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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)




If your Lordships will now permit me, I will state one of the many
places in which he has avowed these principles as the basis and
foundation of all his conduct. "The sovereignty which they assumed, it
fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such
power, or powers of that nature, were delegated to me by any provisions
of any act of Parliament, I confess myself too little of a lawyer to
pronounce. I only know that the acceptance of the sovereignty of
Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any act of Parliament;
and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the Council,
the Company is clearly and indisputably seized of that sovereignty." So
that this gentleman, because he is not a lawyer, nor clothed with those
robes which distinguish, and well distinguish, the learning of this
country, is not to know anything of his duty; and whether he was bound
by any, or what act of Parliament, is a thing he is not lawyer enough to
know! Now, if your Lordships will suffer the laws to be broken by those
who are not of the long robe, I am afraid those of the long robe will
have none to punish but those of their own profession. He therefore goes
to a law he is better acquainted with,--that is, the law of arbitrary
power and force, if it deserves to be called by the name of law. "If,
therefore," says he, "the _sovereignty_ of Benares, as ceded to us by
the Vizier, have _any rights whatever_ annexed to it, and be not a mere
empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as are held,
countenanced, and established by the law, custom, and usage of the Mogul
empire, and not by the provisions of any British act of Parliament
hitherto enacted. _Those rights_, and none other, I have been the
involuntary instrument of enforcing. And if any future act of Parliament
shall positively or by implication tend to annihilate those very rights,
or their exertion as I have exerted them, I much fear that the boasted
sovereignty of Benares, which was held up as an acquisition, almost
obtruded on the Company against my consent and opinion, (for I
acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and
inconveniences in its future exercise,)--I fear, I say, that this
sovereignty will be found a burden instead of a benefit, a heavy clog
rather than a precious gem to its present possessors: I mean, unless the
whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made an
uniform compact body by one grand and systematic arrangement.--such an
arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and
inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the
variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property
and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and
instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of
society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different
laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all
jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass.

"Every part of Hindostan has been constantly exposed to these and
similar disadvantages ever since the Mahomedan conquests. The Hindoos,
who never incorporated with their conquerors, were kept in order only by
the strong hand of power. The constant necessity of similar exertions
would increase at once their energy and extent; so that rebellion itself
is the parent and promoter of despotism. Sovereignty in India implies
nothing else. For I know not how we can form an estimate of its powers,
but from its visible effects; and those are everywhere the same, from
Cabool to Assam. The whole history of Asia is nothing more than
precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power. To all
this I strongly alluded in the minutes I delivered in Council, when the
treaty with the new Vizier was on foot in 1775; and I wished to make
Cheyt Sing independent, because in India dependence included a thousand
evils, many of which I enumerated at that time, and they are entered in
the ninth clause of the first section of this charge. I knew the powers
with which an Indian sovereignty is armed, and the dangers to which
tributaries are exposed. I knew, that, from the history of Asia, and
from the very nature of mankind, the subjects of a despotic empire are
always vigilant for the moment to rebel, and the sovereign is ever
jealous of rebellious intentions. A zemindar is an Indian subject, and
as such exposed to the common lot of his fellows. _The mean and depraved
state of a mere zemindar_ is therefore this very dependence above
mentioned on a despotic government, this very proneness to shake off his
allegiance, and this very exposure to continual danger from his
sovereign's jealousy, which are consequent on the political state of
Hindostanic governments. Bulwant Sing, if he had been, and Cheyt Sing,
as long as he was a zemindar, stood exactly in this _mean and depraved
state_ by the constitution of his country. I did not make it for him,
but would have secured him from it. Those who made him a zemindar
entailed upon him the consequences of so mean and depraved a tenure.
Aliverdy Khan and Cossim Ali fined all their zemindars on the
necessities of war, and on every pretence either of court necessity or
court extravagance."

My Lords, you have now heard the principles on which Mr. Hastings
governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. You have heard
his opinion of the mean and depraved state of those who are subject to
it. You have heard his lecture upon arbitrary power, which he states to
be the constitution of Asia. You hear the application he makes of it;
and you hear the practices which he employs to justify it, and who the
persons were on whose authority he relies, and whose example he
professes to follow. In the first place, your Lordships will be
astonished at the audacity with which he speaks of his own
administration, as if he was reading a speculative lecture on the evils
attendant upon some vicious system of foreign government in which he had
no sort of concern whatsoever. And then, when in this speculative way he
has established, or thinks he has, the vices of the government, he
conceives he has found a sufficient apology for his own crimes. And if
he violates the most solemn engagements, if he oppresses, extorts, and
robs, if he imprisons, confiscates, banishes at his sole will and
pleasure, when we accuse him for his ill-treatment of the people
committed to him as a sacred trust, his defence is,--"To be robbed,
violated, oppressed, is their privilege. Let the constitution of their
country answer for it. I did not make it for them. Slaves I found them,
and as slaves I have treated them. I was a despotic prince. Despotic
governments are jealous, and the subjects prone to rebellion. This very
proneness of the subject to shake off his allegiance exposes him to
continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, and this is consequent
on the political state of Hindostanic governments." He lays it down as a
rule, that despotism is the genuine constitution of India, that a
disposition to rebellion in the subject or dependent prince is the
necessary effect of this despotism, and that jealousy and its
consequences naturally arise on the part of the sovereign,--that the
government is everything, and the subject nothing,--that the great
landed men are in a mean and depraved state, and subject to many evils.

Such a state of things, if true, would warrant conclusions directly
opposite to those which Mr. Hastings means to draw from them, both
argumentatively and practically, first to influence his conduct, and
then to bottom his defence of it.

Perhaps you will imagine that the man who avows these principles of
arbitrary government, and pleads them as the justification of acts which
nothing else can justify, is of opinion that they are on the whole good
for the people over whom they are exercised. The very reverse. He
mentions them as horrible things, tending to inflict on the people a
thousand evils, and to bring on the ruler a continual train of dangers.
Yet he states, that your acquisitions in India will be a detriment
instead of an advantage, if you destroy arbitrary power, unless you can
reduce all the religious establishments, all the civil institutions, and
tenures of land, into one uniform mass,--that is, unless by acts of
arbitrary power you extinguish all the laws, rights, and religious
principles of the people, and force them to an uniformity, and on that
uniformity build a system of arbitrary power.

But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any
country in Asia that we are acquainted with. It is certainly not true of
any Mahomedan constitution. But if it were, do your Lordships really
think that the nation would bear, that any human creature would bear, to
hear an English governor defend himself on such principles? or, if he
can defend himself on such principles, is it possible to deny the
conclusion, that no man in India has a security for anything, but by
being totally independent of the British government? Here he has
declared his opinion, that he is a despotic prince, that he is to use
arbitrary power; and of course all his acts are covered with that
shield. "_I know_," says he, "_the constitution of Asia only from its
practice_." Will your Lordships submit to hear the corrupt practices of
mankind made the principles of government? No! it will be your pride
and glory to teach men intrusted with power, that, in their use of it,
they are to conform to principles, and not to draw their principles from
the corrupt practice of any man whatever. Was there ever heard, or could
it be conceived, that a governor would dare to heap up all the evil
practices, all the cruelties, oppressions, extortions, corruptions,
briberies, of all the ferocious usurpers, desperate robbers, thieves,
cheats, and jugglers, that ever had office, from one end of Asia to
another, and, consolidating all this mass of the crimes and absurdities
of barbarous domination into one code, establish it as the whole duty of
an English governor? I believe that till this time so audacious a thing
was never attempted by man.

_He_ have arbitrary power! My Lords, the East India Company have not
arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give
him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons, nor the whole
legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power
is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man
can lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one
person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in
subjection,--all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in
subjection to one great, immutable, preexistent law, prior to all our
devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas
and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we
are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of
which we cannot stir.

This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the
contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and
sanction they can have. It does not arise from our vain institutions.
Every good gift is of God; all power is of God; and He who has given the
power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer the exercise
of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power
itself. If, then, all dominion of man over man is the effect of the
Divine disposition, it is bound by the eternal laws of Him that gave it,
with which no human authority can dispense,--neither he that exercises
it, nor even those who are subject to it; and if they were mad enough to
make an express compact that should release their magistrate from his
duty, and should declare their lives, liberties, and properties
dependent upon, not rules and laws, but his mere capricious will, that
covenant would be void. The acceptor of it has not his authority
increased, but he has his crime doubled. Therefore can it be imagined,
if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the
greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the
plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a
blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own
feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine wisdom
and justice?

The title of conquest makes no difference at all. No conquest can give
such a right; for conquest, that is, force, cannot convert its own
injustice into a just title, by which it may rule others at its
pleasure. By conquest, which is a more immediate designation of the hand
of God, the conqueror succeeds to all the painful duties and
subordination to the power of God which belonged to the sovereign whom
he has displaced, just as if he had come in by the positive law of some
descent or some election. To this at least he is strictly bound: he
ought to govern them as he governs his own subjects. But every wise
conqueror has gone much further than he was bound to go. It has been his
ambition and his policy to reconcile the vanquished to his fortune, to
show that they had gained by the change, to convert their momentary
suffering into a long benefit, and to draw from the humiliation of his
enemies an accession to his own glory. This has been so constant a
practice, that it is to repeat the histories of all politic conquerors
in all nations and in all times; and I will not so much distrust your
Lordships' enlightened and discriminating studies and correct memories
as to allude to one of them. I will only show you that the Court of
Directors, under whom he served, has adopted that idea,--that they
constantly inculcated it to him, and to all the servants,--that they run
a parallel between their own and the native government, and, supposing
it to be very evil, did not hold it up as an example to be followed, but
as an abuse to be corrected,--that they never made it a question,
whether India is to be improved by English law and liberty, or English
law and liberty vitiated by Indian corruption.

No, my Lords, this arbitrary power is not to be had by conquest. Nor can
any sovereign have it by succession; for no man can succeed to fraud,
rapine, and violence. Neither by compact, covenant, or submission,--for
men cannot covenant themselves out of their rights and their
duties,--nor by any other means, can arbitrary power be conveyed to any
man. Those who give to others such rights perform acts that are void as
they are given,--good indeed and valid only as tending to subject
themselves, and those who act with them, to the Divine displeasure;
because morally there can be no such power. Those who give and those who
receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is
bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its
face to the world. It is a crime to bear it, when it can be rationally
shaken off. Nothing but absolute impotence can justify men in not
resisting it to the utmost of their ability.

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and
I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a
contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in
politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent
of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist?
To suppose for power is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and
governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We
may bite our chains, if we will, but we shall be made to know ourselves,
and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will
substitute _will_ in the place of it is an enemy to GOD.

Despotism does not in the smallest degree abrogate, alter, or lessen any
one duty of any one relation of life, or weaken the force or obligation
of any one engagement or contract whatsoever. Despotism, if it means
anything that is at all defensible, means a mode of government bound by
no written rules, and coerced by no controlling magistracies or
well-settled orders in the state. But if it has no written law, it
neither does nor can cancel the primeval, indefeasible, unalterable law
of Nature and of nations; and if no magistracies control its exertions,
those exertions must derive their limitation and direction either from
the equity and moderation of the ruler, or from downright revolt on the
part of the subject by rebellion, divested of all its criminal
qualities. The moment a sovereign removes the idea of security and
protection from his subjects, and declares that he is everything and
they nothing, when he declares that no contract he makes with them can
or ought to bind him, he then declares war upon them: he is no longer
sovereign; they are no longer subjects.

No man, therefore, has a right to arbitrary power. But the thought which
is suggested by the depravity of him who brings it forward is supported
by a gross confusion of ideas and principles, which your Lordships well
know how to discern and separate. It is manifest, that, in the Eastern
governments, and the Western, and in all governments, the supreme power
in the state cannot, whilst that state subsists, be rendered criminally
responsible for its actions: otherwise it would not be the supreme
power. It is certainly true: but the actions do not change their nature
by losing their responsibility. The arbitrary acts which are unpunished
are not the less vicious, though none but God, the conscience, and the
opinions of mankind take cognizance of them.

It is not merely so in this or that government, but in all countries.
The king in this country is undoubtedly unaccountable for his actions.
The House of Lords, if it should ever exercise, (God forbid I should
suspect it would ever do what it has never done!)--but if it should ever
abuse its judicial power, and give such a judgment as it ought not to
give, whether from fear of popular clamor on the one hand, or
predilection to the prisoner on the other,--if they abuse their
judgments, there is no calling them to an account for it. And so, if the
Commons should abuse their power, nay, if they should have been so
greatly delinquent as not to have prosecuted this offender, they could
not be accountable for it; there is no punishing them for their acts,
because we exercise a part of the supreme power. But are they less
criminal, less rebellious against the Divine Majesty? are they less
hateful to man, whose opinions they ought to cultivate as far as they
are just? No: till society fall into a state of dissolution, they cannot
be accountable for their acts. But it is from confounding the
unaccountable character inherent in the supreme power with arbitrary
power, that all this confusion of ideas has arisen.

Even upon a supposition that arbitrary power can exist anywhere, which
we deny totally, and which your Lordships will be the first and proudest
to deny, still, absolute supreme dominion was never conferred or
delegated by you,--much less, arbitrary power, which never did in any
case, nor ever will in any case, time, or country, produce any one of
the ends of just government.

It is true that the supreme power in every constitution of government
must be absolute, and this may be corrupted into the arbitrary. But all
good constitutions have established certain fixed rules for the exercise
of their functions, which they rarely or ever depart from, and which
rules form the security against that worst of evils, the government of
will and force instead of wisdom and justice.

But though the supreme power is in a situation resembling arbitrary, yet
never was there heard of in the history of the world, that is, in that
mixed chaos of human wisdom and folly, such a thing as an _intermediate_
arbitrary power,--that is, of an officer of government who is to exert
authority over the people without any law at all, and who is to have the
benefit of all laws, and all forms of law, when he is called to an
account. For that is to let a wild beast (for such is a man without law)
loose upon the people to prey on them at his pleasure, whilst all the
laws which ought to secure the people against the abuse of power are
employed to screen that abuse against the cries of the people.

This is _de facto_ the state of our Indian government. But to establish
it so in right as well as in fact is a thing left for us to begin with,
the first of mankind. For a subordinate arbitrary or even despotic power
never was heard of in right, claim, or authorized practice; least of all
has it been heard of in the Eastern governments, where all the instances
of severity and cruelty fall upon governors and persons intrusted with
power. This would be a gross contradiction. Before Mr. Hastings, none
ever came before his superiors to claim it; because, if any such thing
could exist, he claims the very power of that sovereign who calls him to
account.

But suppose a man to come before us, denying all the benefits of law to
the people under him,--and yet, when he is called to account, to claim
all the benefits of that law which was made to screen mankind from the
excesses of power: such a claim, I will venture to say, is a monster
that never existed, except in the wild imagination of some theorist. It
cannot be admitted, because it is a perversion of the fundamental
principle, that every power given for the protection of the people below
should be responsible to the power above. It is to suppose that the
people shall have no laws with regard to _him_, yet, when _he_ comes to
be tried, he shall claim the protection of those laws which were made to
secure the people from his violence,--that he shall claim a fair trial,
an equitable hearing, every advantage of counsel, (God forbid he should
not have them!) yet that the people under him shall have none of those
advantages. The reverse is the principle of every just and rational
procedure. For the people, who have nothing to use but their natural
faculties, ought to be gently dealt with; but those who are intrusted
with an artificial and instituted authority have in their hands a great
deal of the force of other people; and as their temptations to injustice
are greater, so their moans are infinitely more effectual for mischief
by turning the powers given for the preservation of society to its
destruction: so that, if an arbitrary procedure be justifiable, (a
strong one I am sure is,) it is when used against those who pretend to
use it against others.

My Lords, I will venture to say of the governments of Asia, that none of
them ever had an arbitrary power; and if any governments had an
arbitrary power, they cannot delegate it to any persons under them: that
is, they cannot so delegate it to others as not to leave them
accountable on the principles upon which it was given. As this is a
contradiction in terms, a gross absurdity, as well as a monstrous
wickedness, let me say, for the honor of human nature, that, although
undoubtedly we may speak it with the pride of England that we have
better institutions for the preservation of the rights of men than any
other country in the world, yet I will venture to say that no country
has wholly meant, or ever meant, to give this power.

As it cannot exist in right on any rational and solid principles of
government, so neither does it exist in the constitution of Oriental
governments,--and I do insist upon it, that Oriental governments know
nothing of arbitrary power. I have taken as much pains as I could to
examine into the constitutions of them. I have been endeavoring to
inform myself at all times on this subject; of late my duty has led me
to a more minute inspection of them; and I do challenge the whole race
of man to show me any of the Oriental governors claiming to themselves a
right to act by arbitrary will.

The greatest part of Asia is under Mahomedan governments. To name a
Mahomedan government is to name a government by law. It is a law
enforced by stronger sanctions than any law that can bind a Christian
sovereign. Their law is believed to be given by God; and it has the
double sanction of law and of religion, with which the prince is no more
authorized to dispense than any one else. And if any man will produce
the Koran to me, and will but show me one text in it that authorizes in
any degree an arbitrary power in the government, I will confess that I
have read that book, and been conversant in the affairs of Asia, in
vain. There is not such a syllable in it; but, on the contrary, against
oppressors by name every letter of that law is fulminated. There are
interpreters established throughout all Asia to explain that law, an
order of priesthood, whom they call _men of the law_. These men are
conservators of the law; and to enable them to preserve it in its
perfection, they are secured from the resentment of the sovereign: for
he cannot touch them. Even their kings are not always vested with a real
supreme power, but the government is in some degree republican.