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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)




Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the
youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The
servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress
and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority,
at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in
the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,--they
are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from
perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate
expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors
without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its
temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers
that despotism involves.

It is further remarkable, these servants exercise what your Lordships
are now exercising, high judicial powers, and they exercise them without
the smallest study of any law, either general or municipal. It is made a
sort of rule in the service, a rule confirmed even by the attempts that
were made to correct it, (I mean confirmed by Sir Elijah Impey, when,
under the auspices of Mr. Hastings, he undertook to be legislator for
India,) that the judicial character, the last in the order of legal
progress, that to which all professional men look up as the crown of
their labors, that ultimate hope of men grown gray in professional
practice, is among the first experimental situations of a Company's
servant. It is expressly said in that body of regulations to which I
allude, that the office and situation of a judge of the Dewanny Courts
of Adawlut is to be filled by the _junior_ servants of the Company; and
as the judicial emolument is not substantially equal to that of other
situations, the office of a judge is to be taken, as it were, _in
transitu_, as a passage to other offices not of a judicial nature. As
soon, therefore, as a young man has supplied the defects of his
education by the advantage of some experience, he is immediately
translated to a totally different office; and another young man is
substituted, to learn, at the expense of the property of India, to fill
a situation which, when he may be qualified to fill, he is no longer to
hold.

It is in a great measure the same with regard to the other situations.
They are the situations of great statesmen, which, according to the
practice of the world, require, to fill properly, rather a large
converse with men and much intercourse in life than deep study of
books,--though that, too, has its eminent service. We know that in the
habits of civilized life, in cultivated society, there is imbibed by men
a good deal of the solid practice of government, of the true maxims of
state, and everything that enables a man to serve his country. But these
men are sent over to exercise functions at which a statesman here would
tremble, without any theoretical study, and without any of that sort of
experience which, in mixed societies of business and converse, form men
gradually and insensibly to great affairs. Low cunning, intrigue, and
stratagem are soon acquired; but manly, durable policy, which never
sacrifices the general interest to a partial or momentary advantage, is
not so cheaply formed in the human understanding.

Mr. Hastings, in his defence before the House of Commons, and in the
defences he has made before your Lordships, has lamented his own
situation in this particular. It was much to be lamented, indeed. How
far it will furnish justification, extenuation, or palliation of his
conduct, when we come to examine that conduct, will be seen.

These circumstances in the system have in a great degree vitiated and
perverted what is in reality (and many things are in reality) excellent
in it. They have rendered the application of all correctives and
remedies to abuse, at best, precarious in their operation. The laws that
we have made, the covenants which the Company has obliged its servants
to enter into, the occasional orders that have been given, at least
ostensibly good, all have proved noxious to the country, instead of
beneficial.

To illustrate this point, I beg leave to observe to your Lordships, that
the servants of the Company are obliged to enter into that service not
only with an impression of the general duty which attaches upon all
servants, but are obliged to engage in a specific covenant with their
masters to perform all the duties described in that covenant (which are
all the duties of their relation) under heavy penalties. They are bound
to a repetition of these covenants at every step of their progress, from
writer to factor, from factor to junior merchant, and from junior
merchant to senior merchant. They ought, according to the rule, to renew
these covenants at these times by something (I speak without offence)
which may be said to resemble confirmation in the Church. They are
obliged to renew their obligation in particular to receive no gifts,
gratuities, or presents whatsoever.

This scheme of covenants would have been wise and proper, if it had
belonged to a judicious order, and rational, consistent scheme of
discipline. The orders of the Company have forbidden their servants to
take any extraneous emoluments. The act of Parliament has fulminated
against them. Clear, positive laws, and clear, positive private
engagements, have no exception of circumstances in them, no difference
_quoad majus et minus_; but every one who offends against the law is
liable to the law. The consequence is this: he who has deviated but an
inch from the straight line, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful
emolument, (and all have taken many pennies of unlawful emolument,) does
not dare to complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel
oppression in any of his fellow-servants. He who has taken a trifle,
perhaps as the reward of a good action, is obliged to be silent, when he
sees whole nations desolated around him. The great criminal at the head
of the service has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the
small offence, and crush the person who has committed it. This is one
grand source of Mr. Hastings's power. After he had got the better of the
Parliamentary commission, no complaint from any part of the service has
appeared against Mr. Hastings. He is bold enough to state it as one
presumption of his merit, that there has been no such complaint. No such
complaint, indeed, can exist. The spirit of the corps would of itself
almost forbid it,--to which spirit an informer is the most odious and
detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been
hunted down, as a common enemy. But here is a new security. Who can
complain, or dares to accuse? The whole service is irregular: nobody is
free from small offences; and, as I have said, the great offender can
always crush the small one.

If you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine,
from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's
service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption;
but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes,
you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary
perfection. He was fourteen years at the head of that service; and there
is not an instance, no, not one single instance, in which he endeavored
to detect corruption, or that he ever, in any one single instance,
attempted to punish it; but the whole service, with that whole mass of
enormity which he attributes to it, slept, as it were, at once, under
his terror and his protection: under his protection, if they did not
dare to move against him; under terror, from his power to pluck out
individuals and make a public example of them, whenever he thought fit.
And therefore that service, under his guidance and influence, was,
beyond even what its own nature disposed it to, a service of
confederacy, a service of connivance, a service composed of various
systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head and the protector.
But this general connivance he did not think sufficient to secure to him
the general support of the Indian interest. He went further. We shall
prove to your Lordships, that, when the Company were driven by shame,
not by inclination, to order several prosecutions against delinquents in
their service, Mr. Hastings, directly contrary to the duty of his
office, directly contrary to the express and positive law of the Court
of Directors, which law Parliament had bound upon him as his rule of
action, not satisfied with his long tacit connivance, ventured, before
he left his government, and among his last acts, to pass a general act
of pardon and indemnity, and at once ordered the whole body of the
prosecutions directed by his masters, the Company, to be discharged.

Having had fourteen years' lease of connivance to bestow, and giving at
the end a general release of all suits and actions, he now puts himself
at the head of a vast body enriched by his bounties, connivances, and
indemnities, and expects the support of those whom he had thus fully
rewarded and discharged from the pursuit of the laws. You will find, in
the course of this business, that, when charges have been brought
against him of any bribery, corruption, or other malversation, his
course has been to answer little or nothing to that specific bribery,
corruption, or malversation: his way has been to call on the Court of
Directors to inquire of every servant who comes to Europe, and to say
whether there was any one man in it that will give him an ill word. He
has put himself into a situation in which he may always safely call to
his character, and will always find himself utterly incapable of
justifying his conduct.

So far I have troubled your Lordships with the system of confederacy and
connivance, which, under his auspices, was the vital principle of almost
the whole service. There is one member of the service which I have
omitted: but whether I ought to have put it first, or, as I do now,
last, I must confess I am at some loss; because, though it appears to be
the lowest (if any regular) part of the service, it is by far the most
considerable and the most efficient, without a full consideration and
explanation of which hardly any part of the conduct of Mr. Hastings,
and of many others that may be in his situation, can be fully
understood.

I have given your Lordships an account of writers, factors, merchants,
who exercise the office of judges, lord chancellors, chancellors of the
exchequer, ministers of state, and managers of great revenues. But there
is another description of men, of more importance than them all, a
description you have often heard of, but which has not been sufficiently
explained: I mean the _banian_. When the Company's service was no more
than mercantile, and the servants were generally unacquainted with the
country, they used the intervention of certain factors among the
natives, which were called _banians_: we called them so, because they
were of the tribe or caste of the banians or merchants,--the Indians
being generally distributed into trades according to their tribes. The
name still continues, when the functions of the banians are totally
altered. The banian is known by other appellations. He is called
_dewan_, or steward; and, indeed, this is a term with more propriety
applied to him in several of his functions. He is, by his name of
office, the steward of the household of the European gentleman: he has
the management of his affairs, and the ordering of his servants. He is
himself a domestic servant, and generally chosen out of that class of
natives who, by being habituated to misery and subjection, can submit to
any orders, and are fit for any of the basest services. Trained under
oppression, (it is the true education,) they are fit to oppress others.
They serve an apprenticeship of servitude to qualify them for the trade
of tyranny. They know all the devices, all the little frauds, all the
artifices and contrivances, the whole panoply of the defensive armor by
which ingenious slavery secures itself against the violence of power.
They know all the lurking-holes, all the winding recesses, of the
unfortunate; and they hunt out distress and misery even to their last
retreats. They have suffered themselves; but, far from being taught by
those sufferings to abstain from rigor, they have only learned the
methods of afflicting their fellow-slaves. They have the best
intelligence of what is done in England. The moment a Company's servant
arrives in India, and his English connections are known to be powerful,
some of that class of people immediately take possession of him, as if
he were their inheritance. They have knowledge of the country and its
affairs; they have money; they have the arts of making money. The
gentleman who comes from England has none of these; he enters into that
world, as he enters into the world at large, naked. His portion is great
simplicity, great indigence, and a strong disposition to relieve
himself. The banian, once in possession, employs his tyranny, not only
over the native people of his country, but often over the master
himself, who has little other share in the proceedings of his servant
but in giving him the ticket of his name to mark that he is connected
with and supported by an European who is himself well connected and
supported at home. This is a commission which nothing can resist. From
that moment forward it is not the Englishman, it is the black banian,
that is the master. The nominal master often lives from his hand. We
know how young men are sent out of this country; we know how happy we
are to hear soon that they are no longer a burden to their friends and
parents. The banian knows it, too. He supplies the young servant with
money. He has him under his power: first, from the necessity of
employing such a man; and next, (and this is the more important of the
two,) he has that dreadful power over his master which every creditor
has over his debtor. Actions the most abhorrent to his nature he must
see done before his face, and thousands and thousands worse are done in
his absence, and he dare not complain. The banian extorts, robs,
plunders, and then gives him just what proportion of the spoil he
pleases. If the master should murmur, the very power that was sent over
to protect the people of India from these very abuses, (the best things
being perverted, when applied to unknown objects and put into unsuitable
situations,) the very laws of England, by making the recovery of debts
more easy, infinitely increase the power of the banian over his master.
Thus the Supreme Court of Justice, the destined corrector of all abuses,
becomes a collateral security for that abominable tyranny exercised by
the moneyed banians over Europeans as well as the natives. So that,
while we are here boasting of the British power in the East, we are in
perhaps more than half our service nothing but the inferior, miserable
instruments of the tyranny which the lowest part of the natives of India
exercise, to the disgrace of the British authority, and to the ruin of
all that is respectable among their own countrymen. They have subverted
the first houses, totally ruined and undone the country, cheated and
defrauded the revenue,--the master a silent, sometimes a melancholy
spectator, until some office of high emolument has emancipated him. This
has often been the true reason that the Company's servants in India, in
order to free themselves from this horrid and atrocious servitude, are
obliged to become instruments of another tyranny, and must prostitute
themselves to men in power, in order to obtain some office that may
enable them to escape the servitudes below, and enable them to pay their
debts. And thus many have become the instruments of Mr. Hastings.

These banians, or dewans, were originally among the lower castes in the
country. But now, it is true, that, after seeing the power and profits
of these men,--that there is neither power, profession, nor occupation
to be had, which a reputable person can exercise, but through that
channel,--men of higher castes, and born to better things, have thrown
themselves into that disgraceful servitude, have become menial servants
to Englishmen, that they might rise by their degradation. But whoever
they are, or of whatever birth, they have equally prostituted their
integrity, they have equally lost their character; and, once entered
into that course of life, there is no difference between the best castes
and the worst. That system Mr. Hastings confirmed, established,
increased, and made the instrument of the most austere tyranny, of the
basest peculations, and the most scandalous and iniquitous extortions.

In the description I have given of banians a distinction is to be made.
Your Lordships must distinguish the banians of the British servants in
subordinate situations and the banians who are such to persons in higher
authority. In the latter case the banian is in strict subordination,
because he may always be ruined by his superior; whereas in the former
it is always in his power to ruin his nominal superior. It was not
through fear, but voluntarily, and not for the banian's purposes, but
his own, Mr. Hastings has brought forward his banian. He seated him in
the houses of the principal nobility, and invested him with farms of the
revenue; he has given him enormous jobs; he has put him over the heads
of a nobility which, for their grandeur, antiquity, and dignity, might
almost be matched with your Lordships. He has made him supreme
ecclesiastical judge, judge even of the very castes, in the preservation
of the separate rules and separate privileges of which that people
exists. He who has dominion over the caste has an absolute power over
something more than life and fortune.

Such is that first, or last, (I know not which to call it,) order in the
Company's service called a banian. The _mutseddies_, clerks,
accountants, of Calcutta, generally fall under this description. Your
Lordships will see hereafter the necessity of giving you, in the opening
the case, an idea of the situation of a banian. You will see, as no
Englishman, properly speaking, acts by himself, that he must be made
responsible for that person called his banian,--for the power he either
uses under him, or the power he has acquired over him. The banian
escapes, in the night of his complexion and situation, the inquiry that
a white man cannot stand before in this country. Through the banians, or
other black natives, a bad servant of the Company receives his bribes.
Through them he decides falsely against the titles of litigants in the
court of castes, or in the offices of public registry. Through them Mr.
Hastings has exercised oppressions which, I will venture to say, in his
own name, in his own character, daring as he is, (and he is the most
daring criminal that ever existed,) he never would dare to practise.
Many, if not most, of the iniquities of his interior bad administration
have been perpetrated through these banians, or other native agents and
confidants; and we shall show you that he is not satisfied with one of
them, confiding few of his secrets to Europeans, and hardly any of his
instruments, either native or European, knowing the secrets of each
other. This is the system of banianism, and of concealment, which Mr.
Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by
example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into
that dark and insidious character.

I have explained, or endeavored to explain, to your Lordships these
circumstances of the true spirit, genius, and character, more than the
ostensible institutions of the Company's service: I now shall beg leave
to bring before you one institution, taken from the mercantile
constitution of the Company, so excellent, that I will venture to say
that human wisdom has never exceeded it. In this excellent institution
the counting-house gave lessons to the state. The active, awakened, and
enlightened principle of self-interest will provide a better system for
the guard of that interest than the cold, drowsy wisdom of those who
provide for a good out of themselves ever contrived for the public. The
plans sketched by private prudence for private interest, the regulations
by mercantile men for their mercantile purposes, when they can be
applied to the discipline and order of the state, produce a discipline
and order which no state should be ashamed to copy. The Company's
mercantile regulations are admirably fitted for the government of a
remote, large, disjointed empire. As merchants, having factors abroad
in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness
and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which
no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public
ministers. The Company has made it a fundamental part of their
constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written
government. Your Lordships will observe, in the course of the
proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in
the government of India,--that is, that the Company's government is a
government of writing, a government of record. The strictest court of
justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of
record as the India Company's executive service is, or ought to be, in
all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or
diary of all their transactions, public and private: they are bound to
do this by an express covenant. They oblige them, as a corrective upon
that diary, to keep a letter-book, in which all their letters are to be
regularly entered. And they are bound by the same covenant to produce
all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with
affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of
commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life.
But as the great corrective of all, they have contrived that every
proceeding in public council shall be written,--no debates merely
verbal. The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and
recorded. All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council,
Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves,
decisions, and final resolutions of affairs: the argument, the
discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear. But the
Company has proceeded much further, and done much more wisely, because
they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided,
either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written,--the
proposition, the argument, the dissent. This is not confined to their
great Council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, (and
I see considerable traces of it in practice,) in every Provincial
Council, whilst the Provincial Councils existed, and even down to the
minutest ramification of their service. These books, in a progression
from the lowest Councils to the highest Presidency, are ordered to be
transmitted, duplicate and triplicate, by every ship that sails to
Europe. On this system an able servant of the Company, and high in their
service, has recorded his opinion, and strongly expressed his
sentiments. Writing to the Court of Directors, he says, "It ought to be
remembered, that the basis upon which you rose to power, and have been
able to stand the shock of repeated convulsions, has been the accuracy
and simplicity of mercantile method, which makes every transaction in
your service and every expenditure a matter of record."

My Lords, this method not only must produce to them, if strictly
observed, a more accurate idea of the nature of their affairs and the
nature of their expenditures, but it must afford them no trivial
opportunity and means of knowing the true characters of their servants,
their capacities, their ways of thinking, the turn and bias of their
minds. If well employed, and but a little improved, the East India
Company possessed an advantage unknown before to the chief of a remote
government. In the most remote parts of the world, and in the minutest
parts of a remote service, everything came before the principal with a
domestic accuracy and local familiarity. It was, in the power of a
Director, sitting in London, to form an accurate judgment of every
incident that happened upon the Ganges and the Gogra.

The use of this recorded system did not consist only in the facility of
discovering what the nature of their affairs and the character and
capacity of their servants was, but it furnished the means of detecting
their misconduct, frequently of proving it too, and of producing the
evidence of it judicially under their own hands. For your Lordships must
have observed that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of
evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes
of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct, and simple: guilt is a
crooked, intricate, inconstant, and various thing. The iniquitous job of
to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity
of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons that have colored the first crime may
expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into
contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates,
conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records.
They are flown out of their hands, they are in Europe, they are safe in
the registers of the Company, perhaps they are under the eye of
Parliament, before the writers of them have time to invent an excuse for
a direct contrary conduct to that to which their former pretended
principles applied. This is a great, a material part of the constitution
of the Company. My Lords, I do not think it to be much apologized for,
if I repeat, that this is the fundamental regulation of that service,
and which, if preserved in the first instance, as it ought to be, in
official practice in India, and then used as it ought to be in England,
would afford such a mode of governing a great, foreign, dispersed
empire, as, I will venture to say, few countries ever possessed, even in
governing the most limited and narrow jurisdiction.