced the whole as his own. He here goes
+the full length of the fraud: he declares that it is all
+his own,&mdash;so much his own that he does not trust
+the Company with it, and actually takes their bonds
+as a security for it, bearing an interest to be paid to
+him when he thinks proper.</p>
+
+<p>Thus it remained from the 5th of January, 1781,
+till 16th December, 1782, when this business takes
+another turn, and in a letter of his to the Company
+these bonds become all their own. All the money ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">{344}</a></span>vanced
+is now, all of it, the Company's money. First
+he says two thirds were his own; next, that the whole
+is his own; and the third account is, that the whole
+is the Company's, and he will account to them for it.</p>
+
+<p>Now he has accompanied this account with another
+very curious one. For when you come to look into
+the particulars of it, you will find there are three
+bonds declared to be the Company's bonds, and which
+refer to the former transactions, namely, the money
+for which he had taken the bonds; but when you
+come to look at the numbers of them, you will find
+that one of the three bonds which he had taken as
+his own disappears, and another bond, of another date,
+and for a much larger sum, is substituted in its place,
+of which he had never mentioned anything whatever.
+So that, taking his first account, that two thirds is his
+own money, then that it is all his own, in the third
+that it is all the Company's money, by a fourth account,
+given in a paper describing the three bonds,
+you will find that there is one lac which he does not
+account for, but substitutes in its place a bond before
+taken as his own. He sinks and suppresses one bond,
+he gives two bonds to the Company, and to supply
+the want of the third, which he suppresses, he brings
+forward a bond for another sum, of another date,
+which he had never mentioned before. Here, then,
+you have four different accounts: if any one of them
+is true, every one of the other three is totally false.
+Such a system of cogging, such a system of fraud, such
+a system of prevarication, such a system of falsehood,
+never was, I believe, before exhibited in the world.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, why did he take bonds at all from
+the Company for the money that was their own? I
+must be cautious how I charge a legal crime. I will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">{345}</a></span>
+not charge it to be forgery, to take a bond from the
+Company for money which was their own. He was
+employed to make out bonds for the Company, to
+raise money on their credit. He pretends he lent
+them a sum of money, which was not his to lend:
+but he gives their own money to them as his own,
+and takes a security for it. I will not say that it is
+a forgery, but I am sure it is an offence as grievous,
+because it is as much a cheat as a forgery, with this
+addition to it, that the person so cheating is in a
+trust; he violates that trust, and in so doing he defrauds
+and falsifies the whole system of the Company's
+accounts.</p>
+
+<p>I have only to show what his own explanation of
+all these actions was, because it supersedes all observation
+of mine. Hear what prevaricating guilt says
+for the falsehood and delusion which had been used to
+cover it; and see how he plunges deeper and deeper
+upon every occasion. This explanation arose out
+of another memorable bribe, which I must now beg
+leave to state to your Lordships.</p>
+
+<p>About the time of the receipt of the former bribes,
+good fortune, as good things seldom come singly, is
+kind to him; and when he went up and had nearly
+ruined the Company's affairs in Oude and Benares,
+he received a present of 100,000<i>l.</i> sterling, or thereabouts.
+He received bills for it in September, 1781,
+and he gives the Company an account of it in January,
+1782. Remark in what manner the account of
+this money was given, and the purposes for which
+he intends to apply it. He says, in this letter, "I received
+the offer of a considerable sum of money, both
+on the Nabob's part and that of his ministers, as a
+present to myself, not to the Company: I accepted it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">{346}</a></span>
+without hesitation, and gladly, being entirely destitute
+both of means and credit, whether for your service or
+the relief of my own necessities." My Lords, upon
+this you shall hear a comment, made by some abler
+persons than me. This donation was not made in
+species, but in bills upon the house of Gopaul Doss,
+who was then a prisoner in the hands of Cheyt Sing.
+After mentioning that he took this present for the
+Company, and for their exigencies, and partly for his
+own necessities, and in consequence of the distress of
+both, he desires the Company, in the moment of this
+their greatest distress, to award it to him, and therefore
+he ends, "If you should adjudge the deposit to
+me, I shall consider it as the most honorable approbation
+and reward of my labors: and I wish to owe
+my fortune to your bounty. I am now in the fiftieth
+year of my life: I have passed thirty-one years in the
+service of the Company, and the greatest part of that
+time in employments of the highest trust. My conscience
+allows me boldly to claim the merit of zeal
+and integrity; nor has fortune been unpropitious to
+their exertions. To these qualities I bound my pretensions.
+I shall not repine, if you shall deem otherwise
+of my services; nor ought your decision, however
+it may disappoint my hope of a retreat adequate
+to the consequence and elevation of the office which I
+now possess, to lessen my gratitude for having been
+so long permitted to hold it, since it has at least enabled
+me to lay up a provision with which I can be
+contented in a more humble station."</p>
+
+<p>And here your Lordships will be pleased incidentally
+to remark the circumstance of his condition of
+life and his fortune, to which he appeals, and upon account
+of which he desires this money. Your Lord<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">{347}</a></span>ships
+will remember that in 1773 he said, (and this I
+stated to you from himself,) that, if he held his then
+office for a very few years, he should be enabled to
+lay by an ample provision for his retreat. About
+nine years after that time, namely, in the month
+of January, 1782, he finds himself rather pinched
+with want, but, however, not in so bad a way but
+that the holding of his office had enabled him to lay
+up a provision with which he could be contented in a
+more humble station. He wishes to have affluence;
+he wishes to have dignity; he wishes to have consequence
+and rank: but he allows that he has competence.
+Your Lordships will see afterwards how miserably
+his hopes were disappointed: for the Court of
+Directors, receiving this letter from Mr. Hastings,
+did declare, that they could not give it to him, because
+the act had ordered that "no fees of office,
+perquisites, emoluments, or advantages whatsoever,
+should be accepted, received, or taken by such Governor-General
+and Council, or any of them, in any
+manner or on any account or pretence whatsoever";
+"and as the same act further directs, 'that no Governor-General,
+or any of the Council, shall directly
+take, accept, or receive, of or from any person or
+persons, in any manner or on any account whatsoever,
+any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,
+pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement
+for any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,'
+we cannot, were we so inclined, decree the
+amount of this present to the Governor-General.
+And it is further enacted, 'that any such present,
+gift, gratuity, donation, or reward, accepted, taken,
+or received, shall be deemed and construed to have
+been received to and for the sole use of the Com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">{348}</a></span>pany.'"
+And therefore they resolved, most unjustly
+and most wickedly, to keep it to themselves. The
+act made it in the first instance the property of the
+Company, and they would not give it him. And one
+should think this, with his own former construction
+of the act, would have made him cautious of taking
+bribes. You have seen what weight it had with him
+to stop the course of bribes which he was in such a
+career of taking in every place and with both hands.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships have now before you this hundred
+thousand pounds, disclosed in a letter from Patna,
+dated the 20th January, 1782. You find mystery
+and concealment in every one of Mr. Hastings's discoveries.
+For (which is a curious part of it) this letter
+was not sent to the Court of Directors in their
+packet regularly, but transmitted by Major Fairfax,
+one of his agents, to Major Scott, another of his
+agents, to be delivered to the Company. Why was
+this done? Your Lordships will judge, from that circuitous
+mode of transmission, whether he did not
+thereby intend to leave some discretion in his agent
+to divulge it or not. We are told he did not; but
+your Lordships will believe that or not, according to
+the nature of the fact. If he had been anxious to
+make this discovery to the Directors, the regular way
+would have been to send his letter to the Directors
+immediately in the packet: but he sent it in a box to
+an agent; and that agent, upon due discretion, conveyed
+it to the Court of Directors. Here, however,
+he tells you nothing about the persons from whom
+he received this money, any more than he had done
+respecting the two former sums.</p>
+
+<p>On the 2d of May following the date of this Patna
+letter he came down to Calcutta with a mind, as he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">{349}</a></span>
+himself describes it, greatly agitated. All his hope
+of plundering Benares had totally failed. The produce
+of the robbing of the Begums, in the manner
+your Lordships have heard, was all dissipated to pay
+the arrears of the armies: there was no fund left.
+He felt himself agitated and full of dread, knowing
+that he had been threatened with having his place
+taken from him several times, and that he might be
+called home to render an account. He had heard
+that inquiries had begun in a menacing form in Parliament;
+and though at that time Bengal was not
+struck at, there was a charge of bribery and peculation
+brought against the Governor of Madras. With
+this dread, with a mind full of anxiety and perturbation,
+he writes a letter, as he pretends, on the 22d of
+May, 1782. Your Lordships will remark, that, when
+he came down to Calcutta from his expedition up
+the country, he did not till the 22d of May give any
+account whatever of these transactions,&mdash;and that
+this letter, or pretended letter, of the 22d of May was
+not sent till the 16th of December following. We
+shall clearly prove that he had abundant means of
+sending it, and by various ways, before the 16th of
+December, 1782, when he inclosed in another letter
+that of the 22d of May. This is the letter of discovery;
+this is the letter by which his breast was to be
+laid open to his employers, and all the obscurity of
+his transactions to be elucidated. Here are indeed
+new discoveries, but they are like many new-discovered
+lands, exceedingly inhospitable, very thinly inhabited,
+and producing nothing to gratify the curiosity
+of the human mind.</p>
+
+<p>This letter is addressed to the Honorable the
+Court of Directors, dated Fort William, 22d May,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">{350}</a></span>
+1782. He tells them he had promised to account
+for the ten lacs of rupees which he had received, and
+this promise, he says, he now performs, and that he
+takes that opportunity of accounting with them likewise
+for several other sums which he had received.
+His words are,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This promise I now perform, and, deeming it
+consistent with the spirit of it, I have added such
+other sums as have been occasionally converted to
+the Company's property through my means, in consequence
+of the like original destination. Of the second
+of these sums you have already been advised
+in a letter which I had the honor to address the
+Honorable Court of Directors, dated 29th November,
+1780. Both this and the third article were paid immediately
+to the treasury, by my order to the sub-treasurer
+to receive them on the Company's account,
+but never passed through my hands. The three
+sums for which bonds were granted were in like
+manner paid to the Company's treasury, without
+passing through my hands, but their <i>application</i> was
+not specified. The sum of 50,000 current rupees
+was received while I was on my journey to Benares,
+and applied as expressed in the account.</p>
+
+<p>"As to the manner in which these sums have been
+expended, the reference which I have made of it in
+the accompanying account, to the several accounts in
+which they are credited, renders any other specification
+of it unnecessary,&mdash;<i>besides</i> that these accounts
+either have or will have received a much stronger authentication
+than any that I could give to mine."</p>
+
+<p>I wish your Lordships to attend to the next paragraph,
+which is meant by him to explain why he took
+bribes at all,&mdash;why he took bonds for some of them,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">{351}</a></span>
+as moneys of his own, and not moneys of the
+Company,&mdash;why he entered some upon the Company's accounts,
+and why of the others he renders no account at
+all. Light, however, will beam upon you as we proceed.</p>
+
+<p>"Why these sums were taken by me,&mdash;why they
+were, except the second, quietly transferred to the
+Company's use,&mdash;why bonds were taken for the first,
+and not for the rest,&mdash;might, were this matter exposed
+to the view of the public, furnish a variety of
+conjectures, to which it would be of little use to reply.
+Were your Honorable Court to question me on these
+points, I would answer, that the sums were taken for
+the Company's benefit, at times when the Company
+very much needed them,&mdash;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 could at this
+distance of time verify, and that I did not think it
+worth my care to observe the same means with the
+rest. I trust, Honorable Sirs, to your breasts for a
+candid interpretation of my actions,&mdash;and assume
+the freedom to add, that I think myself, on such a
+subject, on such <i>an occasion</i>, entitled to it."</p>
+
+<p>Lofty, my Lords! You see, that, after the Directors
+had expected an explanation for so long a time,
+he says, "Why these sums were taken by me, and,
+except the second, quietly transferred to the Company's
+use, I cannot tell; why bonds were taken for
+the first, and not for the rest, I cannot tell: if this
+matter were exposed to view, it would furnish a variety
+of conjectures." Here is an account which is
+to explain the most obscure, the most mysterious,
+the most evidently fraudulent transactions. When
+asked how he came to take these bonds, how he came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">{352}</a></span>
+to use these frauds, he tells you he really does not
+know,&mdash;that he might have this motive for it, that he
+might have another motive for it,&mdash;that he wished
+to conceal it from public curiosity,&mdash;but, which is the
+most extraordinary, he is not quite sure that he
+had any motive for it at all, which his memory can
+trace. The whole of this is a period of a year and a
+half; and here is a man who keeps his account upon
+principles of whim and vagary. One would imagine
+he was guessing at some motive of a stranger. Why
+he came to take bonds for money not due to him, and
+why he enters some and not others,&mdash;he knows nothing
+of these things: he begs them not to ask about it,
+because it will be of no use. "You foolish Court of
+Directors may conjecture and conjecture on. You
+are asking me why I took bonds to myself for money
+of yours, why I have cheated you, why I have falsified
+my account in such a manner. I will not tell
+you."</p>
+
+<p>In the satisfaction which he had promised to give
+them he neither mentions the persons, the times, the
+occasions, or motives for any of his actions. He adds,
+"I did not think it worth my care to observe the
+same means with the rest." For some purposes, he
+thought it necessary to use the most complicated and
+artful concealments; for some, he could not tell what
+his motives were; and for others, that it was mere
+carelessness. Here is the exchequer of bribery!&mdash;have
+I falsified any part of my original stating of it?&mdash;an
+exchequer in which the man who ought to pay
+receives, the man who ought to give security takes
+it, the man who ought to keep an account says he
+has forgotten; an exchequer in which oblivion was
+the remembrancer; and, to sum up the whole, an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">{353}</a></span>
+exchequer into the accounts of which it was useless
+to inquire. This is the manner in which the account
+of near two hundred thousand pounds is given to the
+Court of Directors. You can learn nothing in this
+business that is any way distinct, except a premeditated
+design of a concealment of his transactions.
+That is avowed.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a more serious thing behind. Who
+were the instruments of his concealment? No other,
+my Lords, than the Company's public accountant.
+That very accountant takes the money, knowing
+it to be the Company's, and that it was only
+pretended to be advanced by Mr. Hastings for the
+Company's use. He sees Mr. Hastings make out
+bonds to himself for it, and Mr. Hastings makes him
+enter him as creditor, when in fact he was debtor.
+Thus he debauches the Company's accountant, and
+makes him his confederate. These fraudulent and
+corrupt acts, covered by false representations, are
+proved to be false not by collation with anything
+else, but false by a collation with themselves. This,
+then, is the account, and his explanation of it; and
+in this insolent, saucy, careless, negligent manner,
+a public accountant like Mr. Hastings, a man bred
+up a book-keeper in the Company's service, who
+ought to be exact, physically exact, in his account,
+has not only been vicious in his own account, but
+made the public accounts vicious and of no value.</p>
+
+<p>But there is in this account another curious circumstance
+with regard to the deposit of this sum of
+money, to which he referred in his first paragraph
+of his letter of the 29th of November, 1780. He
+states that this deposit was made and passed into the
+hands of Mr. Larkins on the 1st of June. It did so;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">{354}</a></span>
+but it is not entered in the Company's accounts till
+November following. Now in all that intermediate
+space where was it? what account was there
+of it? It was entirely a secret between Mr. Larkins
+and Mr. Hastings, without a possibility of any one
+discovering any particular relative to it. Here is
+an account of two hundred thousand pounds received,
+juggled between the accountant and him, without a
+trace of it appearing in the Company's books. Some
+of those committees, to whom, for their diligence at
+least, I must say the public have some obligation, and
+in return for which they ought to meet with some
+indulgence, examining into all these circumstances,
+and having heard that Mr. Hastings had deposited a
+sum of money in the hands of the Company's sub-treasurer
+in the month of June, sent for the Company's
+books. They looked over those books, but they
+did not find the least trace of any such sum of money,
+and not any account of it: nor could there be,
+because it was not paid to the Company's account
+till the November following. The accountant had received
+the money, but never entered it from June
+till November. Then, at last, have we an account
+of it. But was it even then entered regularly upon
+the Company's accounts? No such thing: it is a
+deposit carried to the Governor-General's credit.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>[<i>The entry of the several species in which this deposit
+was made was here read from the Company's General
+Journal of 1780 and 1781.</i>]</p></div>
+
+<p>My Lords, when this account appears at last,
+when this money does emerge in the public accounts,
+whose is it? Is it the Company's? No: Mr. Hast<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">{355}</a></span>ings's.
+And thus, if, notwithstanding this obscure account
+in November, the Directors had claimed and
+called for this affinity to an anecdote,&mdash;if they had
+called for this anecdote and examined the account,&mdash;if
+they had said, "We observe here entered two lac
+and upwards; come, Mr. Hastings, let us see where
+this money is,"&mdash;they would find that it is Mr.
+Hastings's money, not the Company's; they would
+find that it is carried to his credit. In this manner
+he hands over this sum, telling them, on the 22d
+of May, 1782, that not only the bonds were a fraud,
+but the deposit was a fraud, and that neither bonds
+nor deposit did in reality belong to him. Why did
+he enter it at all? Then, afterwards, why did he
+not enter it as the Company's? Why make a false
+entry, to enter it as his own? And how came he,
+two years after, when he does tell you that it was
+the Company's and not his own, to alter the public
+accounts? But why did he not tell them at that
+time, when he pretends to be opening his breast to
+the Directors, from whom he received it, or say
+anything to give light to the Company respecting
+it? who, supposing they had the power of dispensing
+with an act of Parliament, or licensing bribery at
+their pleasure, might have been thereby enabled to
+say, "Here you ought to have received it,&mdash;there
+it might be oppressive and of dreadful example."</p>
+
+<p>I have only to state, that, in this letter, which was
+pretended to be written on the 22d of May, 1782,
+your Lordships will observe that he thinks it his
+absolute duty (and I wish to press this upon your
+Lordships, because it will be necessary in a comparison
+which I shall have hereafter to make) to lay
+open all their affairs to them, to give them a full<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">{356}</a></span>
+and candid explanation of his conduct, which he afterwards
+confesses he is not able to do. The paragraph
+has been just read to you. It amounts to
+this: "I have taken many bribes,&mdash;have falsified
+your accounts,&mdash;have reversed the principle of them
+in my own favor; I now discover to you all these my
+frauds, and think myself entitled to your confidence
+upon this occasion." Now all the principles of diffidence,
+all the principles of distrust, nay, more, all
+the principles upon which a man may be convicted
+of premeditated fraud, and deserve the severest punishment,
+are to be found in this case, in which he
+says he holds himself to be entitled to their confidence
+and trust. If any of your Lordships had a
+steward who told you he had lent you your own
+money, and had taken bonds from you for it, and if
+he afterwards told you that that money was neither
+yours nor his, but extorted from your tenants
+by some scandalous means, I should be glad to know
+what your Lordships would think of such a steward,
+who should say, "I will take the freedom to add, that
+I think myself, on such a subject, on such an occasion,
+entitled to your confidence and trust." You
+will observe his cavalier mode of expression. Instead
+of his exhibiting the rigor and severity of an
+accountant and a book-keeper, you would think that
+he had been a reader of sentimental letters; there
+is such an air of a novel running through the whole,
+that it adds to the ridicule and nausea of it: it is an
+oxymel of squills; there is something to strike you
+with horror for the villany of it, something to strike
+you with contempt for the fraud of it, and something
+to strike you with utter disgust for the vile and bad
+taste with which all these base ingredients are assorted.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">{357}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will see, when the account which
+is subjoined to this unaccountable letter comes before
+you, that, though the Company had desired to know
+the channels through which he got those sums, there
+is not (except by a reference that appears in another
+place to one of the articles) one single syllable of
+explanation given from one end to the other, there is
+not the least glimpse of light thrown upon these transactions.
+But we have since discovered from whom
+he got these bribes; and your Lordships will be struck
+with horror, when you hear it.</p>
+
+<p>I have already remarked to you, that, though this
+letter is dated upon the 22d of May, it was not dispatched
+for Europe till December following; and he
+gets Mr. Larkins, who was his agent and instrument
+in falsifying the Company's accounts, to swear that
+this letter was written upon the 22d of May, and that
+he had no opportunity to send it, but by the "Lively"
+in December. On the 16th of that month he writes
+to the Directors, and tells them that he is quite
+shocked to find he had no earlier opportunity of making
+this discovery, which he thought himself bound to
+make; though this discovery, respecting some articles
+of it, had now been delayed nearly two years, and
+though it since appears that there were many opportunities,
+and particularly by the "Resolution," of
+sending it. He was much distressed, and found himself
+in an awkward situation, from an apprehension
+that the Parliamentary inquiry, which he knew was
+at this time in progress, might have forced from him
+this notable discovery. He says, "I do not fear the
+consequences of any Parliamentary process." Indeed,
+he needed not to fear any Parliamentary inquiry, if it
+produced no further discovery than that which your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">{358}</a></span>
+Lordships have in the letter of the 22d of May, and in
+the accounts subjoined to it. He says, that "the delay
+is of no public consequence; but it has produced a
+situation which, with respect to myself, I regard as
+unfortunate, because it exposes me to the meanest
+imputation, from the occasion which the late Parliamentary
+inquiries have since furnished."</p>
+
+<p>Now here is a very curious letter, that I wish to
+have read for some other reasons, which will afterwards
+appear, but principally at present for the purpose
+of showing you that he held it to be his duty
+and thought it to the last degree dishonorable not to
+give the Company an account of those secret bribes:
+he thought it would reflect upon him, and ruin his
+character forever, if this account did not come voluntarily
+from him, but was extorted by terror of Parliamentary
+inquiry. In this letter of the 16th December,
+1782, he thus writes.</p>
+
+<p>"The delay is of no public consequence, but it has
+produced a situation which, with respect to myself,
+I regard as unfortunate; because it exposes me to
+the meanest imputation, from the occasion which the
+late Parliamentary inquiries have since furnished, but
+which were unknown when my letter was written,
+and written in the necessary consequence of a promise
+made to that effect in a former letter to your Honorable
+Committee, dated 20th January last. However, to
+preclude the possibility of such reflections from affecting
+me, I have desired Mr. Larkins, who was privy to
+the whole transaction, to affix to the letter his affidavit
+of the date in which it was written. I own I feel
+most sensibly the mortification of being reduced to
+the necessity of using such precautions to guard my
+reputation from dishonor. If I had at any time pos<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">{359}</a></span>sessed
+that degree of confidence from my immediate
+employers which they never withheld from the meanest
+of my predecessors, I should have disdained to use
+these attentions. How I have drawn on me a different
+treatment I know not; it is sufficient that I have
+not merited it. And in the course of a service of
+thirty-two years, and ten of these employed in maintaining
+the powers and discharging the duties of the
+first office of the British government in India, that
+honorable court ought to know whether I possess the
+integrity and honor which are the first requisites of
+such a station. If I wanted these, they have afforded
+me but too powerful incentives to suppress the information
+which I now convey to them through you, and
+to appropriate to my own use the sums which I have
+already passed to their credit, by the unworthy and,
+pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which they
+have passed upon me for the first communication of
+this kind: and your own experience will suggest to
+you, that there are persons who would profit by such
+a warning.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the whole of these transactions, which to
+you, who are accustomed to view business in an official
+and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not
+improper, I have but a few short remarks to suggest
+to your consideration.</p>
+
+<p>"If I appear in any unfavorable light by these transactions,
+I resign the common and legal security of
+those who commit crimes or errors. I am ready to
+answer every particular question that may be put
+against myself, upon honor or upon oath.</p>
+
+<p>"The sources from which these reliefs to the public
+service have come would never have yielded them
+to the Company publicly; and the exigencies of your<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">{360}</a></span>
+service (exigencies created by the exposition of your
+affairs, and faction in your councils) required those
+supplies.</p>
+
+<p>"I could have concealed them, had I had a wrong
+motive, from yours and the public eye forever; and I
+know that the difficulties to which a spirit of injustice
+may subject me for my candor and avowal are greater
+than any possible inconvenience that could have attended
+the concealment, except the dissatisfaction of my
+own mind. These difficulties are but a few of those
+which I have suffered in your service. The applause
+of my own breast is my surest reward, and was the
+support of my mind in meeting them. Your applause,
+and that of my country, are my next wish in life."</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will observe at the end of this
+letter, that this man declares his first applause to be
+from his own breast, and that he next wishes to have
+the applause of his employers. But reversing this,
+and taking their applause first, let us see on what
+does he ground his hope of their applause? Was it
+on his former conduct? No: for he says that conduct
+had repeatedly met with their disapprobation.
+Was it upon the confidence which he knew they had
+in him? No: for he says they gave more of their
+confidence to the meanest of his predecessors. Observe,
+my Lords, the style of insolence he constantly
+uses with regard to all mankind. Lord Clive was
+his predecessor, Governor Cartier was his predecessor,
+Governor Verelst was his predecessor: every man of
+them as good as himself: and yet he says the Directors
+had given "more of their confidence to the <i>meanest</i>
+of his predecessors." But what was to entitle
+him to their applause? A clear and full explanation
+of the bribes he had taken. Bribes was to be the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">{361}</a></span>
+foundation of their confidence in him, and the clear
+explanation of them was to entitle him to their applause!
+Strange grounds to build confidence upon!&mdash;the
+rotten ground of corruption, accompanied with
+the infamy of its avowal! Strange ground to expect
+applause!&mdash;a discovery which was no discovery at
+all! Your Lordships have heard this discovery,
+which I have not taken upon me to state, but have
+read his own letter on the occasion. Has there, at
+this moment, any light broken in upon you concerning
+this matter?</p>
+
+<p>But what does he say to the Directors? He says,
+"Upon the whole of these transactions, which to you,
+who are accustomed to view business in an official
+and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not
+improper, I have but a few short remarks to suggest
+to your consideration." He looks upon them and
+treats them as a set of low mechanical men, a set of
+low-born book-keepers, as base souls, who in an account
+call for explanation and precision. If there is
+no precision in accounts, there is nothing of worth
+in them. You see he himself is an eccentric accountant,
+a Pindaric book-keeper, an arithmetician in the
+clouds. "I know," he says, "what the Directors
+desire: but they are mean people; they are not of
+elevated sentiments; they are modest; they avoid
+ostentation in taking of bribes: I therefore am playing
+cups and balls with them, letting them see a little
+glimpse of the bribes, then carrying them fairly
+away." Upon this he founds the applause of his own
+breast.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="noindent">That private <i>ipse plaudo</i> he may have in this busi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">{362}</a></span>ness,
+which is a business of money; but the applause
+of no other human creature will he have for giving
+such an account as he admits this to be,&mdash;irregular,
+uncertain, problematical, and of which no one can
+make either head or tail. He despises us also, who
+are representatives of the people, and have amongst
+us all the regular officers of finance, for expecting
+anything like a regular account from him. He is
+hurt at it; he considers it as a cruel treatment of
+him; he says, "Have I deserved this treatment?"
+Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment,
+if treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of
+which he complains. The Court of Directors had,
+however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and pusillanimous,
+begged of him, as if they were his dependants,
+and not his masters, to give them some light into the
+account; they desire a receiver of money to tell from
+whom he received it, and how he applied it. He answers,
+They may be hanged for a parcel of mean,
+contemptible book-keepers, and that he will give them
+no account at all. He says, "If you sue me"&mdash;There
+is the point: he always takes security in a court
+of law. He considers his being called upon by these
+people, to whom he ought as a faithful servant to give
+an account, and to do which he was bound by an act
+of Parliament specially intrusting him with the administration
+of the revenues, as a gross affront. He
+adds, that he is ready to resign his defence, and to
+answer upon honor or upon oath. Answering upon
+honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your
+Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But
+he forgets, that, being the Company's servant, the
+Company may bring a bill in Chancery against him,
+and force him upon oath to give an account. He has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">{363}</a></span>
+not, however, given them light enough or afforded
+them sufficient ground for a fishing bill in Chancery.
+Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a Chancery way,
+or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms,
+and give you some account." In consequence of this
+the Company did demand from him an account, regularly,
+and as fully and formally as if they had demanded
+it in a court of justice. He positively refused
+to give them any account whatever; and they have
+never, to this very day in which we speak, had any
+account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your
+Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of
+fraud, falsification, iniquity, and prevarication, that,
+in defiance of his promise, which promise they quote
+upon him over and over again, he has never given
+them any account of this matter.</p>
+
+<p>He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming)
+that by calling him to account they may provoke
+him&mdash;to what? "To appropriate," he says, "to
+my own use the sums which I have already passed to
+your credit, by the unworthy and, pardon me, if I
+add, dangerous, reflections which you have passed
+upon me for the first communication of this kind."
+They passed no reflections: they said they would
+neither praise nor blame him, but pressed him for
+an account of a matter which they could not understand:
+and I believe your Lordships understand it no
+more than they, for it is not in the compass of human
+understanding to conceive or comprehend it. Instead
+of an account of it, he dares to threaten them: "I
+may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be
+an honest man,&mdash;to falsify your account a second
+time, and to reclaim those sums which I have passed
+to your credit,&mdash;to alter the account again, by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">{364}</a></span>
+assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration
+is this of his dominion over the public accounts,
+and of his power of altering them! a declaration,
+that, having first falsified those accounts in order to
+deceive them, and afterwards having told them of
+this falsification in order to gain credit with them, if
+they provoke him, he shall take back the money he
+had carried to their account, and make them his
+debtors for it! He fairly avows the dominion he has
+over the Company's accounts; and therefore, when he
+shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able
+to rebut that evidence, and say, "The Company's
+accounts are corrupted by you, through your agent,
+Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them, because
+you not only told the Company you could do so, but
+we can prove that you have actually done it." What
+a strange medley of evasion, pretended discovery, real
+concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears in every
+part of this letter!</p>
+
+<p>But admitting this letter to have been written upon
+the 22d of May, and kept back to the 16th of
+December, you would imagine that during all that
+interval of time he would have prepared himself to
+give some light, some illustration of these dark and
+mysterious transactions, which carried fraud upon
+the very face of them. Did he do so? Not at all.
+Upon the 16th of December, instead of giving them
+some such clear accounts as might have been expected,
+he falls into a violent passion for their expecting
+them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he
+tells them they knew who had profited by these
+transactions: thus, in order to strike terror into
+their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had
+practised or protected. What weight this may have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">{365}</a></span>
+had with them I know not; but your Lordships will
+expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after giving four
+accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three
+must necessarily be false,&mdash;after having thrown the
+Company's accounts into confusion, and being unable
+to tell, as he says himself, why he did so,&mdash;will
+at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who
+continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints
+that he ought to do it.&mdash;You have heard nothing yet
+but the consequences of their refusing to give him the
+present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had
+taken from the Nabob. They did right to refuse it to
+him; they did wrong to take it to themselves.</p>
+
+<p>We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges,
+in September, 1784,&mdash;that Ganges whose purifying
+water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and
+which, one would think, would have washed Mr.
+Hastings's hands a little clean of bribery, and would
+have rolled down its golden sands like another Pactolus.
+Here we find him discovering another of his
+bribes. This was a bribe taken upon totally a different
+principle, according to his own avowal: it is a
+bribe not pretended to be received for the use of the
+Company,&mdash;a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself.
+He tells them that he had taken between thirty
+and forty thousand pounds. This bribe, which, like
+the former, he had taken without right, he tells them
+that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he
+insists upon their sanction for so doing. He says,
+he had in vain, upon a former occasion, appealed to
+their honor, liberality, and generosity,&mdash;that he now
+appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing
+this bribe&mdash;which he had taken without telling
+them from whom, where, or on what account&mdash;to
+his own use.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">{366}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which
+he wrote from Patna, on the 20th of January, 1782,
+he there states that he was in tolerable good circumstances,
+and that this had arisen from his having
+continued long in their service. Now, he has continued
+two years longer in their service, and he is
+reduced to beggary! "This," he says, "is a single
+example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores
+for your benefit, and doomed in its close to suffer the
+extremity of private want, and to sink in obscurity."</p>
+
+<p>So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could
+save an exceeding good fortune out of his place. In
+1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has made a
+decent private competency; but in two years after
+he sunk to the extremity of private want. And how
+does he seek to relieve that want? By taking a
+bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the
+Company's service, but for his own. He takes the
+bribe with an express intention of keeping it for his
+own use, and he calls upon the Company for their
+sanction. If the money was taken without right,
+no claim of his could justify its being appropriated
+to himself: nor could the Company so appropriate
+it; for no man has a right to be generous out of
+another's goods. When he calls upon their justice
+and generosity, they might answer, "If you have a
+just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we will
+pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state
+your merits, and we will consider them." "But I
+have paid myself by a bribe; I have taken another
+man's money; and I call upon your justice&mdash;to do
+what? to restore it to its owner? no&mdash;to allow
+me to keep it myself." Think, my Lords, in what
+a situation the Company stands! "I have done a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">{367}</a></span>
+great deal for you; this is the jackal's portion; you
+have been the lion; I have been endeavoring to prog
+for you; I am your bribe-pander, your factor of
+corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn
+and ignominy, to insults even from you. I have
+been preying and plundering for you; I have gone
+through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness,
+wading through every species of dirt and corruption,
+for your advantage. I am now sinking into the
+extremity of private want; do give me this&mdash;what?
+money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me
+this bribe; vote me&mdash;what? money of your own?
+that would be generous: money you owe me? that
+would be just: no, money which I have extorted
+from another man; and I call upon your justice to
+give it me." This is his idea of justice. He says,
+"I am compelled to depart from that liberal plan
+which I originally adopted, and to claim from your
+justice (for you have forbid me to appeal to your
+generosity) the discharge of a debt which I can with
+the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due,
+and which I cannot sustain." Now, if any of the
+Company's servants may say, "I have been extravagant,
+profuse,&mdash;it was all meant for your good,&mdash;let
+me prey upon the country at my pleasure,&mdash;license
+my bribes, frauds, and peculations, and then
+you do me justice,"&mdash;what country are we in, where
+these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?</p>
+
+<p>It might naturally be expected that in this letter
+he would have given some account of the person from
+whom he had taken this bribe. But here, as in the
+other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the
+Ganges, like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw
+in Mr. Middleton; they recollect nothing, they know<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">{368}</a></span>
+nothing. He has not stated, from that day to this,
+from whom he took that money. But we have made
+the discovery. And such is the use of Parliamentary
+inquiries, such, too, both to the present age and posterity,
+will be their use, that, if we pursue them with
+the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon
+us demands, and if your Lordships do firmly administer
+justice upon this man's frauds, you will at once
+put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever.
+Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry,
+it is the diligence of the House of Commons, which
+he has the audacity to call <i>malice</i>, that has discovered
+and brought to light the frauds which we shall be
+able to prove against him.</p>
+
+<p>I will now read to your Lordships an extract from
+that stuff, called a defence, which he has either written
+himself or somebody else has written for him, and
+which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases, when,
+under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment,
+he discovered at length from whom he got this
+last bribe.</p>
+
+<p>"The last part of the charge states, that, in my
+letter to the Court of Directors of the 21st February,
+1784, I have confessed to have received another
+sum of money, the amount of which is not declared,
+but which, from the application of it, could not be
+less than thirty-four thousand pounds sterling, &amp;c.
+In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a
+sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the
+Company not having at that time sufficient cash in
+their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed three lacs
+of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta,
+whom I desired to call upon me with a bond
+properly filled up. He did so; but at the time I was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">{369}</a></span>
+going to execute it he entreated I would rather accept
+the money than execute the bond. I neither
+accepted the offer nor refused it; and my determination
+upon it remained suspended between the alternative
+of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid,
+and of taking it, and applying it, as I had done
+other sums, to the Company's use. And there the
+matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow,
+when I determined to accept the money for the
+Company's use; and these were my motives. Having
+made disbursements from my own cash for services,
+which, though required to enable me to execute
+the duties of my station, I had hitherto omitted to enter
+into my public accounts, I resolved to reimburse
+myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the
+Company's affairs, by charging these disbursements
+in my durbar accounts of the present year, and crediting
+them by a sum privately received, which was
+this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company
+were not founded in justice, and <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> due, my
+acceptance of three lacs of rupees from Nobkissin
+by no means precludes them from recovering that
+sum from me. No member of this Honorable House
+suspects me, I hope, of the meanness and guilt of
+presenting false accounts."</p>
+
+<p>We do not <i>suspect</i> him of presenting false accounts:
+we can prove, we are now radically proving,
+that he presents false accounts. We suspect no
+man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse
+no man who has not given ground for accusation;
+and we do not attempt to bring before a court
+of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively
+to prove. This will put an end to all idle
+prattle of malice, of groundless suspicions of guilt,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">{370}</a></span>
+and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring
+the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to
+the test, between the Commons of Great Britain and
+this East India delinquent. In his letter of the 21st
+of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited
+himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse
+for taking this bribe from Nobkissin, which he did
+not discover at the time, but many years afterwards,
+at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that
+he wanted to apply it to the contingent account for
+his expenses, that is, for what he pretended to have
+laid out for the Company, during a great number of
+years. He proceeds:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If it should be objected, that the allowance of
+these demands would furnish a precedent for others
+of the like kind, I have to remark, that in their whole
+amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent
+account of twelve years; and if it were to become the
+practice of those who have passed their prime of life
+in your service, and filled, as I have filled it, the first
+office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts
+all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy
+or indifference hath overlooked, your interests
+would suffer infinitely less by the precedent than by
+a single example of a life spent in the accumulation
+of crores for your benefit and doomed in its close to
+suffer the extremity of private want and to sink in
+obscurity."</p>
+
+<p>Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the
+House of Commons that he never made up any contingent
+accounts; and yet, as a set-off against this
+bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended
+to apply to the current use of the Company,
+he feigns and invents a claim upon them, namely,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">{371}</a></span>
+that he had, without any authority of the Company,
+squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and
+other idle services, a sum amounting to 34,000<i>l.</i>
+But was it for the Company's service? Is this language
+to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit
+to expend I have expended for the Company's service.
+I intended, indeed, at that time, to have been
+generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have
+paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I
+was then in the prime of my life, flowing in money,
+and had great expectations: I am now old; I cannot
+afford to be generous: I will look back into all my
+former accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I
+generously or prodigally spent as my own humor
+might suggest; and though, at the same time, I
+know you have given me a noble allowance, I now
+make a charge upon you for this sum of money, and
+intend to take a bribe in discharge of it." Now suppose
+Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope
+will long, and honorably and worthily, fill the seat,
+which that gentleman possessed,&mdash;suppose Lord
+Cornwallis, after never having complained of the
+insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two
+years ago said he had saved a sufficient competency
+out of it, should now tell you that 30,00<i>l.</i> a year
+was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into
+want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged
+want taking a bribe, and then make out a bill
+of contingent expenses to cover it, would your Lordships
+bear this?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow
+money for his own use, and that he applied to
+Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it upon
+him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">{372}</a></span>
+will be astonished to hear of generosity in a banian;
+there never was a banian and generosity united together:
+but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at
+once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings's face
+beams upon him. "Here," says Mr. Hastings, "I
+have prepared bonds for you." "Astonishing! how
+can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call
+upon me to lend you 34,000<i>l.</i>, and propose bonds?
+No, you shall have it: you are the Governor-General,
+who have a large and ample salary; but I know
+you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity:
+I give you all this money." Nobkissin was
+quite shocked at Mr. Hastings's offering him a bond.
+My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower,
+a little more penurious, a little more exacting, a little
+more cunning, a little more money-making, than
+a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner of
+Duke's Place in London that is so crafty, so much a
+usurer, so skilful how to turn money to profit, and so
+resolved not to give any money but for profit, as a
+Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned. But this
+man, however, at once grows generous, and will not
+suffer a bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings,
+accordingly, is thrown into very great distress. You
+see sentiment always prevailing in Mr. Hastings.
+The sentimental dialogue which must have passed
+between him and a Gentoo broker would have
+charmed every one that has a taste for pathos and
+sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the
+money as a gift. He really does not know what to
+do: whether to insist upon giving a bond or not,&mdash;whether
+he shall take the money for his own use, or
+whether he shall take it for the Company's use. But
+it may be said of man as it is said of woman: the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">{373}</a></span>
+woman who deliberates is lost: the man that deliberates
+about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he
+deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is
+lost, the walls shake, down it comes,&mdash;and at the
+same moment enters Nobkissin into the citadel of his
+honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums
+beating, and Mr. Hastings's garrison goes out, very
+handsomely indeed, with the honors of war, all for the
+benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings consents to
+take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the
+money, and is perfectly satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it
+to the Company's service. How? To pay his own
+contingent bills. "Everything that I do," says he,
+"and all the money I squander, is all for the Company's
+benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look
+into them; they are given you upon honor. Let me
+take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be just or
+generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it." But
+in every transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have
+got a name, there we have got a crime. Nobkissin
+gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I
+believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately
+afterwards enters upon the stewardship or management
+of one of the most considerable districts in Bengal.
+We know very well, and shall prove to your
+Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts,
+and exact from the inhabitants the money to
+repay themselves for the bribes which had been taken
+from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence
+of the Company's service, but sooner or later they fall
+upon the Company's treasury. And we shall prove
+that Nobkissin, within a year from the time when he
+gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Compa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">{374}</a></span>ny,
+as their steward, to the amount of a sum the very
+interest of which, according to the rate of interest in
+that country, amounted to more than this bribe, taken,
+as was pretended, for the Company's service. Such
+are the consequences of a banian's generosity, and of
+Mr. Hastings's gratitude, so far as the interest of the
+country is concerned; and this is a good way to pay
+Mr. Hastings's contingent accounts. But this is not
+all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country
+to take the management of it, and the fortunes of
+all the great families in it are given entirely into his
+power. This is the way by which the Company are to
+keep their own servants from falling into "the extremity
+of private want." And the Company itself,
+in this pretended saving to their treasury by the taking
+of bribes, lose more than the amount of the bribes
+received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand,
+there is a balance accruing on the other. No man,
+who had any share in the management of the Company's
+revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not either
+extort the full amount of it from the country, or else
+fall in balance to the Company to that amount, and
+frequently both. In short, Mr. Hastings never was
+guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did not
+follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for
+their benefit, but the Company's treasury was proportionably
+exhausted by it.</p>
+
+<p>And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic
+in bribes brought to light by the Court of Directors?
+No: we got it in the House of Commons. These
+bribes appear to have been taken at various times and
+upon various occasions; and it was not till his return
+from Patna, in February, 1782, that the first communication
+of any of them was made to the Court of Di<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">{375}</a></span>rectors.
+Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of
+Directors wrote back to him, requiring some further
+explanation upon the subject. No explanation was
+given, but a communication of other bribes was made
+in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year,
+but not dispatched to Europe till the December following.
+This produced another requisition from the
+Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships
+are to observe that this correspondence is never in the
+way of letters written and answers given; but he and
+the Directors are perpetually playing at hide-and-seek
+with each other, and writing to each other at random:
+Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the
+Directors requiring an explanation the next; Mr.
+Hastings giving an account of another bribe on the
+third day, without giving any explanation of the former.
+Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their
+chase. But it was not till they learned that the committees
+of the House of Commons (for committees of
+the House of Commons had then some weight) were
+frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings,
+that at last some honest men in the Direction
+were permitted to have some ascendency, and that a
+proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your
+Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact
+account of all the bribes that he had received, and
+painting to him, in colors as strong at least as those
+I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations,&mdash;and
+what does them great honor for that moment, they
+particularly direct that the money which was taken
+from the Nabob of Oude should be carried to his account.
+These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee
+of Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved
+by the Court of Directors, but never were sent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">{376}</a></span>
+out to India. However, something was sent, but
+miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings
+never answered it, or gave them any explanation
+whatever. He now, being prepared for his departure
+from Calcutta, and having finished all his other business,
+went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now
+we cannot follow him. He returned in great disgust
+to Calcutta, and soon after set sail for England, without
+ever giving the Directors one word of the explanation
+which he had so often promised, and they had
+repeatedly asked.</p>
+
+<p>We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where
+you will suppose some satisfactory account of all
+these matters would be obtained from him. One
+would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he
+would have been a little quickened by a menace, as
+he expresses it, which had been thrown out against
+him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would
+be made into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive
+of the same thing, thought it good gently
+to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom and
+how we do not know, that he ought to give some explanation
+of these accounts. This produced a letter
+which I believe in the business of the whole world
+cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his
+parallel in this. Never did inventive folly, working
+upon conscious guilt, and throwing each other totally
+in confusion, ever produce such a false, fraudulent,
+prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given
+to you.</p>
+
+<p>You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the
+country, on the Ganges: now you see him at the
+waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his letter
+from that place to comprehend the substance of all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">{377}</a></span>
+his former letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity,
+fraud, and nonsense contained in the whole of them.
+Here it is, and your Lordships will suffer it to be read.
+I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that
+it has been the most difficult of all things to explain,
+but much more difficult to make pleasant and
+not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued through all
+its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most
+painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication,
+so there is nothing that more calls for the attention,
+the patience, the vigilance, and the scrutiny
+of an exact court of justice. But as you have already
+had almost the whole of the man, do not think
+it too much to hear the rest in this letter from Cheltenham.
+It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of July,
+1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire;<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor" title=" See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth
+Charges, Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.">[8]</a> and
+it begins thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Sir,&mdash;The Honorable Court of Directors, in their
+general letter to Bengal by the 'Surprise,' dated the
+16th of March, 1784, were pleased to express their
+desire that I should inform them of the periods when
+each sum of the presents mentioned in my address
+of the 22d May, 1782, was received,&mdash;what were
+my motives for withholding the several receipts from
+the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of
+Directors,&mdash;and what were my reasons for taking
+bonds for part of these sums, and for paying other
+sums into the treasury as deposits, on my own account."</p>
+
+<p>I wish your Lordships to pause a moment. Here
+is a letter written in July, 1785. You see that from
+the 29th of December [November?], 1780, till that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">{378}</a></span>
+time, during which interval, though convinced in his
+own conscience and though he had declared his own
+opinion of the necessity of giving a full explanation
+of these money transactions, he had been imposing
+upon the Directors false and prevaricating accounts
+of them, they were never able to obtain a full disclosure
+from him.</p>
+
+<p>He goes on:&mdash;"I have been kindly apprised that
+the information required as above is yet expected
+from me. I hope that the circumstances of my past
+situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for
+having thus long withheld it. The fact is, that I
+was not at the Presidency when the 'Surprise' arrived;
+and when I returned to it, my time and attention
+were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my
+final departure from it, by a variety of other more
+important occupations, of which, Sir, I may safely
+appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion
+contributed by myself of the volumes which
+compose our Consultations of that period,"&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>These Consultations, my Lords, to which he appeals,
+form matter of one of the charges that the
+Commons have brought against Mr. Hastings,&mdash;namely,
+a fraudulent attempt to ruin certain persons
+employed in subordinate situations under him, for
+the purpose, by intruding himself into their place,
+of secretly carrying on his own transactions. These
+volumes of Consultations were written to justify that
+act.</p>
+
+<p>He next says,&mdash;"The submission which my respect
+would have enjoined me to pay to the command
+imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps
+from the stronger impression which the first and
+distant perusal of it had left on my mind, that it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">{379}</a></span>
+was rather intended as a reprehension for something
+which had given offence in my report of the original
+transaction than an expression of any want of a further
+elucidation of it."</p>
+
+<p>Permit me to make a few remarks upon this extraordinary
+passage. A letter is written to him, containing
+a repetition of the request which had been
+made a thousand times before, and with which he
+had as often promised to comply. And here he says,
+"It was lost to my recollection." Observe his memory:
+he can forget the command, but he has an
+obscure recollection that he thought it a reprehension
+rather than a demand! Now a reprehension
+is a stronger mode of demand. When I say to a
+servant, "Why have you not given me the account
+which I have so often asked for?" is he to answer,
+"The reason I have not given it is because I thought
+you were railing at and abusing me"?</p>
+
+<p>He goes on:&mdash;"I will now endeavor to reply to the
+different questions which have been stated to me, in
+as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information
+as I can give the Honorable Court is fully
+entitled; and where that shall prove defective, I will
+point out the only means by which it may be rendered
+more complete."</p>
+
+<p>In order that your Lordships may thoroughly enter
+into the spirit of this letter, I must request that
+you will observe how handsomely and kindly these
+tools of Directors have expressed themselves to him,
+and that even their baseness and subserviency to him
+were not able to draw from him anything that could
+be satisfactory to his enemies: for as to these his
+friends, he cares but little about satisfying them,
+though they call upon him in consequence of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">{380}</a></span>
+own promise; and this he calls a reprehension. They
+thus express themselves:&mdash;"Although it is not our
+intention to express any doubt of the integrity of the
+Governor-General,&mdash;on the contrary, after having
+received the presents, we cannot avoid expressing
+our approbation of his conduct in bringing them to
+the credit of the Company,&mdash;yet we must confess
+the statement of those transactions appears to us in
+many points so unintelligible, that we feel ourselves
+under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General
+for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily
+made to us. We therefore desire to be informed
+of the different periods when each sum was
+received, and what were the Governor-General's motives
+for withholding the several receipts from the
+knowledge of the Council and of the Court of Directors,
+and what were his reasons for taking bonds for
+part of these sums and paying other sums into the
+treasury as deposits upon his own account." Such
+is their demand, and this is what his memory furnishes
+as nothing but a reprehension.</p>
+
+<p>He then proceeds:&mdash;"First, I believe I can affirm
+with certainty that the several sums mentioned in the
+account transmitted with my letter above mentioned
+were received at or within a very few days of the
+dates which are affixed to them in the account. But
+as this contains only the gross sums, and each of
+these was received in different payments, though at
+no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign
+a great degree of accuracy to the account."&mdash;Your
+Lordships see, that, after all, he declares he cannot
+make his account accurate. He further adds, "Perhaps
+the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient"&mdash;that
+is, this explanation, namely, that he can give<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">{381}</a></span>
+none&mdash;"for any purpose to which their inquiry was
+directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave
+to refer, for a more minute information, and for the
+means of making any investigation which they may
+think it proper to direct, respecting the particulars
+of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your accountant-general,
+who was privy to every process of it, and
+possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained
+the only account that I ever kept of it."</p>
+
+<p>Here is a man who of his bribe accounts cannot
+give an account in the country where they are carried
+on. When you call upon him in Bengal, he
+cannot give the account, because he is in Bengal;
+when he comes to England, he cannot give the account
+here, because his accounts are left in Bengal.
+Again, he keeps no accounts himself, but his accounts
+are in Bengal, in the hands of somebody
+else: to him he refers, and we shall see what that
+reference produced.</p>
+
+<p>"In this, each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically
+inserted, with the name of the person by whom
+it was made; and I shall write to him to desire that
+he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still
+in being and in his hands, or with whatever he can
+distinctly recollect concerning it."&mdash;Here are accounts
+kept for the Company, and yet he does not
+know whether they are in existence anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;namely, that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">{382}</a></span>
+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."</p>
+
+<p>You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in
+the banian language, a <i>painche</i>, in English, a <i>screw</i>.
+It is a puzzled and studied involution of a period,
+framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and
+the detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better
+exemplified than in this sentence: "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." Observe, that he says, not <i>facts stated</i>,
+but <i>facts implied in the report</i>. And of what was
+this to be a report? Of things which the Directors
+declared they did not understand. And then the inferences
+which are to follow these implied facts are
+to follow them&mdash;But how? <i>With a strong probability</i>.
+If you have a mind to study this Oriental
+figure of rhetoric, the <i>painche</i>, here it is for you in
+its most complete perfection. No rhetorician ever
+gave an example of any figure of oratory that can
+match this.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">{383}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage.
+First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had
+forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's
+accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the
+report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such
+inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability
+follow them. And if I understand it at all, which
+God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote
+did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers
+of which he said it made him run mad to attempt
+to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do
+you call upon me for accounts now, three years after
+the time when I could not give you them? I
+cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating
+to them, I do not know whether they exist; and
+if they do, perhaps you may learn something from
+them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr. Larkins
+for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing
+this with his other accounts, you will see what a
+monstrous scheme he has laid of fraud and concealment
+to cover his peculation. He tells them,&mdash;"I
+have said that the three first sums of the account were
+paid into the Company's treasury without passing
+through my hands. The second of these was forced
+into notice by its destination and application to the
+expense of a detachment which was formed and employed
+against Mahdajee Sindia, under the command
+of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised
+the Court of Directors in my letter of the
+29th December [November?], 1780." He does not
+yet tell the Directors from whom he received it: we
+have found it out by other collateral means.&mdash;"The
+other two were certainly not intended, when I received
+them, to be made public, though intended for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">{384}</a></span>
+public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies
+of government were at that time my own,
+and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight
+upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable
+means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized
+them."&mdash;Allowable means of receiving bribes! for
+such I shall prove them to be in the particular instances.&mdash;"But
+neither could it occur to me as necessary
+to state on our Proceedings every little aid
+that I could thus procure; nor do I know how I could
+have stated it without appearing to court favor by
+an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the
+chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by
+the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated
+merit, derived from the influence of my station,
+to which they might have had an equal claim."</p>
+
+<p>Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for
+many years, he does find out his motive, which he
+could not verify at the time,&mdash;namely, that, if he let
+his colleagues know that he was receiving bribes, and
+gaining the glory of receiving them, they might take
+it into their heads likewise to have their share in the
+same glory, as they were joined in the same commission,
+enjoyed the same powers, and were subject to
+the same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous
+in Mr. Hastings, not behaving like a good, fair colleague
+in office, not to let them know that he was
+going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive
+them of their share in the glory of it: but they
+were grovelling creatures, who thought that keeping
+clean hands was some virtue.&mdash;"Well, but you have
+applied some of these bribes to your own benefit:
+why did you give no account of those bribes?" "I
+did not," he says, "because it might have excited the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">{385}</a></span>
+envy of my colleagues." To be sure, if he was receiving
+bribes for his own benefit, and they not receiving
+such bribes, and if they had a liking to that
+kind of traffic, it is a good ground of envy, that a
+matter which ought to be in common among them
+should be confined to Mr. Hastings, and he therefore
+did well to conceal it; and on the other hand, if we
+suppose him to have taken them, as he pretends, for
+the Company's use, in order not to excite a jealousy
+in his colleagues for being left out of this meritorious
+service, to which they had an equal claim, he did
+well to take bonds for what ought to be brought to
+the Company's account. These are reasons applicable
+to his colleagues, who sat with him at the same
+board,&mdash;Mr. Macpherson, Mr. Stables, Mr. Wheler,
+General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis:
+he was afraid of exciting their envy or their jealousy.</p>
+
+<p>You will next see another reason, and an extraordinary
+one it is, which he gives for concealing these
+bribes from his inferiors. But I must first tell your
+Lordships, what, till the proof is brought before you,
+you will take on credit,&mdash;indeed, it is on his credit,&mdash;that,
+when he formed the Committee of Revenue,
+he bound them by a solemn oath, "not, under any
+name or pretence whatever, to take from any zemindar,
+farmer, person concerned in the revenue, or any
+other, any gift, gratuity, allowance, or reward whatever,
+or anything beyond their salary"; and this is
+the oath to which he alludes. Now his reason for
+concealing his bribes from his inferiors, this Committee,
+under these false and fraudulent bonds, he
+states thus:&mdash;"I should have deemed it particularly
+dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered
+by men of a certain class, from whom I had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">{386}</a></span>
+interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors,
+and bound them by oath not to receive them: I was
+therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the
+suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to
+light upon me, had I suffered the money to be
+brought to my own house, or that of any person
+known to be in trust for me."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that
+he knew the practice of taking money from these people
+was a thing dishonorable in itself. "I should
+have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive
+for my own use money tendered by men of a certain
+class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of
+presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not
+to receive them." He held it particularly dishonorable
+to receive them; he had bound others by an oath
+not to receive them: but he received them himself;
+and why does he conceal it? "Why, because," says
+he, "if the suspicion came upon me, the dishonor
+would fall upon my pate." Why did he, by an oath,
+bind his inferiors not to take these bribes? "Why,
+because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and
+because it would be mischievous and ruinous to the
+Company's affairs to suffer them to take bribes."
+Why, then, did he take them himself? It was ten
+times more ruinous, that he, who was at the head of
+the Company's government, and had bound up others
+so strictly, should practise the same himself; and
+"therefore," says he, "I was more than ordinarily
+cautious." What! to avoid it? "No; to carry it
+on in so clandestine and private a manner as might
+secure me from the suspicion of that which I know
+to be detestable, and bound others up from practising."<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">{387}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We shall prove that the kind of men from whom
+he interdicted his Committee to receive bribes were
+the identical men from whom he received them himself.
+If it was good for him, it was good for them
+to be permitted these means of extorting; and if it
+ought at all to be practised, they ought to be admitted
+to extort for the good of the Company. Rajah
+Nobkissin was one of the men from whom he interdicted
+them to receive bribes, and from whom he received
+a bribe for his own use. But he says he concealed
+it from them, because he thought great mischief
+might happen even from their suspicion of it,
+and lest they should thereby be inclined themselves
+to practise it, and to break their oaths.</p>
+
+<p>You take it, then, for granted that he really concealed
+it from them? No such thing. His principal
+confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr. Croftes,
+who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue,
+and whom he had made to swear not to take bribes:
+he is the confidant, and the very receiver, as we shall
+prove to your Lordships. What will your Lordships
+think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood,
+that he did it to conceal it from these men,
+when one of them was his principal confidant and
+agent in the transaction? What will you think of
+his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the
+suspicion of it? He ought to have avoided the
+crime, and the suspicion would take care of itself.</p>
+
+<p>"For these reasons," he says, "I caused it to be
+transported immediately to the treasury. There I
+well knew, Sir, it could not be received, without
+being passed to some credit; and this could only be
+done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The
+first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">{388}</a></span>
+I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second
+sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant.
+Possibly it was done without any special direction
+from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode
+of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction
+itself did not require concealment, having been already
+avowed."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false
+or groundless: it is completely fallacious in every
+part. The first sum, he says, was entered as a loan,
+the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because,
+when you enter moneys of this kind, you must
+enter them under some name, some head of account;
+"and I entered them," he says, "under these, because
+otherwise there was no entering them at all."
+Is this true? Will he stick to this? I shall desire to
+know from his learned counsel, some time or other,
+whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your
+Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which
+he brought under a regular official head, namely,
+<i>durbar charges</i>; and there is no reason why he should
+not have brought these under the same head. Therefore
+what he says, that there is no other way of entering
+them but as loans and deposits, is not true.
+He next says, that in the second sum there was no
+reason for concealment, because it was avowed.
+But that false deposit was as much concealment as
+the false loan, for he entered that money as his
+own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any
+money to the Company's account, he knew how to
+do it, for he had been accustomed to enter it under
+a general name, called durbar charges,&mdash;a name
+which, in its extent at least, was very much his
+own invention, and which, as he gives no account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">{389}</a></span>
+of those charges, is as large and sufficient to cover
+any fraudulent expenditure in the account as, one
+would think, any person could wish. You see him,
+then, first guessing one thing, then another,&mdash;first
+giving this reason, then another; at last, however,
+he seems to be satisfied that he has hit upon the
+true reason of his conduct.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us open the next paragraph, and see what
+it is.&mdash;"Although I am firmly persuaded that these
+were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm
+that they were. Though I feel their impression
+as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on
+my memory, I am not certain that they may not
+have been produced by subsequent reflection on the
+principal fact, combining with it the probable motives
+of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my
+design originally to have concealed the receipt of all
+the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge
+of the Court of Directors. They had answered
+my purpose of public utility, and I had almost dismissed
+them from my remembrance."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing
+account which he gives here, that several of these
+sums he meant to conceal forever, even from the
+knowledge of the Directors. Look back to his letter
+of 22d May, 1782, and his letter of the 16th of
+December, and in them he tells you that he might
+have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to
+conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable
+so to do; that his conscience would have been
+wounded, if he had done it; and that he was afraid
+it would be thought that this discovery was brought
+from him in consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries.
+Here he says of a discovery which he values<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">{390}</a></span>
+himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it
+should be attributed to arise from motives of fear.
+Now, at last, he tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time
+when he had just cause to dread the strict account to
+which he is called this day, first, that he cannot tell
+whether any one motive which he assigns, either in
+this letter or in the former, were his real motive or
+not; that he does not know whether he has not invented
+them since, in consequence of a train of meditation
+upon what he might have done or might
+have said; and, lastly, he says, contrary to all his
+former declarations, "that he had never meant nor
+could give the Directors the least notice of them at
+all, as they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed
+them from his remembrance." "I intended,"
+he says, "always to keep them secret, though I
+have declared to you solemnly, over and over again,
+that I did not. I do not care how you discovered
+them; I have forgotten them; I have dismissed them
+from my remembrance." Is this the way in which
+money is to be received and accounted for?</p>
+
+<p>He then proceeds thus:&mdash;"But when fortune threw
+a sum of money in my way of a magnitude which
+could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of
+my situation at the time I received it made me more
+circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprise my
+employers of it, which I did hastily and generally:
+hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity
+of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew
+not the exact amount of which I was in the receipt,
+but not in the full possession. I promised to acquaint
+them with the result as soon as I should be
+in possession of it; and, in the performance of my
+promise, I thought it consistent with it to add to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">{391}</a></span>
+the amount all the former appropriations of the same
+kind: my good genius then suggesting to me, with
+a spirit of caution which might have spared me the
+trouble of this apology, had I universally attended
+to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were
+afterwards known, I might be asked what were my
+motives for withholding a part of these receipts from
+the knowledge of the Court of Directors and informing
+them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up
+every doubt."</p>
+
+<p>I am almost ashamed to remark upon the tergiversations
+and prevarications perpetually ringing the
+changes in this declaration. He would not have discovered
+this hundred thousand pounds, if he could
+have concealed it: he would have discovered it, lest
+malicious persons should be telling tales of it. He
+has a system of concealment: he never discovers
+anything, but when he thinks it can be forced from
+him. He says, indeed, "I could conceal these things
+forever, but my conscience would not give me leave":
+but it is guilt, and not honesty of conscience, that
+always prompts him. At one time it is the malice
+of people and the fear of misrepresentation which induced
+him to make the disclosure; and he values
+himself on the precaution which this fear had suggested
+to him. At another time it is the magnitude
+of the sum which produced this effect: nothing but
+the impossibility of concealing it could possibly have
+made him discover it. This hundred thousand pounds
+he declares he would have concealed, if he could; and
+yet he values himself upon the discovery of it. Oh,
+my Lords, I am afraid that sums of much greater magnitude
+have not been discovered at all! Your Lordships
+now see some of the artifices of this letter. You<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">{392}</a></span>
+see the variety of styles he adopts, and how he turns
+himself into every shape and every form. But, after
+all, do you find any clear discovery? do you find any
+satisfactory answer to the Directors' letter? does he
+once tell you from whom he received the money? does
+he tell you for what he received it, what the circumstances
+of the persons giving it were, or any explanation
+whatever of his mode of accounting for it?
+No: and here, at last, after so many years' litigation,
+he is called to account for his prevaricating, false accounts
+in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.</p>
+
+<p>His explanation of his conduct relative to the bonds
+now only remains for your Lordships' consideration.
+Before he left Calcutta, in July, 1784 [1781?], he
+says, when he was going upon a service which he
+thought a service of danger, he indorsed the false
+bonds which he had taken from the Company, declaring
+them to be none of his. You will observe
+that these bonds had been in his hands from the 9th
+or 15th of January (I am not quite sure of the exact
+date) to the day when he went upon this service, some
+time in the month of July, 1784 [1781?]. This service
+he had formerly declared he did not apprehend
+to be a service of danger; but he found it to be so
+after: it was in anticipation of that danger that he
+made this attestation and certificate upon the bonds.
+But who ever saw them? Mr. Larkins saw them, says
+he: "I gave them Mr. Larkins." We will show you
+hereafter that Mr. Larkins deserves no credit in this
+business,&mdash;that honor binds him not to discover the
+secrets of Mr. Hastings. But why did he not deliver
+them up entirely, when he was going upon that
+service? for all pretence of concealment in the business
+was now at an end, as we shall prove. Why<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">{393}</a></span>
+did he not cancel these bonds? Why keep them at
+all? Why not enter truly the state of the account
+in the Company's records? "But I indorsed them,"
+he says. "Did you deliver them so indorsed into
+the treasury?" "No, I delivered them indorsed into
+the hands of my bribe-broker and agent." "But
+why not destroy them, or give them up to the Company,
+and say you were paid, which would have been
+the only truth in this transaction? Why did you
+not indorse them before? Why not, during the long
+period of so many years, cancel them?" No, he
+kept them to the very day when he was going from
+Calcutta, and had made a declaration that they were
+not his. Never before, upon any account, had they
+appeared; and though the Committee of the House
+of Commons, in the Eleventh Report, had remarked
+upon all these scandalous proceedings and prevarications,
+yet he was not stimulated, even then, to give
+up these bonds. He held them in his hands till the
+time when he was preparing for his departure from
+Calcutta, in spite of the Directors, in spite of the
+Parliament, in spite of the cries of his own conscience,
+in a matter which was now grown public,
+and would knock doubly upon his reputation and
+conduct. He then declares they are not for his own
+use, but for the Company's service. But were they
+then cancelled? I do not find a trace of their being
+cancelled. In this letter of the 17th of January,
+1785, he says with regard to these bonds, "The following
+sums were paid into the treasury, and bonds
+granted for the same in the name of the Governor-General,
+in whose possession the bonds remain, with
+a declaration upon each, indorsed and signed by him,
+that he has no claim on the Company for the amount<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">{394}</a></span>
+either of principal or interest, no part of the latter
+having been received."</p>
+
+<p>To the account of the 22d of May, of the indorsement,
+is added the declaration upon oath. But why
+any man need to declare upon oath that the money
+which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from
+another person is not his is the most extraordinary
+thing in the world. If he had a mind to have it
+placed to his credit as his own, then an oath would
+be necessary; but in this case any one would believe
+him upon his word. He comes, however, and says,
+"This is indorsed upon oath." Oath! before what
+magistrate? In whose possession were the bonds?
+Were they given up? There is no trace of that upon
+the record, and it stands for him to prove that they
+were ever given up, and in any hands but Mr. Larkins's
+and his own. So here are the bonds, begun in
+obscurity and ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust
+to dust, corruption to corruption, and fraud to fraud.
+This is all we see of these bonds, till Mr. Larkins, to
+whom he writes some letter concerning them which
+does not appear, is called to read a funeral sermon
+over them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Lords, I am come now near the period of this
+class of Mr. Hastings's bribes. I am a little exhausted.
+There are many circumstances that might
+make me wish not to delay this business by taking
+up another day at your Lordships' bar, in order to
+go through this long, intricate scene of corruption.
+But my strength now fails me. I hope within a very
+short time, to-morrow or the next court-day, to finish
+it, and to go directly into evidence, as I long much to
+do, to substantiate the charge; but it was necessary<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">{395}</a></span>
+that the evidence should be explained. You have
+heard as much of the drama as I could go through:
+bear with my weakness a little: Mr. Larkins's letter
+will be the epilogue to it. I have already incurred
+the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by
+bringing home to him the proof of his crimes, and to
+display them in all their force and turpitude. It is
+my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to
+my heart.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth
+Charges, Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.</p></div>
+</div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">{396}</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><a name="FOURTH_DAY_THURSDAY_MAY_7_1789" id="FOURTH_DAY_THURSDAY_MAY_7_1789"></a></p>
+<h2>SPEECH<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">ON</span><br />
+<br />
+THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="font-size: 50%;">FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p>My Lords,&mdash;When I had the honor last to
+address you from this place, I endeavored to
+press this position upon your minds, and to fortify it
+by the example of the proceedings of Mr. Hastings,&mdash;that
+obscurity and inaccuracies in a matter of
+account constituted a just presumption of fraud. I
+showed, from his own letters, that his accounts were
+confused and inaccurate. I am ready, my Lords, to
+admit that there are situations in which a minister
+in high office may use concealment: it may be his duty
+to use concealment from the enemies of his masters;
+it may be prudent to use concealment from his
+inferiors in the service. It will always be suspicious
+to use concealment from his colleagues and co&ouml;rdinates
+in office; but when, in a money transaction,
+any man uses concealment with regard to them to
+whom the money belongs, he is guilty of a fraud.
+My Lords, I have shown you that Mr. Hastings kept
+no account, by his own confession, of the moneys that
+he had privately taken, as he pretends, for the Company's
+service, and we have but too much reason to
+presume for his own. We have shown you, my
+Lords, that he has not only no accounts, but no
+memory; we have shown that he does not even un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">{397}</a></span>derstand
+his own motives; that, when called upon to
+recollect them, he begs to guess at them; and that as
+his memory is to be supplied by his guess, so he has
+no confidence in his guesses. He at first finds, after
+a lapse of about a year and a half, or somewhat less,
+that he cannot recollect what his motives were to
+certain actions which upon the very face of them appeared
+fraudulent. He is called to an account some
+years after, to explain what they were, and he makes
+a just reflection upon it,&mdash;namely, that, as his memory
+did not enable him to find out his own motive at
+the former time, it is not to be expected that it would
+be clearer a year after. Your Lordships will, however,
+recollect, that in the Cheltenham letter, which
+is made of no perishable stuff, he begins again to
+guess; but after he has guessed and guessed again,
+and after he has gone through all the motives he can
+possibly assign for the action, he tells you he does
+not know whether those were his real motives, or
+whether he has not invented them since.</p>
+
+<p>In that situation the accounts of the Company were
+left with regard to very great sums which passed
+through Mr. Hastings's hands, and for which he, instead
+of giving his masters credit, took credit to himself,
+and, being their debtor, as he confesses himself
+to be at that time, took a security for that debt as if
+he had been their creditor. This required explanation.
+Explanation he was called upon for, over and
+over again; explanation he did not give, and declared
+he could not give. He was called upon for
+it when in India: he had not leisure to attend to it
+there. He was called upon for it when in Europe:
+he then says he must send for it to India. With much
+prevarication, and much insolence too, he confesses<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">{398}</a></span>
+himself guilty of falsifying the Company's accounts
+by making himself their creditor when he was their
+debtor, and giving false accounts of this false transaction.
+The Court of Directors was slow to believe
+him guilty; Parliament expressed a strong suspicion
+of his guilt, and wished for further information. Mr.
+Hastings about this time began to imagine his conscience
+to be a faithful and true monitor,&mdash;which it
+were well he had attended to upon many occasions, as
+it would have saved him his appearance here,&mdash;and
+it told him that he was in great danger from the Parliamentary
+inquiries that were going on. It was now
+to be expected that he would have been in haste to
+fulfil the promise which he had made in the Patna
+letter of the 20th of January, 1782; and accordingly
+we find that about this time his first agent, Major
+Fairfax, was sent over to Europe, which agent entered
+himself at the India House, and appeared before
+the Committee of the House of Commons, as an
+agent expressly sent over to explain whatever might
+appear doubtful in his conduct. Major Fairfax, notwithstanding
+the character in which Mr. Hastings
+employed him, appeared to be but a letter-carrier:
+he had nothing to say: he gave them no information
+in the India House at all: to the Committee (I can
+speak with the clearness of a witness) he gave no
+satisfaction whatever. However, this agent vanished
+in a moment, in order to make way for another, more
+substantial, more efficient agent,&mdash;an agent perfectly
+known in this country,&mdash;an agent known by the name
+given to him by Mr. Hastings, who, like the princes
+of the East, gives titles: he calls him an incomparable
+agent; and by that name he is very well known
+to your Lordships and the world. This agent, Major<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">{399}</a></span>
+Scott, who I believe was here prior to the time of
+Major Fairfax's arrival in the character of an agent,
+and for the very same purposes, was called before the
+Committee, and examined, point by point, article by
+article, upon all that obscure enumeration of bribes
+which the Court of Directors declare they did not
+understand; but he declared that he could speak
+nothing with regard to any of these transactions, and
+that he had got no instructions to explain any part
+of them. There was but one circumstance which in
+the course of his examination we drew from him,&mdash;namely,
+that one of these articles, entered in the account
+of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received
+from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing.
+He produced an extract of a letter relative to it, which
+your Lordships in the course of this trial may see, and
+which will lead us into a further and more minute
+inquiry on that head; but when that committee made
+their report in 1783, not one single article had been
+explained to Parliament, not one explained to the
+Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr.
+Hastings had never thought proper to communicate
+to the East India Company, either by himself, nor,
+as far as we could find out, by his agent; nor was
+it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn
+out from him by a long examination in the Committee
+of the House of Commons. And thus, notwithstanding
+the letters he had written and the agents he employed,
+he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to
+give his employers no satisfaction at all. What is
+curious in this proceeding is, that Mr. Hastings, all
+the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the
+credit of a discovery. Your Lordships have seen
+what his discovery is; but Mr. Hastings, among his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">{400}</a></span>
+other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an
+effectual method of concealment through discovery.
+I will venture to say, that, whatever suspicions there
+might have been of Mr. Hastings's bribes, there was
+more effectual concealment in regard to every circumstance
+respecting them in that discovery than if he
+had kept a total silence. Other means of discovery
+might have been found, but this, standing in the way,
+prevented the employment of those means.</p>
+
+<p>Things continued in this state till the time of the
+letter from Cheltenham. The Cheltenham letter declared
+that Mr. Hastings knew nothing of the matter,&mdash;that
+he had brought with him no accounts to
+England upon the subject; and though it appears by
+this very letter that he had with him at Cheltenham
+(if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a great deal
+of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of
+the 22d of May with him, yet any account that could
+elucidate that letter he declared that he had not; but
+he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India, whom your
+Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly
+apprised of all that transaction. Your Lordships will
+observe that Mr. Hastings has all his faculties, some
+way or other, in deposit: one person can speak to his
+motives; another knows his fortune better than himself;
+to others he commits the sentimental parts of
+his defence; to Mr. Larkins he commits his memory.
+We shall see what a trustee of memory Mr. Larkins is,
+and how far he answers the purpose which might be
+expected, when appealed to by a man who has no memory
+himself, or who has left it on the other side of the
+water, and who leaves it to another to explain for him
+accounts which he ought to have kept himself, and
+circumstances which ought to be deposited in his own
+memory.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">{401}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This Cheltenham letter, I believe, originally became
+known, as far as I can recollect, to the House
+of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Hastings's own
+agent: I do not like to be positive upon that point,
+but I think that was the first appearance of it. It
+appeared likewise in public: for it was thought so
+extraordinary and laborious a performance, by the
+writer or his friends, (as indeed it is,) that it might
+serve to open a new source of eloquence in the kingdom,
+and consequently was printed, I believe, at the
+desire of the parties themselves. But however it became
+known, it raised an extreme curiosity in the public
+to hear, when Mr. Hastings could say nothing, after
+so many years, of his own concerns and his own
+affairs, what satisfaction Mr. Larkins at last would
+give concerning them. This letter was directed to
+Mr. Devaynes, Chairman of the Court of Directors.
+It does not appear that the Court of Directors wrote
+anything to India in consequence of it, or that they directed
+this satisfactory account of the business should
+be given them; but some private communications
+passed between Mr. Hastings, or his agents, and Mr.
+Larkins. There was a general expectation upon this
+occasion, I believe, in the House of Commons and in
+the nation at large, to know what would become of
+the portentous inquiry. Mr. Hastings has always contrived
+to have half the globe between question and
+answer: when he was in India, the question went to
+him, and then he adjourned his answer till he came
+to England; and when he came to England, it was
+necessary his answer should arrive from India; so
+that there is no manner of doubt that all time was
+given for digesting, comparing, collating, and making
+up a perfect memory upon the occasion.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">{402}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But, my Lords, Mr. Larkins, who has in custody
+Mr. Hastings's memory, no small part of his conscience,
+and all his accounts, did, at last, in compliance
+with Mr. Hastings's desire, think proper to send
+an account. Then, at last, we may expect light.
+Where are we to look for accounts, but from an
+accountant-general? Where are they to be met with,
+unless from him? And accordingly, in that night of
+perplexity into which Mr. Hastings's correspondence
+had plunged them, men looked up to the dawning of
+the day which was to follow that star, the little Lucifer,
+which with his lamp was to dispel the shades
+of night, and give us some sort of light into this
+dark, mysterious transaction. At last the little lamp
+appeared, and was laid on the table of this House of
+Commons, on the motion of Mr. Hastings's friends: for
+we did not know of its arrival. It arrives, with all
+the intelligence, all the memory, accuracy, and clearness
+which Mr. Larkins can furnish for Mr. Hastings
+upon a business that before was nothing but mystery
+and confusion. The account is called,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>"Copy of the particulars of the dates on which the
+component parts of sundry sums included in the account
+of sums received on the account of the Honorable
+Company by the Governor-General, or paid to
+their Treasury by his order, and applied to their service,
+were received for Mr. Hastings, and paid to the
+Sub-Treasurer."</i></p>
+
+<p>The letter from Mr. Larkins consisted of two parts:
+first, what was so much wanted, an account; next,
+what was wanted most of all to such an account as
+he sent, a comment and explanation. The account
+consisted of two members: one gave an account of several
+detached bribes that Mr. Hastings had received<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">{403}</a></span>
+within the course of about a year and a half; and the
+other, of a great bribe which he had received in one
+gross sum of one hundred thousand pounds from the
+Nabob of Oude. It appeared to us, upon looking into
+these accounts, that there was some geography, a little
+bad chronology, but nothing else in the first: neither
+the persons who took the money, nor the persons
+from whom it was taken, nor the ends for which it
+was given, nor any other circumstances are mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing we saw was <i>Dinagepore</i>. I believe
+you know this piece of geography,&mdash;that it is one of
+the provinces of the kingdom of Bengal. We then
+have a long series of months, with a number of sums
+added to them; and in the end it is said, that on
+the 18th and 19th of Asin, (meaning part of September
+and part of October,) were paid to Mr. Croftes
+two lac of rupees; and then remains one lac, which
+was taken from a sum of three lac six thousand nine
+hundred and seventy-three rupees. After we had
+waited for Mr. Hastings's own account, after it had
+been pursued through a series of correspondence in
+vain, after his agents had come to England to explain
+it, this is the explanation that your Lordships have got
+of this first article, Dinagepore. Not the person paid
+to, not the person paying, are mentioned, nor any
+other circumstance, except the signature, <i>G.G.S.</i>:
+this might serve for <i>George Gilbert Sanders</i>, or any
+other name you please; and seeing <i>Croftes</i> above
+it, you might imagine it was an Englishman. And
+this, which I call a geographical and a chronological
+account, is the only account we have. Mr. Larkins,
+upon the mere face of the account, sadly disappoints
+us; and I will venture to say that in matters of ac<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">{404}</a></span>count
+Bengal book-keeping is as remote from good
+book-keeping as the Bengal <i>painches</i> are remote from
+all the rules of good composition. We have, however,
+got some light: namely, that one G.G.S. has
+paid some money to Mr. Croftes for some purpose,
+but from whom we know not, nor where; that there
+is a place called Dinagepore; and that Mr. Hastings
+received some money from somebody in Dinagepore.</p>
+
+<p>The next article is <i>Patna</i>. Your Lordships are
+not so ill acquainted with the geography of India as
+not to know that there is such a place as Patna, nor
+so ill acquainted with the chronology of it as not to
+know that there are three months called Baisakh,
+Asin, Chait. Here was paid to Mr. Croftes two lac
+of rupees, and there was left a balance of about
+two more. But though you learn with regard to the
+province of Dinagepore that there is a balance to be
+discharged by G.G.S., yet with regard to Patna
+we have not even a G.G.S.: we have no sort of
+light whatever to know through whose hands the
+money passed, nor any glimpse of light whatever respecting
+it.</p>
+
+<p>You may expect to be made amends in the other
+province, called <i>Nuddea</i>, where Mr. Hastings had
+received a considerable sum of money. There is
+the very same darkness: not a word from whom
+received, by whom received, or any other circumstance,
+but that it was paid into the hands of Mr.
+Hastings's <i>white banian</i>, as he was commonly called
+in that country, into the hands of Mr. Croftes, who
+is his white agent in receiving bribes: for he was
+very far from having but one.</p>
+
+<p>After all this inquiry, after so many severe animadversions
+from the House of Commons, after all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">{405}</a></span>
+those reiterated letters from the Directors, after an
+application to Mr. Hastings himself, when you are
+hunting to get at some explanation of the proceedings
+mentioned in the letter of the month of May,
+1782, you receive here by Mr. Larkins's letter, which
+is dated the 5th of August, 1786, this account,
+which, to be sure, gives an amazing light into this
+business: it is a letter for which it was worth sending
+to Bengal, worth waiting for with all that anxious
+expectation with which men wait for great
+events. Upon the face of the account there is not
+one single word which can tend to illustrate the
+matter: he sums up the whole, and makes out that
+there was received five lac and fifty thousand rupees,
+that is to say, 55,000<i>l.</i>, out of the sum of nine lac
+and fifty thousand engaged to be paid: namely,&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class='ctr'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>From Dinagepore</td><td align='right'>4,00,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>From Nuddea</td><td align='right'>1,50,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And from Patna</td><td align='right'>4,00,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right' class="bt bb">9,50,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>Or</td><td align='right' class="bb">&pound;95,000</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p>Now you have got full light! <i>Cabooleat</i> signifies a
+contract, or an agreement; and this agreement was,
+to pay Mr. Hastings, as one should think, certain sums
+of money,&mdash;it does not say from whom, but only that
+such a sum of money was paid, and that there remains
+such a balance. When you come and compare the
+money received by Mr. Croftes with these cabooleats,
+you find that the cabooleats amount to 95,000<i>l.</i>, and
+that the receipt has been about 55,000<i>l.</i>, and that upon
+the face of this account there is 40,000<i>l.</i> somewhere<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">{406}</a></span>
+or other unaccounted for. There never was such a
+mode of account-keeping, except in the new system of
+this bribe exchequer.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will now see, from this luminous,
+satisfactory, and clear account, which could come from
+no other than a great accountant and a great financier,
+establishing some new system of finance, and recommending
+it to the world as superior to those old-fashioned
+foolish establishments, the Exchequer and Bank
+of England, what lights are received from Mr. Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>However, it does so happen that from these obscure
+hints we have been able to institute examinations
+which have discovered such a mass of fraud, guilt,
+corruption, and oppression as probably never before
+existed since the beginning of the world; and in that
+darkness we hope and trust the diligence and zeal of
+the House of Commons will find light sufficient to
+make a full discovery of his base crimes. We hope
+and trust, that, after all his concealments, and though
+he appear resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication,
+all his artifices will not be able to secure him
+from the siege which the diligence of the House of
+Commons has laid to his corruptions.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships will remark, in a paragraph, which,
+though it stands last, is the first in principle, in Mr. Larkins's
+letter, that, having before given his comment, he
+perorates, as is natural upon such an occasion. This
+peroration, as is usual in perorations, is in favor of the
+parties speaking it, and <i>ad conciliandum auditorem</i>.
+"Conscious," he says, "that the concern which I have
+had in these transactions needs neither an apology nor
+an excuse,"&mdash;that is rather extraordinary, too!&mdash;"and
+that I have in no action of my life sacrificed the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">{407}</a></span>
+duty and fidelity which I owed to my honorable employers
+either to the regard which I felt for another
+or to the advancement of my own fortune, I shall conclude
+this address, firmly relying upon the candor of
+those before whom it may be submitted for its being
+deemed a satisfactory as well as a circumstantial compliance
+with the requisition in conformity to which the
+information it affords has been furnished,"&mdash;meaning,
+as your Lordships will see in the whole course of the
+letter, that he had written it in compliance with the
+requisition and in conformity to the information he
+had been furnished with by Mr. Hastings,&mdash;"without
+which it would have been as base as dishonorable for
+me spontaneously to have afforded it: for, though the
+duty which every man owes to himself should render
+him incapable of making an assertion not strictly true,
+no man actuated either by virtuous or honorable sentiments
+could mistakenly apprehend, that, unless he
+betrayed the confidence reposed in him by another, he
+might be deemed deficient in fidelity to his employers."</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, here is, in my opinion, a discovery very
+well worthy your Lordships' attention; here is the
+accountant-general of the Company, who declares, and
+fixes it as a point of honor, that he would not have
+made a discovery so important to them, if Mr. Hastings
+himself had not authorized him to make it: a
+point to which he considers himself bound by his honor
+to adhere. Let us see what becomes of us, when
+the principle of honor is so debauched and perverted.
+A principle of honor, as long as it is connected with
+virtue, adds no small efficacy to its operation, and no
+small brilliancy and lustre to its appearance: but honor,
+the moment that it becomes unconnected with the
+duties of official function, with the relations of life,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">{408}</a></span>
+and the eternal and immutable rules of morality, and
+appears in its substance alien to them, changes its nature,
+and, instead of justifying a breach of duty, aggravates
+all its mischiefs to an almost infinite degree;
+by the apparent lustre of the surface, it hides from
+you the baseness and deformity of the ground. Here
+is Mr. Hastings's agent, Mr. Larkins, the Company's
+general accountant, prefers his attachment to Mr.
+Hastings to his duty to the Company. Instead of the
+account which he ought to give to them in consequence
+of the trust reposed in him, he thinks himself bound
+by honor to Mr. Hastings, if Mr. Hastings had not
+called for that explanation, not to have given it: so
+that, whatever obscurity is in this explanation, it is because
+Mr. Hastings did not authorize or require him
+to give a clearer. Here is a principle of treacherous
+fidelity, of perfidious honor, of the faith of conspirators
+against their masters, the faith of robbers against the
+public, held up against the duty of an officer in a
+public situation. You see how they are bound to one
+another, and how they give their fidelity to keep the
+secrets of one another, to prevent the Directors having
+a true knowledge of their affairs; and I am sure, if
+you do not destroy this honor of conspirators and this
+faith of robbers, that there will be no other honor and
+no other fidelity among the servants in India. Mr.
+Larkins, your Lordships see, adheres to the principle
+of secrecy.</p>
+
+<p>You will next remark that Mr. Hastings had as
+many bribe-factors as bribes. There was confidence
+to be reposed in each of them, and not one of these
+men appears to be in the confidence of another.
+You will find in this letter the policy, the frame,
+and constitution of this new exchequer. Mr. Croftes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">{409}</a></span>
+seems to have known things which Mr. Larkins did
+not; Mr. Larkins knew things which Gunga Govind
+Sing did not; Gunga Govind Sing knew things which
+none of the rest of the confederates knew. Cantoo
+Baboo, who appears in this letter as a principal actor,
+was in a secret which Mr. Larkins did not know; it
+appears likewise, that there was a Persian moonshee
+in a secret of which Cantoo Baboo was ignorant; and
+it appears that Mr. Palmer was in the secret of a transaction
+not intrusted to any of the rest. Such is the
+labyrinth of this practical <i>painche</i>, or screw, that, if,
+for instance, you were endeavoring to trace backwards
+some transaction through Major Palmer, you would
+be stopped there, and must go back again; for it had
+begun with Cantoo Baboo. If in another you were
+to penetrate into the dark recess of the black breast
+of Cantoo Baboo, you could not go further; for it began
+with Gunga Govind Sing. If you pierce the breast
+of Gunga Govind Sing, you are again stopped; a Persian
+moonshee was the confidential agent. If you get
+beyond this, you find Mr. Larkins knew something
+which the others did not; and at last you find Mr.
+Hastings did not put entire confidence in any of them.
+You will see, by this letter, that he kept his accounts
+in all colors, black, white, and mezzotinto; that he
+kept them in all languages,&mdash;in Persian, in Bengalee,
+and in a language which, I believe, is neither Persian
+nor Bengalee, nor any other known in the world, but
+a language in which Mr. Hastings found it proper to
+keep his accounts and to transact his business. The
+persons carrying on the accounts are Mr. Larkins, an
+Englishman, Cantoo Baboo, a Gentoo, and a Persian
+moonshee, probably a Mahometan. So all languages,
+all religions, all descriptions of men are to keep the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">{410}</a></span>
+account of these bribes, and to make out this valuable
+account which Mr. Larkins gave you!</p>
+
+<p>Let us now see how far the memory, observation,
+and knowledge of the persons referred to can supply
+the want of them in Mr. Hastings. These accounts
+come at last, though late, from Mr. Larkins, who, I
+will venture to say, let the banians boast what they
+will, has skill perhaps equal to the best of them: he
+begins by explaining to you something concerning the
+present of the ten lac. I wish your Lordships always
+to take Mr. Hastings's word, where it can be had,&mdash;or
+Mr. Larkins's, who was the representative of and
+memory-keeper to Mr. Hastings; and then I may
+perhaps take the liberty of making some observations
+upon it.</p>
+
+
+<h3><i>Extract of a Letter from William Larkins, Accountant-General
+of Bengal, to the Chairman of the East India
+Company, dated 5th August, 1786.</i></h3>
+
+<p>"Mr. Hastings returned from Benares to Calcutta
+on the 5th February, 1782. At that time I was wholly
+ignorant of the letter which on the 20th January he
+wrote from Patna to the Secret Committee of the Honorable
+the Court of Directors. The rough draught of
+this letter, in the handwriting of Major Palmer, is
+now in my possession. Soon after his arrival at the
+Presidency, he requested me to form the account of
+his receipts and disbursements, which you will find
+journalized in the 280th, &amp;c., and 307th pages of
+the Honorable Company's general books of the year
+1781-2. My official situation as accountant-general
+had previously convinced me that Mr. Hastings could
+not have made the issues which were acknowledged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">{411}</a></span>
+as received from him by some of the paymasters of
+the army, unless he had obtained some such supply as
+that which he afterwards, viz., on the 22d May, 1782,
+made known to me, when I immediately suggested to
+him the necessity of his transmitting that account
+which accompanied his letter of that date, till when
+the promise contained in his letter of 20th January
+had entirely escaped his recollection."</p>
+
+<p>The first thing I would remark on this (and I believe
+your Lordships have rather gone before me in
+the remark) is, that Mr. Hastings came down to Calcutta
+on the 5th of February; that then, or a few
+days after, he calls to him his confidential and faithful
+friend, (not his official secretary, for he trusted none
+of his regular secretaries with these transactions,)&mdash;he
+calls him to help him to make out his accounts
+during his absence. You would imagine that at that
+time he trusted this man with his account. No such
+thing: he goes on with the accountant-general, accounting
+with him for money expended, without ever
+explaining to that accountant-general how that money
+came into his hands. Here, then, we have the
+accountant making out the account, and the person
+accounting. The accountant does not in any manner
+make an objection, and say, "Here you are giving
+me an account by which it appears that you have
+expended money, but you have not told me where
+you received it: how shall I make out a fair account
+of debtor and creditor between you and the Company?"
+He does no such thing. There lies a suspicion
+in his breast that Mr. Hastings must have
+taken some money in some irregular way, or he could
+not have made those payments. Mr. Larkins begins
+to suspect him. "Where did you lose this bodkin?"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">{412}</a></span>
+said one lady to another, upon a certain occasion.
+"Pray, Madam, where did you find it?" Mr. Hastings,
+at the very moment of his life when confidence
+was required, even when making up his accounts
+with his accountant, never told him one word of the
+matter. You see he had no confidence in Mr. Larkins.
+This makes out one of the propositions I want
+to impress upon your Lordships' minds, that no one
+man did he let into every part of his transactions: a
+material circumstance, which will help to lead your
+Lordships' judgment in forming your opinion upon
+many parts of this cause.</p>
+
+<p>You see that Mr. Larkins suspected him. Probably
+in consequence of those suspicions, or from some
+other cause, he at last told him, upon the 22d of May,
+1782, (but why at that time, rather than at any other
+time, does not appear; and this we shall find very
+difficult to be accounted for,)&mdash;he told him that he
+had received a bribe from the Nabob of Oude, of
+100,000<i>l.</i> He informs him of this on the 22d of May,
+which, when the accounts were making up, he conceals
+from him. And he communicates to him the
+rough draught of his letter to the Court of Directors,
+informing them that this business was not transacted
+by any known secretary of the Company, nor with
+the intervention of any interpreter of the Company,
+nor passed through any official channel whatever, but
+through a gentleman much in his confidence, his military
+secretary; and, as if receiving bribes, and receiving
+letters concerning them, and carrying on correspondence
+relative to them, was a part of military
+duty, the rough draught of this letter was in the
+hands of this military secretary. Upon the communication
+of the letter, it rushes all at once into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">{413}</a></span>
+mind of Mr.Larkins, who knows Mr. Hastings's recollection,
+who knows what does and what does not escape
+it, and who had a memory ready to explode at
+Mr. Hastings's desire, "Good God!" says he, "you
+have promised the Directors an account of this business!"&mdash;a
+promise which Mr. Larkins assures the
+Directors, upon his word, had entirely escaped Mr.
+Hastings's recollection. Mr. Hastings, it seems, had
+totally forgotten the promise relative to the paltry sum
+of 100,000<i>l.</i> which he had made to the Court of Directors
+in the January before; he never once thought
+of it, no, not even when he was making up his accounts
+of that very identical sum, till the 22d of
+May. So that these persons answer for one another's
+bad memory: and you will see they have good reason.
+Mr. Hastings's want of recollection appears in things
+of some moment. However lightly he may regard
+the sum of 100,000<i>l.</i>, which, considering the enormous
+sums he has received, I dare say he does,&mdash;for
+he totally forgot it, he knew nothing about it,&mdash;observe
+what sort of memory this registrar and accountant
+of such sums as 100,000<i>l.</i> has. In what confusion
+of millions must it be, that such sums can be lost
+to Mr. Hastings's recollection! However, at last it
+was brought to his recollection, and he thought that
+it was necessary to give some account of it. And
+who is the accountant whom he produces? His own
+memory is no accountant. He had dismissed the matter
+(as he happily expresses it in the Cheltenham
+letter) from his memory. Major Palmer is not the accountant.
+One is astonished that a man who had had
+100,000<i>l.</i> in his hands, and laid it out, as he pretends,
+in the public service, has not a scrap of paper to show
+for it. No ordinary or extraordinary account is given<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">{414}</a></span>
+of it. Well, what is to be done in such circumstances?
+He sends for a person whose name you have
+heard and will often hear of, the faithful Cantoo Baboo.
+This man comes to Mr. Larkins, and he reads
+to him (be so good as to remark the words) from a
+Bengal paper the account of the detached bribes.
+Your Lordships will observe that I have stated the
+receipt of a number of detached bribes, and a bribe
+in one great body: one, the great <i>corps d'arm&eacute;e</i>; the
+other, flying scouting bodies, which were only to be
+collected together by a skilful man who knew how
+to manage them, and regulate the motions of those
+wild and disorderly troops. When No. 2 was to be
+explained, Cantoo Baboo failed him; he was not
+worth a farthing as to any transaction that happened
+when Mr. Hastings was in the Upper Provinces, where
+though he was his faithful and constant attendant
+through the whole, yet he could give no account of
+it. Mr. Hastings's moonshee then reads three lines
+from a paper to Mr. Larkins. Now it is no way even
+insinuated that both the Bengal and Persian papers
+did not contain the account of other immense sums;
+and, indeed, from the circumstance of only three lines
+being read from the Persian paper, your Lordships
+will be able, in your own minds, to form some judgment
+upon this business.</p>
+
+<p>I shall now proceed with his letter of explanation.
+"The particulars," he goes on to say, "of the paper
+No. 1 were read to me from a Bengal paper by Mr.
+Hastings's banian, Cantoo Baboo; and if I am not mistaken,
+the three first lines of that No. 2 were read
+over to me from a Persian paper by his moonshee.
+The translation of these particulars, made by me, was,
+as I verily believe, the first complete memorandum<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">{415}</a></span>
+that he ever possessed of them in the English language;
+and I am confident, that, if I had not suggested
+to him the necessity of his taking this precaution,
+he would at this moment have been unable to have
+afforded any such information concerning them."</p>
+
+<p>Now, my Lords, if he had not got, on the intimation
+of Mr. Larkins, some scraps of paper, your
+Lordships might have at this day wanted that valuable
+information which Mr. Larkins has laid before
+you. These, however, contain, Mr. Larkins says,
+"the first complete"&mdash;what?&mdash;account, do you
+imagine?&mdash;no, "the first complete <i>memorandum</i>."
+You would imagine that he would himself, for his
+own use, have notched down, somewhere or other,
+in short-hand, in Persian characters, short without
+vowels, or in some other way, <i>memorandums</i>. But
+he had not himself even a memorandum of this
+business; and consequently, when he was at Cheltenham,
+and even here at your bar, he could never
+have had any account of a sum of 200,000<i>l.</i>, but by
+this account of Mr. Larkins, taken, as people read
+them, from detached pieces of paper.</p>
+
+<p>One would have expected that Mr. Larkins, being
+warned that day, and cautioned by the strange memory
+of Mr. Hastings, and the dangerous situation,
+therefore, in which he himself stood, would at least
+have been very guarded and cautious. Hear what he
+next says upon this subject. "As neither of the
+other sums passed through his hands, these" (meaning
+the scraps) "contained no such specification, and
+consequently could not enable him to afford the information
+with which he has requested me to furnish
+you; and it is more than probable, that, if the affidavit
+which I took on the 16th December, 1782, had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">{416}</a></span>
+not exposed my character to the suspicion of my
+being capable of committing one of the basest trespasses
+upon the confidence of mankind, I should, at
+this distance of time, have been equally unable to
+have complied with this request: but after I became
+acquainted with the insinuation suggested in the
+Eleventh Report of the Select Committee of the
+House of Commons, I thought it but too probable,
+that, unless I was possessed of the original memorandum
+which I had made of these transactions, I
+might not at some distant period be able to prove
+that I had not descended to commit so base an action.
+I have therefore always most carefully preserved
+every paper which I possessed regarding these
+transactions."</p>
+
+<p>You see that Mr. Hastings had no memorandums
+of his accounts; you see, that, after Mr. Larkins had
+made his memorandums of them, he had no design
+of guarding or keeping them; and you will commend
+those wicked and malicious committees who
+by their reports have told an accountant-general and
+first public officer of revenue, that, in order to guard
+his character from their suspicions, it was necessary
+that he should keep some paper or other of an
+account. We have heard of the base, wicked, and
+mercenary license that has been used by these gentlemen
+of India towards the House of Commons:
+a license to libel and traduce the diligence of the
+House of Commons, the purity of their motives, and
+the fidelity of their actions, by which the very means
+of informing the people are attempted to be used for
+the purpose of leaving them in darkness and delusion.
+But, my Lords, when the accountant-general
+declares, that, if the House of Commons had not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">{417}</a></span>
+expressed, as they ought to express, much diffidence
+and distrust respecting these transactions, and even
+suspected him of perjury, this very day that man
+would not have produced a scrap of those papers to
+you, but might have turned them to the basest and
+most infamous of uses. If, I say, we have saved
+these valuable fragments by suspecting his integrity,
+your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use:
+and I hope the world will learn that punishment will
+be of use, too, in preventing such transactions.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships have seen that no two persons
+knew anything of these transactions; you see that
+even memorandums of transactions of very great
+moment, some of which had passed in the year 1779,
+were not even so much as put in the shape of complete
+memoranda until May, 1782; you see that Mr.
+Hastings never kept them: and there is no reason to
+imagine that a black banian and a Persian moonshee
+would have been careful of what Mr. Hastings himself,
+who did not seem to stimulate his accountants
+to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity,
+was negligent. You see that Mr. Larkins, our last,
+our only hope, if he had not been suspected by the
+House of Commons, probably would never have kept
+these papers; and that you could not have had this
+valuable cargo, such as it is, if it had not been for
+the circumstance Mr. Larkins thinks proper to mention.</p>
+
+<p>From the specimen which we have given of Mr.
+Hastings's mode of accounts, of its vouchers, checks,
+and counter-checks, your Lordships will have observed
+that the mode itself is past describing, and
+that the checks and counter-checks, instead of being
+put upon one another to prevent abuse, are put upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">{418}</a></span>
+each other to prevent discovery and to fortify abuse.
+When you hear that one man has an account of receipt,
+another of expenditure, another of control, you
+say that office is well constituted: but here is an
+office constituted by different persons without the
+smallest connection with each other; for the only purpose
+which they have ever answered is the purpose
+of base concealment.</p>
+
+<p>We shall now proceed a little further with Mr.
+Larkins. The first of the papers from which he took
+the memoranda was a paper of Cantoo Baboo. It
+contained detached payments, amounting in the
+whole, with the cabooleat, or agreement, to about
+95,000<i>l.</i> sterling, and of which it appears that there
+was received by Mr. Croftes 55,000<i>l.</i>, and no more.</p>
+
+<p>Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest
+in your memory what sort of an exchequer this is,
+even with regard to its receipts? As your Lordships
+have seen the economy and constitution of this office,
+so now see the receipt. It appears that in the month
+of May, 1782, out of the sums beginning to be received
+in the month of Shawal, that is in July,
+1779, there was, during that interval, 40,000<i>l.</i> out
+of 95,000<i>l.</i> sunk somewhere, in some of the turnings
+over upon the gridiron, through some of those agents
+and panders of corruption which Mr. Hastings uses.
+Here is the <i>valuable</i> revenue of the Company, <i>which
+is to supply them in their exigencies, which is to come
+from sources which otherwise never would have yielded
+it</i>,&mdash;which, though small in proportion to the other
+revenue, yet is a diamond, something that by its value
+makes amends for its want of bulk,&mdash;falling short by
+40,000<i>l.</i> out of 95,000<i>l.</i> Here is a system made for
+fraud, and producing all the effects of it.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">{419}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Upon the face of this account, the agreement was
+to yield to Mr. Hastings, some way or other, to be
+paid to Mr. Croftes, 95,000<i>l.</i>, and there was a deficiency
+of 40,000<i>l.</i> Would any man, even with no
+more sense than Mr. Hastings, who wants all the faculties
+of the human mind, who has neither memory
+nor judgment, any man who was that poor half-idiot
+creature that Mr. Hastings pretends to be, engage in a
+dealing that was to extort from some one or other an
+agreement to pay 95,000<i>l.</i> which was not to produce
+more than 55,000<i>l.</i>? What, then, is become of it?
+Is it in the hands of Mr. Hastings's wicked bribe-brokers,
+or in his own hands? Is it in arrear? Do you
+know anything about it? Whom are you to apply
+to for information? Why, to G.G.S.&mdash;G.G.S. I
+find to be, what indeed I suspected him to be, a person
+that I have mentioned frequently to your Lordships,
+and that you will often hear of, commonly
+called Gunga Govind Sing,&mdash;in a short word, the
+wickedest of the whole race of banians: the consolidated
+wickedness of the whole body is to be found in
+this man.</p>
+
+<p>Of the deficiency which appears in this agreement
+with somebody or other on the part of Mr. Hastings
+through Gunga Govind Sing you will expect to hear
+some explanation. Of the first sum, which is said to
+have been paid through Gunga Govind Sing, amounting
+on the cabooleat to four lac, and of which no more
+than two lac was actually received,&mdash;that is to say,
+half of it was sunk,&mdash;we have this memorandum
+only: "Although Mr. Hastings was extremely dissatisfied
+with the excuses Gunga Govind Sing assigned
+for not paying Mr. Croftes the sum stated by the
+paper No. 1 to be in his charge, he never could ob<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">{420}</a></span>tain
+from him any further payments on this account."
+Mr. Hastings is exceedingly dissatisfied with those
+excuses, and this is the whole account of the transaction.
+This is the only thing said of Gunga Govind
+Sing in the account: he neither states how he came
+to be employed, or for what he was employed. It
+appears, however, from the transaction, as far as we
+can make our way through this darkness, that he had
+actually received 10,000<i>l.</i> of the money, which he did
+not account for, and that he pretended that there
+was an arrear of the rest. So here Mr. Hastings's
+bribe-agent admits that he had received 10,000<i>l.</i>, but
+he will not account for it; he says there is an arrear
+of another 10,000<i>l.</i>; and thus it appears that he was
+enabled to take from somebody at Dinagepore, by a
+cabooleat, 40,000<i>l.</i>, of which Mr. Hastings can get but
+20,000<i>l.</i>: there is cent per cent loss upon it. Mr.
+Hastings was so exceedingly dissatisfied with this
+conduct of Gunga Govind Sing, that you would imagine
+a breach would have immediately ensued between
+them. I shall not anticipate what some of my
+honorable friends will bring before your Lordships;
+but I tell you, that, so far from quarrelling with Gunga
+Govind Sing, or being really angry with him, it is
+only a little pettish love quarrel with Gunga Govind
+Sing: <i>amantium ir&aelig; amoris integratio est</i>. For Gunga
+Govind Sing, without having paid him one shilling
+of this money, attended him to the Ganges; and one
+of the last acts of Mr. Hastings's government was to
+represent this man, who was unfaithful even to fraud,
+who did not keep the common faith of thieves and
+robbers, this very man he recommends to the Company
+as a person who ought to be rewarded, as one
+of their best and most faithful servants. And how<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">{421}</a></span>
+does he recommend him to be rewarded? By giving
+him the estate of another person,&mdash;the way in which
+Mr. Hastings desires to be always rewarded himself:
+for, in calling upon the Company's justice to give
+him some money for expenses with which he never
+charged them, he desires them to assign him the
+money upon some person of the country. So here
+Mr. Hastings recommends Gunga Govind Sing not
+only to trust, confidence, and employment, which he
+does very fully, but to a reward taken out of the substance
+of other people. This is what Mr. Hastings
+has done with Gunga Govind Sing; and if such are
+the effects of his anger, what must be the effect of
+his pleasure and satisfaction? Now I say that Mr.
+Hastings, who, in fact, saw this man amongst the
+very last with whom he had any communication in
+India, could not have so recommended him after this
+known fraud, in one business only, of 20,000<i>l.</i>,&mdash;he
+could not so have supported him, he could not so
+have caressed him, he could not so have employed
+him, he could not have done all this, unless he had
+paid to Mr. Hastings privately that sum of money
+which never was brought into any even of these miserable
+accounts, without some payment or other with
+which Mr. Hastings was and ought to be satisfied, or
+unless Gunga Govind Sing had some dishonorable secret
+to tell of him which he did not dare to provoke
+him to give a just account of, or, lastly, unless the
+original agreement was that half or a third of the
+bribe should go to Gunga Govind Sing.</p>
+
+<p>Such is this patriotic scheme of bribery, this public-spirited
+corruption which Mr. Hastings has invented
+upon this occasion, and by which he thinks out of
+the vices of mankind to draw a better revenue than<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">{422}</a></span>
+out of any legal source whatever; and therefore he
+has resolved to become the most corrupt of all Governors-General,
+in order to be the most useful servant
+to the finances of the Company.</p>
+
+<p>So much as to the first article of Dinagepore
+peshcush. All you have is, that G.G.S is Gunga
+Govind Sing; that he has cheated the public of half
+of it; that Mr. Hastings was angry with him, and
+yet went away from Bengal, rewarding, praising, and
+caressing him. Are these things to pass as matters
+of course? They cannot so pass with your Lordships'
+sagacity: I will venture to say that no court,
+even of <i>pie-poudre</i>, could help finding him guilty
+upon such a matter, if such a court had to inquire
+into it.</p>
+
+<p>The next article is <i>Patna</i>. Here, too, he was to
+receive 40,000<i>l.</i>; but from whom this deponent saith
+not. At this circumstance Mr. Larkins, who is a
+famous deponent, never hints once. You may look
+through his whole letter, which is a pretty long one,
+(and which I will save your Lordships the trouble of
+hearing read at length now, because you will have it
+before you when you come to the Patna business,)
+and you will only find that somebody had engaged to
+pay him 40,000<i>l.</i>, and that but half of this sum was
+received. You want an explanation of this. You
+have seen the kind of explanation given in the former
+case, a conjectural explanation of G.G.S. But
+when you come to the present case, who the person
+paying was, why the money was not paid, what the
+cause of failure was, you are not told: you only
+learn that there was that sum deficient; and Mr.
+Larkins, who is our last resort and final hope of
+elucidation in this transaction, throws not the small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">{423}</a></span>est
+glimpse of light upon it. We of the House of
+Commons have been reduced to form the best legitimate
+conjectures we could upon this business, and
+those conjectures have led us to further evidence,
+which will enable us to fix one of the most scandalous
+and most mischievous bribes, in all the circumstances
+of it, upon Mr. Hastings, that was ever
+known. If he extorted 40,000<i>l.</i> under pretence of
+the Company's service, here is again another failure
+of half the money. Oh, my Lords, you will find that
+even the remaining part was purchased with the loss
+of one of the best revenues in India, and with the
+grievous distress of a country that deserved well your
+protection, instead of being robbed to give 20,000<i>l.</i>
+to the Company, and another 20,000<i>l.</i> to some robber
+or other, black or white. When I say, given to some
+other robber, black or white, I do not suppose that
+either generosity, friendship, or even communion,
+can exist in that country between white men and
+black: no, their colors are not more adverse than
+their characters and tempers. There is not that
+<i>idem velle et idem nolle</i>, there are none of those
+habits of life, nothing, that can bind men together
+even in the most ordinary society: the mutual means
+of such an union do not exist between them. It is a
+money-dealing, and a money-dealing only, which can
+exist between them; and when you hear that a black
+man is favored, and that 20,000<i>l.</i> is pretended to be
+left in his hands, do not believe it: indeed, you cannot
+believe it; for we will bring evidence to show
+that there is no friendship between those people,&mdash;and
+that, when black men give money to a white
+man, it is a bribe,&mdash;and that, when money is given
+to a black man, he is only a sharer with the white man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">{424}</a></span>
+in their infamous profits. We find, however, somebody,
+anonymous, with 20,000<i>l.</i> left in his hands; and
+when we come to discover who the man is, and the final
+balance which appears against him in his account
+with the Company, we find that for this 20,000<i>l.</i>,
+which was received for the Company, they paid such
+a compound interest as was never before paid for
+money advanced: the most violently griping usurer,
+in dealing with the most extravagant heir, never
+made such a bargain as Mr. Hastings has made for
+the Company by this bribe. Therefore it could be
+nothing but fraud that could have got him to have
+undertaken such a revenue. This evidently shows
+the whole to be a pretence to cover fraud, and not
+a weak attempt to raise a revenue,&mdash;and that Mr.
+Hastings was not that idiot he represents himself to
+be, a man forgetting all his offices, all his duties, all
+his own affairs, and all the public affairs. He does
+not, however, forget how to make a bargain to get
+money; but when the money is to be recovered for
+the Company, (as he says,) he forgets to recover it:
+so that the accuracy with which he begins a bribe,
+<i>acribus initiis et soporos&acirc; fine</i>, and the carelessness
+with which he ends it, are things that characterize,
+not weakness and stupidity, but fraud.</p>
+
+<p>The next article we proceed to is <i>Nuddea</i>. Here
+we have more light; but does Mr. Larkins anywhere
+tell you anything about Nuddea? No it appears
+as if the account had been paid up, and that the cabooleat
+and the payments answer and tally with each
+other; yet, when we come to produce the evidence
+upon these parts, you will see most abundant reason
+to be assured that there is much more concealed
+than is given in this account,&mdash;that it is an account<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">{425}</a></span>
+current, and not an account closed,&mdash;and that the
+agreement was for some other and greater sum than
+appears. It might be expected that the Company
+would inquire of Mr. Hastings, and ask, "From whom
+did he get it? Who has received it? Who is to answer
+for it?" But he knew that they were not likely
+to make any inquiry at all,&mdash;they are not that kind
+of people. You would imagine that a mercantile body
+would have some of the mercantile excellencies, and
+even you would allow them perhaps some of the mercantile
+faults. But they have, like Mr. Hastings, forgotten
+totally the mercantile character; and, accordingly,
+neither accuracy nor fidelity of account do
+they ever require of Mr. Hastings. They have too
+much confidence in him; and he, accordingly, acts
+like a man in whom such confidence, without reason,
+is reposed.</p>
+
+<p>Your Lordships may perhaps suppose that the payment
+of this money was an act of friendship and generosity
+in the people of the country. No: we have
+found out, and shall prove, from whom he got it;
+at least we shall produce such a conjecture upon it
+as your Lordships will think us bound to do, when
+we have such an account before us. Here on the
+face of the account there is no deficiency; but when
+we look into it, we find skulking in a corner a person
+called Nundulol, from whom there is received
+58,000 rupees. You will find that he, who appears
+to have paid up this money, and which Mr. Hastings
+spent as he pleased in his journey to Benares, and
+who consequently must have had some trust reposed
+in him, was the wickedest of men, next to those I
+have mentioned,&mdash;always giving the first rank to
+Gunga Govind Sing, <i>primus inter pares</i>, the second<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">{426}</a></span>
+to Debi Sing, the third to Cantoo Baboo: this man
+is fit to be one next on a par with them. Mr. Larkins,
+when he comes to explain this article, says, "I
+believe it is for a part of the Dinagepore peshcush,
+which would reduce the balance to about 5,000<i>l.</i>":
+but he does not pretend to know what it is given
+for; he gives several guesses at it; "but," he says,
+"as I do not know, I shall not pretend to give more
+than my conjecture upon it." He is in the right;
+because we shall prove Nundulol never did have any
+thing to do with the Dinagepore peshcush. These
+are very extraordinary proceedings. It is my business
+simply to state them to your Lordships now;
+we will give them in afterwards in evidence, and I
+will leave that evidence to be confirmed and fortified
+by further observations.</p>
+
+<p>One of the objects of Mr. Larkins's letter is to
+illustrate the bonds. He says, "The two first stated
+sums" (namely, Dinagepore and Patna, in the paper
+marked No. 1, I suppose, for he seems to explain
+it to be such) "are sums for a part of which Mr.
+Hastings took two bonds: viz., No. 1539, dated 1st
+October, 1780, and No. 1540, dated 2d October, 1780,
+each for the sum of current rupees 1,16,000, or sicca
+rupees one lac. The remainder of that amount
+was carried to the credit of the head, <i>Four per Cent
+Remittance Loan:</i> Mr. Hastings having taken a bond
+for it, (No. 89,) which has been since completely
+liquidated, conformable to the law." But before I
+proceed with the bonds, I will beg leave to recall
+to your Lordships' recollection that Mr. Larkins
+states in his letter that these sums were received
+in November. How does this agree with another
+state of the transaction given by Mr. Hastings,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">{427}</a></span>
+namely, that the time of his taking the bonds was
+the 1st and 2d of October? Mr. Larkins, therefore,
+who has thought proper to say that the money was
+received in the month of November, has here given
+as extraordinary an instance either of fraudulent accuracy
+or shameful official inaccuracy as was ever
+perhaps discovered. The first sums are asserted to
+be paid to Mr. Croftes on the 18th and 19th of Asin,
+1187. The month of Asin corresponds with the
+month of September and part of October, and not
+with November; and it is the more extraordinary
+that Mr. Larkins should mistake this, because he is
+in an office which requires monthly payments, and
+consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual
+transfer from one month to another: we cannot
+suppose any accountant in England can be more
+accurately acquainted with the succession of months
+than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative
+state of Bengal and English months. How are
+we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you
+have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a
+moralist inaccurate, you know that these are cases
+which, from the narrow bounds of our weak faculties,
+do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what
+is an inaccurate <i>accountant</i> good for? "Silly man,
+that dost not know thy own silly trade!" was once
+well said: but the trade here is not silly. You do
+not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because
+you have thousands of them; but you justly
+blame a public accountant who is guilty of a gross
+inaccuracy. But what end could his being inaccurate
+answer? Why not name October as well as
+November? I know no reason for it; but here is
+certainly a gross mistake: and from the nature of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">{428}</a></span>
+the thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be
+a mere mistake. But take it that it is a mistake,
+and to have nothing of fraud, but mere carelessness;
+this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very
+punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the bonds. We find a bond taken
+in the month of Shawal, 1186, or 1779, but the receipt
+is said to be in Asin, 1780: that is to say,
+there was a year and about three months between
+the collection and the receipt; and during all that
+period of time an enormous sum of money had lain
+in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed
+when Mr. Hastings should think fit. He employed
+it, he says, for the Mahratta expedition. Now he
+began that letter on the 29th of November by telling
+you that the bribe would not have been taken from
+Cheyt Sing, if it had not been at the instigation of an
+exigency which it seems required a supply of money,
+to be procured lawfully or unlawfully. But in fact
+there was no exigency for it before the Berar army
+came upon the borders of the country,&mdash;that army
+which he invited by his careless conduct towards the
+Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to
+buy off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was
+taken from Cheyt Sing long before he had this occasion
+for it. The fund lay in Gunga Govind Sing's hands;
+and he afterwards applied to that purpose a part of
+this fund, which he must have taken without any
+view whatever to the Company's interest. This pretence
+of the exigency of the Company's affairs is the
+more extraordinary, because the first receipt of these
+moneys was some time in the year 1779 (I have not
+got the exact date of the agreement); and it was
+but a year before that the Company was so far from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">{429}</a></span>
+being in distress, that he declared he should have, at
+very nearly the period when this bribe became payable,
+a very large sum (I do not recollect the precise
+amount) in their treasury. I cannot certainly tell
+when the cabooleat, or agreement, was made; yet I
+shall lay open something very extraordinary upon
+that subject, and will lead you, step by step, to the
+bloody scenes of Debi Sing. Whilst, therefore, Mr.
+Hastings was carrying on these transactions, he was
+carrying them on without any reference to the pretended
+object to which he afterwards applied them.
+It was an old, premeditated plan; and the money to
+be received could not have been designed for an exigency,
+because it was to be paid by monthly instalments.
+The case is the same with respect to the
+other cabooleats: it could not have been any momentary
+exigence which he had to provide for by
+these sums of money; they were paid regularly, period
+by period, as a constant, uniform income, to Mr.
+Hastings.</p>
+
+<p>You find, then, Mr. Hastings first leaving this sum
+of money for a year and three months in the hands
+of Gunga Govind Sing; you find, that, when an exigence
+pressed him by the Mahrattas suddenly invading
+Bengal, and he was obliged to refer to his bribe-fund,
+he finds that fund empty, and that, in supplying
+money for this exigence, he takes a bond for two
+thirds of his own money and one third of the Company's.
+For, as I stated before, Mr. Larkins proves
+of one of these accounts, that he took, in the month
+of January, for this bribe-money, which, according to
+the principles he lays down, was the Company's money,
+three bonds as for money advanced from his own
+cash. Now this sum of three lacs, instead of being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">{430}</a></span>
+all his own, as it should appear to be in the month of
+January, when he took the bonds, or two thirds his
+own and one third the Company's, as he said in his
+letter of the 29th of November, turns out, by Mr. Larkins's
+account, paragraph 9, which I wish to mark to
+your Lordships, to be two thirds the Company's money
+and one third his own; and yet it is all confounded
+under bonds, as if the money had been his own.
+What can you say to this heroic sharper disguised
+under the name of a patriot, when you find him to be
+nothing but a downright cheat, first taking money
+under the Company's name, then taking their securities
+to him for their own money, and afterwards entering
+a false account of them, contradicting that by
+another account?&mdash;and God knows whether the third
+be true or false. These are not things that I am to
+make out by any conclusion of mine; here they are,
+made out by himself and Mr. Larkins, and, comparing
+them with his letter of the 27th, you find a gross
+fraud covered by a direct falsehood.</p>
+
+<p>We have now done with Mr. Larkins's account of
+the bonds, and are come to the other species of Mr.
+Hastings's frauds, (for there is a great variety in
+them,) and first to Cheyt Sing's bribe. Mr. Larkins
+came to the knowledge of the bond-money through
+Gunga Govind Sing and through Cantoo Baboo. Of
+this bribe he was not in the secret originally, but was
+afterwards made a confidant in it; it was carried to
+him; and the account he gives of it I will state to
+your Lordships.</p>
+
+<p>"The fourth sum stated in Mr. Hastings's account
+was the produce of sundry payments made to me by
+Sadamund, Cheyt Sing's buckshee, who either brought
+or sent the gold mohurs to my house, from whence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">{431}</a></span>
+they were taken by me to Mr. Croftes, either on the
+same night or early in the morning after: they were
+made at different times, and I well remember that the
+same people never came twice. On the 21st June,
+1780, Mr. Hastings sent for me, and desired that I
+would take charge of a present that had been offered
+to him by Cheyt Sing's buckshee, under the plea of
+atoning for the opposition which he had made towards
+the payment of the extra subsidy for defraying part
+of the expenses of the war, but really in the hope
+of its inducing Mr. Hastings to give up that claim;
+with which view the present had first been offered.
+Mr. Hastings declared, that, although he would not
+take this for his own use, he would apply it to that of
+the Company, in removing Mr. Francis's objections to
+the want of a fund for defraying the extra expenses
+of Colonel Camac's detachment. On my return to
+the office, I wrote down the substance of what Mr.
+Hastings had said to me, and requested Mr. James
+Miller, my deputy, to seal it up with his own seal,
+and write upon it, that he had then done so at my
+request. He was no further informed of my motive
+for this than merely that it contained the substance
+of a conversation which had passed between me and
+another gentleman, which, in case that conversation
+should hereafter become the subject of inquiry, I
+wished to be able to adduce the memorandum then
+made of it, in corroboration of my own testimony;
+and although that paper has remained unopened to
+this hour, and notwithstanding that I kept no memorandum
+whatever of the substance thereof, yet, as I
+have wrote this representation under the most scrupulous
+adherence to what I conceived to be truth,
+should it ever become necessary to refer to this paper,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">{432}</a></span>
+I am confident that it will not be found to differ materially
+from the substance of this representation."</p>
+
+<p>I forgot to mention, that, besides these two bonds,
+which Mr. Hastings declared to be the Company's,
+and one bond his own, that he slipped into the place
+of the bond of his own a much better, namely, a bond
+of November, which he never mentioned to the Company
+till the 22d of May; and this bond for current
+rupees 1,74,000, or sicca rupees 1,50,000, was taken
+for the payment stated in the paper No. 1 to have
+been made to Mr. Croftes on the 11th Aghan, 1187,
+which corresponds to the 23d of November, 1780.
+This is the Nuddea money, and this is all that you
+know of it; you know that this money, for which
+he had taken this other bond from the Company, was
+not his own neither, but bribes taken from the other
+provinces.</p>
+
+<p>I am ashamed to be troublesome to your Lordships
+in this dry affair, but the detection of fraud requires
+a good deal of patience and assiduity, and we cannot
+wander into anything that can relieve the mind: if it
+was in my power to do it, I would do it. I wish,
+however, to call your Lordships' attention to this last
+bribe before I quit these bonds. Such is the confusion,
+so complicated, so intricate are these bribe accounts,
+that there is always something left behind,
+glean never so much from the paragraphs of Mr.
+Hastings and Mr. Larkins. "I could not bring them
+to account," says Mr. Larkins. "They were received
+before the 1st and 2d of October." Why does not the
+running treasury account give an account of them?
+The Committee of the House of Commons examined
+whether the running treasury account had any such
+account of sums deposited. No such thing. They<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">{433}</a></span>
+are said by Mr. Hastings to be deposited in June:
+they were not deposited in October, nor any account
+of them given till the January following. "These
+bonds," says he, "I could not enter as regular money,
+to be entered on the Company's account, or in
+any public way, until I had had an order of the Governor-General
+and Council." But why had not you
+an order of the Governor-General and Council? We
+are not calling on you, Mr. Larkins, for an account
+of your conduct: we are calling upon Mr. Hastings
+for an account of his conduct, and which he refers to
+you to explain. Why did not Mr. Hastings order you
+to carry them to the public account? "Because,"
+says he, "there was no other way." Every one who
+knows anything of a treasury or public banking-place
+knows, that if any person brings money as belonging
+to the public, that the public accountant is bound, no
+doubt, to receive it and enter it as such. "But,"
+says he, "I could not do it until the account could
+be settled, as between debtor and creditor: I did not
+do it till I could put on one side durbar charges, secret
+service, to such an amount, and balance that
+again with bonds to Mr. Hastings." That is, he
+could not make an entry regularly in the Company's
+books until Mr. Hastings had enabled him to commit
+one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public
+trust that ever was committed, by ordering that money
+of the Company's to be considered as his own, and
+a bond to be taken as a security for it from the Company,
+as if it was his own.</p>
+
+<p>But to proceed with this deposit. What is the
+substance of Mr. Larkins's explanation of it? The
+substance of this explanation is, that here was a bribe
+received by Mr. Hastings from Cheyt Sing, guarded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">{434}</a></span>
+with such scrupulous secrecy, that it was not carried
+to the house of Mr. Croftes, who was to receive it
+finally, but to the house of Mr. Larkins, as a less suspected
+place; and that it was conveyed in various
+sums, no two people ever returning twice with the various
+payments which made up that sum of 23,000<i>l.</i>
+or thereabouts. Now do you want an instance of
+prevarication and trickery in an account? If any
+person should inquire whether 23,000<i>l.</i> had been paid
+by Cheyt Sing to Mr. Hastings, there was not any
+one man living, or any person concerned in the
+transaction, except Mr.Larkins, who received it, that
+could give an account of how much he received, or
+who brought it. As no two people are ever his
+confidants in the same transaction in Mr. Hastings's
+accounts, so here no two people are permitted to have
+any share whatever in bringing the several fragments
+that make up this sum. This bribe, you might
+imagine, would have been entered by Mr. Larkins
+to some public account, at least to the fraudulent
+account of Mr. Hastings. No such thing. It was
+never entered till the November following. It was
+not entered till Mr. Francis had left Calcutta. All
+these corrupt transactions were carried on privately
+by Mr. Hastings alone, without any signification to
+his colleagues of his carrying on this patriotic traffic,
+as he called it. Your Lordships will also consider
+both the person who employs such a fraudulent
+accountant, and his ideas of his duty in his office.
+These are matters for your Lordships' grave determination;
+but I appeal to you, upon the face of these
+accounts, whether you ever saw anything so gross,&mdash;and
+whether any man could be daring enough to
+attempt to impose upon the credulity of the weakest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">{435}</a></span>
+of mankind, much more to impose upon such a court
+as this, such accounts as these are.</p>
+
+<p>If the Company had a mind to inquire what is
+become of all the debts due to them, and where is
+the cabooleat, he refers them to Gunga Govind Sing.
+"Give us," say they, "an account of this balance
+that remains in your hands." "I know," says he,
+"of no balance." "Why, is there not a cabooleat?"
+"Where is it? What are the date and circumstances
+of it? There is no such cabooleat existing." This
+is the case even where you have the name of the person
+through whose hands the money passed. But
+suppose the inquiry went to the payments of the
+Patna cabooleat. "Here," they say, "we find half
+the money due: out of forty thousand pounds there
+is only twenty thousand received: give us some
+account of it." Who is to give an account of it?
+Here there is no mention made of the name of
+the person who had the cabooleat: whom can they
+call upon? Mr. Hastings does not remember; Mr.
+Larkins does not tell; they can learn nothing about
+it. If the Directors had a disposition, and were
+honest enough to the Proprietors and the nation to
+inquire into it, there is not a hint given, by either
+of those persons, who received the Nuddea, who
+received the Patna, who received the Dinagepore
+peshcush.</p>
+
+<p>But in what court can a suit be instituted, and
+against whom, for the recovery of this balance of
+40,000<i>l.</i> out of 95,000<i>l.</i>? I wish your Lordships to
+examine strictly this account,&mdash;to examine strictly
+every part, both of the account itself, and Mr. Larkins's
+explanation: compare them together, and divine,
+if you can, what remedy the Company could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">{436}</a></span>
+have for their loss. Can your Lordships believe that
+this can be any other than a systematical, deliberate
+fraud, grossly conducted? I will not allow
+Mr. Hastings to be the man he represents himself
+to be: he was supposed to be a man of parts; I
+will only suppose him to be a man of mere common
+sense. Are these the accounts we should expect
+from such a man? And yet he and Mr. Larkins
+are to be magnified to heaven for great financiers;
+and this is to be called book-keeping! This is the
+Bengal account saved so miraculously on the 22d of
+May.</p>
+
+<p>Next comes the Persian account. You have heard
+of a present to which it refers. It has been already
+stated, but it must be a good deal farther explained.
+Mr. Larkins states that this account was taken from
+a paper, of which three lines, and only three lines,
+were read to him by a Persian moonshee; and it is
+not pretended that this was the whole of it. The
+three lines read are as follows.</p>
+
+<div class='ctr'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>"From the Nabob" (meaning the Nabob of Oude) "to the Governor-General,
+six lac</td><td align='right'>&pound;60,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>From Hussein Reza Kh&acirc;n and Hyder Beg Kh&acirc;n to ditto, three lac</td><td align='right'>30,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And ditto to Mrs. Hastings, one lac</td><td align='right'>10,000.</td><td align='left'>"</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>Here, I say, are the three lines that were read by a
+Persian moonshee. Is he a man you can call to account
+for these particulars? No: he is an anonymous
+moonshee; his name is not so much as mentioned
+by Mr. Larkins, nor hinted at by Mr. Hastings;
+and you find these sums, which Mr. Hastings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">{437}</a></span>
+mentions as a sum in gross given to himself, are not
+so. They were given by three persons: one, six lacs,
+was given by the Nabob to the Governor; another,
+of three lacs more, by Hussein Reza Kh&acirc;n [and Hyder
+Beg Kh&acirc;n?]; and a third, one lac, by both of them
+clubbing, as a present to Mrs. Hastings. This is the
+first discovery that appears of Mrs. Hastings having
+been concerned in receiving presents for the Governor-General
+and others, in addition to Gunga Govind
+Sing, Cantoo Baboo, and Mr. Croftes. Now, if this
+money was not received for the Company, is it proper
+and right to take it from Mrs. Hastings? Is there
+honor and justice in taking from a lady a gratuitous
+present made to her? Yet Mr. Hastings says he has
+applied it all to the Company's service. He has done
+ill, in suffering it to be received at all, if she has
+not justly and properly received it. Whether, in fact,
+she ever received this money at all, she not being
+upon the spot, as I can find, at the time, (though, to
+be sure, a present might be sent her,) I neither affirm
+nor deny, farther than that, as Mr. Larkins says,
+there was a sum of 10,000<i>l.</i> from these ministers to
+Mrs. Hastings. Whether she ever received any other
+money than this, I also neither affirm nor deny.
+But in whatever manner Mrs. Hastings received this
+or any other money, I must say, in this grave place
+in which I stand, that, if the wives of Governors-General,
+the wives of Presidents of Council, the wives
+of the principal officers of the India Company, through
+all the various departments, can receive presents,
+there is an end of the covenants, there is an end of
+the act of Parliament, there is an end to every power
+of restraint. Let a man be but married, and if his
+wife may take presents, that moment the acts of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">{438}</a></span>
+Parliament, the covenants, and all the rest expire.
+There is something, too, in the manners of the East
+that makes this a much more dangerous practice.
+The people of the East, it is well known, have their
+zenanah, the apartment for their wives, as a sanctuary
+which nobody can enter,&mdash;a kind of holy of holies,
+a consecrated place, safe from the rage of war, safe
+from the fury of tyranny. The rapacity of man has
+here its bounds: here you shall come, and no farther.
+But if English ladies can go into these zenanahs and
+there receive presents, the natives of Hindostan cannot
+be said to have anything left of their own. Every
+one knows that in the wisest and best time of the
+Commonwealth of Rome, towards the latter end of it,
+(I do not mean the best time for morals, but the
+best for its knowledge how to correct evil government,
+and to choose the proper means for it,) it was
+an established rule, that no governor of a province
+should take his wife along with him into his province,&mdash;wives
+not being subject to the laws in the
+same manner as their husbands; and though I do
+not impute to any one any criminality here, I should
+think myself guilty of a scandalous dereliction of my
+duty, if I did not mention the fact to your Lordships.
+But I press it no further: here are the
+accounts, delivered in by Mr. Larkins at Mr. Hastings's
+own requisition.</p>
+
+<p>The three lines which were read out of a Persian
+paper are followed by a long account of the several
+species in which this present was received, and
+converted by exchange into one common standard.
+Now, as these three lines of paper, which are said
+to have been read out of a Persian paper, contain
+an account of bribes to the amount of 100,000<i>l.</i>,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">{439}</a></span>
+and as it is not even insinuated that this was the
+whole of the paper, but rather the contrary indirectly
+implied, I shall leave it for your Lordships, in
+your serious consideration, to judge what mines of
+bribery that paper might contain. For why did not
+Mr. Larkins get the whole of that paper read and
+translated? The moment any man stops in the
+midst of an account, he is stopping in the midst of
+a fraud.</p>
+
+<p>My Lords, I have one farther remark to make upon
+these accounts. The cabooleats, or agreements for
+the payments of these bribes, amount, in the three
+specified provinces, to 95,000<i>l.</i> Do you believe that
+these provinces were thus particularly favored? Do
+you think that they were chosen as a little demesne
+for Mr. Hastings? that they were the only provinces
+honored with his protection, so far as to take bribes
+from them? Do you perceive anything in their
+local situation that should distinguish them from other
+provinces of Bengal? What is the reason why
+Dinagepore, Patna, Nuddea, should have the post of
+honor assigned them? What reason can be given for
+not taking bribes also from Burdwan, from Bissunpore,
+in short, from all the sixty-eight collections
+which comprise the revenues of Bengal, and for selecting
+only three? How came he, I say, to be so
+wicked a servant, that, out of sixty-eight divisions,
+he chose only three to supply the exigencies of the
+Company? He did not do his duty in making this
+distinction, if he thought that bribery was the best
+way of supplying the Company's treasury, and that
+it formed the most useful and effectual resource for
+them,&mdash;which he has declared over and over again.
+Was it right to lay the whole weight of bribery, ex<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">{440}</a></span>tortion,
+and oppression upon those three provinces,
+and neglect the rest? No: you know, and must
+know, that he who extorts from three provinces will
+extort from twenty, if there are twenty. You have
+a standard, a measure of extortion, and that is all: <i>ex
+pede Herculem</i>: guess from thence what was extorted
+from all Bengal. Do you believe he could be so cruel
+to these provinces, so partial to the rest, as to charge
+them with that load, with 95,000<i>l.</i>, knowing the
+heavy oppression they were sinking under, and leave
+all the rest untouched? You will judge of what
+is concealed from us by what we have discovered
+through various means that have occurred, in consequence
+both of the guilty conscience of the person
+who confesses the fact with respect to these provinces,
+and of the vigor, perseverance and sagacity
+of those who have forced from him that discovery.
+It is not, therefore, for me to say that the 100,000<i>l.</i>
+and 95,000<i>l.</i> only were taken. Where the circumstances
+entitle me to go on, I must not be stopped,
+but at the boundary where human nature has fixed
+a barrier.</p>
+
+<p>You have now before you the true reason why he
+did not choose that this affair should come before a
+court of justice. Rather than this exposure should
+be made, he to-day would call for the mountains to
+cover him: he would prefer an inquiry into the business
+of the three seals, into anything foreign to the
+subject I am now discussing, in order to keep you
+from the discovery of that gross bribery, that shameful
+peculation, that abandoned prostitution and corruption,
+which he has practised with indemnity and
+impunity to this day, from one end of India to the
+other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">{441}</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At the head of the only account we have of these
+transactions stands Dinagepore; and it now only remains
+for me to make some observations upon Mr.
+Hastings's proceedings in that province. Its name,
+then, and that money was taken from it, is all that
+appears; but from whom, by what hands, by what
+means, under what pretence it was taken, he has not
+told you, he has not told his employers. I believe,
+however, I can tell from whom it was taken, and I
+believe it will appear to your Lordships that it must
+have been taken from the unhappy Rajah of Dinagepore;
+and I shall in a very few words state the circumstances
+attending, and the service performed for
+it: from these you will be able to form a just opinion
+concerning this bribe.</p>
+
+<p>Dinagepore, a large province, was possessed by
+an ancient family, the last of which, about the year
+1184 of their era, the Rajah Bija Naut, had no legitimate
+issue. When he was at the point of death, he
+wished to exclude from the succession to the zemindary
+his half-brother, Cantoo Naut, with whom he
+had lived upon ill terms for many years, by adopting
+a son. Such an adoption, when a person has a half-brother,
+as he had, in my poor judgment is not countenanced
+by the Gentoo laws. But Gunga Govind
+Sing, who was placed, by the office he held, at the
+head of the registry, where the records were kept
+by which the rules of succession according to the
+custom of the country are ascertained, became master
+of these Gentoo laws; and through his means
+Mr. Hastings decreed in favor of the adoption. We
+find that immediately after this decree Gunga Govind
+Sing received a cabooleat on Dinagepore for the
+sum of 40,000<i>l.</i>, of which it appears that he has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">{442}</a></span>
+actually exacted 30,000<i>l.</i>, though he has paid to Mr.
+Hastings only 20,000<i>l.</i> We find, before the young
+Rajah had been in possession a year, his natural
+guardians and relations, on one pretence or another,
+all turned out of their offices. The peshcush, or
+fixed annual rent, payable to the Company for his
+zemindary, fell into arrear, as might naturally be
+expected, from the Rajah's inability to pay both his
+rent and this exorbitant bribe, extorted from a ruined
+family. Instantly, under pretext of this arrearage,
+Gunga Govind Sing, and the fictitious Committee
+which Mr. Hastings had made for his wicked
+purposes, composed of Mr. Anderson, Mr. Shore, and
+Mr. Croftes, who were but the tools, as they tell us
+themselves, of Gunga Govind Sing, gave that monster
+of iniquity, Debi Sing, the government of this
+family. They put this noble infant, this miserable
+Rajah, together with the management of the provinces
+of Dinagepore and Rungpore, into his wicked
+and abominable hands, where the ravages he committed
+excited what was called a rebellion, that
+forced him to fly from the country, and into which I
+do not wonder he should be desirous that a political
+and not a juridical inquiry should be made. The savage
+barbarities which were there perpetrated I have
+already, in the execution of my duty, brought before
+this House and my country; and it will be seen,
+when we come to the proof, whether what I have
+asserted was the effect either of a deluded judgment
+or disordered imagination, and whether the facts I
+state cannot be substantiated by authentic reports,
+and were none of my invention, and, lastly, whether
+the means that were taken to discredit them do not
+infinitely aggravate the guilt of the offenders. Mr.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">{443}</a></span>
+Hastings wanted to fly from judicial inquiry; he
+wanted to put Debi Sing anywhere but in a court
+of justice. A court of justice, where a direct assertion
+is brought forward, and a direct proof applied
+to it, is an element in which he cannot live for a
+moment. He would seek refuge anywhere, even in
+the very sanctuary of his accusers, rather than abide
+a trial with him in a court of justice. But the House
+of Commons was too just not to send him to this
+tribunal, whose justice they cannot doubt, whose
+penetration he cannot elude, and whose decision will
+justify those managers whose characters he attempted
+to defame.</p>
+
+<p>But this is not all. We find, that, after the cruel
+sale of this infant, who was properly and directly
+under the guardianship of the Company, (for the
+Company acts as steward and dewan of the province,
+which office has the guardianship of minors,) after
+he had been robbed of 40,000<i>l.</i> by the hands of
+Gunga Govind Sing, and afterwards, under pretence
+of his being in debt to the Company, delivered into
+the hands of that monster, Debi Sing, Mr. Hastings,
+by way of anticipation of these charges, and in answer
+to them, has thought proper to produce the
+certificate from this unfortunate boy which I will
+now again read to you.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote"><p>"I, Radanaut, Zemindar of Purgunnah Havelly
+Punjera, commonly called Dinagepore:&mdash;As it has
+been learnt by me, the mutsuddies, and the respectable
+officers of my zemindary, that the ministers
+of England are displeased with the late Governor,
+Warren Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that
+he oppressed us, took money from us by deceit and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">{444}</a></span>
+force, and ruined the country; therefore we, upon
+the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent
+on and necessary for us to abide by, following
+the rules laid down in giving evidence, declare
+the particulars of the acts and deeds of Warren Hastings,
+Esquire, full of circumspection and caution,
+civility and justice, superior to the caution of the
+most learned, and, by representing what is fact, wipe
+away the doubts that have possessed the minds of
+the ministers of England: that Mr. Hastings is possessed
+of fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection
+to us; that he is clear of the contamination of
+mistrust and wrong, and his mind is free of covetousness
+or avarice. During the time of his administration,
+no one saw other conduct than that of protection
+to the husbandmen, and justice; no inhabitant
+ever experienced afflictions, no one ever felt oppression
+from him. Our reputations have always been
+guarded from attacks by his prudence, and our families
+have always been protected by his justice. He
+never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards
+us, but healed the wounds of despair with the
+salve of consolation, by means of his benevolent and
+kind behavior, never permitting one of us to sink
+in the pit of despondence. He supported every one
+by his goodness, overset the designs of evil-minded
+men by his authority, tied the hands of oppression
+with the strong bandage of justice, and by these means
+expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness and
+joy over us. He re&euml;stablished justice and impartiality.
+We were, during his government, in the enjoyment
+of perfect happiness and ease, and many of
+us are thankful and satisfied. As Mr. Hastings was
+well acquainted with our manners and customs, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">{445}</a></span>
+was always desirous, in every respect, of doing
+whatever would preserve our religious rites, and
+guard them against every kind of accident and injury,
+and at all times protected us. Whatever we
+have experienced from him, and whatever happened
+from him, we have written without deceit or exaggeration."</p></div>
+
+<p>My Lords, this Radanaut, zemindar of the purgunnah,
+who, as your Lordships hear, bears evidence upon
+oath to all the great and good qualities of the Governor,
+and particularly to his absolute freedom from covetousness,&mdash;this
+person, to whom Mr. Hastings appeals,
+was, as the Committee state, a boy between five and
+six years old at the time when he was given into the
+hands of Debi Sing, and when Mr. Hastings left Bengal,
+which was in 1786 [1785?], was between eleven
+and twelve years old. This is the sort of testimony
+that Mr. Hastings produces, to prove that he was clear
+from all sort of extortion, oppression, and covetousness,
+in this very zemindary of Dinagepore. This boy, who
+is so observant, who is so penetrating, who is so accurate
+in his knowledge of the whole government of Mr.
+Hastings, was, I say, when he left his government, at
+the utmost, but eleven years and a half old. Now to
+what an extremity is this unhappy man at your bar
+driven, when, oppressed by this accumulative load of
+corruption charged upon him, and seeing his bribery,
+his prevarication, his fraudulent bonds brought before
+you, he gives the testimony of this child, who for the
+greatest part of his time lived three hundred miles
+from the seat of Mr. Hastings's government! Consider
+the miserable situation of this poor, unfortunate
+boy, made to swear, with all the solemnities of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">{446}</a></span>
+religion, that Mr. Hastings was never guilty in his
+province of any act of rapacity! Such are the testimonies,
+which are there called <i>razinamas</i>, in favor
+of Mr. Hastings, with which all India is said to
+sound. Do we attempt to conceal them from your
+Lordships? No, we bring them forth, to show you
+the wickedness of the man, who, after he has robbed
+innocence, after he has divided the spoil between Gunga
+Govind Sing and himself, gets the party robbed to
+perjure himself for his sake,&mdash;if such a creature is
+capable of being guilty of perjury. We have another
+razinama sent from Nuddea, by a person nearly
+under the same circumstances with Radanaut, namely,
+Maha Rajah Dirauje Seo Chund Behadre, only
+made to differ in some expressions from the former,
+that it might not appear to originate from the same
+hand. These miserable razinamas he delivers to
+you as the collected voice of the country, to show
+how ill-founded the impressions are which committees
+of the House of Commons (for to them they allude,
+I suppose) have taken concerning this man, during
+their inquiries into the management of the affairs of
+the Company in India.</p>
+
+<p>Before I quit this subject, I have only to give you
+the opinion of Sir Elijah Impey, a name consecrated
+to respect forever, (your Lordships know him in this
+House as well as I do,) respecting these petitions and
+certificates of good behavior.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>"From the reasons and sentiments that they contain,"
+&amp;c.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor" title=" This document cannot be found">[9]</a></p></div>
+
+
+<p>The moment an Englishman appears, as this gentleman
+does, in the province of Dinagepore, to collect<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">{447}</a></span>
+certificates for Mr. Hastings, it is a command for them,
+the people, to say what he pleases.</p>
+
+<p>And here, my Lords, I would wish to say something
+of the miserable situation of the people of that country;
+but it is not in my commission, and I must be
+silent, and shall only request your Lordships to observe
+how this crime of bribery grows in its magnitude.
+First, the bribe is taken, through Gunga Govind Sing,
+from this infant, for his succession to the zemindary.
+Next follows the removal from their offices, and consequent
+ruin, of all his nearest natural relations.
+Then the delivery of the province to Debi Sing, upon
+the pretence of the arrears due to the Company, with
+all the subsequent horrors committed under the management
+of that atrocious villain. And lastly, the
+gross subornation of perjury, in making this wretched
+minor, under twelve years of age, bear testimony
+upon oath to the good qualities of Mr. Hastings
+and of his government,&mdash;this minor, I say, who
+lived three hundred miles from the seat of his government,
+and who, if he knew anything at all of his
+own affairs, must have known that Mr. Hastings was
+the cause of all his sufferings.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>My Lords, I have now gone through the whole of
+what I have in charge. I have laid before you the
+covenants by which the Company have thought fit to
+guard against the avarice and rapacity of their Governors.
+I have shown that they positively forbid the
+taking of all sorts of bribes and presents; and I have
+stated the means adopted by them for preventing the
+evasion of their orders, by directing, in all money
+transactions, the publicity of them. I have farther
+shown, that, in order to remove every temptation to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">{448}</a></span>
+a breach of their orders, the next step was the framing
+a legal fiction, by which presents and money, under
+whatever pretence taken, were made the legal
+property of the Company, in order to enable them to
+recover them out of any rapacious hands that might
+violate the new act of Parliament. I have also
+stated this act of Parliament. I have stated Mr.
+Hastings's sense of it. I have stated the violation
+of it by his taking bribes from all quarters. I have
+stated the fraudulent bonds by which he claimed
+a security for money as his own which belonged to
+the Company. I have stated the series of frauds,
+prevarications, concealments, and all that mystery
+of iniquity, which I waded through with pain to
+myself, I am sure, and with infinite pain, I fear, to
+your Lordships. I have shown your Lordships that
+his evasions of the clear words of his covenant and
+the clear words of an act of Parliament were such
+as did not arise from an erroneous judgment, but
+from a corrupt intention; and I believe you will
+find that his attempt to evade the law aggravates infinitely
+his guilt in breaking it. In all this I have
+only <i>opened</i> to you the package of this business; I
+have opened it to ventilate it, and give air to it; I
+have opened it, that a quarantine might be performed,&mdash;that
+the sweet air of heaven, which is
+polluted by the poison it contains, might be let
+loose upon it, and that it may be aired and ventilated
+before your Lordships touch it. Those who
+follow me will endeavor to explain to your Lordships
+what Mr. Hastings has endeavored to involve in mystery,
+by bringing proof after proof that every bribe
+that was here concealed was taken with corrupt purposes
+and followed with the most pernicious <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">{449}</a></span>consequences.
+These are things which will be brought
+to you in proof. I have only regarded the system
+of bribery; I have endeavored to show that it is a
+system of mystery and concealment, and consequently
+a system of fraud.</p>
+
+<p>You now see some of the means by which fortunes
+have been made by certain persons in India;
+you see the confederacies they have formed with one
+another for their mutual concealment and mutual
+support; you will see how they reply to their own
+deceitful inquiries by fraudulent answers; you will
+see that Cheltenham calls upon Calcutta, as one
+deep calls upon another, and that the call which
+is made for explanation is answered in mystery; in
+short, you will see the very constitution of their
+minds here developed.</p>
+
+<p>And now, my Lords, in what a situation are we
+all placed! This prosecution of the Commons, I
+wish to have it understood, and I am sure I shall
+not be disclaimed in it, is a prosecution not only
+for the punishing a delinquent, a prosecution not
+merely for preventing this and that offence, but it
+is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose of
+preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that
+characterize the people of England. The situation
+in which we stand is dreadful. These people pour
+in upon us every day. They not only bring with
+them the wealth which they have acquired, but they
+bring with them into our country the vices by which
+it was acquired. Formerly the people of England
+were censured, and perhaps properly, with being a
+sullen, unsocial, cold, unpleasant race of men, and as
+inconstant as the climate in which they are born.
+These are the vices which the enemies of the king<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">{450}</a></span>dom
+charged them with: and people are seldom
+charged with vices of which they do not in some
+measure partake. But nobody refused them the
+character of being an open-hearted, candid, liberal,
+plain, sincere people,&mdash;qualities which would cancel
+a thousand faults, if they had them. But if, by conniving
+at these frauds, you once teach the people
+of England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded
+conduct,&mdash;if you teach them qualities directly
+the contrary to those by which they have hitherto
+been distinguished,&mdash;if you make them a nation
+of concealers, a nation of dissemblers, a nation of
+liars, a nation of forgers,&mdash;my Lords, if you, in
+one word, turn them into a people of <i>banians</i>, the
+character of England, that character which, more
+than our arms, and more than our commerce, has
+made us a great nation, the character of England
+will be gone and lost.</p>
+
+<p>Our liberty is as much in danger as our honor
+and our national character. We, who here appear
+representing the Commons of England, are not wild
+enough not to tremble both for ourselves and for our
+constituents at the effect of riches. <i>Opum metuenda
+potestas.</i> We dread the operation of money. Do
+we not know that there are many men who wait, and
+who indeed hardly wait, the event of this prosecution,
+to let loose all the corrupt wealth of India, acquired
+by the oppression of that country, for the corruption
+of all the liberties of this, and to fill the Parliament
+with men who are now the object of its indignation?
+To-day the Commons of Great Britain prosecute the
+delinquents of India: to-morrow the delinquents of
+India may be the Commons of Great Britain. We
+know, I say, and feel the force of money; and we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">{451}</a></span>
+now call upon your Lordships for justice in this cause
+of money. We call upon you for the preservation of
+our manners, of our virtues. We call upon you
+for our national character. We call upon you for
+our liberties; and hope that the freedom of the Commons
+will be preserved by the justice of the Lords.</p>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> This document cannot be found</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>END OF VOL. X.</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable
+Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12), by Edmund Burke
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+</pre>
+
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