PART IX.

FULL VINDICATION OF FYZOOLA KHÂN BY MAJOR PALMER AND MR. HASTINGS.

I. That, in the course of the said negotiation for establishing the

rights of the Nabob Fyzoola Khân, Major Palmer aforesaid did communicate

to the Resident, Bristow, and through the said Resident to the

Council-General of Bengal, the full and direct denial of the Nabob

Fyzoola Khân to all and every of the charges made or pretended to be

made against him, as follows.

"Fyzoola Khân persists in denying the infringement on his part of any

one article in the treaty, or the neglect of any obligation which it

imposed upon him.

"He does not admit of _the improvements reported to be made_ in his

jaghire, and even asserts that the collections this year will fall short

of the original _jumma_ [or estimate] by reason of the long drought.

"He denies having exceeded the limited number of Rohillas in his

service;

"And having refused the required aid of cavalry, made by Johnson, to act

with General Goddard.

"He observes, respecting the charge of evading the Vizier's requisition

for the cavalry lately stationed at Daranagur, to be stationed at

Lucknow, that he is not bound by treaty to maintain a stationary force

for the service of the Vizier, but to supply an aid of two or three

thousand troops in time of war.

"Lastly, he asserts, that, so far from encouraging the ryots [or

peasants] of the Vizier to settle in his jaghire, it has been his

constant practice to deliver them up to the Aumil of Rohilcund, whenever

he could discover them."

II. That, in giving his opinions on the aforesaid denials of the Nabob

Fyzoola Khân, the said Palmer did not controvert any one of the

constructions of the treaty advanced by the said Nabob.

That, although the said Palmer, "from general appearances as well as

universal report, did not doubt that the jumma of the jaghire is

_greatly increased_," yet he, the said Palmer, did not intimate that it

was increased in any degree near _the amount reported_, as it was drawn

out in a regular estimate transmitted to the said Palmer expressly for

the purposes of his negotiation, which was of course by him produced to

the Nabob Fyzoola Khân, and to which specifically the denial of Fyzoola

Khân must be understood to apply.

That the said Palmer did not hint any doubt of the deficiency affirmed

by Fyzoola Khân in the collections for the current year: and,

That, if any increase of jumma did truly exist, whatever it may have

been, the said Palmer did acknowledge it "to have been solemnly

relinquished (in a private agreement) by the Vizier."

That, although the said Palmer did suppose the number of Rohillas

(employed "in ordinary occupations) in Rampoor alone to exceed that

limited by the treaty for his [Fyzoola Khân's] service," yet the said

Palmer did by no means imply that the Nabob Fyzoola Khân _maintained in

his service_ a single man more than was allowed by treaty; and by a

particular and minute account of the troops of Fyzoola Khân, transmitted

by the Resident, Bristow, to the said Palmer, the number was stated but

at 5,840, probably including officers, who were not understood to be

comprehended in the treaty.

That the said Palmer did further admit it "_to be not clearly expressed_

in the treaty, whether the restriction included Rohillas of all

descriptions"; but, at any rate, he adds, "it does not appear that their

number is formidable, or that he [Fyzoola Khân] _could by any means

subsist such numbers as could cause any serious alarm to the Vizier_;

neither is there any appearance of their entertaining any views beyond

the quiet possession of the advantages which they at present enjoy."

And that, in a subsequent letter, in which the said Palmer thought it

prudent "to vindicate himself from any possible insinuation that he

meant to sacrifice the Vizier's interest," he, the said Palmer, did

positively attest the new claim on Fyzoola Khân for the protection of

the Vizier's ryots to be wholly without foundation, as the Nabob Fyzoola

Khân "had proved to him [Palmer], by producing receipts of various dates

and for great numbers of these people surrendered upon requisition from

the Vizier's officers."

III. That, over and above the aforesaid complete refutation of the

different charges and pretexts under which exactions had been practised,

or attempted to be practised, on the Nabob Fyzoola Khân, the said Palmer

did further condemn altogether the principle of calculation assumed in

such exactions (even if they had been founded in justice) by the

following explanation of the nature of the tenure by which, under the

treaty of Lall-Dang, the Nabob Fyzoola Khân held his possessions as a

jaghiredar.

"There are no precedents in the ancient usage of the country for

ascertaining the _nuzzerana_ [customary present] or _peshcush_ [regular

fine] of grants of this nature: _they were bestowed by the prince as

rewards or favors_; and the accustomary present in return was adapted to

the dignity of the donor rather than to the value of the gift,--_to

which it never, I believe, bore any kind of proportion_."

IV. That a sum of money ("which of course was to be received by the

Company") being now obtained, and the "_interests both of the Company

and the Vizier_" being thus much "_better promoted_" by "_establishing

the rights_" of Fyzoola Khân than they could have been by "_depriving

him of his independency_," when every undue influence of secret and

criminal purposes was removed from the mind of the Governor-General,

Warren Hastings, Esquire, he, the said Hastings, did also concur with

his friend and agent, Major Palmer, in the vindication of the Nabob

Fyzoola Khân, and in the most ample manner.

That the said Warren Hastings did now clearly and explicitly understand

the clauses of the treaty, "that Fyzoola Khân should send _two_ or

_three_ [and not _five_] thousand men, or _attend in person, in case it

was requisite_."

That the said Warren Hastings did now confess that the right of the

Vizier under the treaty was at best "but _a precarious and unserviceable

right_; and that he thought fifteen lacs, or 150,000_l._ and upwards, an

ample equivalent," (or, according to the expression of Major Palmer, _an

excellent bargain_,) as in truth it was, "for expunging an article of

such a tenor and so loosely worded."

And, finally, that the said Hastings did give the following description

of the general character, disposition, and circumstances of the Nabob

Fyzoola Khân.

"The rumors which had been spread of his hostile designs against the

Vizier were totally groundless, and if he had been inclined, he had not

the means to make himself formidable; on the contrary, being in the

decline of life, and possessing a very fertile and prosperous jaghire,

it is more natural to suppose that Fyzoola Khân wishes to spend the

remainder of his days in quietness than that he is preparing to embark

in active and offensive scenes which must end in his own destruction."

V. Yet that, notwithstanding this virtual and implied crimination of his

whole conduct toward the Nabob Fyzoola Khân, and after all the aforesaid

acts systematically prosecuted in open violation of a positive treaty

against a prince who had an hereditary right to more than he actually

possessed, for whose protection the faith of the Company and the nation

was repeatedly pledged, and who had deserved and obtained the public

thanks of the British government,--when, in allusion to certain of the

said acts, the Court of Directors had expressed to the said Hastings

their wishes "to be considered rather as the guardians of the honor and

property of the native powers than as the instruments of oppression,"

he, the said Hastings, in reply to the said Directors, his masters, did

conclude his official account of the final settlement with Fyzoola Khân

with the following indecent, because unjust, exultation:--

"Such are the measures which we shall ever wish to observe towards our

allies or dependants upon our frontiers."

APPENDIX

TO THE

EIGHTH AND SIXTEENTH CHARGES.[26]

Copy of a Letter from Warren Hastings, Esquire, to William Devaynes,

Esquire, Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India

Company, dated Cheltenham, 11th of July, 1785, and printed by order

of the House of Commons.

_To William Devaynes, Esquire, Chairman of the Honorable the Court of

Directors._

Sir,--The Honorable Court of Directors, in their general letter to

Bengal by the "Surprise," dated the 16th March, 1784, were pleased to

express their desire that I should inform them of the periods when each

sum of the presents mentioned in my address of the 22d May, 1782, was

received, what were my motives for withholding the several receipts from

the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and what

were my reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums, and for paying

other sums into the treasury as deposits on my own account.

I have been kindly apprised that the information required as above is

yet expected from me. I hope that the circumstances of my past

situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for having thus long

withheld it. The fact is, that I was not at the Presidency when the

"Surprise" arrived; and when I returned to it, my time and attention

were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my final departure from it, by

a variety of other more important occupations, of which, Sir, I may

safely appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion

contributed by myself of the volumes which compose our Consultations of

that period, that the submission which my respect would have enjoined me

to pay to the command imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps

from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it

had left on my mind that it was rather intended as a reprehension for

something which had given offence in my report of the original

transaction than as expressive of any want of a further elucidation of

it.

I will now endeavor to reply to the different questions which have been

stated to me in as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information

as I can give the Honorable Court is fully entitled; and where that

shall prove defective, I will point out the easy means by which it may

be rendered more complete.

First, I believe I can affirm with certainty, that the several sums

mentioned in the account transmitted with my letter above mentioned were

received at or within a very few days of the dates which are prefixed to

them in the account; but as this contains only the gross sums, and each

of these was received in different payments, though at no great distance

of time, I cannot therefore assign a greater degree of accuracy to the

account. Perhaps the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient for any

purpose to which their inquiry was directed; but if it should not be so,

I will beg leave to refer for a more minute information, and for the

means of making any investigation which they may think it proper to

direct, respecting the particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins,

your Accountant-General, who was privy to every process of it, and

possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only

account that I ever kept of it. In this each receipt was, as I

recollect, specifically inserted, with the name of the person by whom it

was made; and I shall write to him to desire that he will furnish you

with the paper itself, if it is still in being and in his hands, or with

whatever he can distinctly recollect concerning it.

For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge

of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for

part of these sums, and paying others into the treasury as deposits on

my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable

the Court of Directors of the 22d May, 1782: namely, that "I either

chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving

bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which

my memory at that distance of time could verify; and that I did not

think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest." It will

not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation

of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the

time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I

attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in

that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a

strong probability, follow them.

I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the

Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these

was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense

of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia

under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly

apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th November, 1780.

The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be

made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to

it. The exigencies of the government were at that time my own, and every

pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I

could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized

them; but neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our

Proceedings every little aid which I could thus procure, nor do I know

how I could have stated it, without appearing to court favor by an

ostentation which I disdain, nor without the chance of exciting the

jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate

and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to

which they might have laid an equal claim. I should have deemed it

particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by

men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of

presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them. I

was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of

it, which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered

the money to be brought directly to my own house, or to that of any

person known to be in trust for me: for these reasons I caused it to be

transported immediately to the treasury. There, you well know, Sir, it

could not be received without being passed to some credit, and this

could only be done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit: the first

was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously

recourse to it. Why the second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly

ignorant: possibly it was done without any special direction from me;

possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore

preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having

been already avowed.

Although I am firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the

occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their

impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory,

I am not certain that they may not have been produced by subsequent

reflection on the principal fact, combining with it the probable motives

of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my design originally to have

concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the

knowledge of the Court of Directors. They had answered my purpose of

public utility, and I had almost totally dismissed them from my

remembrance. But when fortune threw a sum in my way of a magnitude which

could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the

time in which I received it made me more circumspect of appearances, I

chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily and generally:

hastily, perhaps to prevent the vigilance and activity of secret

calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of the sum,

of which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession. I

promised to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in

possession of it, and in the performance of my promise I thought it

consistent with it to add to the account all the former appropriations

of the same kind: my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of

caution which might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I

universally attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they

were afterwards known, I might be asked what were my motives for

withholding part of these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of

Directors and informing them of the rest.

It being my wish to clear up every doubt upon this transaction, which

either my own mind could suggest or which may have been suggested by

others, I beg leave to suppose another question, and to state the terms

of it in my reply, by informing you that the indorsement on the bonds

was made about the period of my leaving the Presidency, in the middle of

the year 1781, in order to guard against their becoming a claim on the

Company, as part of my estate, in the event of my death occurring in the

course of the service on which I was then entering.

This, Sir, is the plain history of the transaction. I should be ashamed

to request that you would communicate it to the Honorable Court of

Directors, whose time is too valuable for the intrusion of a subject so

uninteresting, but that it is become a point of indispensable duty; I

must therefore request the favor of you to lay it, at a convenient time,

before them. In addressing it to you personally, I yield to my own

feelings of the respect which is due to them as a body, and to the

assurances which I derive from your experienced civilities that you will

kindly overlook the trouble imposed by it.

I have the honor to be, Sir,

Your very humble and most obedient servant,

(Signed) WARREN HASTINGS.

CHELTENHAM, 11 July, 1785.

SPEECHES

IN

THE IMPEACHMENT

OF

WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,

LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.

SPEECH IN OPENING.

FEBRUARY, 1788.

SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

FIRST DAY: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1788.

My Lords,--The gentlemen who have it in command to support the

impeachment against Mr. Hastings have directed me to open the cause with

a general view of the grounds upon which the Commons have proceeded in

their charge against him. They have directed me to accompany this with

another general view of the extent, the magnitude, the nature, the

tendency, and the effect of the crimes which they allege to have been by

him committed. They have also directed me to give an explanation (with

their aid I may be enabled to give it) of such circumstances, preceding

the crimes charged on Mr. Hastings, or concomitant with them, as may

tend to elucidate whatever may be found obscure in the articles as they

stand. To these they wished me to add a few illustrative remarks on the

laws, customs, opinions, and manners of the people concerned, and who

are the objects of the crimes we charge on Mr. Hastings. The several

articles, as they appear before you, will be opened by other gentlemen

with more particularity, with more distinctness, and, without doubt,

with infinitely more ability, when they come to apply the evidence which

naturally belongs to each article of this accusation. This, my Lords, is

the plan which we mean to pursue on the great charge which is now to

abide your judgment.

My Lords, I must look upon it as an auspicious circumstance to this

cause, in which the honor of the kingdom and the fate of many nations

are involved, that, from the first commencement of our Parliamentary

process to this the hour of solemn trial, not the smallest difference of

opinion has arisen between the two Houses.

My Lords, there are persons who, looking rather upon what was to be

found in our records and histories than what was to be expected from the

public justice, had formed hopes consolatory to themselves and

dishonorable to us. They flattered themselves that the corruptions of

India would escape amidst the dissensions of Parliament. They are

disappointed. They will be disappointed in all the rest of their

expectations which they have formed upon everything, except the merits

of their cause. The Commons will not have the melancholy unsocial glory

of having acted a solitary part in a noble, but imperfect work. What the

greatest inquest of the nation has begun its highest tribunal will

accomplish. At length justice will be done to India. It is true that

your Lordships will have your full share in this great achievement; but

the Commons have always considered that whatever honor is divided with

you is doubled on themselves.

My Lords, I must confess, that, amidst these encouraging prospects, the

Commons do not approach your bar without awe and anxiety. The magnitude

of the interests which we have in charge will reconcile some degree of

solicitude for the event with the undoubting confidence with which we

repose ourselves upon your Lordships' justice. For we are men, my

Lords; and men are so made, that it is not only the greatness of danger,

but the value of the adventure, which measures the degree of our concern

in every undertaking. I solemnly assure your Lordships that no standard

is sufficient to estimate the value which the Commons set upon the event

of the cause they now bring before you. My Lords, the business of this

day is not the business of this man, it is not solely whether the

prisoner at the bar be found innocent or guilty, but whether millions of

mankind shall be made miserable or happy.

Your Lordships will see, in the progress of this cause, that there is

not only a long, connected, systematic series of misdemeanors, but an

equally connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify

them. Upon both of these you must judge. According to the judgment that

you shall give upon the past transactions in India, inseparably

connected as they are with the principles which support them, the whole

character of your future government in that distant empire is to be

unalterably decided. It will take its perpetual tenor, it will receive

its final impression, from the stamp of this very hour.

It is not only the interest of India, now the most considerable part of

the British empire, which is concerned, but the credit and honor of the

British nation itself will be decided by this decision. We are to decide

by this judgment, whether the crimes of individuals are to be turned

into public guilt and national ignominy, or whether this nation will

convert the very offences which have thrown a transient shade upon its

government into something that will reflect a permanent lustre upon the

honor, justice, and humanity of this kingdom.

My Lords, there is another consideration, which augments the solicitude

of the Commons, equal to those other two great interests I have stated,

those of our empire and our national character,--something that, if

possible, comes more home to the hearts and feelings of every

Englishman: I mean, the interests of our Constitution itself, which is

deeply involved in the event of this cause. The future use and the whole

effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of

high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the

charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in this

cause. This tribunal will be found (I hope it will always be found) too

great for petty causes: if it should at the same time be found

incompetent to one of the greatest,--that is, if little offences, from

their minuteness, escape you, and the greatest, from their magnitude,

oppress you,--it is impossible that this form of trial should not in the

end vanish out of the Constitution. For we must not deceive ourselves:

whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long. And if the

Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually,

of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is

valuable in it. For this process is the cement which binds the whole

together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what

England is. In this court it is that no subject, in no part of the

empire, can fail of competent and proportionable justice; here it is

that we provide for that which is the substantial excellence of our

Constitution,--I mean, the great circulation of responsibility, by which

(excepting the supreme power) no man, in no circumstance, can escape

the account which he owes to the laws of his country. It is by this

process that magistracy, which tries and controls all other things, is

itself tried and controlled. Other constitutions are satisfied with

making good subjects; this is a security for good governors. It is by

this tribunal that statesmen who abuse their power are accused by

statesmen and tried by statesmen, not upon the niceties of a narrow

jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state

morality. It is here that those who by the abuse of power have violated

the spirit of law can never hope for protection from any of its forms;

it is here that those who have refused to conform themselves to its

perfections can never hope to escape through any of its defects. It

ought, therefore, my Lords, to become our common care to guard this your

precious deposit, rare in its use, but powerful in its effect, with a

religious vigilance, and never to suffer it to be either discredited or

antiquated. For this great end your Lordships are invested with great

and plenary powers: but you do not suspend, you do not supersede, you do

not annihilate any subordinate jurisdiction; on the contrary, you are

auxiliary and supplemental to them all.

Whether it is owing to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great

offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a

sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am

not called upon to determine,--but, whatever may be the cause, it is now

sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of

authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before this tribunal. The

last is that of Lord Macclesfield, which happened in the year 1725. So

that the oldest process known to the Constitution of this country has,

upon its revival, some appearance of novelty. At this time, when all

Europe is in a state of, perhaps, contagious fermentation, when

antiquity has lost all its reverence and all its effect on the minds of

men, at the same time that novelty is still attended with the suspicions

that always will be attached to whatever is new, we have been anxiously

careful, in a business which seems to combine the objections both to

what is antiquated and what is novel, so to conduct ourselves that

nothing in the revival of this great Parliamentary process shall afford

a pretext for its future disuse.

My Lords, strongly impressed as they are with these sentiments, the

Commons have conducted themselves with singular care and caution.

Without losing the spirit and zeal of a public prosecution, they have

comported themselves with such moderation, temper, and decorum as would

not have ill become the final judgment, if with them rested the final

judgment, of this great cause.

With very few intermissions, the affairs of India have constantly

engaged the attention of the Commons for more than fourteen years. We

may safely affirm we have tried every mode of legislative provision

before we had recourse to anything of penal process. It was in the year

1774 [1773?] we framed an act of Parliament for remedy to the then

existing disorders in India, such as the then information before us

enabled us to enact. Finding that the act of Parliament did not answer

all the ends that were expected from it, we had, in the year 1782,

recourse to a body of monitory resolutions. Neither had we the expected

fruit from them. When, therefore, we found that our inquiries and our

reports, our laws and our admonitions, were alike despised, that

enormities increased in proportion as they were forbidden, detected, and

exposed,--when we found that guilt stalked with an erect and upright

front, and that legal authority seemed to skulk and hide its head like

outlawed guilt,--when we found that some of those very persons who were

appointed by Parliament to assert the authority of the laws of this

kingdom were the most forward, the most bold, and the most active in the

conspiracy for their destruction,--then it was time for the justice of

the nation to recollect itself. To have forborne longer would not have

been patience, but collusion; it would have been participation with

guilt; it would have been to make ourselves accomplices with the

criminal.

We found it was impossible to evade painful duty without betraying a

sacred trust. Having, therefore, resolved upon the last and only

resource, a penal prosecution, it was our next business to act in a

manner worthy of our long deliberation. In all points we proceeded with

selection. We have chosen (we trust it will so appear to your Lordships)

such a crime, and such a criminal, and such a body of evidence, and such

a mode of process, as would have recommended this course of justice to

posterity, even if it had not been supported by any example in the

practice of our forefathers.

First, to speak of the process: we are to inform your Lordships, that,

besides that long previous deliberation of fourteen years, we examined,

as a preliminary to this proceeding, every circumstance which could

prove favorable to parties apparently delinquent, before we finally

resolved to prosecute. There was no precedent to be found in the

Journals, favorable to persons in Mr. Hastings's circumstances, that was

not applied to. Many measures utterly unknown to former Parliamentary

proceedings, and which, indeed, seemed in some degree to enfeeble them,

but which were all to the advantage of those that were to be prosecuted,

were adopted, for the first time, upon this occasion. In an early stage

of the proceeding, the criminal desired to be heard. He was heard; and

he produced before the bar of the House that insolent and unbecoming

paper which lies upon our table. It was deliberately given in by his own

hand, and signed with his own name. The Commons, however, passed by

everything offensive in that paper with a magnanimity that became them.

They considered nothing in it but the facts that the defendant alleged,

and the principles he maintained; and after a deliberation not short of

judicial, we proceeded with confidence to your bar.

So far as to the process; which, though I mentioned last in the line and

order in which I stated the objects of our selection, I thought it best

to dispatch first.

As to the crime which we chose, we first considered well what it was in

its nature, under all the circumstances which attended it. We weighed it

with all its extenuations and with all its aggravations. On that review,

we are warranted to assert that the crimes with which we charge the

prisoner at the bar are substantial crimes,--that they are no errors or

mistakes, such as wise and good men might possibly fall into, which may

even produce very pernicious effects without being in fact great

offences. The Commons are too liberal not to allow for the difficulties

of a great and arduous public situation. They know too well the

domineering necessities which frequently occur in all great affairs.

They know the exigency of a pressing occasion, which, in its precipitate

career, bears everything down before it,--which does not give time to

the mind to recollect its faculties, to reinforce its reason, and to

have recourse to fixed principles, but, by compelling an instant and

tumultuous decision, too often obliges men to decide in a manner that

calm judgment would certainly have rejected. We know, as we are to be

served by men, that the persons who serve us must be tried as men, and

with a very large allowance indeed to human infirmity and human error.

This, my Lords, we knew and we weighed before we came before you. But

the crimes which we charge in these articles are not lapses, defects,

errors of common human frailty, which, as we know and feel, we can allow

for. We charge this offender with no crimes that have not arisen from

passions which it is criminal to harbor,--with no offences that have not

their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery,

cruelty, malignity of temper,--in short, in [with?] nothing that does

not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not

manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, dyed in grain with malice,

vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core. If we do not plant his

crimes in those vices which the breast of man is made to abhor, and the

spirit of all laws, human and divine, to interdict, we desire no longer

to be heard upon this occasion. Let everything that can be pleaded on

the ground of surprise or error, upon those grounds be pleaded with

success: we give up the whole of those predicaments. We urge no crimes

that were not crimes of forethought. We charge him with nothing that he

did not commit upon deliberation,--that he did not commit against

advice, supplication, and remonstrance,--that he did not commit against

the direct command of lawful authority,--that he did not commit after

reproof and reprimand, the reproof and reprimand of those who were

authorized by the laws to reprove and reprimand him. The crimes of Mr.

Hastings are crimes not only in themselves, but aggravated by being

crimes of contumacy. They were crimes, not against forms, but against

those eternal laws of justice which are our rule and our birthright. His

offences are, not in formal, technical language, but in reality, in

substance and effect, _high_ crimes and high misdemeanors.

So far as to the crimes. As to the criminal, we have chosen him on the

same principle on which we selected the crimes. We have not chosen to

bring before you a poor, puny, trembling delinquent, misled, perhaps, by

those who ought to have taught him better, but who have afterwards

oppressed him by their power, as they had first corrupted him by their

example. Instances there have been many, wherein the punishment of minor

offences, in inferior persons, has been made the means of screening

crimes of an high order, and in men of high description. Our course is

different. We have not brought before you an obscure offender, who, when

his insignificance and weakness are weighed against the power of the

prosecution, gives even to public justice something of the appearance of

oppression: no, my Lords, we have brought before you the first man of

India, in rank, authority, and station. We have brought before you the

chief of the tribe, the head of the whole body of Eastern offenders, a

captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the

peculation, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined, arrayed,

and paid. This is the person, my Lords, that we bring before you. We

have brought before you such a person, that, if you strike at him with

the firm and decided arm of justice, you will not have need of a great

many more examples. You strike at the whole corps, if you strike at the

head.

So far as to the crime: so far as to the criminal. Now, my Lords, I

shall say a few words relative to the evidence which we have brought to

support such a charge, and which ought to be equal in weight to the

charge itself. It is chiefly evidence of record, officially signed by

the criminal himself in many instances. We have brought before you his

own letters, authenticated by his own hand. On these we chiefly rely.

But we shall likewise bring before you living witnesses, competent to

speak to the points to which they are brought.

When you consider the late enormous power of the prisoner,--when you

consider his criminal, indefatigable assiduity in the destruction of all

recorded evidence,--when you consider the influence he has over almost

all living testimony,--when you consider the distance of the scene of

action,--I believe your Lordships, and I believe the world, will be

astonished that so much, so clear, so solid, and so conclusive evidence

of all kinds has been obtained against him. I have no doubt that in nine

instances in ten the evidence is such as would satisfy the narrow

precision supposed to prevail, and to a degree rightly to prevail, in

all subordinate power and delegated jurisdiction. But your Lordships

will maintain, what we assert and claim as the right of the subjects of

Great Britain, that you are not bound by any rules of evidence, or any

other rules whatever, except those of natural, immutable, and

substantial justice.

God forbid the Commons should desire that anything should be received as

proof from them which is not by nature adapted to prove the thing in

question! If they should make such a request, they would aim at

overturning the very principles of that justice to which they resort;

they would give the nation an evil example that would rebound back on

themselves, and bring destruction upon their own heads, and on those of

all their posterity.

On the other hand, I have too much confidence in the learning with which

you will be advised, and the liberality and nobleness of the sentiments

with which you are born, to suspect that you would, by any abuse of the

forms, and a technical course of proceeding, deny justice to so great a

part of the world that claims it at your hands. Your Lordships always

had an ample power, and almost unlimited jurisdiction; you have now a

boundless object. It is not from this district or from that parish, not

from this city or the other province, that relief is now applied for:

exiled and undone princes, extensive tribes, suffering nations, infinite

descriptions of men, different in language, in manners, and in rites,

men separated by every barrier of Nature from you, by the Providence of

God are blended in one common cause, and are now become suppliants at

your bar. For the honor of this nation, in vindication of this

mysterious Providence, let it be known that no rule formed upon

municipal maxims (if any such rule exists) will prevent the course of

that imperial justice which you owe to the people that call to you from

all parts of a great disjointed world. For, situated as this kingdom is,

an object, thank God, of envy to the rest of the nations, its conduct in

that high and elevated situation will undoubtedly be scrutinized with a

severity as great as its power is invidious.

It is well known that enormous wealth has poured into this country from

India through a thousand channels, public and concealed; and it is no

particular derogation from our honor to suppose a possibility of being

corrupted by that by which other empires have been corrupted, and

assemblies almost as respectable and venerable as your Lordships' have

been directly or indirectly vitiated. Forty millions of money, at least,

have within our memory been brought from India into England. In this

case the most sacred judicature ought to look to its reputation. Without

offence we may venture to suggest that the best way to secure reputation

is, not by a proud defiance of public opinion, but by guiding our

actions in such a manner as that public opinion may in the end be

securely defied, by having been previously respected and dreaded. No

direct false judgment is apprehended from the tribunals of this country;

but it is feared that partiality may lurk and nestle in the abuse of our

forms of proceeding. It is necessary, therefore, that nothing in that

proceeding should appear to mark the slightest trace, should betray the

faintest odor of chicane. God forbid, that, when you try the most

serious of all causes, that, when you try the cause of Asia in the

presence of Europe, there should be the least suspicion that a narrow

partiality, utterly destructive of justice, should so guide us that a

British subject in power should appear in substance to possess rights

which are denied to the humble allies, to the attached dependants of

this kingdom, who by their distance have a double demand upon your

protection, and who, by an implicit (I hope not a weak and useless)

trust in you, have stripped themselves of every other resource under

heaven!

I do not say this from any fear, doubt, or hesitation concerning what

your Lordships will finally do,--none in the world; but I cannot shut my

ears to the rumors which you all know to be disseminated abroad. The

abusers of power may have a chance to cover themselves by those fences

and intrenchments which were made to secure the liberties of the people

against men of that very description. But God forbid it should be

bruited from Pekin to Paris, that the laws of England are for the rich

and the powerful, but to the poor, the miserable, and defenceless they

afford no resource at all! God forbid it should be said, no nation is

equal to the English in _substantial_ violence and in _formal_

justice,--that in this kingdom we feel ourselves competent to confer the

most extravagant and inordinate powers upon public ministers, but that

we are deficient, poor, helpless, lame, and impotent in the means of

calling them to account for their use of them! An opinion has been

insidiously circulated through this kingdom, and through foreign nations

too, that, in order to cover our participation in guilt, and our common

interest in the plunder of the East, we have invented a set of

scholastic distinctions, abhorrent to the common sense and unpropitious

to the common necessities of mankind, by which we are to deny ourselves

the knowledge of what the rest of the world knows, and what so great a

part of the world both knows and feels. I do not deprecate any

appearance which may give countenance to this aspersion from suspicion

that any corrupt motive can influence this court; I deprecate it from

knowing that hitherto we have moved within the narrow circle of

municipal justice. I am afraid, that, from the habits acquired by moving

within a circumscribed sphere, we may be induced rather to endeavor at

forcing Nature into that municipal circle than to enlarge the circle of

national justice to the necessities of the empire we have obtained.

This is the only thing which does create any doubt or difficulty in the

minds of sober people. But there are those who will not judge so

equitably. Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may

be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred. If, from any

appearance of chicane in the court, justice should fail, all men will

say, better there were no tribunals at all. In my humble opinion, it

would be better a thousand times to give all complainants the short

answer the Dey of Algiers gave a British ambassador, representing

certain grievances suffered by the British merchants,--"My friend," (as

the story is related by Dr. Shaw,) "do not you know that my subjects are

a band of robbers, and that I am their captain?"--better it would be a

thousand times, and a thousand thousand times more manly, than an

hypocritical process, which, under a pretended reverence to punctilious

ceremonies and observances of law, abandons mankind without help and

resource to all the desolating consequences of arbitrary power. The

conduct and event of this cause will put an end to such doubts,

wherever they may be entertained. Your Lordships will exercise the great

plenary powers with which you are invested in a manner that will do

honor to the protecting justice of this kingdom, that will completely

avenge the great people who are subjected to it. You will not suffer

your proceedings to be squared by any rules but by their necessities,

and by that law of a common nature which cements them to us and us to

them. The reports to the contrary have been spread abroad with uncommon

industry; but they will be speedily refuted by the humanity, simplicity,

dignity, and nobleness of your Lordships' justice.

* * * * *

Having said all that I am instructed to say concerning the process which

the House of Commons has used, concerning the crimes which they have

chosen, concerning the criminal upon whom they attach the crimes, and

concerning the evidence which they mean to produce, I am now to proceed

to open that part of the business which falls to my share. It is rather

an explanation of the circumstances than an enforcement of the crimes.

Your Lordships of course will be apprised that this cause is not what

occurs every day, in the ordinary round of municipal affairs,--that it

has a relation to many things, that it touches many points in many

places, which are wholly removed from the ordinary beaten orbit of our

English affairs. In other affairs, every allusion immediately meets its

point of reference; nothing can be started that does not immediately

awaken your attention to something in your own laws and usages which you

meet with every day in the ordinary transactions of life. But here you

are caught, as it were, into another world; you are to have the way

pioneered before you. As the subject is new, it must be explained; as it

is intricate as well as new, that explanation can be only comparatively

short: and therefore, knowing your Lordships to be possessed, along with

all other judicial virtues, of the first and foundation of them all,

judicial patience, I hope that you will not grudge a few hours to the

explanation of that which has cost the Commons fourteen years' assiduous

application to acquire,--that your Lordships will not disdain to grant a

few hours to what has cost the people of India upwards of thirty years

of their innate, inveterate, hereditary patience to endure.

* * * * *

My Lords, the powers which Mr. Hastings is charged with having abused

are the powers delegated to him by the East India Company. The East

India Company itself acts under two very dissimilar sorts of powers,

derived from two sources very remote from each other. The first source

of its power is under charters which the crown of Great Britain was

authorized by act of Parliament to grant; the other is from several

charters derived from the Emperor of the Moguls, the person in whose

dominions they were chiefly conversant,--particularly that great charter

by which, in the year 1765, they acquired the high-stewardship of the

kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Under those two bodies of

charters, the East India Company, and all their servants, are authorized

to act.

As to those of the first description, it is from the British charters

that they derive the capacity by which they are considered as a public

body, or at all capable of any public function. It is from thence they

acquire the capacity to take from any power whatsoever any other

charter, to acquire any other offices, or to hold any other possessions.

This, being the root and origin of their power, renders them responsible

to the party from whom all their immediate and consequential powers are

derived. As they have emanated from the supreme power of this kingdom,

the whole body and the whole train of their servants, the corporate body

as a corporate body, individuals as individuals, are responsible to the

high justice of this kingdom. In delegating great power to the East

India Company, this kingdom has not released its sovereignty; on the

contrary, the responsibility of the Company is increased by the

greatness and sacredness of the powers that have been intrusted to it.

Attempts have been made abroad to circulate a notion that the acts of

the East India Company and their servants are not cognizable here. I

hope on this occasion your Lordships will show that this nation never

did give a power without annexing to it a proportionable degree of

responsibility.

As to their other powers, the Company derives them from the Mogul empire

by various charters from that crown, and from the great magistrates of

that crown, and particularly by the Mogul charter of 1765, by which they

obtained the _dewanny_, that is, the office of lord high-steward, of the

kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. By that charter they bound

themselves (and bound inclusively all their servants) to perform all the

duties belonging to that new office, and to be held by all the ties

belonging to that new relation. If the Mogul empire had existed in its

vigor, they would have been bound, under that responsibility, to

observe the laws, rights, usages, and customs of the natives, and to

pursue their benefit in all things: for this duty was inherent in the

nature, institution, and purpose of the office which they received. If

the power of the sovereign from whom they derived these powers should by

any revolution in human affairs be annihilated or suspended, their duty

to the people below them, which was created under the Mogul charter, is

not annihilated, is not even suspended; and for their responsibility in

the performance of that duty, they are thrown back upon that country

(thank God, not annihilated) from whence their original power, and all

subsequent derivative powers, have flowed. When the Company acquired

that high office in India, an English corporation became an integral

part of the Mogul empire. When Great Britain virtually assented to that

grant of office, and afterwards took advantage of it, Great Britain

guarantied the performance of all its duties. Great Britain entered into

a virtual act of union with that country, by which we bound ourselves as

securities to preserve the people in all the rights, laws, and liberties

which their natural, original sovereign was bound to support, if he had

been in condition to support them. By the disposition of events, the two

duties, flowing from two different sources, are now united in one. The

people of India, therefore, come in the name of the Commons of Great

Britain, but in their own right, to the bar of this House, before the

supreme royal justice of this kingdom, from whence originally all the

powers under which they have suffered were derived.

It may be a little necessary, when we are stating the powers the Company

have derived from their charter, and which we state Mr. Hastings to

have abused, to state in as short and as comprehensive words as I can

(for the matter is large indeed) what the constitution of that Company

is,--I mean chiefly, what it is in reference to its Indian service, the

great theatre of the abuse. Your Lordships will naturally conceive that

it is not to inform you, but to revive circumstances in your memory,

that I enter into this detail.

You will therefore recollect, that the East India Company had its origin

about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, a period of projects,

when all sorts of commercial adventures, companies, and monopolies were

in fashion. At that time the Company was constituted with extensive

powers for increasing the commerce and the honor of this country;

because increasing its commerce, without increasing its honor and

reputation, would have been thought at that time, and will be thought

now, a bad bargain for the country. The powers of the Company were,

under that charter, merely commercial. By degrees, as the theatre of

operation was distant, as its intercourse was with many great, some

barbarous, and all of them armed nations, nations in which not only the

sovereign, but the subjects, were armed, it was found necessary to

enlarge their powers. The first power they obtained was a power of naval

discipline in their ships,--a power which has been since dropped; the

next was a power of law martial; the next was a power of civil, and, to

a degree, of criminal jurisdiction, within their own factories, upon

their own people and their own servants; the next was (and here was a

stride indeed) the power of peace and war. Those high and almost

incommunicable prerogatives of sovereignty, which were hardly ever

known before to be parted with to any subjects, and which in several

states were not wholly intrusted to the prince or head of the

commonwealth himself, were given to the East India Company. That Company

acquired these powers about the end of the reign of Charles the Second;

and they were afterwards more fully, as well as more legally, given by

Parliament after the Revolution. From this time, the East India Company

was no longer merely a mercantile company, formed for the extension of

the British commerce: it more nearly resembled a delegation of the whole

power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East. From that time

the Company ought to be considered as a subordinate sovereign power:

that is, sovereign with regard to the objects which it touched;

subordinate with regard to the power from whence its great trust was

derived.

Under these successive arrangements things took a course very different

from their usual order. A new disposition took place, not dreamt of in

the theories of speculative politicians, and of which few examples in

the least resembling it have been seen in the modern world, none at all

in the ancient. In other instances, a political body that acts as a

commonwealth was first settled, and trade followed as a consequence of

the protection obtained by political power; but here the course of

affairs was reversed. The constitution of the Company began in commerce

and ended in empire. Indeed, wherever the sovereign powers of peace and

war are given, there wants but time and circumstance to make these

powers supersede every other. The affairs of commerce will fall at last

into their proper rank and situation. However primary in their original

intention, they will become secondary. The possession, therefore, and

the power of assertion of these great authorities coinciding with the

improved state of Europe, with the improved state of arts in Europe,

with the improved state of laws, and, what is much more material, the

improved state of military discipline, more and more perfected every day

with us,--universal improvement in Europe coinciding with the general

decay of Asia, (for the proud day of Asia is passed,) this improvement

coinciding with the relaxation and dissolution of the Mogul government,

with the decline of its warlike spirit, with the total disuse of the

ancient strictness of the military discipline established by Tamerlane,

the India Company came to be what it is, a great empire, carrying on,

subordinately, a great commerce; it became that thing which was supposed

by the Roman law irreconcilable to reason and propriety,--_eundem

negotiatorem et dominum_: the same power became the general trader, the

same power became the supreme lord.

In this exalted situation, the India Company, however, still preserves

traces of its original mercantile character. The whole exterior order of

its political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and

mercantile principles. In fact, the East India Company in Asia is a

state in the disguise of a merchant. Its whole service is a system of

public offices in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly, the

whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is

commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely

political.

This system of the Company's service, its order and discipline, is

necessary to be explained to your Lordships, that you may see in what

manner the abuses have affected it. In the first place, all the persons

who go abroad in the Company's civil service enter as clerks in the

counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to

it,--_writers_. In that condition they are obliged to serve five years.

The second step is that of a _factor_, in which they are obliged to

serve three years. The third step they take is that of a _junior

merchant_, in which they are obliged to serve three years more. At that

period they become _senior merchants_, which is the highest stage of

advance in the Company's service,--a rank by which they had pretensions,

before the year 1774, to the Council, to the succession of the

Presidency, and to whatever other honors the Company has to bestow.

The Company had, in its early times, established factories in certain

places; which factories by degrees grew to the name of Presidencies and

Council, in proportion as the power and influence of the Company

increased, and as the political began first to struggle with, and at

length to predominate over, the mercantile. In this form it continued

till the year 1773, when the legislature broke in, for proper reasons

urging them to it, upon that order of the service, and appointed to the

superior department persons who had no title to that place under the

ordinary usage of the service. Mr. Hastings and Mr. Harwell, whatever

other titles they might have had, held solely under the act of

Parliament nominating them to that authority; but in all other respects,

except where the act and other subsequent acts have not broken in upon

it, the whole course of the service remains upon the ancient footing,

that is, the commercial footing, as to the gradation and order of

service.

Your Lordships see here a regular series of gradation, which requires

eleven years before any persons can arrive at the highest trusts and

situations. You will therefore be astonished, when so long a

probationary service was required, that effects very different from

those to be expected from long probation have happened, and that in a

much shorter time than those eleven years you have seen persons

returning into this kingdom with affluent, with overbearing fortunes. It

will be a great part of your inquiry, when we come before your Lordships

to substantiate evidence against Mr. Hastings, to discover how that

order came to be so completely broken down and erased that scarce a

trace of it for any good purpose remains. Though I will not deny that

that order, or that any order in a state, may be superseded by the

ruling power, when great talents, upon pressing exigencies, are to be

called forth, yet I must say the order itself was formed upon wise

principles. It furnished the persons who were put in that course of

probation with an opportunity (if circumstances enabled them) of

acquiring experience in business of revenue, trade, and policy. It gave

to those who watched them a constant inspection of their conduct through

all their progress. On the expectants of office it imposed the necessity

of acquiring a character in proportion to their standing, in order that

all which they had gained by the good behavior of years should not be

lost by the misconduct of an hour. It was a great substantial

regulation. But scarce a trace of the true spirit of it remains to be

discovered in Mr. Hastings's government; for Mr. Hastings established

offices, nay, whole systems of offices, and especially a system of

offices in 1781, which being altogether new, none of the rules of

gradation applied to them; and he filled those offices in such a manner

as suited best, not the constitution nor the spirit of the service, but

his own particular views and purposes. The consequence has been, that

persons in the most immature stages of life have been appointed to

conduct affairs which required the greatest maturity of judgment, the

greatest possible temper and moderation. Effects naturally consequent

have followed upon it.--I shall not trouble your Lordships with any

further observations on this system of gradation.

I must, however, remark, before I go further, that there is something in

the representation of the East India Company in their Oriental territory

different from that, perhaps, of any other nation that has ever

transported any part of its power from one country to another. The East

India Company in India is not properly a branch of the British nation:

it is only a deputation of individuals. When the Tartars entered into

China, when the Arabs and Tartars successively entered into Hindostan,

when the Goths and Vandals penetrated into Europe, when the Normans

forced their way into England, indeed, in all conquests, migrations,

settlements, and colonizations, the new people came as the offset of a

nation. The Company in India does not exist as a national colony. In

effect and substance nobody can go thither that does not go in its

service. The English in India are nothing but a seminary for the

succession of officers. They are a nation of placemen; they are a

commonwealth without a people; they are a state made up wholly of

magistrates. There is nothing to be in propriety called people, to

watch, to inspect, to balance against the power of office. The power of

office, so far as the English nation is concerned, is the sole power in

the country: the consequence of which is, that, being a kingdom of

magistrates, what is commonly called the _esprit du corps_ is strong in

it. This spirit of the body predominates equally in all its parts; by

which the members must consider themselves as having a common interest,

and that common interest separated both from that of the country which

sent them out and from that of the country in which they act. No control

upon them exists,--none, I mean, in persons who understand their

language, who understand their manners, or can apply their conduct to

the laws. Therefore, in a body so constituted, confederacy is easy, and

has been general. Your Lordships are not to expect that that should

happen in such a body which never happened in any body or

corporation,--that is, that they should, in any instance, be a proper

check and control upon themselves. It is not in the nature of things.

The fundamental principle of the whole of the East India Company's

system is monopoly, in some sense or other. The same principle

predominates in the service abroad and the service at home; and both

systems are united into one, animated with the same spirit, that is,

with the corporate spirit. The whole, taken together, is such as has not

been seen in the examples of the Moors, the Portuguese, the Spaniards,

the Romans,--in no old, in no recent examples. The Dutch may resemble

it, but they have not an empire properly so denominated. By means of

this peculiar circumstance it has not been difficult for Mr. Hastings to

embody abuse, and to put himself at the head of a regular system of

corruption.

Another circumstance in that service is deserving of notice. Except in

the highest parts of all, the emoluments of office do not in any degree

correspond with the trust, nor the nature of the office with its name.

In other official systems, the style, in general, is above the function;

here it is the reverse. Under the name of junior merchant, senior

merchant, writer, and other petty appellations of the counting-house,

you have magistrates of high dignity, you have administrators of

revenues truly royal, you have judges, civil, and in some respects

criminal, who pass judgment upon the greatest properties of a great

country. The legal public emoluments that belong to them are very often

so inadequate to the real dignity of the character, that it is

impossible, almost absolutely impossible, for the subordinate parts of

it, which, though subordinate, are stations of power, to exist, as

Englishmen, who look at a fortune to be enjoyed at home as their

ultimate object, and to exist in a state of perfect incorruption in that

service.

In some parts of Europe, it is true that the greatest situations are

often attended with but little emolument; yet still they are filled.

Why? Because reputation, glory, fame, the esteem, the love, the tears of

joy which flow from happy sensibility, the honest applauses of a

grateful country, sometimes pay the cares, anxieties, and toils which

wait on great situations in the commonwealth; and in these they pay in

money what cannot be paid in fame and reputation. It is the reverse in

the service of the India Company. Glory is not the lot of subordinated

merit,--and all the subordinate parts of the gradation are officers who,

in comparison with the offices and duties intrusted to them, are

miserably provided for; whereas the chief of each great Presidency has

emoluments securing him against every mode of temptation. But if this

has not secured the head, we may easily judge how the members are to be

coerced. Mr. Hastings, at the head of the service, with high legal

emoluments, has fouled his hands and sullied his government with bribes.

He has substituted oppression and tyranny in the place of legal

government. With all that unbounded, licentious power which he has

assumed over the public revenues, instead of endeavoring to find a

series of gradual, progressive, honorable, and adequate rewards for the

persons who serve the public in the subordinate, but powerful

situations, he has left them to prey upon the people without the

smallest degree of control. In default of honest emolument, there is the

unbounded license of power; and, as one of the honestest and ablest

servants of the Company said to me in conversation, the civil service of

the Company resembled the military service of the Mahrattas,--little

pay, but unbounded license to plunder. I do not say that some of the

salaries given in India would not sound well here; but when you consider

the nature of the trusts, the dignity of the situation, whatever the

name of them may be, the powers that are granted, the hopes that every

man has of establishing himself at home, I repeat, it is a source of

infinite grievance, of infinite abuse: of which source of corrupt power

we charge Mr. Hastings with having availed himself, in filling up the

void of direct pay by finding out and countenancing every kind of

oblique and unjust emolument; though it must be confessed that he is

far from being solely guilty of this offence.

Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the

youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The

servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress

and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority,

at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in

the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,--they

are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from

perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate

expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors

without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its

temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers

that despotism involves.

It is further remarkable, these servants exercise what your Lordships

are now exercising, high judicial powers, and they exercise them without

the smallest study of any law, either general or municipal. It is made a

sort of rule in the service, a rule confirmed even by the attempts that

were made to correct it, (I mean confirmed by Sir Elijah Impey, when,

under the auspices of Mr. Hastings, he undertook to be legislator for

India,) that the judicial character, the last in the order of legal

progress, that to which all professional men look up as the crown of

their labors, that ultimate hope of men grown gray in professional

practice, is among the first experimental situations of a Company's

servant. It is expressly said in that body of regulations to which I

allude, that the office and situation of a judge of the Dewanny Courts

of Adawlut is to be filled by the _junior_ servants of the Company; and

as the judicial emolument is not substantially equal to that of other

situations, the office of a judge is to be taken, as it were, _in

transitu_, as a passage to other offices not of a judicial nature. As

soon, therefore, as a young man has supplied the defects of his

education by the advantage of some experience, he is immediately

translated to a totally different office; and another young man is

substituted, to learn, at the expense of the property of India, to fill

a situation which, when he may be qualified to fill, he is no longer to

hold.

It is in a great measure the same with regard to the other situations.

They are the situations of great statesmen, which, according to the

practice of the world, require, to fill properly, rather a large

converse with men and much intercourse in life than deep study of

books,--though that, too, has its eminent service. We know that in the

habits of civilized life, in cultivated society, there is imbibed by men

a good deal of the solid practice of government, of the true maxims of

state, and everything that enables a man to serve his country. But these

men are sent over to exercise functions at which a statesman here would

tremble, without any theoretical study, and without any of that sort of

experience which, in mixed societies of business and converse, form men

gradually and insensibly to great affairs. Low cunning, intrigue, and

stratagem are soon acquired; but manly, durable policy, which never

sacrifices the general interest to a partial or momentary advantage, is

not so cheaply formed in the human understanding.

Mr. Hastings, in his defence before the House of Commons, and in the

defences he has made before your Lordships, has lamented his own

situation in this particular. It was much to be lamented, indeed. How

far it will furnish justification, extenuation, or palliation of his

conduct, when we come to examine that conduct, will be seen.

These circumstances in the system have in a great degree vitiated and

perverted what is in reality (and many things are in reality) excellent

in it. They have rendered the application of all correctives and

remedies to abuse, at best, precarious in their operation. The laws that

we have made, the covenants which the Company has obliged its servants

to enter into, the occasional orders that have been given, at least

ostensibly good, all have proved noxious to the country, instead of

beneficial.

To illustrate this point, I beg leave to observe to your Lordships, that

the servants of the Company are obliged to enter into that service not

only with an impression of the general duty which attaches upon all

servants, but are obliged to engage in a specific covenant with their

masters to perform all the duties described in that covenant (which are

all the duties of their relation) under heavy penalties. They are bound

to a repetition of these covenants at every step of their progress, from

writer to factor, from factor to junior merchant, and from junior

merchant to senior merchant. They ought, according to the rule, to renew

these covenants at these times by something (I speak without offence)

which may be said to resemble confirmation in the Church. They are

obliged to renew their obligation in particular to receive no gifts,

gratuities, or presents whatsoever.

This scheme of covenants would have been wise and proper, if it had

belonged to a judicious order, and rational, consistent scheme of

discipline. The orders of the Company have forbidden their servants to

take any extraneous emoluments. The act of Parliament has fulminated

against them. Clear, positive laws, and clear, positive private

engagements, have no exception of circumstances in them, no difference

_quoad majus et minus_; but every one who offends against the law is

liable to the law. The consequence is this: he who has deviated but an

inch from the straight line, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful

emolument, (and all have taken many pennies of unlawful emolument,) does

not dare to complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel

oppression in any of his fellow-servants. He who has taken a trifle,

perhaps as the reward of a good action, is obliged to be silent, when he

sees whole nations desolated around him. The great criminal at the head

of the service has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the

small offence, and crush the person who has committed it. This is one

grand source of Mr. Hastings's power. After he had got the better of the

Parliamentary commission, no complaint from any part of the service has

appeared against Mr. Hastings. He is bold enough to state it as one

presumption of his merit, that there has been no such complaint. No such

complaint, indeed, can exist. The spirit of the corps would of itself

almost forbid it,--to which spirit an informer is the most odious and

detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been

hunted down, as a common enemy. But here is a new security. Who can

complain, or dares to accuse? The whole service is irregular: nobody is

free from small offences; and, as I have said, the great offender can

always crush the small one.

If you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine,

from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's

service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption;

but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes,

you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary

perfection. He was fourteen years at the head of that service; and there

is not an instance, no, not one single instance, in which he endeavored

to detect corruption, or that he ever, in any one single instance,

attempted to punish it; but the whole service, with that whole mass of

enormity which he attributes to it, slept, as it were, at once, under

his terror and his protection: under his protection, if they did not

dare to move against him; under terror, from his power to pluck out

individuals and make a public example of them, whenever he thought fit.

And therefore that service, under his guidance and influence, was,

beyond even what its own nature disposed it to, a service of

confederacy, a service of connivance, a service composed of various

systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head and the protector.

But this general connivance he did not think sufficient to secure to him

the general support of the Indian interest. He went further. We shall

prove to your Lordships, that, when the Company were driven by shame,

not by inclination, to order several prosecutions against delinquents in

their service, Mr. Hastings, directly contrary to the duty of his

office, directly contrary to the express and positive law of the Court

of Directors, which law Parliament had bound upon him as his rule of

action, not satisfied with his long tacit connivance, ventured, before

he left his government, and among his last acts, to pass a general act

of pardon and indemnity, and at once ordered the whole body of the

prosecutions directed by his masters, the Company, to be discharged.

Having had fourteen years' lease of connivance to bestow, and giving at

the end a general release of all suits and actions, he now puts himself

at the head of a vast body enriched by his bounties, connivances, and

indemnities, and expects the support of those whom he had thus fully

rewarded and discharged from the pursuit of the laws. You will find, in

the course of this business, that, when charges have been brought

against him of any bribery, corruption, or other malversation, his

course has been to answer little or nothing to that specific bribery,

corruption, or malversation: his way has been to call on the Court of

Directors to inquire of every servant who comes to Europe, and to say

whether there was any one man in it that will give him an ill word. He

has put himself into a situation in which he may always safely call to

his character, and will always find himself utterly incapable of

justifying his conduct.

So far I have troubled your Lordships with the system of confederacy and

connivance, which, under his auspices, was the vital principle of almost

the whole service. There is one member of the service which I have

omitted: but whether I ought to have put it first, or, as I do now,

last, I must confess I am at some loss; because, though it appears to be

the lowest (if any regular) part of the service, it is by far the most

considerable and the most efficient, without a full consideration and

explanation of which hardly any part of the conduct of Mr. Hastings,

and of many others that may be in his situation, can be fully

understood.

I have given your Lordships an account of writers, factors, merchants,

who exercise the office of judges, lord chancellors, chancellors of the

exchequer, ministers of state, and managers of great revenues. But there

is another description of men, of more importance than them all, a

description you have often heard of, but which has not been sufficiently

explained: I mean the _banian_. When the Company's service was no more

than mercantile, and the servants were generally unacquainted with the

country, they used the intervention of certain factors among the

natives, which were called _banians_: we called them so, because they

were of the tribe or caste of the banians or merchants,--the Indians

being generally distributed into trades according to their tribes. The

name still continues, when the functions of the banians are totally

altered. The banian is known by other appellations. He is called

_dewan_, or steward; and, indeed, this is a term with more propriety

applied to him in several of his functions. He is, by his name of

office, the steward of the household of the European gentleman: he has

the management of his affairs, and the ordering of his servants. He is

himself a domestic servant, and generally chosen out of that class of

natives who, by being habituated to misery and subjection, can submit to

any orders, and are fit for any of the basest services. Trained under

oppression, (it is the true education,) they are fit to oppress others.

They serve an apprenticeship of servitude to qualify them for the trade

of tyranny. They know all the devices, all the little frauds, all the

artifices and contrivances, the whole panoply of the defensive armor by

which ingenious slavery secures itself against the violence of power.

They know all the lurking-holes, all the winding recesses, of the

unfortunate; and they hunt out distress and misery even to their last

retreats. They have suffered themselves; but, far from being taught by

those sufferings to abstain from rigor, they have only learned the

methods of afflicting their fellow-slaves. They have the best

intelligence of what is done in England. The moment a Company's servant

arrives in India, and his English connections are known to be powerful,

some of that class of people immediately take possession of him, as if

he were their inheritance. They have knowledge of the country and its

affairs; they have money; they have the arts of making money. The

gentleman who comes from England has none of these; he enters into that

world, as he enters into the world at large, naked. His portion is great

simplicity, great indigence, and a strong disposition to relieve

himself. The banian, once in possession, employs his tyranny, not only

over the native people of his country, but often over the master

himself, who has little other share in the proceedings of his servant

but in giving him the ticket of his name to mark that he is connected

with and supported by an European who is himself well connected and

supported at home. This is a commission which nothing can resist. From

that moment forward it is not the Englishman, it is the black banian,

that is the master. The nominal master often lives from his hand. We

know how young men are sent out of this country; we know how happy we

are to hear soon that they are no longer a burden to their friends and

parents. The banian knows it, too. He supplies the young servant with

money. He has him under his power: first, from the necessity of

employing such a man; and next, (and this is the more important of the

two,) he has that dreadful power over his master which every creditor

has over his debtor. Actions the most abhorrent to his nature he must

see done before his face, and thousands and thousands worse are done in

his absence, and he dare not complain. The banian extorts, robs,

plunders, and then gives him just what proportion of the spoil he

pleases. If the master should murmur, the very power that was sent over

to protect the people of India from these very abuses, (the best things

being perverted, when applied to unknown objects and put into unsuitable

situations,) the very laws of England, by making the recovery of debts

more easy, infinitely increase the power of the banian over his master.

Thus the Supreme Court of Justice, the destined corrector of all abuses,

becomes a collateral security for that abominable tyranny exercised by

the moneyed banians over Europeans as well as the natives. So that,

while we are here boasting of the British power in the East, we are in

perhaps more than half our service nothing but the inferior, miserable

instruments of the tyranny which the lowest part of the natives of India

exercise, to the disgrace of the British authority, and to the ruin of

all that is respectable among their own countrymen. They have subverted

the first houses, totally ruined and undone the country, cheated and

defrauded the revenue,--the master a silent, sometimes a melancholy

spectator, until some office of high emolument has emancipated him. This

has often been the true reason that the Company's servants in India, in

order to free themselves from this horrid and atrocious servitude, are

obliged to become instruments of another tyranny, and must prostitute

themselves to men in power, in order to obtain some office that may

enable them to escape the servitudes below, and enable them to pay their

debts. And thus many have become the instruments of Mr. Hastings.

These banians, or dewans, were originally among the lower castes in the

country. But now, it is true, that, after seeing the power and profits

of these men,--that there is neither power, profession, nor occupation

to be had, which a reputable person can exercise, but through that

channel,--men of higher castes, and born to better things, have thrown

themselves into that disgraceful servitude, have become menial servants

to Englishmen, that they might rise by their degradation. But whoever

they are, or of whatever birth, they have equally prostituted their

integrity, they have equally lost their character; and, once entered

into that course of life, there is no difference between the best castes

and the worst. That system Mr. Hastings confirmed, established,

increased, and made the instrument of the most austere tyranny, of the

basest peculations, and the most scandalous and iniquitous extortions.

In the description I have given of banians a distinction is to be made.

Your Lordships must distinguish the banians of the British servants in

subordinate situations and the banians who are such to persons in higher

authority. In the latter case the banian is in strict subordination,

because he may always be ruined by his superior; whereas in the former

it is always in his power to ruin his nominal superior. It was not

through fear, but voluntarily, and not for the banian's purposes, but

his own, Mr. Hastings has brought forward his banian. He seated him in

the houses of the principal nobility, and invested him with farms of the

revenue; he has given him enormous jobs; he has put him over the heads

of a nobility which, for their grandeur, antiquity, and dignity, might

almost be matched with your Lordships. He has made him supreme

ecclesiastical judge, judge even of the very castes, in the preservation

of the separate rules and separate privileges of which that people

exists. He who has dominion over the caste has an absolute power over

something more than life and fortune.

Such is that first, or last, (I know not which to call it,) order in the

Company's service called a banian. The _mutseddies_, clerks,

accountants, of Calcutta, generally fall under this description. Your

Lordships will see hereafter the necessity of giving you, in the opening

the case, an idea of the situation of a banian. You will see, as no

Englishman, properly speaking, acts by himself, that he must be made

responsible for that person called his banian,--for the power he either

uses under him, or the power he has acquired over him. The banian

escapes, in the night of his complexion and situation, the inquiry that

a white man cannot stand before in this country. Through the banians, or

other black natives, a bad servant of the Company receives his bribes.

Through them he decides falsely against the titles of litigants in the

court of castes, or in the offices of public registry. Through them Mr.

Hastings has exercised oppressions which, I will venture to say, in his

own name, in his own character, daring as he is, (and he is the most

daring criminal that ever existed,) he never would dare to practise.

Many, if not most, of the iniquities of his interior bad administration

have been perpetrated through these banians, or other native agents and

confidants; and we shall show you that he is not satisfied with one of

them, confiding few of his secrets to Europeans, and hardly any of his

instruments, either native or European, knowing the secrets of each

other. This is the system of banianism, and of concealment, which Mr.

Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by

example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into

that dark and insidious character.

I have explained, or endeavored to explain, to your Lordships these

circumstances of the true spirit, genius, and character, more than the

ostensible institutions of the Company's service: I now shall beg leave

to bring before you one institution, taken from the mercantile

constitution of the Company, so excellent, that I will venture to say

that human wisdom has never exceeded it. In this excellent institution

the counting-house gave lessons to the state. The active, awakened, and

enlightened principle of self-interest will provide a better system for

the guard of that interest than the cold, drowsy wisdom of those who

provide for a good out of themselves ever contrived for the public. The

plans sketched by private prudence for private interest, the regulations

by mercantile men for their mercantile purposes, when they can be

applied to the discipline and order of the state, produce a discipline

and order which no state should be ashamed to copy. The Company's

mercantile regulations are admirably fitted for the government of a

remote, large, disjointed empire. As merchants, having factors abroad

in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness

and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which

no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public

ministers. The Company has made it a fundamental part of their

constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written

government. Your Lordships will observe, in the course of the

proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in

the government of India,--that is, that the Company's government is a

government of writing, a government of record. The strictest court of

justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of

record as the India Company's executive service is, or ought to be, in

all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or

diary of all their transactions, public and private: they are bound to

do this by an express covenant. They oblige them, as a corrective upon

that diary, to keep a letter-book, in which all their letters are to be

regularly entered. And they are bound by the same covenant to produce

all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with

affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of

commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life.

But as the great corrective of all, they have contrived that every

proceeding in public council shall be written,--no debates merely

verbal. The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and

recorded. All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council,

Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves,

decisions, and final resolutions of affairs: the argument, the

discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear. But the

Company has proceeded much further, and done much more wisely, because

they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided,

either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written,--the

proposition, the argument, the dissent. This is not confined to their

great Council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, (and

I see considerable traces of it in practice,) in every Provincial

Council, whilst the Provincial Councils existed, and even down to the

minutest ramification of their service. These books, in a progression

from the lowest Councils to the highest Presidency, are ordered to be

transmitted, duplicate and triplicate, by every ship that sails to

Europe. On this system an able servant of the Company, and high in their

service, has recorded his opinion, and strongly expressed his

sentiments. Writing to the Court of Directors, he says, "It ought to be

remembered, that the basis upon which you rose to power, and have been

able to stand the shock of repeated convulsions, has been the accuracy

and simplicity of mercantile method, which makes every transaction in

your service and every expenditure a matter of record."

My Lords, this method not only must produce to them, if strictly

observed, a more accurate idea of the nature of their affairs and the

nature of their expenditures, but it must afford them no trivial

opportunity and means of knowing the true characters of their servants,

their capacities, their ways of thinking, the turn and bias of their

minds. If well employed, and but a little improved, the East India

Company possessed an advantage unknown before to the chief of a remote

government. In the most remote parts of the world, and in the minutest

parts of a remote service, everything came before the principal with a

domestic accuracy and local familiarity. It was, in the power of a

Director, sitting in London, to form an accurate judgment of every

incident that happened upon the Ganges and the Gogra.

The use of this recorded system did not consist only in the facility of

discovering what the nature of their affairs and the character and

capacity of their servants was, but it furnished the means of detecting

their misconduct, frequently of proving it too, and of producing the

evidence of it judicially under their own hands. For your Lordships must

have observed that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of

evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes

of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct, and simple: guilt is a

crooked, intricate, inconstant, and various thing. The iniquitous job of

to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity

of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons that have colored the first crime may

expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into

contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates,

conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records.

They are flown out of their hands, they are in Europe, they are safe in

the registers of the Company, perhaps they are under the eye of

Parliament, before the writers of them have time to invent an excuse for

a direct contrary conduct to that to which their former pretended

principles applied. This is a great, a material part of the constitution

of the Company. My Lords, I do not think it to be much apologized for,

if I repeat, that this is the fundamental regulation of that service,

and which, if preserved in the first instance, as it ought to be, in

official practice in India, and then used as it ought to be in England,

would afford such a mode of governing a great, foreign, dispersed

empire, as, I will venture to say, few countries ever possessed, even in

governing the most limited and narrow jurisdiction.

It was the great business of Mr. Hastings's policy to subvert this great

political edifice. His first mode of subverting it was by commanding the

public ministers, paid by the Company, to deliver their correspondence

upon the most critical and momentous affairs to him, in order to be

suppressed and destroyed at his pleasure. To support him in this plan of

spoliation, he has made a mischievous distinction in public business

between public and private correspondence. The Company's orders and

covenants made none. There are, readily I admit, thousands of occasions

in which it is not proper to divulge promiscuously a private

correspondence, though on public affairs, to the world; but there is no

occasion in which it is not a necessary duty, on requisition, to

communicate your correspondence to those who form the paramount

government, on whose interests and on whose concerns and under whose

authority this correspondence has been carried on. The very same reasons

which require secrecy with regard to others demand the freest

communication to them. But Mr. Hastings has established principles of

confidence and secrecy towards himself which have cut off all confidence

between the Directors and their ministers, and effectually kept them at

least out of the secret of their own affairs.

Without entering into all the practices by which he has attempted to

maim the Company's records, I shall state one more to your

Lordships,--that is, his avowed appointment of spies and under-agents,

who shall carry on the real state business, while there are public and

ostensible agents who are not in the secret. The correspondence of those

private agents he holds in his own hands, communicates as he thinks

proper, but most commonly withholds. There remains nothing for the

Directors but the shell and husk of a dry, formal, official

correspondence, which neither means anything nor was intended to mean

anything.

These are some of the methods by which he has defeated the purposes of

the excellent institution of a recorded administration. But there are

cases to be brought before this court in which he has laid the axe at

once to the root,--which was, by delegating out of his own hands a great

department of the powers of the Company, which he was himself bound to

execute, to a board which was not bound to record their deliberations

with the same strictness as he himself was bound. He appointed of his

own usurped authority a board for the administration of the revenue, the

members of which were expressly dispensed from recording their dissents,

until they chose it; and in that office, as in a great gulf, a most

important part of the Company's transactions has been buried.

Notwithstanding his unwearied pains in the work of spoliation, some

precious fragments are left, which we ought infinitely to value,--by

which we may learn, and lament, the loss of what he has destroyed. If it

were not for those inestimable fragments and wrecks of the recorded

government which have been saved from the destruction which Mr.

Hastings intended for them all, the most shameful enormities that have

ever disgraced a government or harassed a people would only be known in

this country by secret whispers and unauthenticated anecdotes; the

disgracer's of government, the vexers and afflicters of mankind, instead

of being brought before an awful public tribunal, might have been

honored with the highest distinctions and rewards their country has to

bestow; and sordid bribery, base peculation, iron-handed extortion,

fierce, unrelenting tyranny, might themselves have been invested with

those sacred robes of justice before which this day they have cause to

tremble.

Mr. Hastings, sensible of what he suffers from this register of acts and

opinions, has endeavored to discredit and ruin what remains of it. He

refuses, in his defence to the House of Commons, in letters to the Court

of Directors, in various writings and declarations, he refuses to be

tried by his own recorded declarations; he refuses to be bound by his

own opinions, delivered under his own hand. He knows that he and the

record cannot exist together. He knows that what remains of the written

constitution which he has not destroyed is enough to destroy him. He

claims a privilege of systematic inconstancy, a privilege of

prevarication, a privilege of contradiction,--a privilege of not only

changing his conduct, but the principles of his conduct, whenever it

suits his occasions. But I hope your Lordships will show the destroyers

of that wise constitution, and the destroyers of those records which are

to be the securities against malversation in office, the discoverers and

avengers of it, that whoever destroys the discoverer establishes the

iniquity; that, therefore, your Lordships will bind him to his own

declarations, given on record under his own hand; that you will say to

this unfaithful servant of the Company, what was said to another

unfaithful person upon a far less occasion by a far greater authority,

"Out of thy own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant."

* * * * *

Having gone through what I have been instructed might be necessary to

state to your Lordships concerning the Company's constitution, (I mean

the real inside, and not the shell of its constitution,)--having stated

the abuses that existed in it,--having stated how Mr. Hastings

endeavored to perpetuate and to increase and to profit of the abuse, and

how he has systematically endeavored to destroy, and has in some

instances in fact destroyed, many things truly excellent in that

constitution,--if I have not wasted your time in explanation of matters

that you are already well acquainted with, I shall next beg leave to

state to you the abuse in some particulars of the other part of the

public authority which the Company acquired over the natives of India,

in virtue of the royal charter of the present Mogul emperor, in the year

1766 [1765?].

My Lords, that you may the better judge of the abuse Mr. Hastings has

made of the powers vested in him, it will be expedient to consider a

little who the people are to whose prejudice he has abused these powers.

I shall explain this point with as much brevity as is consistent with

the distinctness with which I mean to bring the whole before your

Lordships; and I beg to observe to you that this previous discourse,

rather explanatory than accusatorial, (if I may use the expression,) is

meant rather to elucidate the nature of the matter to come before you in

regular charges than as proof of the charges themselves.