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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)




I do not say this from any fear, doubt, or hesitation concerning what
your Lordships will finally do,--none in the world; but I cannot shut my
ears to the rumors which you all know to be disseminated abroad. The
abusers of power may have a chance to cover themselves by those fences
and intrenchments which were made to secure the liberties of the people
against men of that very description. But God forbid it should be
bruited from Pekin to Paris, that the laws of England are for the rich
and the powerful, but to the poor, the miserable, and defenceless they
afford no resource at all! God forbid it should be said, no nation is
equal to the English in _substantial_ violence and in _formal_
justice,--that in this kingdom we feel ourselves competent to confer the
most extravagant and inordinate powers upon public ministers, but that
we are deficient, poor, helpless, lame, and impotent in the means of
calling them to account for their use of them! An opinion has been
insidiously circulated through this kingdom, and through foreign nations
too, that, in order to cover our participation in guilt, and our common
interest in the plunder of the East, we have invented a set of
scholastic distinctions, abhorrent to the common sense and unpropitious
to the common necessities of mankind, by which we are to deny ourselves
the knowledge of what the rest of the world knows, and what so great a
part of the world both knows and feels. I do not deprecate any
appearance which may give countenance to this aspersion from suspicion
that any corrupt motive can influence this court; I deprecate it from
knowing that hitherto we have moved within the narrow circle of
municipal justice. I am afraid, that, from the habits acquired by moving
within a circumscribed sphere, we may be induced rather to endeavor at
forcing Nature into that municipal circle than to enlarge the circle of
national justice to the necessities of the empire we have obtained.

This is the only thing which does create any doubt or difficulty in the
minds of sober people. But there are those who will not judge so
equitably. Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may
be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred. If, from any
appearance of chicane in the court, justice should fail, all men will
say, better there were no tribunals at all. In my humble opinion, it
would be better a thousand times to give all complainants the short
answer the Dey of Algiers gave a British ambassador, representing
certain grievances suffered by the British merchants,--"My friend," (as
the story is related by Dr. Shaw,) "do not you know that my subjects are
a band of robbers, and that I am their captain?"--better it would be a
thousand times, and a thousand thousand times more manly, than an
hypocritical process, which, under a pretended reverence to punctilious
ceremonies and observances of law, abandons mankind without help and
resource to all the desolating consequences of arbitrary power. The
conduct and event of this cause will put an end to such doubts,
wherever they may be entertained. Your Lordships will exercise the great
plenary powers with which you are invested in a manner that will do
honor to the protecting justice of this kingdom, that will completely
avenge the great people who are subjected to it. You will not suffer
your proceedings to be squared by any rules but by their necessities,
and by that law of a common nature which cements them to us and us to
them. The reports to the contrary have been spread abroad with uncommon
industry; but they will be speedily refuted by the humanity, simplicity,
dignity, and nobleness of your Lordships' justice.

* * * * *

Having said all that I am instructed to say concerning the process which
the House of Commons has used, concerning the crimes which they have
chosen, concerning the criminal upon whom they attach the crimes, and
concerning the evidence which they mean to produce, I am now to proceed
to open that part of the business which falls to my share. It is rather
an explanation of the circumstances than an enforcement of the crimes.

Your Lordships of course will be apprised that this cause is not what
occurs every day, in the ordinary round of municipal affairs,--that it
has a relation to many things, that it touches many points in many
places, which are wholly removed from the ordinary beaten orbit of our
English affairs. In other affairs, every allusion immediately meets its
point of reference; nothing can be started that does not immediately
awaken your attention to something in your own laws and usages which you
meet with every day in the ordinary transactions of life. But here you
are caught, as it were, into another world; you are to have the way
pioneered before you. As the subject is new, it must be explained; as it
is intricate as well as new, that explanation can be only comparatively
short: and therefore, knowing your Lordships to be possessed, along with
all other judicial virtues, of the first and foundation of them all,
judicial patience, I hope that you will not grudge a few hours to the
explanation of that which has cost the Commons fourteen years' assiduous
application to acquire,--that your Lordships will not disdain to grant a
few hours to what has cost the people of India upwards of thirty years
of their innate, inveterate, hereditary patience to endure.

* * * * *

My Lords, the powers which Mr. Hastings is charged with having abused
are the powers delegated to him by the East India Company. The East
India Company itself acts under two very dissimilar sorts of powers,
derived from two sources very remote from each other. The first source
of its power is under charters which the crown of Great Britain was
authorized by act of Parliament to grant; the other is from several
charters derived from the Emperor of the Moguls, the person in whose
dominions they were chiefly conversant,--particularly that great charter
by which, in the year 1765, they acquired the high-stewardship of the
kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Under those two bodies of
charters, the East India Company, and all their servants, are authorized
to act.

As to those of the first description, it is from the British charters
that they derive the capacity by which they are considered as a public
body, or at all capable of any public function. It is from thence they
acquire the capacity to take from any power whatsoever any other
charter, to acquire any other offices, or to hold any other possessions.
This, being the root and origin of their power, renders them responsible
to the party from whom all their immediate and consequential powers are
derived. As they have emanated from the supreme power of this kingdom,
the whole body and the whole train of their servants, the corporate body
as a corporate body, individuals as individuals, are responsible to the
high justice of this kingdom. In delegating great power to the East
India Company, this kingdom has not released its sovereignty; on the
contrary, the responsibility of the Company is increased by the
greatness and sacredness of the powers that have been intrusted to it.
Attempts have been made abroad to circulate a notion that the acts of
the East India Company and their servants are not cognizable here. I
hope on this occasion your Lordships will show that this nation never
did give a power without annexing to it a proportionable degree of
responsibility.

As to their other powers, the Company derives them from the Mogul empire
by various charters from that crown, and from the great magistrates of
that crown, and particularly by the Mogul charter of 1765, by which they
obtained the _dewanny_, that is, the office of lord high-steward, of the
kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. By that charter they bound
themselves (and bound inclusively all their servants) to perform all the
duties belonging to that new office, and to be held by all the ties
belonging to that new relation. If the Mogul empire had existed in its
vigor, they would have been bound, under that responsibility, to
observe the laws, rights, usages, and customs of the natives, and to
pursue their benefit in all things: for this duty was inherent in the
nature, institution, and purpose of the office which they received. If
the power of the sovereign from whom they derived these powers should by
any revolution in human affairs be annihilated or suspended, their duty
to the people below them, which was created under the Mogul charter, is
not annihilated, is not even suspended; and for their responsibility in
the performance of that duty, they are thrown back upon that country
(thank God, not annihilated) from whence their original power, and all
subsequent derivative powers, have flowed. When the Company acquired
that high office in India, an English corporation became an integral
part of the Mogul empire. When Great Britain virtually assented to that
grant of office, and afterwards took advantage of it, Great Britain
guarantied the performance of all its duties. Great Britain entered into
a virtual act of union with that country, by which we bound ourselves as
securities to preserve the people in all the rights, laws, and liberties
which their natural, original sovereign was bound to support, if he had
been in condition to support them. By the disposition of events, the two
duties, flowing from two different sources, are now united in one. The
people of India, therefore, come in the name of the Commons of Great
Britain, but in their own right, to the bar of this House, before the
supreme royal justice of this kingdom, from whence originally all the
powers under which they have suffered were derived.

It may be a little necessary, when we are stating the powers the Company
have derived from their charter, and which we state Mr. Hastings to
have abused, to state in as short and as comprehensive words as I can
(for the matter is large indeed) what the constitution of that Company
is,--I mean chiefly, what it is in reference to its Indian service, the
great theatre of the abuse. Your Lordships will naturally conceive that
it is not to inform you, but to revive circumstances in your memory,
that I enter into this detail.

You will therefore recollect, that the East India Company had its origin
about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, a period of projects,
when all sorts of commercial adventures, companies, and monopolies were
in fashion. At that time the Company was constituted with extensive
powers for increasing the commerce and the honor of this country;
because increasing its commerce, without increasing its honor and
reputation, would have been thought at that time, and will be thought
now, a bad bargain for the country. The powers of the Company were,
under that charter, merely commercial. By degrees, as the theatre of
operation was distant, as its intercourse was with many great, some
barbarous, and all of them armed nations, nations in which not only the
sovereign, but the subjects, were armed, it was found necessary to
enlarge their powers. The first power they obtained was a power of naval
discipline in their ships,--a power which has been since dropped; the
next was a power of law martial; the next was a power of civil, and, to
a degree, of criminal jurisdiction, within their own factories, upon
their own people and their own servants; the next was (and here was a
stride indeed) the power of peace and war. Those high and almost
incommunicable prerogatives of sovereignty, which were hardly ever
known before to be parted with to any subjects, and which in several
states were not wholly intrusted to the prince or head of the
commonwealth himself, were given to the East India Company. That Company
acquired these powers about the end of the reign of Charles the Second;
and they were afterwards more fully, as well as more legally, given by
Parliament after the Revolution. From this time, the East India Company
was no longer merely a mercantile company, formed for the extension of
the British commerce: it more nearly resembled a delegation of the whole
power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East. From that time
the Company ought to be considered as a subordinate sovereign power:
that is, sovereign with regard to the objects which it touched;
subordinate with regard to the power from whence its great trust was
derived.

Under these successive arrangements things took a course very different
from their usual order. A new disposition took place, not dreamt of in
the theories of speculative politicians, and of which few examples in
the least resembling it have been seen in the modern world, none at all
in the ancient. In other instances, a political body that acts as a
commonwealth was first settled, and trade followed as a consequence of
the protection obtained by political power; but here the course of
affairs was reversed. The constitution of the Company began in commerce
and ended in empire. Indeed, wherever the sovereign powers of peace and
war are given, there wants but time and circumstance to make these
powers supersede every other. The affairs of commerce will fall at last
into their proper rank and situation. However primary in their original
intention, they will become secondary. The possession, therefore, and
the power of assertion of these great authorities coinciding with the
improved state of Europe, with the improved state of arts in Europe,
with the improved state of laws, and, what is much more material, the
improved state of military discipline, more and more perfected every day
with us,--universal improvement in Europe coinciding with the general
decay of Asia, (for the proud day of Asia is passed,) this improvement
coinciding with the relaxation and dissolution of the Mogul government,
with the decline of its warlike spirit, with the total disuse of the
ancient strictness of the military discipline established by Tamerlane,
the India Company came to be what it is, a great empire, carrying on,
subordinately, a great commerce; it became that thing which was supposed
by the Roman law irreconcilable to reason and propriety,--_eundem
negotiatorem et dominum_: the same power became the general trader, the
same power became the supreme lord.

In this exalted situation, the India Company, however, still preserves
traces of its original mercantile character. The whole exterior order of
its political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and
mercantile principles. In fact, the East India Company in Asia is a
state in the disguise of a merchant. Its whole service is a system of
public offices in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly, the
whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is
commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely
political.

This system of the Company's service, its order and discipline, is
necessary to be explained to your Lordships, that you may see in what
manner the abuses have affected it. In the first place, all the persons
who go abroad in the Company's civil service enter as clerks in the
counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to
it,--_writers_. In that condition they are obliged to serve five years.
The second step is that of a _factor_, in which they are obliged to
serve three years. The third step they take is that of a _junior
merchant_, in which they are obliged to serve three years more. At that
period they become _senior merchants_, which is the highest stage of
advance in the Company's service,--a rank by which they had pretensions,
before the year 1774, to the Council, to the succession of the
Presidency, and to whatever other honors the Company has to bestow.

The Company had, in its early times, established factories in certain
places; which factories by degrees grew to the name of Presidencies and
Council, in proportion as the power and influence of the Company
increased, and as the political began first to struggle with, and at
length to predominate over, the mercantile. In this form it continued
till the year 1773, when the legislature broke in, for proper reasons
urging them to it, upon that order of the service, and appointed to the
superior department persons who had no title to that place under the
ordinary usage of the service. Mr. Hastings and Mr. Harwell, whatever
other titles they might have had, held solely under the act of
Parliament nominating them to that authority; but in all other respects,
except where the act and other subsequent acts have not broken in upon
it, the whole course of the service remains upon the ancient footing,
that is, the commercial footing, as to the gradation and order of
service.

Your Lordships see here a regular series of gradation, which requires
eleven years before any persons can arrive at the highest trusts and
situations. You will therefore be astonished, when so long a
probationary service was required, that effects very different from
those to be expected from long probation have happened, and that in a
much shorter time than those eleven years you have seen persons
returning into this kingdom with affluent, with overbearing fortunes. It
will be a great part of your inquiry, when we come before your Lordships
to substantiate evidence against Mr. Hastings, to discover how that
order came to be so completely broken down and erased that scarce a
trace of it for any good purpose remains. Though I will not deny that
that order, or that any order in a state, may be superseded by the
ruling power, when great talents, upon pressing exigencies, are to be
called forth, yet I must say the order itself was formed upon wise
principles. It furnished the persons who were put in that course of
probation with an opportunity (if circumstances enabled them) of
acquiring experience in business of revenue, trade, and policy. It gave
to those who watched them a constant inspection of their conduct through
all their progress. On the expectants of office it imposed the necessity
of acquiring a character in proportion to their standing, in order that
all which they had gained by the good behavior of years should not be
lost by the misconduct of an hour. It was a great substantial
regulation. But scarce a trace of the true spirit of it remains to be
discovered in Mr. Hastings's government; for Mr. Hastings established
offices, nay, whole systems of offices, and especially a system of
offices in 1781, which being altogether new, none of the rules of
gradation applied to them; and he filled those offices in such a manner
as suited best, not the constitution nor the spirit of the service, but
his own particular views and purposes. The consequence has been, that
persons in the most immature stages of life have been appointed to
conduct affairs which required the greatest maturity of judgment, the
greatest possible temper and moderation. Effects naturally consequent
have followed upon it.--I shall not trouble your Lordships with any
further observations on this system of gradation.

I must, however, remark, before I go further, that there is something in
the representation of the East India Company in their Oriental territory
different from that, perhaps, of any other nation that has ever
transported any part of its power from one country to another. The East
India Company in India is not properly a branch of the British nation:
it is only a deputation of individuals. When the Tartars entered into
China, when the Arabs and Tartars successively entered into Hindostan,
when the Goths and Vandals penetrated into Europe, when the Normans
forced their way into England, indeed, in all conquests, migrations,
settlements, and colonizations, the new people came as the offset of a
nation. The Company in India does not exist as a national colony. In
effect and substance nobody can go thither that does not go in its
service. The English in India are nothing but a seminary for the
succession of officers. They are a nation of placemen; they are a
commonwealth without a people; they are a state made up wholly of
magistrates. There is nothing to be in propriety called people, to
watch, to inspect, to balance against the power of office. The power of
office, so far as the English nation is concerned, is the sole power in
the country: the consequence of which is, that, being a kingdom of
magistrates, what is commonly called the _esprit du corps_ is strong in
it. This spirit of the body predominates equally in all its parts; by
which the members must consider themselves as having a common interest,
and that common interest separated both from that of the country which
sent them out and from that of the country in which they act. No control
upon them exists,--none, I mean, in persons who understand their
language, who understand their manners, or can apply their conduct to
the laws. Therefore, in a body so constituted, confederacy is easy, and
has been general. Your Lordships are not to expect that that should
happen in such a body which never happened in any body or
corporation,--that is, that they should, in any instance, be a proper
check and control upon themselves. It is not in the nature of things.
The fundamental principle of the whole of the East India Company's
system is monopoly, in some sense or other. The same principle
predominates in the service abroad and the service at home; and both
systems are united into one, animated with the same spirit, that is,
with the corporate spirit. The whole, taken together, is such as has not
been seen in the examples of the Moors, the Portuguese, the Spaniards,
the Romans,--in no old, in no recent examples. The Dutch may resemble
it, but they have not an empire properly so denominated. By means of
this peculiar circumstance it has not been difficult for Mr. Hastings to
embody abuse, and to put himself at the head of a regular system of
corruption.

Another circumstance in that service is deserving of notice. Except in
the highest parts of all, the emoluments of office do not in any degree
correspond with the trust, nor the nature of the office with its name.
In other official systems, the style, in general, is above the function;
here it is the reverse. Under the name of junior merchant, senior
merchant, writer, and other petty appellations of the counting-house,
you have magistrates of high dignity, you have administrators of
revenues truly royal, you have judges, civil, and in some respects
criminal, who pass judgment upon the greatest properties of a great
country. The legal public emoluments that belong to them are very often
so inadequate to the real dignity of the character, that it is
impossible, almost absolutely impossible, for the subordinate parts of
it, which, though subordinate, are stations of power, to exist, as
Englishmen, who look at a fortune to be enjoyed at home as their
ultimate object, and to exist in a state of perfect incorruption in that
service.

In some parts of Europe, it is true that the greatest situations are
often attended with but little emolument; yet still they are filled.
Why? Because reputation, glory, fame, the esteem, the love, the tears of
joy which flow from happy sensibility, the honest applauses of a
grateful country, sometimes pay the cares, anxieties, and toils which
wait on great situations in the commonwealth; and in these they pay in
money what cannot be paid in fame and reputation. It is the reverse in
the service of the India Company. Glory is not the lot of subordinated
merit,--and all the subordinate parts of the gradation are officers who,
in comparison with the offices and duties intrusted to them, are
miserably provided for; whereas the chief of each great Presidency has
emoluments securing him against every mode of temptation. But if this
has not secured the head, we may easily judge how the members are to be
coerced. Mr. Hastings, at the head of the service, with high legal
emoluments, has fouled his hands and sullied his government with bribes.
He has substituted oppression and tyranny in the place of legal
government. With all that unbounded, licentious power which he has
assumed over the public revenues, instead of endeavoring to find a
series of gradual, progressive, honorable, and adequate rewards for the
persons who serve the public in the subordinate, but powerful
situations, he has left them to prey upon the people without the
smallest degree of control. In default of honest emolument, there is the
unbounded license of power; and, as one of the honestest and ablest
servants of the Company said to me in conversation, the civil service of
the Company resembled the military service of the Mahrattas,--little
pay, but unbounded license to plunder. I do not say that some of the
salaries given in India would not sound well here; but when you consider
the nature of the trusts, the dignity of the situation, whatever the
name of them may be, the powers that are granted, the hopes that every
man has of establishing himself at home, I repeat, it is a source of
infinite grievance, of infinite abuse: of which source of corrupt power
we charge Mr. Hastings with having availed himself, in filling up the
void of direct pay by finding out and countenancing every kind of
oblique and unjust emolument; though it must be confessed that he is
far from being solely guilty of this offence.