laudable. It is an imposition on public prostitutes, a duty upon the
societies of dancing-girls,--those seminaries from which Mr. Hastings
has selected an administrator of justice and governor of kingdoms. Debi
Sing thought it expedient to farm this tax,--not only because he
neglected no sort of gain, but because he regarded it as no contemptible
means of power and influence. Accordingly, in plain terms, he opened a
legal brothel, out of which he carefully reserved (you may be sure) the
very flower of his collection for the entertainment of his young
superiors: ladies recommended not only by personal merit, but, according
to the Eastern custom, by sweet and enticing names which he had given
them. For, if they were to be translated, they would sound,--Riches of
my Life, Wealth of my Soul, Treasure of Perfection, Diamond of Splendor,
Pearl of Price, Ruby of Pure Blood, and other metaphorical descriptions,
that, calling up dissonant passions to enhance the value of the general
harmony, heightened the attractions of love with the allurements of
avarice. A moving seraglio of these ladies always attended his progress,
and were always brought to the splendid and multiplied entertainments
with which he regaled his Council. In these festivities, whilst his
guests were engaged with the seductions of beauty, the intoxications of
the most delicious wines of France, and the voluptuous vapor of perfumed
India smoke, uniting the vivid satisfactions of Europe with the torpid
blandishments of Asia, the great magician himself, chaste in the midst
of dissoluteness, sober in the centre of debauch, vigilant in the lap of
negligence and oblivion, attended with an eagle's eye the moment for
thrusting in business, and at such times was able to carry without
difficulty points of shameful enormity, which at other hours he would
not so much as have dared to mention to his employers, young men rather
careless and inexperienced than intentionally corrupt. Not satisfied
with being pander to their pleasures, he anticipated and was purveyor to
their wants, and supplied them with a constant command of money; and by
these means he reigned with an uncontrolled dominion over the province
and over its governors.
For you are to understand that in many things we are very much
misinformed with regard to the true seat of power in India. Whilst we
were proudly calling India a British government, it was in substance a
government of the lowest, basest, and most flagitious of the native
rabble, to whom the far greater part of the English who figured in
employment and station had from their earliest youth been slaves and
instruments. Banians had anticipated the period of their power in
premature advances of money, and have ever after obtained the entire
dominion over their nominal masters.
By these various ways and means Debi Sing contrived to add job to job,
employment to employment, and to hold, besides the farms of two very
considerable districts, various trusts in the revenue,--sometimes
openly appearing, sometimes hid two or three deep in false names,
emerging into light or shrouding himself in darkness, as successful or
defeated crimes rendered him bold or cautious. Every one of these trusts
was marked with its own fraud; and for one of those frauds, committed by
him in another name, by which he became deeply in balance to the
revenue, he was publicly whipped _by proxy_.
All this while Mr. Hastings kept his eye upon him, and attended to his
progress. But as he rose in Mr. Hastings's opinion, he fell in that of
his immediate employers. By degrees, as reason prevailed, and the fumes
of pleasure evaporated, the Provincial Council emerged from their first
dependence, and, finding nothing but infamy attending the councils and
services of such a man, resolved to dismiss him. In this strait and
crisis of his power the artist turned himself into all shapes. He
offered great sums individually, he offered them collectively, and at
last put a _carte blanche_ on the table,--all to no purpose. "What are
you?--stones? Have I not men to deal with? Will flesh and blood refuse
me?"
When Debi Sing found that the Council had entirely escaped, and were
proof against his offers, he left them with a sullen and menacing
silence. He applied where he had good intelligence that these offers
would be well received, and that he should at once be revenged of the
Council, and obtain all the ends which through them he had sought in
vain.
Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a set of innocent
officers,--sold his fellow-servants of the Company, entitled by every
duty to his protection,--sold English subjects, recommended by every tie
of national sympathy,--sold the honor of the British government
itself,--without charge, without complaint, without allegation of crime
in conduct, or of insufficiency in talents: he sold them to the most
known and abandoned character which the rank servitude of that clime
produces. For _him_ he entirely broke and quashed the Council of
Moorshedabad, which had been the settled government for twelve years, (a
long period in the changeful history of India,)--at a time, too, when it
had acquired a great degree of consistency, an official experience, a
knowledge and habit of business, and was making full amends for early
errors.
For now Mr. Hastings, having buried Colonel Monson and General
Clavering, and having shaken off Mr. Francis, who retired half dead from
office, began at length to respire; he found elbow-room once more to
display his genuine nature and disposition, and to make amends in a riot
and debauch of peculation for the forced abstinence to which he was
reduced during the usurped dominion of honor and integrity.
It was not enough that the English were thus sacrificed to the revenge
of Debi Sing. It was necessary to deliver over the natives to his
avarice. By the intervention of bribe-brokerage he united the two great
rivals in iniquity, who before, from an emulation of crimes, were
enemies to each other,--Gunga Govind Sing and Debi Sing. He negotiated
the bribe and the farm of the latter through the former; and Debi Sing
was invested in farm for two years with the three provinces of
Dinagepore, Edrackpore, and Rungpore,--territories making together a
tract of land superior in dimensions to the northern counties of
England, Yorkshire included.
To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle on the full swing of
his genius, he removed all the restraints which had been framed to give
an ostensible credit, to give some show of official order, to the plans
of revenue administration framed from time to time in Bengal. An
officer, called a _dewan_, had been established in the provinces,
expressly as a check on the person who should act as farmer-general.
This office he conferred along with that of farmer-general on Debi Sing,
in order that Debi might become an effectual check upon Sing; and thus
these provinces, without inspection, without control, without law, and
without magistrates, were delivered over by Mr. Hastings, bound hand and
foot, to the discretion of the man whom he had before recorded as the
destroyer of Purneah, and capable of every the most atrocious wickedness
that could be imputed to man.
Fatally for the natives of India, every wild project and every corrupt
sale of Mr. Hastings, and those whose example he followed, is covered
with a pretended increase of revenue to the Company. Mr. Hastings would
not pocket his bribe of 40,000_l._ for himself without letting the
Company in as a sharer and accomplice. For the province of Rungpore, the
object to which I mean in this instance to confine your attention,
7,000_l._ a year was added. But lest this avowed increase of rent should
seem to lead to oppression, great and religious care was taken in the
covenant so stipulated with Debi Sing, that _this_ increase should not
arise from any additional assessment whatsoever on the country, but
solely from improvements in the cultivation, and the encouragement to be
given to the landholder and husbandman. But as Mr. Hastings's bribe, of
a far greater sum, was not guarded by any such provision, it was left to
the discretion of the donor in what manner he was to indemnify himself
for it.
Debi Sing fixed the seat of his authority at Dinagepore, where, as soon
as he arrived, he did not lose a moment in doing his duty. If Mr.
Hastings can forget his covenant, you may easily believe that Debi Sing
had not a more correct memory; and accordingly, as soon as he came into
the province, he instantly broke every covenant which he had entered
into as a restraint on his avarice, rapacity, and tyranny, which, from
the highest of the nobility and gentry to the lowest husbandmen, were
afterwards exercised, with a stern and unrelenting impartiality, upon
the whole people. For, notwithstanding the province before Debi Sing's
lease was, from various causes, in a state of declension, and in balance
for the revenue of the preceding year, at his very first entrance into
office he forced from the zemindars or landed gentry an enormous
increase of their tribute. They refused compliance. On this refusal he
threw the whole body of zemindars into prison, and thus in bonds and
fetters compelled them to sign their own ruin by an increase of rent
which they knew they could never realize. Having thus gotten them under,
he added exaction to exaction, so that every day announced some new and
varied demand, until, exhausted by these oppressions, they were brought
to the extremity to which he meant to drive them, the sale of their
lands.
The lands held by the zemindars of that country are of many
descriptions. The first and most general are those that pay revenue; the
others are of the nature of demesne lands, which are free, and pay no
rent to government. The latter are for the immediate support of the
zemindars and their families,--as from the former they derive their
influence, authority, and the means of upholding their dignity. The
lands of the former description were immediately attached, sequestered,
and sold for the most trifling consideration. The rent-free lands, the
best and richest lands of the whole province, were sold,--sold for--what
do your Lordships think? They were sold for less than one year's
purchase,--at less than one year's purchase, at the most underrated
value; so that the fee-simple of an English acre of rent-free land sold
at the rate of seven or eight shillings. Such a sale, on such terms,
strongly indicated the purchaser. And how did it turn out in fact? The
purchaser was the very agent and instrument of Mr. Hastings, Debi Sing
himself. He made the exaction; he forced the sale; he reduced the rate;
and he became the purchaser at less than one year's purchase, and paid
with the very money which he had extorted from the miserable vendors.
When he had thus sold and separated these lands, he united the whole
body of them, amounting to about 7,000_l._ sterling a year (but,
according to the rate of money and living in that country, equivalent to
a rental in England of 30,000_l._ a year); and then having raised in the
new letting, as on the sale he had fraudulently reduced those lands, he
reserved them as an estate for himself, or to whomsoever resembling
himself Mr. Hastings should order them to be disposed.
The lands, thus sold for next to nothing, left of course the late
landholder still in debt. The failure of fund, the rigorous exaction of
debt, and the multiplication of new arbitrary taxes next carried off the
goods.
There is a circumstance attending this business which will call for
your Lordships' pity. Most of the landholders or zemindars in that
country happened at that time to be women. The sex there is in a state
certainly resembling imprisonment, but guarded as a sacred treasure with
all possible attention and respect. None of the coarse male hands of the
law can reach them; but they have a custom, very cautiously used in all
good governments there, of employing female bailiffs or sergeants in the
execution of the law, where that sex is concerned. Guards, therefore,
surrounded the houses; and then female sergeants and bailiffs entered
into the habitations of these female zemindars, and held their goods and
persons in execution,--nothing being left but what was daily threatened,
their life and honor. The landholders, even women of eminent rank and
condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled
from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable
followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous,
without protection and without bread. The monthly instalment of Mr.
Hastings's bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the
vitals of the people.
The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all
the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and
pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support
infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the
blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the
enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of
violence and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had
been before made away with. Even the lands and funds set aside for
their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their
miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial
sufferings of their lives,--even the very feeble consolations of death,
were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,--a tyranny more consuming than
the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than
death itself,--seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and
the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.
Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people. Were
the lower, the more industrious, spared? Alas! as their situation was
far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and
grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more
vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary. To afford your Lordships
some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr.
Hastings's hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the
very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing. Debi
Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of
gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country,
had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the
improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.
"It is notorious," says he, "that poverty generally prevails amongst the
husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the
country. They are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time
they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence.
And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the
famine. Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses
only a handful of straw, the sale of a _thousand_ of which would not
perhaps produce twenty shillings."
These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was
to obtain a gift of 40,000_l._, over and above a large increase of rent,
over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself
for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit
of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.
Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences. All
this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven
like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by
imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more
than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.
Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive
imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was
not put in practice. On its own day your Lordships will hear, with
astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous
inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded
demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent
on which they were piled.
The country being in many parts left wholly waste and in all parts
considerably depopulated by the first rigors, the full rate of the
district was exacted from the miserable survivors. Their burdens were
increased, as their fellow-laborers, to whose joint efforts they were to
owe the means of payment, diminished. Driven to make payments beyond all
possible calculation, previous to receipts and above their means, in a
very short time they fell into the hands of usurers.
The usurers, who under such a government held their own funds by a
precarious tenure, and were to lend to those whose substance was still
more precarious, to the natural hardness and austerity of that race of
men had additional motives to extortion, and made their terms
accordingly. And what were the terms these poor people were obliged to
consent to, to answer the bribes and peshcush paid to Mr.
Hastings?--five, ten, twenty, forty per cent? No! at an interest of six
hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day! A tiller of land to pay
six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government! What
exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of
wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder
between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the
country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted,
overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part
of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. An
universal treasury extent and process of execution followed on the
cattle and stock, and was enforced with more or less rigor in every
quarter. We have it in evidence, that in those sales five cows were sold
for not more than seven or eight shillings. All other things were
depreciated in the same proportion. The sale of the instruments of
husbandry succeeded to that of the corn and stock. Instances there are,
where, all other things failing, the farmers were dragged from the court
to their houses, in order to see them first plundered, and then burnt
down before their faces. It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it
was a savage war made upon the country.
The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies.
The families were disposed of. It is a known observation, that those who
have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly
attached to their children and wives. The most tender of parents sold
their children at market. The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their
wives. The tyranny of Mr. Hastings extinguished every sentiment of
father, son, brother, and husband!
I come now to the last stage of their miseries. Everything visible and
vendible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from
the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors,
all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature,
attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient
rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which
producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow
irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury,
and malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing
their avarice, their vices are no longer human. From cruel men they are
transformed into savage beasts, with no other vestiges of reason left
but what serves to furnish the inventions and refinements of ferocious
subtlety, for purposes of which beasts are incapable and at which fiends
would blush.
Debi Sing and his instruments suspected, and in a few cases they
suspected justly, that the country people had purloined from their own
estates, and had hidden in secret places in the circumjacent deserts,
some small reserve of their own grain to maintain themselves during the
unproductive months of the year, and to leave some hope for a future
season. But the under-tyrants knew that the demands of Mr. Hastings
would admit no plea for delay, much less for subtraction of his bribe,
and that he would not abate a shilling of it to the wants of the whole
human race. These hoards, real or supposed, not being discovered by
menaces and imprisonment, they fell upon the last resource, the naked
bodies of the people. And here, my Lords, began such a scene of
cruelties and tortures as I believe no history has ever presented to the
indignation of the world,--such as I am sure, in the most barbarous
ages, no politic tyranny, no fanatic persecution, has ever yet exceeded.
Mr. Paterson, the commissioner appointed to inquire into the state of
the country, makes his own apology and mine for opening this scene of
horrors to you in the following words: "That the punishments inflicted
upon the ryots, both of Rungpore and Dinagepore, for non-payment, were
in many instances of such a nature that I would rather wish to draw a
veil over them than shock your feelings by the detail, but that, however
disagreeable the task may be to myself, it is absolutely necessary, for
the sake of justice, humanity, and the honor of government, that they
should be exposed, to be prevented in future."
My Lords, they began by winding cords round the fingers of the unhappy
freeholders of those provinces, until they clung to and were almost
incorporated with one another; and then they hammered wedges of iron
between them, until, regardless of the cries of the sufferers, they had
bruised to pieces and forever crippled those poor, honest, innocent,
laborious hands, which had never been raised to their mouths but with a
penurious and scanty proportion of the fruits of their own soil; but
those fruits (denied to the wants of their own children) have for more
than fifteen years past furnished the investment for our trade with
China, and been sent annually out, and without recompense, to purchase
for us that delicate meal with which your Lordships, and all this
auditory, and all this country, have begun every day for these fifteen
years at their expense. To those beneficent hands that labor for our
benefit the return of the British government has been cords and hammers
and wedges. But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands
will act with resistless power. What is it that they will not pull down,
when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors? Then what can
withstand such hands? Can the power that crushed and destroyed them?
Powerful in prayer, let us at least deprecate and thus endeavor to
secure ourselves from the vengeance which these mashed and disabled
hands may pull down upon us. My Lords, it is an awful consideration: let
us think of it.