castle, which in the happy days of the Carnatic was without some hoard
of treasure, by which the governors were enabled to combat with the
irregularity of the seasons, and to resist or to buy off the invasion of
an enemy. In all the cities were multitudes of merchants and bankers,
for all occasions of moneyed assistance; and on the other hand, the
native princes were in condition to obtain credit from them. The
manufacturer was paid by the return of commodities, or by imported
money, and not, as at present, in the taxes that had been originally
exacted from his industry. In aid of casual distress, the country was
full of choultries, which were inns and hospitals, where the traveller
and the poor were relieved. All ranks of people had their place in the
public concern, and their share in the common stock and common
prosperity. But _the chartered rights of men_, and the right which it
was thought proper to set up in the Nabob of Arcot, introduced a new
system. It was their policy to consider hoards of money as crimes,--to
regard moderate rents as frauds on the sovereign,--and to view, in the
lesser princes, any claim of exemption from more than settled tribute as
an act of rebellion. Accordingly, all the castles were, one after the
other, plundered and destroyed; the native princes were expelled; the
hospitals fell to ruin; the reservoirs of water went to decay; the
merchants, bankers, and manufacturers disappeared; and sterility,
indigence, and depopulation overspread the face of these once
flourishing provinces.
The Company was very early sensible of these mischiefs, and of their
true cause. They gave precise orders, "that the native princes, called
polygars, should _not be extirpated_." "The rebellion" (so they choose
to call it) "of the polygars may, they fear, _with, too much justice_,
be attributed to the maladministration of the Nabob's collectors." "They
observe with concern, that their troops have been put to _disagreeable_
services." They might have used a stronger expression without
impropriety. But they make amends in another place. Speaking of the
polygars, the Directors say that "it was repugnant to humanity to
_force_ them to such dreadful extremities _as they underwent";_ that
some examples of severity _might_ be necessary, "when they fell into
the Nabob's hands," _and not by the destruction of the country_; "that
_they fear_ his government is _none of the mildest_, and that there is
_great oppression_ in collecting his revenues." They state, that the
wars in which he has involved the Carnatic had been a cause of its
distresses; "that those distresses have been certainly great, but those
by _the Nabob's oppressions_ they believe _to be greater than all_."
Pray, Sir, attend to the reason for their opinion that the government of
this their instrument is more calamitous to the country than the ravages
of war:--Because, say they, his oppressions are "_without intermission_;
the others are temporary;--by all which _oppressions_ we believe the
Nabob has great wealth in store." From this store neither he nor they
could derive any advantage whatsoever, upon the invasion of Hyder Ali,
in the hour of their greatest calamity and dismay.
It is now proper to compare these declarations with the Company's
conduct. The principal reason which they assigned against the
_extirpation_ of the polygars was, that the _weavers_ were protected in
their fortresses. They might have added, that the Company itself, which
stung them to death, had been warmed in the bosom of these unfortunate
princes: for, on the taking of Madras by the French, it was in their
hospitable pollams that most of the inhabitants found refuge and
protection. But notwithstanding all these orders, reasons, and
declarations, they at length gave an indirect sanction, and permitted
the use of a very direct and irresistible force, to measures which they
had over and over again declared to be false policy, cruel, inhuman, and
oppressive. Having, however, forgot all attention to the princes and the
people, they remembered that they had some sort of interest in the
trade of the country; and it is matter of curiosity to observe the
protection which they afforded to this their natural object.
Full of anxious cares on this head, they direct, "that, in reducing the
polygars, they [their servants] were to be _cautious_ not to deprive the
_weavers and manufacturers_ of the protection they often met with in the
strongholds of the polygar countries"; and they write to their
instrument, the Nabob of Arcot, concerning these poor people in a most
pathetic strain. "We _entreat_ your Excellency," (say they,) "in
particular, to make the manufacturers the object of your _tenderest
care;_ particularly when you _root out_ the polygars, you do not deprive
the _weavers of the protection they enjoyed under them_." When they root
out the protectors in favor of the oppressor, they show themselves
religiously cautious of the rights of the protected. When they extirpate
the shepherd and the shepherd's dog, they piously recommend the helpless
flock to the mercy, and even to the _tenderest care,_ of the wolf. This
is the uniform strain of their policy,--strictly forbidding, and at the
same time strenuously encouraging and enforcing, every measure that can
ruin and desolate the country committed to their charge. After giving
the Company's idea of the government of this their instrument, it may
appear singular, but it is perfectly consistent with their system, that,
besides wasting for him, at two different times, the most exquisite spot
upon the earth, Tanjore, and all the adjacent countries, they have even
voluntarily put their own territory, that is, a large and fine country
adjacent to Madras, called their jaghire, wholly out of their
protection,--and have continued to farm their subjects, and their
duties towards these subjects, to that very Nabob whom they themselves
constantly represent as an habitual oppressor and a relentless tyrant.
This they have done without any pretence of ignorance of the objects of
oppression for which this prince has thought fit to become their renter;
for he has again and again told them that it is for the sole purpose of
exercising authority he holds the jaghire lands; and he affirms (and I
believe with truth) that he pays more for that territory than the
revenues yield. This deficiency he must make up from his other
territories; and thus, in order to furnish the means of oppressing one
part of the Carnatic, he is led to oppress all the rest.
The House perceives that the livery of the Company's government is
uniform. I have described the condition of the countries indirectly, but
most substantially, under the Company's authority. And now I ask,
whether, with this map of misgovernment before me, I can suppose myself
bound by my vote to continue, upon any principles of pretended public
faith, the management of these countries in those hands. If I kept such
a faith (which in reality is no better than a _fides latronum_) with
what is called the Company, I must break the faith, the covenant, the
solemn, original, indispensable oath, in which I am bound, by the
eternal frame and constitution of things, to the whole human race.
As I have dwelt so long on these who are indirectly under the Company's
administration, I will endeavor to be a little shorter upon the
countries immediately under this charter-government. These are the
Bengal provinces. The condition of these provinces is pretty fully
detailed in the Sixth and Ninth Reports, and in their Appendixes. I
will select only such principles and instances as are broad and general.
To your own thoughts I shall leave it to furnish the detail of
oppressions involved in them. I shall state to you, as shortly as I am
able, the conduct of the Company:--1st, towards the landed
interests;--next, the commercial interests;--3rdly, the native
government;--and lastly, to their own government.
Bengal, and the provinces that are united to it, are larger than the
kingdom of France, and once contained, as France does contain, a great
and independent landed interest, composed of princes, of great lords, of
a numerous nobility and gentry, of freeholders, of lower tenants, of
religious communities, and public foundations. So early as 1769, the
Company's servants perceived the decay into which these provinces had
fallen under English administration, and they made a strong
representation upon this decay, and what they apprehended to be the
causes of it. Soon after this representation, Mr. Hastings became
President of Bengal. Instead of administering a remedy to this
melancholy disorder, upon the heels of a dreadful famine, in the year
1772, the succor which the new President and the Council lent to this
afflicted nation was--shall I be believed in relating it?--the landed
interest of a whole kingdom, of a kingdom to be compared to France, was
set up to public auction! They set up (Mr. Hastings set up) the whole
nobility, gentry, and freeholders to the highest bidder. No preference
was given to the ancient proprietors. They must bid against every
usurer, every temporary adventurer, every jobber and schemer, every
servant of every European,--or they were obliged to content themselves,
in lieu of their extensive domains, with their house, and such a
pension as the state auctioneers thought fit to assign. In this general
calamity, several of the first nobility thought (and in all appearance
justly) that they had better submit to the necessity of this pension,
than continue, under the name of zemindars, the objects and instruments
of a system by which they ruined their tenants and were ruined
themselves. Another reform has since come upon the back of the first;
and a pension having been assigned to these unhappy persons, in lieu of
their hereditary lands, a new scheme of economy has taken place, and
deprived them of that pension.
The menial servants of Englishmen, persons (to use the emphatical phrase
of a ruined and patient Eastern chief) "_whose fathers they would not
have set with the dogs of their flock_" entered into their patrimonial
lands. Mr. Hastings's banian was, after this auction, found possessed of
territories yielding a rent of one hundred and forty thousand pounds a
year.
Such an universal proscription, upon any pretence, has few examples.
Such a proscription, without even a pretence of delinquency, has none.
It stands by itself. It stands as a monument to astonish the
imagination, to confound the reason of mankind. I confess to you, when I
first came to know this business in its true nature and extent, my
surprise did a little suspend my indignation. I was in a manner
stupefied by the desperate boldness of a few obscure young men, who,
having obtained, by ways which they could not comprehend, a power of
which they saw neither the purposes nor the limits, tossed about,
subverted, and tore to pieces, as if it were in the gambols of a boyish
unluckiness and malice, the most established rights, and the most
ancient and most revered institutions, of ages and nations. Sir, I will
not now trouble you with any detail with regard to what they have since
done with these same lands and landholders, only to inform you that
nothing has been suffered to settle for two seasons together upon any
basis, and that the levity and inconstancy of these mock legislators
were not the least afflicting parts of the oppressions suffered under
their usurpation; nor will anything give stability to the property of
the natives, but an administration in England at once protecting and
stable. The country sustains, almost every year, the miseries of a
revolution. At present, all is uncertainty, misery, and confusion. There
is to be found through these vast regions no longer one landed man who
is a resource for voluntary aid or an object for particular rapine. Some
of them were not long since great princes; they possessed treasures,
they levied armies. There was a zemindar in Bengal, (I forget his name,)
that, on the threat of an invasion, supplied the subah of these
provinces with the loan of a million sterling. The family at this day
wants credit for a breakfast at the bazaar.
I shall now say a word or two on the Company's care of the commercial
interest of those kingdoms. As it appears in the Reports that persons in
the highest stations in Bengal have adopted, as a fixed plan of policy,
the destruction of all intermediate dealers between the Company and the
manufacturer, native merchants have disappeared of course. The spoil of
the revenues is the sole capital which purchases the produce and
manufactures, and through three or four foreign companies transmits the
official gains of individuals to Europe. No other commerce has an
existence in Bengal. The transport of its plunder is the only traffic of
the country. I wish to refer you to the Appendix to the Ninth Report for
a full account of the manner in which the Company have protected the
commercial interests of their dominions in the East.
As to the native government and the administration of justice, it
subsisted in a poor, tottering manner for some years. In the year 1781 a
total revolution took place in that establishment. In one of the usual
freaks of legislation of the Council of Bengal, the whole criminal
jurisdiction of these courts, called the Phoujdary Judicature, exercised
till then by the principal Mussulmen, was in one day, without notice,
without consultation with the magistrates or the people there, and
without communication with the Directors or Ministers here, totally
subverted. A new institution took place, by which this jurisdiction was
divided between certain English servants of the Company and the Gentoo
zemindars of the country, the latter of whom never petitioned for it,
nor, for aught that appears, ever desired this boon. But its natural use
was made of it: it was made a pretence for new extortions of money.
The natives had, however, one consolation in the ruin of their
judicature: they soon saw that it fared no better with the English
government itself. That, too, after destroying every other, came to its
period. This revolution may well be rated for a most daring act, even
among the extraordinary things that have been doing in Bengal since our
unhappy acquisition of the means of so much mischief.
An establishment of English government for civil justice, and for the
collection of revenue, was planned and executed by the President and
Council of Bengal, subject to the pleasure of the Directors, in the year
1772. According to this plan, the country was divided into six
districts, or provinces. In each of these was established a provincial
council, which administered the revenue; and of that council, one
member, by monthly rotation, presided in the courts of civil resort,
with an appeal to the council of the province, and thence to Calcutta.
In this system (whether in other respects good or evil) there were some
capital advantages. There was, in the very number of persons in each
provincial council, authority, communication, mutual check, and control.
They were obliged, on their minutes of consultation, to enter their
reasons and dissents; so that a man of diligence, of research, and
tolerable sagacity, sitting in London, might, from these materials, be
enabled to form some judgment of the spirit of what was going on on the
furthest banks of the Ganges and Burrampooter.
The Court of Directors so far ratified this establishment, (which was
consonant enough to their general plan of government,) that they gave
precise orders that no alteration should be made in it without their
consent. So far from being apprised of any design against this
constitution, they had reason to conceive that on trial it had been more
and more approved by their Council-General, at least by the
Governor-General, who had planned it. At the time of the revolution, the
Council-General was nominally in two persons, virtually in one. At that
time measures of an arduous and critical nature ought to have been
forborne, even if, to the fullest council, this specific measure had
not been prohibited by the superior authority. It was in this very
situation that one man had the hardiness to conceive and the temerity to
execute a total revolution in the form and the persons composing the
government of a great kingdom. Without any previous step, at one stroke,
the whole constitution, of Bengal, civil and criminal, was swept away.
The counsellors were recalled from their provinces; upwards of fifty of
the principal officers of government were turned out of employ, and
rendered dependent on Mr. Hastings for their immediate subsistence, and
for all hope of future provision. The chief of each council, and one
European collector of revenue, was left in each province.
But here, Sir, you may imagine a new government, of some permanent
description, was established in the place of that which had been thus
suddenly overturned. No such thing. Lest these chiefs, without councils,
should be conceived to form the ground-plan of some future government,
it was publicly declared that their continuance was only temporary and
permissive. The whole subordinate British administration of revenue was
then vested in a committee in Calcutta, all creatures of the
Governor-General; and the provincial management, under the permissive
chief, was delivered over to native officers.
But that the revolution and the purposes of the revolution might be
complete, to this committee were delegated, not only the functions of
all the inferior, but, what will surprise the House, those of the
supreme administration of revenue also. Hitherto the Governor-General
and Council had, in their revenue department, administered the finances
of those kingdoms. By the new scheme they are delegated to this
committee, who are only to report their proceedings for approbation.
The key to the whole transaction is given in one of the instructions to
the committee,--"that it is not necessary that they should enter
dissents." By this means the ancient plan of the Company's
administration was destroyed; but the plan of concealment was perfected.
To that moment the accounts of the revenues were tolerably clear,--or at
least means were furnished for inquiries, by which they might be
rendered satisfactory. In the obscure and silent gulf of this committee
everything is now buried. The thickest shades of night surround all
their transactions. No effectual means of detecting fraud,
mismanagement, or misrepresentation exist. The Directors, who have dared
to talk with such confidence on their revenues, know nothing about them.
What used to fill volumes is now comprised under a few dry heads on a
sheet of paper. The natives, a people habitually made to concealment,
are the chief managers of the revenue throughout the provinces. I mean
by natives such wretches as your rulers select out of them as most
fitted for their purposes. As a proper keystone to bind the arch, a
native, one Gunga Govind Sing, a man turned out of his employment by Sir
John Clavering for malversation in office, is made the corresponding
secretary, and, indeed, the great moving principle of their new board.
As the whole revenue and civil administration was thus subverted, and a
clandestine government substituted in the place of it, the judicial
institution underwent a like revolution. In 1772 there had been six
courts, formed out of the six provincial councils. Eighteen new ones
are appointed in their place, with each a judge, taken from the _junior_
servants of the Company. To maintain these eighteen courts, a tax is
levied on the sums in litigation, of two and one half per cent on the
great, and of five per cent on the less. This money is all drawn from
the provinces to Calcutta. The chief justice (the same who stays in
defiance of a vote of this House, and of his Majesty's recall) is
appointed at once the treasurer and disposer of these taxes, levied
without any sort of authority from the Company, from the Crown, or from
Parliament.
In effect, Sir, every legal, regular authority, in matters of revenue,
of political administration, of criminal law, of civil law, in many of
the most essential parts of military discipline, is laid level with the
ground; and an oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, rapacious,
and peculating despotism, with a direct disavowal of obedience to any
authority at home, and without any fixed maxim, principle, or rule of
proceeding to guide them in India, is at present the state of your
charter-government over great kingdoms.
As the Company has made this use of their trust, I should ill discharge
mine, if I refused to give my most cheerful vote for the redress of
these abuses, by putting the affairs of so large and valuable a part of
the interests of this nation and of mankind into some steady hands,
possessing the confidence and assured of the support of this House,
until they can be restored to regularity, order, and consistency.
I have touched the heads of some of the grievances of the people and the
abuses of government. But I hope and trust you will give me credit, when
I faithfully assure you that I have not mentioned one fourth part of
what has come to my knowledge in your committee; and further, I have
full reason to believe that not one fourth part of the abuses are come
to my knowledge, by that or by any other means. Pray consider what I
have said only as an index to direct you in your inquiries.
If this, then, Sir, has been the use made of the trust of political
powers, internal and external, given by you in the charter, the next
thing to be seen is the conduct of the Company with regard to the
commercial trust. And here I will make a fair offer:--If it can be
proved that they have acted wisely, prudently, and frugally, as
merchants, I shall pass by the whole mass of their enormities as
statesmen. That they have not done this their present condition is proof
sufficient. Their distresses are said to be owing to their wars. This is
not wholly true. But if it were, is not that readiness to engage in
wars, which distinguishes them, and for which the Committee of Secrecy
has so branded their politics, founded on the falsest principles of
mercantile speculation?
The principle of buying cheap and selling dear is the first, the great
foundation of mercantile dealing. Have they ever attended to this
principle? Nay, for years have they not actually authorized in their
servants a total indifference as to the prices they were to pay?
A great deal of strictness in driving bargains for whatever we contract
is another of the principles of mercantile policy. Try the Company by
that test. Look at the contracts that are made for them. Is the Company
so much as a good commissary to their own armies? I engage to select for
you, out of the innumerable mass of their dealings, all conducted very
nearly alike, one contract only the excessive profits on which during a
short term would pay the whole of their year's dividend. I shall
undertake to show that upon two others the inordinate profits given,
with the losses incurred in order to secure those profits, would pay a
year's dividend more.
It is a third property of trading-men to see that their clerks do not
divert the dealings of the master to their own benefit. It was the other
day only, when their Governor and Council taxed the Company's investment
with a sum of fifty thousand pounds, as an inducement to persuade only
seven members of their Board of Trade to give their _honor_ that they
would abstain from such profits upon that investment, as they must have
violated their _oaths_, if they had made at all.
It is a fourth quality of a merchant to be exact in his accounts. What
will be thought, when you have fully before you the mode of accounting
made use of in the Treasury of Bengal? I hope you will have it soon.
With regard to one of their agencies, when it came to the material part,
the prime cost of the goods on which a commission of fifteen per cent
was allowed, to the astonishment of the factory to whom the commodities
were sent, the Accountant-General reports that he did not think himself
authorized to call for _vouchers_ relative to this and other
particulars,--because the agent was upon his _honor_ with regard to
them. A new principle of account upon honor seems to be regularly
established in their dealings and their treasury, which in reality
amounts to an entire annihilation of the principle of all accounts.
It is a fifth property of a merchant, who does not meditate a
fraudulent bankruptcy, to calculate his probable profits upon the money
he takes up to vest in business. Did the Company, when they bought goods
on bonds bearing eight per cent interest, at ten and even twenty per
cent discount, even ask themselves a question concerning the possibility
of advantage from dealing on these terms?