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The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) written by Edmund Burke

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12)




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 totally dismissed them from my
remembrance. But when fortune threw a sum in my way of a magnitude which
could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the
time in which 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 the sum,
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 account 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 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 upon this transaction, which
either my own mind could suggest or which may have been suggested by
others, I beg leave to suppose another question, and to state the terms
of it in my reply, by informing you that the indorsement on the bonds
was made about the period of my leaving the Presidency, in the middle of
the year 1781, in order to guard against their becoming a claim on the
Company, as part of my estate, in the event of my death occurring in the
course of the service on which I was then entering.

This, Sir, is the plain history of the transaction. I should be ashamed
to request that you would communicate it to the Honorable Court of
Directors, whose time is too valuable for the intrusion of a subject so
uninteresting, but that it is become a point of indispensable duty; I
must therefore request the favor of you to lay it, at a convenient time,
before them. In addressing it to you personally, I yield to my own
feelings of the respect which is due to them as a body, and to the
assurances which I derive from your experienced civilities that you will
kindly overlook the trouble imposed by it.

I have the honor to be, Sir,
Your very humble and most obedient servant,
(Signed) WARREN HASTINGS.

CHELTENHAM, 11 July, 1785.




SPEECHES

IN

THE IMPEACHMENT

OF

WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,

LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.


SPEECH IN OPENING.

FEBRUARY, 1788.




SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

FIRST DAY: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1788.


My Lords,--The gentlemen who have it in command to support the
impeachment against Mr. Hastings have directed me to open the cause with
a general view of the grounds upon which the Commons have proceeded in
their charge against him. They have directed me to accompany this with
another general view of the extent, the magnitude, the nature, the
tendency, and the effect of the crimes which they allege to have been by
him committed. They have also directed me to give an explanation (with
their aid I may be enabled to give it) of such circumstances, preceding
the crimes charged on Mr. Hastings, or concomitant with them, as may
tend to elucidate whatever may be found obscure in the articles as they
stand. To these they wished me to add a few illustrative remarks on the
laws, customs, opinions, and manners of the people concerned, and who
are the objects of the crimes we charge on Mr. Hastings. The several
articles, as they appear before you, will be opened by other gentlemen
with more particularity, with more distinctness, and, without doubt,
with infinitely more ability, when they come to apply the evidence which
naturally belongs to each article of this accusation. This, my Lords, is
the plan which we mean to pursue on the great charge which is now to
abide your judgment.

My Lords, I must look upon it as an auspicious circumstance to this
cause, in which the honor of the kingdom and the fate of many nations
are involved, that, from the first commencement of our Parliamentary
process to this the hour of solemn trial, not the smallest difference of
opinion has arisen between the two Houses.

My Lords, there are persons who, looking rather upon what was to be
found in our records and histories than what was to be expected from the
public justice, had formed hopes consolatory to themselves and
dishonorable to us. They flattered themselves that the corruptions of
India would escape amidst the dissensions of Parliament. They are
disappointed. They will be disappointed in all the rest of their
expectations which they have formed upon everything, except the merits
of their cause. The Commons will not have the melancholy unsocial glory
of having acted a solitary part in a noble, but imperfect work. What the
greatest inquest of the nation has begun its highest tribunal will
accomplish. At length justice will be done to India. It is true that
your Lordships will have your full share in this great achievement; but
the Commons have always considered that whatever honor is divided with
you is doubled on themselves.

My Lords, I must confess, that, amidst these encouraging prospects, the
Commons do not approach your bar without awe and anxiety. The magnitude
of the interests which we have in charge will reconcile some degree of
solicitude for the event with the undoubting confidence with which we
repose ourselves upon your Lordships' justice. For we are men, my
Lords; and men are so made, that it is not only the greatness of danger,
but the value of the adventure, which measures the degree of our concern
in every undertaking. I solemnly assure your Lordships that no standard
is sufficient to estimate the value which the Commons set upon the event
of the cause they now bring before you. My Lords, the business of this
day is not the business of this man, it is not solely whether the
prisoner at the bar be found innocent or guilty, but whether millions of
mankind shall be made miserable or happy.

Your Lordships will see, in the progress of this cause, that there is
not only a long, connected, systematic series of misdemeanors, but an
equally connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify
them. Upon both of these you must judge. According to the judgment that
you shall give upon the past transactions in India, inseparably
connected as they are with the principles which support them, the whole
character of your future government in that distant empire is to be
unalterably decided. It will take its perpetual tenor, it will receive
its final impression, from the stamp of this very hour.

It is not only the interest of India, now the most considerable part of
the British empire, which is concerned, but the credit and honor of the
British nation itself will be decided by this decision. We are to decide
by this judgment, whether the crimes of individuals are to be turned
into public guilt and national ignominy, or whether this nation will
convert the very offences which have thrown a transient shade upon its
government into something that will reflect a permanent lustre upon the
honor, justice, and humanity of this kingdom.

My Lords, there is another consideration, which augments the solicitude
of the Commons, equal to those other two great interests I have stated,
those of our empire and our national character,--something that, if
possible, comes more home to the hearts and feelings of every
Englishman: I mean, the interests of our Constitution itself, which is
deeply involved in the event of this cause. The future use and the whole
effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of
high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the
charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in this
cause. This tribunal will be found (I hope it will always be found) too
great for petty causes: if it should at the same time be found
incompetent to one of the greatest,--that is, if little offences, from
their minuteness, escape you, and the greatest, from their magnitude,
oppress you,--it is impossible that this form of trial should not in the
end vanish out of the Constitution. For we must not deceive ourselves:
whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long. And if the
Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually,
of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is
valuable in it. For this process is the cement which binds the whole
together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what
England is. In this court it is that no subject, in no part of the
empire, can fail of competent and proportionable justice; here it is
that we provide for that which is the substantial excellence of our
Constitution,--I mean, the great circulation of responsibility, by which
(excepting the supreme power) no man, in no circumstance, can escape
the account which he owes to the laws of his country. It is by this
process that magistracy, which tries and controls all other things, is
itself tried and controlled. Other constitutions are satisfied with
making good subjects; this is a security for good governors. It is by
this tribunal that statesmen who abuse their power are accused by
statesmen and tried by statesmen, not upon the niceties of a narrow
jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state
morality. It is here that those who by the abuse of power have violated
the spirit of law can never hope for protection from any of its forms;
it is here that those who have refused to conform themselves to its
perfections can never hope to escape through any of its defects. It
ought, therefore, my Lords, to become our common care to guard this your
precious deposit, rare in its use, but powerful in its effect, with a
religious vigilance, and never to suffer it to be either discredited or
antiquated. For this great end your Lordships are invested with great
and plenary powers: but you do not suspend, you do not supersede, you do
not annihilate any subordinate jurisdiction; on the contrary, you are
auxiliary and supplemental to them all.

Whether it is owing to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great
offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a
sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am
not called upon to determine,--but, whatever may be the cause, it is now
sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of
authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before this tribunal. The
last is that of Lord Macclesfield, which happened in the year 1725. So
that the oldest process known to the Constitution of this country has,
upon its revival, some appearance of novelty. At this time, when all
Europe is in a state of, perhaps, contagious fermentation, when
antiquity has lost all its reverence and all its effect on the minds of
men, at the same time that novelty is still attended with the suspicions
that always will be attached to whatever is new, we have been anxiously
careful, in a business which seems to combine the objections both to
what is antiquated and what is novel, so to conduct ourselves that
nothing in the revival of this great Parliamentary process shall afford
a pretext for its future disuse.

My Lords, strongly impressed as they are with these sentiments, the
Commons have conducted themselves with singular care and caution.
Without losing the spirit and zeal of a public prosecution, they have
comported themselves with such moderation, temper, and decorum as would
not have ill become the final judgment, if with them rested the final
judgment, of this great cause.

With very few intermissions, the affairs of India have constantly
engaged the attention of the Commons for more than fourteen years. We
may safely affirm we have tried every mode of legislative provision
before we had recourse to anything of penal process. It was in the year
1774 [1773?] we framed an act of Parliament for remedy to the then
existing disorders in India, such as the then information before us
enabled us to enact. Finding that the act of Parliament did not answer
all the ends that were expected from it, we had, in the year 1782,
recourse to a body of monitory resolutions. Neither had we the expected
fruit from them. When, therefore, we found that our inquiries and our
reports, our laws and our admonitions, were alike despised, that
enormities increased in proportion as they were forbidden, detected, and
exposed,--when we found that guilt stalked with an erect and upright
front, and that legal authority seemed to skulk and hide its head like
outlawed guilt,--when we found that some of those very persons who were
appointed by Parliament to assert the authority of the laws of this
kingdom were the most forward, the most bold, and the most active in the
conspiracy for their destruction,--then it was time for the justice of
the nation to recollect itself. To have forborne longer would not have
been patience, but collusion; it would have been participation with
guilt; it would have been to make ourselves accomplices with the
criminal.

We found it was impossible to evade painful duty without betraying a
sacred trust. Having, therefore, resolved upon the last and only
resource, a penal prosecution, it was our next business to act in a
manner worthy of our long deliberation. In all points we proceeded with
selection. We have chosen (we trust it will so appear to your Lordships)
such a crime, and such a criminal, and such a body of evidence, and such
a mode of process, as would have recommended this course of justice to
posterity, even if it had not been supported by any example in the
practice of our forefathers.

First, to speak of the process: we are to inform your Lordships, that,
besides that long previous deliberation of fourteen years, we examined,
as a preliminary to this proceeding, every circumstance which could
prove favorable to parties apparently delinquent, before we finally
resolved to prosecute. There was no precedent to be found in the
Journals, favorable to persons in Mr. Hastings's circumstances, that was
not applied to. Many measures utterly unknown to former Parliamentary
proceedings, and which, indeed, seemed in some degree to enfeeble them,
but which were all to the advantage of those that were to be prosecuted,
were adopted, for the first time, upon this occasion. In an early stage
of the proceeding, the criminal desired to be heard. He was heard; and
he produced before the bar of the House that insolent and unbecoming
paper which lies upon our table. It was deliberately given in by his own
hand, and signed with his own name. The Commons, however, passed by
everything offensive in that paper with a magnanimity that became them.
They considered nothing in it but the facts that the defendant alleged,
and the principles he maintained; and after a deliberation not short of
judicial, we proceeded with confidence to your bar.

So far as to the process; which, though I mentioned last in the line and
order in which I stated the objects of our selection, I thought it best
to dispatch first.

As to the crime which we chose, we first considered well what it was in
its nature, under all the circumstances which attended it. We weighed it
with all its extenuations and with all its aggravations. On that review,
we are warranted to assert that the crimes with which we charge the
prisoner at the bar are substantial crimes,--that they are no errors or
mistakes, such as wise and good men might possibly fall into, which may
even produce very pernicious effects without being in fact great
offences. The Commons are too liberal not to allow for the difficulties
of a great and arduous public situation. They know too well the
domineering necessities which frequently occur in all great affairs.
They know the exigency of a pressing occasion, which, in its precipitate
career, bears everything down before it,--which does not give time to
the mind to recollect its faculties, to reinforce its reason, and to
have recourse to fixed principles, but, by compelling an instant and
tumultuous decision, too often obliges men to decide in a manner that
calm judgment would certainly have rejected. We know, as we are to be
served by men, that the persons who serve us must be tried as men, and
with a very large allowance indeed to human infirmity and human error.
This, my Lords, we knew and we weighed before we came before you. But
the crimes which we charge in these articles are not lapses, defects,
errors of common human frailty, which, as we know and feel, we can allow
for. We charge this offender with no crimes that have not arisen from
passions which it is criminal to harbor,--with no offences that have not
their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery,
cruelty, malignity of temper,--in short, in [with?] nothing that does
not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not
manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, dyed in grain with malice,
vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core. If we do not plant his
crimes in those vices which the breast of man is made to abhor, and the
spirit of all laws, human and divine, to interdict, we desire no longer
to be heard upon this occasion. Let everything that can be pleaded on
the ground of surprise or error, upon those grounds be pleaded with
success: we give up the whole of those predicaments. We urge no crimes
that were not crimes of forethought. We charge him with nothing that he
did not commit upon deliberation,--that he did not commit against
advice, supplication, and remonstrance,--that he did not commit against
the direct command of lawful authority,--that he did not commit after
reproof and reprimand, the reproof and reprimand of those who were
authorized by the laws to reprove and reprimand him. The crimes of Mr.
Hastings are crimes not only in themselves, but aggravated by being
crimes of contumacy. They were crimes, not against forms, but against
those eternal laws of justice which are our rule and our birthright. His
offences are, not in formal, technical language, but in reality, in
substance and effect, _high_ crimes and high misdemeanors.

So far as to the crimes. As to the criminal, we have chosen him on the
same principle on which we selected the crimes. We have not chosen to
bring before you a poor, puny, trembling delinquent, misled, perhaps, by
those who ought to have taught him better, but who have afterwards
oppressed him by their power, as they had first corrupted him by their
example. Instances there have been many, wherein the punishment of minor
offences, in inferior persons, has been made the means of screening
crimes of an high order, and in men of high description. Our course is
different. We have not brought before you an obscure offender, who, when
his insignificance and weakness are weighed against the power of the
prosecution, gives even to public justice something of the appearance of
oppression: no, my Lords, we have brought before you the first man of
India, in rank, authority, and station. We have brought before you the
chief of the tribe, the head of the whole body of Eastern offenders, a
captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the
peculation, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined, arrayed,
and paid. This is the person, my Lords, that we bring before you. We
have brought before you such a person, that, if you strike at him with
the firm and decided arm of justice, you will not have need of a great
many more examples. You strike at the whole corps, if you strike at the
head.

So far as to the crime: so far as to the criminal. Now, my Lords, I
shall say a few words relative to the evidence which we have brought to
support such a charge, and which ought to be equal in weight to the
charge itself. It is chiefly evidence of record, officially signed by
the criminal himself in many instances. We have brought before you his
own letters, authenticated by his own hand. On these we chiefly rely.
But we shall likewise bring before you living witnesses, competent to
speak to the points to which they are brought.

When you consider the late enormous power of the prisoner,--when you
consider his criminal, indefatigable assiduity in the destruction of all
recorded evidence,--when you consider the influence he has over almost
all living testimony,--when you consider the distance of the scene of
action,--I believe your Lordships, and I believe the world, will be
astonished that so much, so clear, so solid, and so conclusive evidence
of all kinds has been obtained against him. I have no doubt that in nine
instances in ten the evidence is such as would satisfy the narrow
precision supposed to prevail, and to a degree rightly to prevail, in
all subordinate power and delegated jurisdiction. But your Lordships
will maintain, what we assert and claim as the right of the subjects of
Great Britain, that you are not bound by any rules of evidence, or any
other rules whatever, except those of natural, immutable, and
substantial justice.

God forbid the Commons should desire that anything should be received as
proof from them which is not by nature adapted to prove the thing in
question! If they should make such a request, they would aim at
overturning the very principles of that justice to which they resort;
they would give the nation an evil example that would rebound back on
themselves, and bring destruction upon their own heads, and on those of
all their posterity.

On the other hand, I have too much confidence in the learning with which
you will be advised, and the liberality and nobleness of the sentiments
with which you are born, to suspect that you would, by any abuse of the
forms, and a technical course of proceeding, deny justice to so great a
part of the world that claims it at your hands. Your Lordships always
had an ample power, and almost unlimited jurisdiction; you have now a
boundless object. It is not from this district or from that parish, not
from this city or the other province, that relief is now applied for:
exiled and undone princes, extensive tribes, suffering nations, infinite
descriptions of men, different in language, in manners, and in rites,
men separated by every barrier of Nature from you, by the Providence of
God are blended in one common cause, and are now become suppliants at
your bar. For the honor of this nation, in vindication of this
mysterious Providence, let it be known that no rule formed upon
municipal maxims (if any such rule exists) will prevent the course of
that imperial justice which you owe to the people that call to you from
all parts of a great disjointed world. For, situated as this kingdom is,
an object, thank God, of envy to the rest of the nations, its conduct in
that high and elevated situation will undoubtedly be scrutinized with a
severity as great as its power is invidious.

It is well known that enormous wealth has poured into this country from
India through a thousand channels, public and concealed; and it is no
particular derogation from our honor to suppose a possibility of being
corrupted by that by which other empires have been corrupted, and
assemblies almost as respectable and venerable as your Lordships' have
been directly or indirectly vitiated. Forty millions of money, at least,
have within our memory been brought from India into England. In this
case the most sacred judicature ought to look to its reputation. Without
offence we may venture to suggest that the best way to secure reputation
is, not by a proud defiance of public opinion, but by guiding our
actions in such a manner as that public opinion may in the end be
securely defied, by having been previously respected and dreaded. No
direct false judgment is apprehended from the tribunals of this country;
but it is feared that partiality may lurk and nestle in the abuse of our
forms of proceeding. It is necessary, therefore, that nothing in that
proceeding should appear to mark the slightest trace, should betray the
faintest odor of chicane. God forbid, that, when you try the most
serious of all causes, that, when you try the cause of Asia in the
presence of Europe, there should be the least suspicion that a narrow
partiality, utterly destructive of justice, should so guide us that a
British subject in power should appear in substance to possess rights
which are denied to the humble allies, to the attached dependants of
this kingdom, who by their distance have a double demand upon your
protection, and who, by an implicit (I hope not a weak and useless)
trust in you, have stripped themselves of every other resource under
heaven!