calumniated for the course which they have taken? Why should it ever
have been supposed that we are actuated by revenge? I answer, There are
two very sufficient causes: corruption and ignorance. The first disposes
an innumerable multitude of people to a fellow-feeling with the
prisoner. Under the shadow of his crimes thousands of fortunes have been
made; and therefore thousands of tongues are employed to justify the
means by which these fortunes were made. When they cannot deny the
facts, they attack the accusers,--they attack their conduct, they attack
their persons, they attack their language, in every possible manner. I
have said, my Lords, that ignorance is the other cause of this calumny
by which the House of Commons is assailed. Ignorance produces a
confusion of ideas concerning the decorum of life, by confounding the
rules of private society with those of public function. To talk, as we
here talk, to persons in a mixed company of men and women, would violate
the law of such societies; because they meet for the sole purpose of
social intercourse, and not for the exposure, the censure, the
punishment of crimes: to all which things private societies are
altogether incompetent. In them crimes can never be regularly stated,
proved, or refuted. The law has therefore appointed special places for
such inquiries; and if in any of those places we were to apply the
emollient language of drawing-rooms to the exposure of great crimes, it
would be as false and vicious in taste and in morals as to use the
criminatory language of this hall in drawing and assembling rooms would
be misplaced and ridiculous. Every one knows that in common society
palliating names are given to vices. Adultery in a lady is called
gallantry; the gentleman is commonly called a man of good fortune,
sometimes in French and sometimes in English. But is this the tone which
would become a person in a court of justice, calling these people to an
account for that horrible crime which destroys the basis of society?
No, my Lords, this is not the tone of such proceedings. Your Lordships
know that it is not; the Commons know that it is not; and because we
have acted on that knowledge, and stigmatized crimes with becoming
indignation, we are said to be actuated rather by revenge than justice.
If it should still be asked why we show sufficient acrimony to excite a
suspicion of being in any manner influenced by malice or a desire of
revenge, to this, my Lords, I answer, Because we would be thought to
know our duty, and to have all the world know how resolutely we are
resolved to perform it. The Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to
quarrel with the Divine Wisdom and Goodness, which has moulded up
revenge into the frame and constitution of man. He that has made us what
we are has made us at once resentful and reasonable. Instinct tells a
man that he ought to revenge an injury; reason tells him that he ought
not to be a judge in his own cause. From that moment revenge passes from
the private to the public hand; but in being transferred it is far from
being extinguished. My Lords, it is transferred as a sacred trust to be
exercised for the injured, in measure and proportion, by persons who,
feeling as he feels, are in a temper to reason better than he can
reason. Revenge is taken out of the hands of the original injured
proprietor, lest it should be carried beyond the bounds of moderation
and justice. But, my Lords, it is in its transfer exposed to a danger of
an opposite description. The delegate of vengeance may not feel the
wrong sufficiently: he may be cold and languid in the performance of his
sacred duty. It is for these reasons that good men are taught to
tremble even at the first emotions of anger and resentment for their own
particular wrongs; but they are likewise taught, if they are well
taught, to give the loosest possible rein to their resentment and
indignation, whenever their parents, their friends, their country, or
their brethren of the common family of mankind are injured. Those who
have not such feelings, under such circumstances, are base and
degenerate. These, my Lords, are the sentiments of the Commons of Great
Britain.
Lord Bacon has very well said, that "revenge is a kind of wild justice."
It is so, and without this wild austere stock there would be no justice
in the world. But when, by the skilful hand of morality and wise
jurisprudence, a foreign scion, but of the very same species, is grafted
upon it, its harsh quality becomes changed, it submits to culture, and,
laying aside its savage nature, it bears fruits and flowers, sweet to
the world, and not ungrateful even to heaven itself, to which it
elevates its exalted head. The fruit of this wild stock is revenge
regulated, but not extinguished,--revenge transferred from the suffering
party to the communion and sympathy of mankind. This is the revenge by
which we are actuated, and which we should be sorry, if the false, idle,
girlish, novel-like morality of the world should extinguish in the
breast of us who have a great public duty to perform.
This sympathetic revenge, which is condemned by clamorous imbecility, is
so far from being a vice, that it is the greatest of all possible
virtues,--a virtue which the uncorrupted judgment of mankind has in all
ages exalted to the rank of heroism. To give up all the repose and
pleasures of life, to pass sleepless nights and laborious days, and,
what is ten times more irksome to an ingenuous mind, to offer oneself to
calumny and all its herd of hissing tongues and poisoned fangs, in order
to free the world from fraudulent prevaricators, from cruel oppressors,
from robbers and tyrants, has, I say, the test of heroic virtue, and
well deserves such a distinction. The Commons, despairing to attain the
heights of this virtue, never lose sight of it for a moment. For
seventeen years they have, almost without intermission, pursued, by
every sort of inquiry, by legislative and by judicial remedy, the cure
of this Indian malady, worse ten thousand times than the leprosy which
our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if
they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial
passion, which, burning like the Vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never
suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the
injured or in denouncing the crimes of the oppressor?
My Lords, the Managers for the Commons have been actuated by this
passion; my Lords, they feel its influence at this moment; and so far
from softening either their measures or their tone, they do here, in the
presence of their Creator, of this House, and of the world, make this
solemn declaration, and nuncupate this deliberate vow: that they will
ever glow with the most determined and unextinguishable animosity
against tyranny, oppression, and peculation in all, but more
particularly as practised by this man in India; that they never will
relent, but will pursue and prosecute him and it, till they see corrupt
pride prostrate under the feet of justice. We call upon your Lordships
to join us; and we have no doubt that you will feel the same sympathy
that we feel, or (what I cannot persuade my soul to think or my mouth to
utter) you will be identified with the criminal whose crimes you excuse,
and rolled with him in all the pollution of Indian guilt, from
generation to generation. Let those who feel with me upon this occasion
join with me in this vow: if they will not, I have it all to myself.
It is not to defend ourselves that I have addressed your Lordships at
such length on this subject. No, my Lords, I have said what I considered
necessary to instruct the public upon the principles which induced the
House of Commons to persevere in this business with a generous warmth,
and in the indignant language which Nature prompts, when great crimes
are brought before men who feel as they ought to feel upon such
occasions.
* * * * *
I now proceed, my Lords, to the next recriminatory charge, which is
_delay_. I confess I am not astonished at this charge. From the first
records of human impatience down to the present time, it has been
complained that the march of violence and oppression is rapid, but that
the progress of remedial and vindictive justice, even the divine, has
almost always favored the appearance of being languid and sluggish.
Something of this is owing to the very nature and constitution of human
affairs; because, as justice is a circumspect, cautious, scrutinizing,
balancing principle, full of doubt even of itself, and fearful of doing
wrong even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its
movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with
which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey
of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the
disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular
acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and
criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and
tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like this,) if we did
not look, not to the _immediate_, not to the _retrospective_, but to the
_provident_ operation of justice. Its chief operation is in its future
example; and this turns the balance, upon the total effect, in favor of
vindictive justice, and in some measure reconciles a pious and humble
mind to this great mysterious dispensation of the world.
Upon the charge of delay in this particular cause, my Lords, I have only
to say that the business before you is of immense magnitude. The
prisoner himself says that all the acts of his life are committed in it.
With a due sense of this magnitude, we know that the investigation could
not be short to us, nor short to your Lordships; but when we are called
upon, as we have been daily, to sympathize with the prisoner in that
delay, my Lords, we must tell you that we have no sympathy with him.
Rejecting, as we have done, all false, spurious, and hypocritical
virtues, we should hold it to be the greatest of all crimes to bestow
upon the oppressors that pity which belongs to the oppressed. The
unhappy persons who are wronged, robbed, and despoiled have no remedy
but in the sympathies of mankind; and when these sympathies are suffered
to be debauched, when they are perversely carried from the victim to the
oppressor, then we commit a robbery still greater than that which was
committed by the criminal accused.
My Lords, we do think this process long; we lament it in every sense in
which it ought to be lamented; but we lament still more that the Begums
have been so long without having a just punishment inflicted upon their
spoiler. We lament that Cheyt Sing has so long been a wanderer, while
the man who drove him from his dominions is still unpunished. We are
sorry that Nobkissin has been cheated of his money for fourteen years,
without obtaining redress. These are our sympathies, my Lords; and thus
we reply to this part of the charge.
My Lords, there are some matters of fact in this charge of delay which I
must beg your Lordships will look into. On the 19th of February, 1789,
the prisoner presented a petition to your Lordships, in which he states,
after many other complaints, that a great number of his witnesses were
obliged to go to India, by which he has lost the benefit of their
testimony, and that a great number of your Lordships' body were dead, by
which he has lost the benefit of their judgment. As to the hand of God,
though some members of your House may have departed this life since the
commencement of this trial, yet the body always remains entire. The
evidence before you is the same; and therefore there is no reason to
presume that your final judgment will be affected by these afflicting
dispensations of Providence. With regard to his witnesses, I must beg to
remind your Lordships of one extraordinary fact. This prisoner has sent
to India, and obtained, not testimonies, but testimonials to his general
good behavior. He has never once applied, by commission or otherwise, to
falsify any one fact that is charged upon, him,--no, my Lords, not one.
Therefore that part of his petition which states the injury he has
received from the Commons of Great Britain is totally false and
groundless. For if he had any witnesses to examine, he would not have
failed to examine them; if he had asked for a commission to receive
their depositions, a commission would have been granted; if, without a
commission, he had brought affidavits to facts, or regular recorded
testimony, the Commons of Great Britain would never have rejected such
evidence, even though they could not have cross-examined it.
Another complaint is, that many of his witnesses were obliged to leave
England before he could make use of their evidence. My Lords, no delay
in the trial has prevented him from producing any evidence; for we were
willing that any of his witnesses should be examined at any time most
convenient to himself. If many persons connected with his measures are
gone to India, during the course of his trial, many others have returned
to England. Mr. Larkins returned. Was the prisoner willing to examine
him? No: and it was nothing but downright shame, and the presumptions
which he knew would be drawn against him, if he did not call this
witness, which finally induced him to make use of his evidence. We
examined Mr. Larkins, my Lords; we examined all the prisoner's
witnesses; your Lordships have their testimony; and down to this very
hour he has not put his hand upon any one whom he thought a proper and
essential witness to the facts, or to any part of the cause, whose
examination has been denied him; nor has he even stated that any man, if
brought here, would prove such and such points. No, not one word to this
effect has ever been stated by the prisoner.
There is, my Lords, another case, which was noticed by my honorable
fellow Manager yesterday. Mr. Belli, the confidential secretary of the
prisoner, was agent and contractor for stores; and this raised a
suspicion that the contracts were held by him for the prisoner's
advantage. Mr. Belli was here during the whole time of the trial, and
six weeks after we had closed our evidence. We had then no longer the
arrangement of the order of witnesses, and he might have called whom he
pleased. With the full knowledge of these circumstances, that witness
did he suffer to depart for India, if he did not even encourage his
departure. This, my Lords, is the kind of damage which he has suffered
by the want of witnesses, through the protraction of this trial.
But the great and serious evil which he complains of, as being
occasioned by our delay, is of so extraordinary a nature that I must
request your Lordships to examine it with extraordinary strictness and
attention. In the petition before your Lordships, the prisoner asserts
that he was under the necessity, through his counsel and solicitors, "of
collecting and collating from the voluminous records of the Company the
whole history of his public life, in order to form a complete defence to
every allegation which the Honorable House of Commons had preferred
against him, and that he has expended upwards of thirty thousand pounds
in preparing the materials of his defence."
It is evident, my Lords, that the expenditure of this thirty thousand
pounds is not properly connected with the delay of which he complains;
for he states that he had incurred this loss merely in collecting and
collating materials, previous to his defence before your Lordships. If
this were true, and your Lordships were to admit the amount as a rule
and estimate by which the aggregate of his loss could be ascertained,
the application of the rule of three to the sum and time given would
bring out an enormous expenditure in the long period which has elapsed
since the commencement of the trial,--so enormous, that, if this
monstrous load of oppression has been laid upon him by the delay of the
Commons, I believe no man living can stand up in our justification. But,
my Lords, I am to tell your Lordships some facts, into which we trust
_you_, will inquire: for this business is not in our hands, nor can we
lay it as a charge before you. Your own Journals have recorded the
document, in which the prisoner complains bitterly of the House of
Commons, and indeed of the whole judicature of the country,--a complaint
which your Lordships will do well to examine.
When we first came to a knowledge of this petition, which was not till
some time after it was presented, I happened to have conversation with a
noble lord,--I know not whether he be in his place in the House or not,
but I think I am not irregular in mentioning his name. When I mention
Lord Suffolk, I name a peer whom honor, justice, veracity, and every
virtue that distinguishes the man and the peer would claim for their
own. My Lord Suffolk told me, that, in a conversation with the late Lord
Dover, who brought the prisoner's petition into your House, he could not
refrain from expressing his astonishment at that part of the petition
which related to the expense Mr. Hastings had been at; and particularly
as a complaint had been made in the House of the enormous expense of the
prosecution, which at that time had only amounted to fourteen thousand
pounds, although the expense of the prosecutor is generally greater than
that of the defendant, and public proceedings more expensive than
private ones. Lord Dover said, that, before he presented the petition,
he had felt exactly in the same manner; but that Mr. Hastings assured
him that six thousand pounds had been paid to copying clerks in the
India House, and that from this circumstance he might judge of the other
expenses. Lord Dover was satisfied with this assurance, and presented
the petition, which otherwise he should have declined to do, on account
of the apparent enormity of the allegation it contained. At the time
when Lord Suffolk informed me of these particulars, (with a good deal of
surprise and astonishment,) I had not leisure to go down to the India
House in order to make inquiries concerning them, but I afterwards asked
the Secretary, Mr. Hudson, to whom _we_ had given a handsome reward,
what sums he had received from Mr. Hastings for his services upon this
occasion, and the answer was, "Not one shilling." Not one shilling had
Mr. Hudson received from Mr. Hastings. The clerks of the Company
informed us that the Court of Directors had ordered that every paper
which Mr. Hastings wanted should be copied for him gratuitously,--and
that, if any additional clerks were wanting for the effectual execution
of his wishes, the expense would be defrayed by the Directors. Hearing
this account, I next inquired what _expedition money_ might have been
given to the clerks: for we know something of this kind is usually done.
In reply to this question, Mr. Hudson told me that at various times they
had received in little driblets to the amount of ninety-five pounds, or
thereabouts. In this way the account stood when I made this inquiry,
which was at least half a year after the petition had been presented to
your Lordships. Thus the whole story of the six thousand pounds was
absolutely false. At that time there was not one word of truth in it,
whatever be the amount of the sums which he has paid since. Your
Lordships will now judge whether you have been abused by false
allegations or not,--allegations which could scarcely admit of being
true, and which upon the best inquiry I found absolutely false; and I
appeal to the testimony of the noble lord, who is now living, for the
truth of the account he received from the worthy and respectable peer
whose loss the nation has to bewail.
There are many other circumstances of fraud and falsehood attending this
petition, (we must call things by their proper names, my Lords,)--there
are, I say, many circumstances of fraud and falsehood. We know it to
have been impossible, at the time of presenting this petition, that this
man should have expended thirty thousand pounds in the preparation of
materials for his defence; and your Lordships' justice, together with
the credit of the House of Commons, are concerned in the discovery of
the truth. There is, indeed, an ambiguous word in the petition. He
asserts that he is _engaged_ for the payment of that sum. We asked the
clerks of the India House whether he had given them any bond, note,
security, or promise of payment: they assured us that he had not: they
will be ready to make the same assurance to your Lordships, when you
come to inquire into this matter, which before you give judgment we
desire and claim that you will do. All is concealment and mystery on the
side of the prisoner; all is open and direct with us. We are desirous
that everything which is concealed may be brought to light.
In contradiction, then, to this charge of oppression and of an attempt
to ruin his fortune, your Lordships will see that at the time when he
made this charge he had not been, in fact, nor was for a long time
after, one shilling out of pocket. But some other person had become
security to his attorney for him. What, then, are we to think of these
men of business, of these friends of Mr. Hastings, who, when he is
possessed of nothing, are contented to become responsible for thirty
thousand pounds, (was it thirty thousand pounds out of the bullock
contracts?)--responsible, I say, for this sum, in order to maintain this
suit previous to its actual commencement, and who consequently must be
so engaged for every article of expense that has followed from that time
to this?
Thus much we have thought it necessary to say upon this part of the
recriminatory charge of delay. With respect to the delay in general, we
are at present under an account to our constituents upon that subject.
To them we shall give it. We shall not give any further account of it to
your Lordships. The means belong to us as well as to you of removing
these charges. Your Lordships may inquire upon oath, as we have done in
our committee, into all the circumstances of these allegations. I hope
your Lordships will do so, and will give the Commons an opportunity of
attending and assisting at this most momentous and important inquiry.
* * * * *
The next recriminatory charge made upon us by the prisoner is, that,
merely to throw an odium upon him, we have brought forward a great deal
of irrelevant matter, which could not be proved regularly in the course
of examination at your bar, and particularly in the opening speech,
which I had the honor of making on the subject.
Your Lordships know very well that we stated in our charge that great
abuses had prevailed in India, that the Company had entered into
covenants with their servants respecting those abuses, that an act of
Parliament was made to prevent their recurrence, and that Mr. Hastings
still continued in their practice. Now, my Lords, having stated this,
nothing could be more regular, more proper, and more pertinent, than for
us to justify both the covenants required by the Company and the act
made to prevent the abuses which existed in India. We therefore went
through those abuses; we stated them, and were ready to prove every
material word and article in them. Whether they were personally relevant
or irrelevant to the prisoner we cared nothing. We were to make out from
the records of the House (which records I can produce, whenever I am
called upon for them) all these articles of abuse and grievance; and we
have stated these abuses as the grounds of the Company's provisional
covenants with its servants, and of the act of Parliament. We have
stated them under two heads, violence and corruption: for these crimes
will be found, my Lords, in almost every transaction with the native
powers; and the prisoner is directly or indirectly involved in every
part of them. If it be still objected, that these crimes are irrelevant
to the charge, we answer, that we did not introduce them as matter of
charge. We say they were not irrelevant to the proof of the preamble of
our charge, which preamble is perfectly relevant in all its parts. That
the matters stated in it are perfectly true we vouch the House of
Commons, we vouch the very persons themselves who were concerned in the
transactions. When Arabic authors are quoted, and Oriental tales told
about _flashes of lightning_ and _three seals_, we quote the very
parties themselves giving this account of their own conduct to a
committee of the House of Commons.
Your Lordships will remember that a most reverend prelate, who cannot be
named without every mark of respect and attention, conveyed a petition
to your Lordships from a gentleman concerned in one of those narratives.
Upon your Lordships' table that petition still lies. For the production
of this narrative we are not answerable to this House; your Lordships
could not make us answerable to him; but we are answerable to our own
House, we are answerable to our own honor, we are answerable to all the
Commons of Great Britain for whatever we have asserted in their name.
Accordingly, General Burgoyne, then a member of this Committee of
Managers, and myself, went down into the House of Commons; we there
restated the whole affair; we desired that an inquiry should be made
into it, at the request of the parties concerned. But, my Lords, they
have never asked for inquiry from that day to this. Whenever he or they
who are criminated (not by us, but in this volume of Reports that is in
my hand) desire it, the House will give them all possible satisfaction
upon the subject.