knowledge, which I will not now particularize, as I hope that with
the assistance of the Resident they may be in part corrected: one,
however, I must mention, because it has been verified by my own
observation, and is of that kind which reflects an unmerited
reproach on our general and national character. When I was at Buxar,
the Resident at my desire enjoined the Naib to appoint creditable
people to every town through which our route lay, to persuade and
encourage the inhabitants to remain in their houses, promising to
give them guards as I approached, and they required it for their
protection; and that he might perceive how earnest I was for his
observance of this precaution, (which I am certain was faithfully
delivered,) I repeated it to him in person, and dismissed him, that
he might precede me for that purpose: but, to my great
disappointment, I found every place through which I passed
abandoned; nor had there been a man left in any of them for their
protection. I am sorry to add, that, from Buxar to the opposite
boundary, I have seen nothing but the traces of complete devastation
in every village, whether caused by the followers of the troops
which have lately passed, for their natural relief, (and I know not
whether my own may not have had their share,) or from the
apprehension of the inhabitants left to themselves, and of
themselves deserting their houses. I wish to acquit my own
countrymen of the blame of these unfavorable appearances, and in my
own heart I do acquit them: for at one encampment, near a large
village called Derrara, in the purgunnah of Zemaneea, a crowd of
people came to me, complaining that their former aumil, who was a
native of the place, and had long been established in authority over
them, and whose custom it had been, whenever any troops passed, to
remain in person on the spot for their protection, having been
removed, the new aumil, on the approach of any military detachment,
himself first fled from the place, and the inhabitants, having no
one to whom they could apply for redress, or for the representation
of their grievances, and being thus remediless, fled also; so that
their houses and effects became a prey to any person who chose to
plunder them. The general conclusion appeared to me an inevitable
consequence from such a state of facts,--and my own senses bore
testimony to it in this specific instance; nor do I know how it is
possible for any officer commanding a military party, how attentive
soever he may be to the discipline and forbearance of his people,
to prevent disorders, when there is neither opposition to hinder nor
evidence to detect them. These and many other irregularities I
impute solely to the Naib; and I think it my duty to recommend his
instant removal. I would myself have dismissed him, had the control
of this province come within the line of my powers, and have
established such regulations and checks as would have been most
likely to prevent the like irregularities. I have said checks,
because, unless there is some visible influence, and a powerful and
able one, impended over the head of the manager, no system can
avail. The next appointed may prove, from some defect, as unfit for
the office as the present; for the choice is limited to few, without
experience to guide it. The first was of my own nomination; his
merits and qualifications stood in equal balance with my knowledge
of those who might have been the candidates for the office; but he
was the father of the Rajah, and the affinity sunk the scale wholly
in his favor: for who could be so fit to be intrusted with the
charge of his son's interest, and the new credit of the rising
family? He deceived my expectations. Another was recommended by the
Resident, and at my instance the board appointed him. This was
Jagher Deo Seo, the present Naib. I knew him not, and the other
members of the board as little. While Mr. Markham remained in
office, of whom, as his immediate patron, he may have stood in awe,
I am told that he restrained his natural disposition, which has been
described to me as rapacious, unfeeling, haughty, and to an extreme
vindictive.
"I cannot avoid remarking, that, excepting the city of Benares
itself, the province depending upon it is in effect without a
government, the Naib exercising only a dependent jurisdiction
without a principal. The Rajah is without authority, and even his
name disused in the official instruments issued or taken by the
manager. The representation of his situation shall be the subject of
another letter; I have made this already too long, and shall confine
it to the single subject for the communication of which it was
begun. This permit me to recapitulate. The administration of the
province is misconducted, and the people oppressed; trade
discouraged, and the revenue, though said to be exceeded in the
actual collections by many lacs, (for I have a minute account of it,
which states the net amount, including jaghires, as something more
than fifty-one lacs,) in danger of a rapid decline, from the violent
appropriation of its means; the Naib or manager is unfit for his
office; a new manager is required, and a system of official
control,--in a word, a constitution: for neither can the board
extend its superintending powers to a district so remote from its
observation, nor has it delegated that authority to the Resident,
who is merely the representative of government, and the receiver of
its revenue in the last process of it; nor, indeed, would it be
possible to render him wholly so, for reasons which I may hereafter
detail."
My Lords, you have now heard--not from the Managers, not from records of
office, not from witnesses at your bar, but from the prisoner
himself--the state of the country of Benares, from the time that Mr.
Hastings and his delegated Residents had taken the management of it. My
Lords, it is a proof, beyond all other proof, of the melancholy state of
the country, in which, by attempting to exercise usurped and arbitrary
power, all power and all authority become extinguished, complete anarchy
takes place, and nothing of government appears but the means of robbing
and ravaging, with an utter indisposition to take one step for the
protection of the people.
Think, my Lords, what a triumphal progress it was for a British
governor, from one extremity of the province to the other, (for so he
has stated it,) to be pursued by the cries of an oppressed and ruined
people, where they dared to appear before him,--and when they did not
dare to appear, flying from every place, even the very magistrates being
the first to fly! Think, my Lords, that, when these unhappy people saw
the appearance of a British soldier, they fled as from a pestilence; and
then think, that these were the people who labored in the manner which
you have just heard, who dug their own wells, whose country would not
produce anything but from the indefatigable industry of its inhabitants;
and that such a meritorious, such an industrious people, should be
subjected to such a cursed anarchy under pretence of revenue, to such a
cursed tyranny under the pretence of government!
"But Jagher Deo Seo was unfit for his office."--"How dared you to
appoint a man unfit for his office?"--"Oh, it signified little, without
their having a constitution."--"Why did you destroy the official
constitution that existed before? How dared you to destroy those
establishments which enabled the people to dig wells and to cultivate
the country like a garden, and then to leave the whole in the hands of
your arbitrary and wicked Residents and their instruments, chosen
without the least idea of government and without the least idea of
protection?"
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the
credit of human reason, that men who are not in some degree mad are
never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. The human faculties
and reason are in such cases deranged; and therefore this man has been
dragged by the just vengeance of Providence to make his own madness the
discoverer of his own wicked, perfidious, and cursed machinations in
that devoted country.
Think, my Lords, of what he says respecting the military. He says there
is no restraining them,--that they pillage the country wherever they go.
But had not Mr. Hastings himself just before encouraged the military to
pillage the country? Did he not make the people's resistance, when the
soldiers attempted to pillage them, one of the crimes of Cheyt Sing? And
who would dare to obstruct the military in their abominable ravages,
when they knew that one of the articles of Cheyt Sing's impeachment was
his having suffered the people of the country, when plundered by these
wicked soldiers, to return injury for injury and blow for blow? When
they saw, I say, that these were the things for which Cheyt Sing was
sacrificed, there was manifestly nothing left for them but
flight.--What! fly from a Governor-General? You would expect he was
bearing to the country, upon his balmy and healing wings, the cure of
all its disorders and of all its distress. No: they knew him too well;
they knew him to be the destroyer of the country; they knew him to be
the destroyer of their sovereign, the destroyer of the persons whom he
had appointed to govern under him; they knew that neither governor,
sub-governor, nor subject could enjoy a moment's security while he
possessed supreme power. This was the state of the country; and this the
Commons of England call upon your Lordships to avenge.
Let us now see what is next done by the prisoner at your bar. He is
satisfied with simply removing from his office Jagher Deo Seo, who is
accused by him of all these corruptions and oppressions. The other poor,
unfortunate man, who was not even accused of malversations in such a
degree, and against whom not one of the accusations of oppression was
regularly proved, but who had, in Mr. Hastings's eye, the one
unpardonable fault of not having been made richer by his crimes, was
twice imprisoned, and finally perished in prison. But we have never
heard one word of the imprisonment of Jagher Deo Seo, who, I believe,
after some mock inquiry, was acquitted.
Here, my Lords, I must beg you to recollect Mr. Hastings's proceeding
with Gunga Govind Sing, and to contrast his conduct towards these two
peculators with his proceeding towards Durbege Sing. Such a comparison
will let your Lordships into the secret of one of the prisoner's motives
of conduct upon such occasions. When you will find a man pillaging and
desolating a country, in the manner Jagher Deo Seo is described by Mr.
Hastings to have done, but who takes care to secure to himself the
spoil, you will likewise find that such a man is safe, secure,
unpunished. Your Lordships will recollect the desolation of Dinagepore.
You will recollect that the rapacious Gunga Govind Sing, (the coadjutor
of Mr. Hastings in peculation,) out of 80,000_l._ which he had received
on the Company's account, retained 40,000_l._ for his own use, and that,
instead of being turned out of his employment and treated with rigor and
cruelty, he was elevated in Mr. Hastings's grace and favor, and never
called upon for the restoration of a penny. Observe, my Lords, the
difference in his treatment of men who have wealth to purchase impunity,
or who have secrets to reveal, and of another who has no such merit, and
is poor and insolvent.
We have shown your Lordships the effects of Mr. Hastings's government
upon the country and its inhabitants; and although I have before
suggested to you some of its effects upon the army of the Company, I
will now call your attention to a few other observations on that
subject. Your Lordships will, in the first place, be pleased to attend
to the character which he gives of this army. You have heard what he
tells you of the state of the country in which it was stationed, and of
the terror which it struck into the inhabitants. The appearance of an
English soldier was enough to strike the country people with affright
and dismay: they everywhere, he tells you, fled before them. And yet
they are the officers of this very army who are brought here as
witnesses to express the general satisfaction of the people of India. To
be sure, a man who never calls Englishmen to an account for any robbery
or injury whatever, who acquits them, upon their good intentions,
without any inquiry, will in return for this indemnity have their good
words. We are not surprised to find them coming with emulation to your
bar to declare him possessed of all virtues, and that nobody has or can
have a right to complain of him. But we, my Lords, protest against these
indemnities; we protest against their good words; we protest against
their testimonials; and we insist upon your Lordships trying him, not
upon what this or that officer says of his good conduct, but upon the
proved result of the actions tried before you. Without ascribing,
perhaps, much guilt to men who must naturally wish to favor the person
who covers their excesses, who suffers their fortunes to be made, you
will know what value to set upon their testimony. The Commons look on
those testimonies with the greatest slight, and they consider as nothing
all evidence given by persons who are interested in the very
cause,--persons who derive their fortunes from the ruin of the very
people of the country, and who have divided the spoils with the man whom
we accuse. Undoubtedly these officers will give him their good word.
Undoubtedly the Residents will give him their good word. Mr. Markham,
and Mr. Benn, and Mr. Fowke, if he had been called, every servant of the
Company, except some few, will give him the same good word, every one of
them; because, my Lords, they have made their fortunes under him, and
their conduct has not been inquired into.
But to return to the observations we were making upon the ruinous
effects in general of the successive governments which had been
established at Benares by the prisoner at your bar. These effects, he
would have you believe, arose from the want of a constitution. Why, I
again ask, did he destroy the constitution which he found established
there, or suffer it to be destroyed? But he had actually authorized Mr.
Markham to make a new, a regular, an official constitution. Did Mr.
Markham make it? No: though he professed to do it; it never was done:
and so far from there being any regular, able, efficient constitution,
you see there was an absolute and complete anarchy in the country. The
native inhabitants, deprived of their ancient government, were so far
from looking up to their new masters for protection, that, the moment
they saw the face of a soldier or of a British person in authority, they
fled in dismay, and thought it more eligible to abandon their houses to
robbery than to remain exposed to the tyranny of a British governor. Is
this what they call British dominion? Will you sanction by your judicial
authority transactions done in direct defiance of your legislative
authority? Are they so injuriously mad as to suppose your Lordships can
be corrupted to betray in your judicial capacity (the most sacred of the
two) what you have ordained in your legislative character?
My Lords, I am next to remind you what this man has had the insolence
and audacity to state at your bar. "In fact," says he, "I can adduce
very many gentlemen now in London to confirm my assertions, that the
countries of Benares and Gazipore were never within the memory of
Englishmen so well protected, so peaceably governed, or more
industriously cultivated than at the present moment."
Your Lordships know that this report of Mr. Hastings which has been read
was made in the year 1784. Your Lordships know that no step was taken,
while Mr. Hastings remained in India, for the regulation and management
of the country. If there was, let it be shown. There was no constitution
framed, nor any other means taken for the settlement of the country,
except the appointment of Ajeet Sing in the room of Durbege Sing, to
reign like him, and like him to be turned out. Mr. Hastings left India
in February, 1785; he arrived here, as I believe, in June or July
following. Our proceedings against him commenced in the sessions of
1786; and this defence was given, I believe, in the year 1787. Yet at
that time, when he could hardly have received any account from India, he
was ready, he says, to produce the evidence (and no doubt might have
done so) of many gentlemen whose depositions would have directly
contradicted what he had himself deposed of the state in which he, so
short a time before, had left the country. Your Lordships cannot suppose
that it could have recovered its prosperity within that time. We know
you may destroy that in a day which will take up years to build; we know
a tyrant can in a moment ruin and oppress: but you cannot restore the
dead to life; you cannot in a moment restore fields to cultivation; you
cannot, as you please, make the people in a moment restore old or dig
new wells: and yet Mr. Hastings has dared to say to the Commons that he
would produce persons to refute the account which we had fresh from
himself. We will, however, undertake to show you that the direct
contrary was the fact.
I will first refer you to Mr. Barlow's account of the state of trade.
Your Lordships will there find a full exposure of the total falsehood of
the prisoner's assertions. You will find that Mr. Hastings himself had
been obliged to give orders for the change of almost every one of the
regulations he had made. Your Lordships may there see the madness and
folly of tyranny attempting to regulate trade. In the printed Minutes,
page 2830, your Lordships will see how completely Mr. Hastings had
ruined the trade of the country. You will find, that, wherever he
pretended to redress the grievances which he had occasioned, he did not
take care to have any one part of his pretended redress executed. When
you consider the anarchy in which he states the country through which he
passed to have been, you may easily conceive that regulations for the
protection of trade, without the means of enforcing them, must be
nugatory.
Mr. Barlow was sent, in the years 1786 and 1787, to examine into the
state of the country. He has stated the effect of all those regulations,
which Mr. Hastings has had the assurance to represent here as prodigies
of wisdom. At the very time when our charge was brought to this House,
(it is a remarkable period, and we desire your Lordships to advert to
it,) at that time, I do not know whether it was not on the very same day
that we brought our charge to your bar, Mr. Duncan was sent by Lord
Cornwallis to examine into the state of that province. Now, my Lords,
you have Mr. Duncan's report before you, and you will judge whether or
not, by any regulation which Mr. Hastings had made, or whether through
_any_ means used by him, that country had recovered or was recovering.
Your Lordships will there find other proofs of the audacious falsehood
of his representation, that all which he had done had operated on the
minds of the inhabitants very greatly in favor of British integrity and
good government. Mr. Duncan's report will not only enable you to decide
upon what he has said himself, it will likewise enable you to judge of
the credit which is due to the gentlemen now in London whom he can
produce to confirm his assertions, that the country of Benares and
Gazipore were never, within the memory of Englishmen, so well protected
and cultivated as at the present moment.
Instead, therefore, of a speech from me, you shall hear what the country
says itself, by the report of the last commissioner who was sent to
examine it by Lord Cornwallis. The perfect credibility of his testimony
Mr. Hastings has established out of Lord Cornwallis's mouth, who, being
asked the character of Mr. Jonathan Duncan, has declared that there is
nothing he can report of the state of the country to which you ought not
to give credit. Your Lordships will now see how deep the wounds are
which tyranny and arbitrary power must make in a country where their
existence is suffered; and you will be pleased to observe that this
statement was made at a time when Mr. Hastings was amusing us with _his_
account of Benares.
_Extract of the Proceedings of the Resident at Benares, under date
the 16th February, 1788, at the Purgunnah of Gurrah Dehmah, &c.
Printed Minutes, page 2610._
"The Resident, having arrived in this purgunnah of Gurrah Dehmah
from that of Mohammedabad, is very sorry to observe that it seems
about one third at least uncultivated, owing to the mismanagement of
the few last years. The Rajah, however, promises that it shall be by
next year in a complete state of cultivation; and Tobarck Hossaine,
his aumeen, aumil, or agent, professes his confidence of the same
happy effects, saying, that he has already brought a great
proportion of the land, that lay fallow when he came into the
purgunnah in the beginning of the year, into cultivation, and that,
it being equally the Rajah's directions and his own wish, he does
not doubt of being successful in regard to the remaining part of
the waste land."
_Report, dated the 18th of February, at the Purgunnah of Bulleah._
"The Resident, having come yesterday into this purgunnah from that
of Gurrah Dehmah, finds its appearance much superior to that
purgunnah in point of cultivation; yet it is on the decline so for
that its collectible jumma will not be so much this year as it was
last, notwithstanding all the efforts of Reazel Husn, the agent of
Khulb Ali Khân, who has farmed this purgunnah upon a three years'
lease, (of which the present is the last,) during which his, that
is, the head farmer's, management cannot be applauded, as the funds
of the purgunnah are very considerably declined in his hands:
indeed, Reazel Husn declares that this year there was little or no
_khereef_, or first harvest, in the purgunnah, and that it has been
merely by the greatest exertions that he has prevailed on the ryots
to cultivate the _rubby_ crop, which is now on the ground and seems
plentiful."
_Report, dated the 20th of February, at the Purgunnah of Khereed._
"The Resident, having this day come into the purgunnah of Khereed,
finds that part of it laying between the frontiers of Bulleah, the
present station, and Bansdeah, (which is one of the _tuppahs_, or
subdivisions, of Khereed,) exceedingly wasted and uncultivated. The
said tuppah is sub-farmed by Gobind Ram from Kulub Ali Bey, and
Gobind Ram has again under-rented it to the zemindars."
_Report, dated the 23d February, at the Purgunnah of Sekunderpoor._
"The Resident is set out for Sekunderpoor, and is sorry to observe,
that, for about six or seven coss that he had further to pass
through the purgunnah of Kereebs, the whole appeared one continued
waste, as far as the eye could reach, on both sides of the road. The
purgunnah Sekunderpoor, beginning about a coss before he reached the
village, an old fort of that name, appeared to a little more
advantage; but even here the crops seem very scanty, and the ground
more than half fallow."
_Extract of the Proceedings of the Resident at Benares, under date
the 26th February, at the Purgunnah of Sekunderpoor._
"The Resident now leaves Sekunderpoor to proceed to Nurgurah, the
head cutchery of the purgunnah. He is sorry to observe, that, during
the whole way between these two places, which are at the distance of
six coss, or twelve miles, from each other, not above twenty fields
of cultivated ground are to be seen; all the rest being, as far as
the eye can reach, except just in the vicinity of Nuggeha, one
general waste of long grass, with here and there some straggling
jungly trees. This falling off in the cultivation is said to have
happened in the course of but a few years,--that is, since the late
Rajah's expulsion."
Your Lordships will observe, the date of the ruin of this country is the
expulsion of Cheyt Sing.
_Extract of the Proceedings of the Resident at Benares, under date
the 27th February, at the Purgunnah Sekunderpoor._
"The Resident meant to have proceeded from this place to Cossimabad;
but understanding that the village of Ressenda, the capital of the
purgunnah of Susknesser, is situated at three coss' distance, and
that many _rahdarry_ collections are there exacted, the zemindars
and ryots being, it seems, all one body of Rajpoots, who affect to
hold themselves in some sort independent of the Rajah's government,
paying only a _mokurrery_, or fixed jumma, (which it may be supposed
is not overrated,) and managing their interior concerns as they
think fit, the Resident thought it proper on this report to deviate
a little from his intended route, by proceeding this day to
Ressenda, where he accordingly arrived in the afternoon; and the
remaining part of the country near the road through Sekunderpoor,
from Nuggurha to Seundah, appearing nearly equally waste with the
former part, as already noticed in the proceedings of the 26th
instant.