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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)




An auction was now opened before the English Council at Calcutta.
Mahomed Reza Khan bid largely; Nundcomar bid largely. The circumstances
of these two rivals at the Nabob court were equally favorable to the
pretensions of each. But the preponderating merits of Mahomed Reza Khan,
arising from the subjection in which he was likely to keep the Nabob,
and make him fitter for the purpose of continued exactions, induced the
Council to take his money, which amounted to about 220,000_l._ Be the
sum paid what it may, it was certainly a large one; in consequence of
which the Council attempted to invest Mahomed Reza Khan with the office
of Naib Subah, or Deputy Viceroy. As to Nundcomar, they fell upon him
with a vengeful fury. He fought his battle as well as he could; he
opposed bribe to bribe, eagle to eagle; but at length he was driven to
the wall. Some received his money, but did him no service in return;
others, more conscientious, refused to receive it; and in this battle of
bribes he was vanquished. A deputation was sent from Calcutta to the
miserable Nabob, to tear Nundcomar, his only support, from his side, and
to put the object of all his terrors, Mahomed Reza Khan, in his place.

Thus began a new division that split the Presidency into violent
factions; but the faction which adhered to Nundcomar was undoubtedly the
weakest. That most miserable of men, Mir Jaffier Ali Khan, clinging, as
to the last pillar, to Nundcomar, trembling at Mahomed Reza Khan, died
in the struggle, a miserable victim to all the revolutions, to all the
successive changes and versatile politics at Calcutta. Like all the rest
of the great personages whom we have degraded and brutalized by insult
and oppression, he betook himself to the usual destructive resources of
unprincipled misery,--sensuality, opium, and wine. His gigantic frame of
constitution soon gave way under the oppression of this relief, and he
died, leaving children and grandchildren by wives and concubines. On the
old Nabob's death, Mahomed Reza Khan was acknowledged Deputy Nabob, the
money paid, and this revolution completed.

Here, my Lords, opened a new source of plunder, peculation, and bribery,
which was not neglected. Revolutions were no longer necessary;
succession supplied their places: and well the object agreed with the
policy. Rules of succession could not be very well ascertained to an
office like that of the Nabob, which was hereditary only by the
appointment of the Mogul. The issue by lawful wives would naturally be
preferred by those who meant the quiet of the country. But a more
doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the purposes of
extortion and peculation. This miserable succession was sold, and the
eldest of the issue of Munny Begum, an harlot, brought in to pollute the
harem of the seraglio, of whom you will hear much hereafter, was chosen.
He soon succeeded to the grave. Another son of the same prostitute
succeeded to the same unhappy throne, and followed to the same untimely
grave. Every succession was sold; and between venal successions and
venal revolutions, in a very few years seven princes and six sales were
seen successively in Bengal. The last was a minor, the issue of a
legitimate wife, admitted to succeed because a minor, and because there
was none illegitimate left. He was instantly stripped of the allowance
of his progenitors, and reduced to a pension of 160,000 a year. He still
exists, and continued to the end of Mr. Hastings's government to furnish
constant sources of bribery and plunder to him and his creatures.

The offspring of Munny Begum clinging, as his father did, to Nundcomar,
they tore Nundcomar from his side, as they had done from the side of his
father, and carried him down as a sort of prisoner to Calcutta; where,
having had the weakness to become the first informer, he was made the
first example. This person, pushed to the wall, and knowing that the man
he had to deal with was desperate and cruel in his resentments, resolves
on the first blow, and enters before the Council a regular information
in writing of bribery against Mr. Hastings. In his preface to that
charge he excuses himself for what is considered to be an act equally
insane and wicked, and as the one inexpiable crime of an Indian, the
discovery of the money he gives,--that Mr. Hastings had declaredly
determined on his ruin, and to accomplish it had newly associated
himself with one Mohun Persaud, a name I wish your Lordships to
remember, a bitter enemy of his, an infamous person, whom Mr. Hastings
knew to be such, and as such had turned him out of his house,--that Mr.
Hastings had lately recalled, and held frequent communications with this
Mohun Persaud, the subject of which he had no doubt was his ruin. In the
year 1775 he was hanged by those incorrupt English judges who were sent
to India by Parliament to protect the natives from oppression.

Your Lordships will observe that this new sale of the office of
ministers succeeded to the sale of that of nabobs. All these varied and
successive sales shook the country to pieces. As if those miserable
exhausted provinces were to be cured of inanition by phlebotomy, while
Cossim Ali was racking it above, the Company were drawing off all its
nutriment below. A dreadful, an extensive, and most chargeable war
followed. Half the northern force of India poured down like a torrent on
Bengal, endangered our existence, and exhausted all our resources. The
war was the fruit of Mr. Hastings's cabals. Its termination, as usual,
was the result of the military merit and the fortune of this nation.
Cossim Ali, after having been defeated toy the military genius and
spirit of England, (for the Adamses, Monroes, and others of that period,
I believe, showed as much skill and bravery as any of their
predecessors,) in his flight swept away above three millions in money,
jewels, or effects, out of a country which he had plundered and
exhausted by his unheard-of exactions. However, he fought his way like a
retiring lion, turning his face to his pursuers. He still fought along
his frontier. His ability and his money drew to his cause the Subahdar
of Oude, the famous Sujah ul Dowlah. The Mogul entered into these wars,
and penetrated into the lower provinces on one side, whilst Bulwant
Sing, the Rajah of Benares, entered them on another. After various
changes of party and changes of fortune, the loss which began in the
treachery of the civil service was, as I have before remarked, redeemed
by military merit. Many examples of the same sort have since been seen.

Whilst these things were transacted in India, the Court of Directors in
London, hearing of so many changes, hearing of such an incredible mass
of perfidy and venality, knowing that there was a general market made of
the country and of the Company, that the flame of war spread from
province to province, that, in proportion as it spread, the fire glowed
with augmented fierceness, and that the rapacity which originally gave
rise to it was following it in all its progress,--the Company, my Lords,
alarmed not only for their acquisitions, but their existence, and
finding themselves sinking lower and lower by every victory they
obtained, thought it necessary at length to come to some system and some
settlement. After composing their differences with Lord Clive, they sent
him out to that country about the year 1765, in order, by his name,
weight, authority, and vigor of mind, to give some sort of form and
stability to government, and to rectify the innumerable abuses which
prevailed there, and particularly that great source of disorders, that
fundamental abuse, presents: for the bribes by which all these
revolutions were bought had not the name of conditions, stipulations, or
rewards; they even had the free and gratuitous style of presents. The
receivers contended that they were mere gratuities given for service
done, or mere tokens of affection and gratitude to the parties. They may
give them what names they please, and your Lordships will think of them
what you please; but they were the donations of misery to power, the
gifts of sufferers to the oppressors; and consequently, where they
prevailed, they left no certain property or fixed situation to any man
in India, from the highest to the lowest.

The Court of Directors sent out orders to enlarge the servants'
covenants with new and severe clauses, strongly prohibiting the practice
of receiving presents. Lord Clive himself had been a large receiver of
them. Yet, as it was in the moment of a revolution which gave them all
they possessed, the Company would hear no more of it. They sent him out
to reform: whether they chose well or ill does not signify. I think,
upon the whole, they chose well; because his name and authority could do
much. They sent him out to redress the grievances of that country, and
it was necessary he should be well armed for that service. They sent him
out with such powers as no servant of the Company ever held before. I
would not be understood here in my own character, much less in the
delegated character in which I stand, to contend for any man in the
totality of his conduct. Perhaps in some of his measures he was
mistaken, and in some of his acts reprehensible; but justice obliges me
to say, that the plan which he formed and the course which he pursued
were in general great and well imagined,--that he laid great
foundations, if they had been properly built upon. For, in the first
place, he composed all the neighboring countries torn to pieces by the
wars of Cossim Ali, and quieted the apprehensions raised by the opinion
of the boundless ambition of England. He took strong measures to put an
end to a great many of the abuses that prevailed in the country subject
to the Company. He then proceeded to the upper provinces, and formed a
plan which, for a military man, has great civil and political merit. He
put a bound to the aspiring spirit of the Company's servants; he limited
its conquests; he prescribed bounds to its ambition. "First" (says he)
"quiet the minds of the country; what you have obtained regulate; make
it known to India that you resolve to acquire no more."

On this solid plan he fixed every prince that was concerned in the
preceding wars, on the one side and on the other, in an happy and easy
settlement. He restored Sujah ul Dowlah, who had been driven from his
dominions by the military arm of Great Britain, to the rank of Vizier,
and to the dominion of the territories of Oude. With a generosity that
astonished all Asia, he reinstated this expelled enemy of his nation
peaceably upon his throne. And this act of politic generosity did more
towards quieting the minds of the people of Asia than all the terror,
great as it was, of the English arms. At the same time, Lord Clive,
generous to all, took peculiar care of our friends and allies. He took
care of Bulwant Sing, the great Rajah of Benares, who had taken our part
in the war. He secured him from the revenge of Sujah ul Dowlah. The
Mogul had granted us the superiority over Bulwant Sing. Lord Clive
reestablished him in a secure, easy independency. He confirmed him,
under the British guaranty, in the rich principality which he held.

The Mogul, the head of the Mussulman religion in India, and of the
Indian empire, a head honored and esteemed even in its ruins, he
procured to be recognized by all the persons that were connected with
his empire. The rents that ought to be paid to the Vizier of the Empire
he gave to the Vizierate. Thus our alliances were cemented, our enemies
were reconciled, all Asia was conciliated by our settlement with the
king. To that unhappy fugitive king, driven from place to place, the
sport of fortune, now an emperor and now a prisoner, prayed for in every
mosque in which his authority was conspired against, one day opposed by
the coin struck in his name and the other day sold for it,--to this
descendant of Tamerlane he allotted, with a decent share of royal
dignity, an honorable fixed residence, where he might be useful and
could not be dangerous.

As to the Bengal provinces, he did not take for the Company the
viceroyalty, as Mr. Holwell would have persuaded, almost forced, the
Company to do; but, to satisfy the prejudices of the Mahomedans, the
country was left in the hands nominally of the Subah, or viceroy, who
was to administer the criminal justice and the exterior forms of
royalty. He obtained from the sovereign the _dewanny_. This is the great
act of the constitutional entrance of the Company into the body politic
of India. It gave to the settlement of Bengal a fixed constitutional
form, with a legal title, acknowledged and recognized now for the first
time by all the natural powers of the country, because it arose from the
charter of the undoubted sovereign. The _dewanny_, or high-stewardship,
gave to the Company the collection and management of the revenue; and in
this modest and civil character they appeared, not the oppressors, but
the protectors of the people. This scheme had all the real power,
without any invidious appearance of it; it gave them the revenue,
without the parade of sovereignty. On this double foundation the
government was happily settled. The minds of the natives were quieted.
The Company's territories and views were circumscribed. The arm of force
was put out of sight. The imperial name covered everything. The power of
the purse was in the hand of the Company. The power of the sword was in
effect so, as they contracted for the maintenance of the army. The
Company had a revenue of a million and a half. The Nabob had, indeed,
fallen from any real and effective power, yet the dignity of the court
was maintained. The prejudices and interests of the Mahomedans, and
particularly of their nobility, who had suffered more by this great
revolution even than the old inhabitants of the country, were consulted;
for by this plan a revenue of 500,000_l._ was settled on the
viceroyalty, which was thus enabled to provide in some measure for those
great families. The Company likewise, by this plan, in order to enjoy
their revenues securely, and to avoid envy and murmur, put them into the
hands of Mahomed Reza Khan, whom Lord Clive found in the management of
affairs, and did not displace; and he was now made deputy-steward to the
Company, as he had been before lieutenant-viceroy to the Nabob. A
British Resident at Moorshedabad was established as a control. The
Company exercised their power over the revenue in the first instance
through the natives, but the British Resident was in reality the great
mover.

If ever this nation stood in a situation of glory throughout Asia, it
was in that moment. But, as I have said, some material errors and
mistakes were committed. After the formation of this plan, Lord Clive
unfortunately did not stay long enough in the country to give
consistency to the measures of reformation he had undertaken, but
rapidly returned to England; and after his departure, the government
that continued had not vigor or authority to support the settlement then
made, and considerable abuses began to prevail in every quarter. Another
capital period in our history here commences. Those who succeeded
(though I believe one of them was one of the honestest men that ever
served the Company, I mean Governor Verelst) had not weight enough to
poise the system of the service, and consequently many abuses and
grievances again prevailed. Supervisors were appointed to every
district, as a check on the native collectors, and to report every abuse
as it should arise. But they who were appointed to redress grievances
were themselves accused of being guilty of them. However, the disorders
were not of that violent kind which preceded Mr. Hastings's departure,
nor such as followed his return: no mercenary wars, no mercenary
revolutions, no extirpation of nations, no violent convulsions in the
revenue, no subversion of ancient houses, no general sales of any
descriptions of men,--none of these, but certainly such grievances as
made it necessary for the Company to send out another commission in
1769, with instructions pointing out the chief abuses. It was composed
of Mr. Vansittart, Mr. Ford, and Mr. Scrafton. The unfortunate end of
that commission is known to all the world; but I mention it in order to
state that the receipt of presents was considered as one of the
grievances which then prevailed in India, and that the supervisors under
that commission were ordered upon no account whatever to take presents.
Upon the unfortunate catastrophe which happened, the Company was
preparing to send out another for the rectification of these grievances,
when Parliament thought it necessary to supersede that commission, to
take the matter into their own hands, and to appoint another commission
in a Parliamentary way (of which Mr. Hastings was one) for the better
government of that country. Mr. Hastings, as I must mention to your
Lordships, soon after the deposition and restoration of Jaffier Ali
Khan, and before Lord Clive arrived, quitted for a while the scene in
which he had been so mischievously employed, and returned to England to
strengthen himself by those cabals which again sent him out with new
authority to pursue the courses which were the natural sequel to his
former proceedings. He returned to India with great power,
indeed,--first to a seat in Council at Fort St. George, and from thence
to succeed to the Presidency of Fort William. On him the Company placed
their chief reliance. Happy had it been for them, happy for India and
for England, if his conduct had been such as to spare your Lordships and
the Commons the exhibition of this day!

When this government, with Mr. Hastings at the head of it, was settled,
Moorshedabad did still continue the seat of the native government, and
of all the collections. Here the Company was not satisfied with placing
a Resident at the durbar, which was the first step to our assuming the
government in that country. These steps must be traced by your
Lordships; for I should never have given you this trouble, if it was not
necessary to possess you clearly of the several progressive steps by
which the Company's government came to be established and to supersede
the native. The next step was the appointment of supervisors in every
province, to oversee the native collector. The third was to establish a
general Council of Revenue at Moorshedabad, to superintend the great
steward, Mahomed Reza Khan. In 1772 that Council by Mr. Hastings was
overturned, and the whole management of the revenue brought to Calcutta.
Mahomed Reza Khan, by orders of the Company, was turned out of all his
offices, and turned out for reasons and principles which your Lordships
will hereafter see; and at last the dewanny was entirely taken out of
the native hands, and settled in the Supreme Council and Presidency
itself in Calcutta; and so it remained until the year 1781, when Mr.
Hastings made another revolution, took it out of the hands of the
Supreme Council, in which the orders of the Company, an act of
Parliament, and their own act had vested it, and put it into a
subordinate council: that is, it was entirely vested in himself.

* * * * *

Now your Lordships see the whole of the revolutions. I have stated them,
I trust, with perspicuity,--stated the grounds and principles upon which
they were made,--stated the abuses that grew upon them,--and that every
revolution produced its abuse. You saw the native government vanish by
degrees, until it was reduced to a situation fit for nothing but to
become a private perquisite, as it has been, to Mr. Hastings, and to be
granted to whom he pleased. The English government succeeded, at the
head of which Mr. Hastings was placed by an act of Parliament, having
before held the office of President of the Council,--the express object
of both these appointments being to redress grievances; and within these
two periods of his power, as President and Governor-General, were those
crimes committed of which he now stands accused. All this history is
merely by way of illustration: his crimination begins from his
nomination to the Presidency; and we are to consider how he comported
himself in that station, and in his office of Governor-General.

The first thing, in considering the merits or demerits of any governor,
is to have some test by which they are to be tried. And here, my Lords,
we conceive, that, when a British governor is sent abroad, he is sent to
pursue the good of the people as much as possible in the spirit of the
laws of this country, which in all respects intend their conservation,
their happiness, and their prosperity. This is the principle upon which
Mr. Hastings was bound to govern, and upon which he is to account for
his conduct here. His rule was, what a British governor, intrusted with
the power of this country, was bound to do or to forbear. If he has
performed and if he has abstained as he ought, dismiss him honorably
acquitted from your bar; otherwise condemn him. He may resort to other
principles and to other maxims; but this country will force him to be
tried by its laws. The law of this country recognizes that well-known
crime called misconduct in office; it is a head of the law of England,
and, so far as inferior courts are competent to try it, may be tried in
them. Here your Lordships' competence is plenary: you are fully
competent both to inquire into and to punish the offence.

And, first, I am to state to your Lordships, by the direction of those
whom I am bound to obey, the principles on which Mr. Hastings declares
he has conducted his government,--principles which he has avowed, first
in several letters written to the East India Company, next in a paper of
defence delivered to the House of Commons explicitly, and more
explicitly in his defence before your Lordships. Nothing in Mr.
Hastings's proceedings is so curious as his several defences; and
nothing in the defences is so singular as the principles upon which he
proceeds. Your Lordships will have to decide not only upon a large,
connected, systematic train of misdemeanors, but an equally connected
system of principles and maxims of government, invented to justify those
misdemeanors. He has brought them forward and avowed them in the face of
day. He has boldly and insultingly thrown them in the face of the
representatives of a free people, and we cannot pass them by without
adopting them. I am directed to protest against those grounds and
principles upon which he frames his defence; for, if those grounds are
good and valid, they carry off a great deal at least, if not entirely,
the foundation of our charge.

My Lords, we contend that Mr. Hastings, as a British governor, ought to
govern on British principles, not by British forms,--God forbid!--for if
ever there was a case in which the letter kills and the spirit gives
life, it would be an attempt to introduce British forms and the
substance of despotic principles together into any country. No! We call
for that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice, that spirit of
protection, that spirit of lenity, which ought to characterize every
British subject in power; and on these, and these principles only, he
will be tried.

But he has told your Lordships, in his defence, that actions in Asia do
not bear the same moral qualities which the same actions would bear in
Europe.

My Lords, we positively deny that principle. I am authorized and called
upon to deny it. And having stated at large what he means by saying that
the same actions have not the same qualities in Asia and in Europe, we
are to let your Lordships know that these gentlemen have formed a plan
of _geographical morality_, by which the duties of men, in public and in
private situations, are not to be governed by their relation to the
great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by
climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of
latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues
die, as they say some insects die when they cross the line; as if there
were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they
unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and after which
a new order and system of things commenced.

This geographical morality we do protest against; Mr. Hastings shall not
screen himself under it; and on this point I hope and trust many words
will not be necessary to satisfy your Lordships. But we think it
necessary, in justification of ourselves, to declare that the laws of
morality are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which
would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of
oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation,
of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world
over. This I contend for not in the technical forms of it, but I contend
for it in the substance.

Mr. Hastings comes before your Lordships not as a British governor
answering to a British tribunal, but as a subahdar, as a bashaw of three
tails. He says, "I had an arbitrary power to exercise: I exercised it.
Slaves I found the people: slaves they are,--they are so by their
constitution; and if they are, I did not make it for them. I was
unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I
did exercise it. It was disagreeable to me, but I did exercise it; and
no other power can be exercised in that country." This, if it be true,
is a plea in bar. But I trust and hope your Lordships will not judge by
laws and institutions which you do not know, against those laws and
institutions which you do know, and under whose power and authority Mr.
Hastings went out to India. Can your Lordships patiently hear what _we_
have heard with indignation enough, and what, if there were nothing
else, would call these principles, as well as the actions which are
justified on such principles, to your Lordships' bar, that it may be
known whether the peers of England do not sympathize with the Commons in
their detestation of such doctrine? Think of an English governor tried
before you as a British subject, and yet declaring that he governed on
the principles of arbitrary power! His plea is, that he did govern there
on arbitrary and despotic, and, as he supposes, Oriental principles. And
as this plea is boldly avowed and maintained, and as, no doubt, all his
conduct was perfectly correspondent to these principles, the principles
and the conduct must be tried together.