to your Lordships, what I am hereafter to prove, that the most
substantial and leading yeomen, the responsible farmers, the parochial
magistrates and chiefs of villages, were tied two and two by the legs
together; and their tormentors, throwing them with their heads
downwards, over a bar, beat them on the soles of the feet with rattans,
until the nails fell from the toes; and then attacking them at their
heads, as they hung downward, as before at their feet, they beat them
with sticks and other instruments of blind fury, until the blood gushed
out at their eyes, mouths, and noses. Not thinking that the ordinary
whips and cudgels, even so administered, were sufficient, to others (and
often also to the same who had suffered as I have stated) they applied,
instead of rattan and bamboo, whips made of the branches of the bale
tree,--a tree full of sharp and strong thorns, which tear the skin and
lacerate the flesh far worse than ordinary scourges. For others,
exploring with a searching and inquisitive malice, stimulated by an
insatiate rapacity, all the devious paths of Nature for whatever is most
unfriendly to man, they made rods of a plant highly caustic and
poisonous, called _Bechettea_, every wound of which festers and
gangrenes, adds double and treble to the present torture, leaves a crust
of leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of
life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of
avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season
when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and
cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to
reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment.
They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at
certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe
and almost intolerable,--they were led out before break of day, and,
stiff and sore as they were with the bruises and wounds of the night,
were plunged into water; and whilst their jaws clung together with the
cold, and their bodies were rendered infinitely more sensible, the blows
and stripes were renewed upon their backs; and then, delivering them
over to soldiers, they were sent into their farms and villages to
discover where a few handfuls of grain might be found concealed, or to
extract some loan from the remnants of compassion and courage not
subdued in those who had reason to fear that their own turn of torment
would be next, that they should succeed them in the same punishment, and
that their very humanity, being taken as a proof of their wealth, would
subject them (as it did in many cases subject them) to the same inhuman
tortures. After this circuit of the day through their plundered and
ruined villages, they were remanded at night to the same prison,
whipped, as before, at their return to the dungeon, and at morning
whipped at their leaving it, and then sent, as before, to purchase, by
begging in the day, the reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of
menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and
flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long
time made up all the vicissitude of life to these miserable people.
But there are persons whose fortitude could bear their own suffering;
there are men who are hardened by their very pains, and the mind,
strengthened even by the torments of the body, rises with a strong
defiance against its oppressor. They were assaulted on the side of their
sympathy. Children were scourged almost to death in the presence of
their parents. This was not enough. The son and father were bound close
together, face to face and body to body, and in that situation cruelly
lashed together, so that the blow which escaped the father fell upon the
son, and the blow which missed the son wound over the back of the
parent. The circumstances were combined by so subtle a cruelty that
every stroke which did not excruciate the sense should wound and
lacerate the sentiments and affections of nature.
On the same principle, and for the same ends, virgins, who had never
seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses,
and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was
to be sought against all wrong and all violence, (but where no judge or
lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and
hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench,) these virgins, vainly
invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst
their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all
the people, publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the
human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and
suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the
bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were
buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this
consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then
cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the
circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the
nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of
cleft bamboos. Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would
think it incredible. But it did not end there. Growing from crime to
crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging
sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire--(I cannot
proceed for shame and horror!)--these infernal furies planted death in
the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason,
distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks
from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural,
monstrous, and nefarious cruelty,--there, where the reverence of nature
and the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe
their practices.
These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India
and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature. But there
were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things
done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than
all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of
opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in
mere sensitive nature can do.
The women thus treated lost their caste. My Lords, we are not here to
commend or blame the institutions and prejudices of a whole race of
people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no
reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of
men, or foreign conquest, have been able to make the smallest
impression. The aboriginal Gentoo inhabitants are all dispersed into
tribes or castes,--each caste born to an invariable rank, rights, and
descriptions of employment, so that one caste cannot by any means pass
into another. With the Gentoos, certain impurities or disgraces, though
without any guilt of the party, infer loss of caste; and when the
highest caste, that of Brahmin, which is not only noble, but sacred, is
lost, the person who loses it does not slide down into one lower, but
reputable,--he is wholly driven from all honest society. All the
relations of life are at once dissolved. His parents are no longer his
parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his,
are no longer to regard him as their father. It is something far worse
than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal
excommunication. It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches
any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death.
Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned. No honest
occupation can be followed. He becomes an _halicore_, if (which is rare)
he survives that miserable degradation.
Upon those whom all the shocking catalogue of tortures I have mentioned
could not make to flinch one of the modes of losing caste for Brahmins
and other principal tribes was practised. It was to harness a bullock at
the court-door, and to put the Brahmin on his back, and to lead him
through the towns, with drums beating before him. To intimidate others,
this bullock, with drums, (the instrument, according to their ideas, of
outrage, disgrace, and utter loss of caste,) was led through the
country; and as it advanced, the country fled before it. When any
Brahmin was seized, he was threatened with this pillory, and for the
most part he submitted in a moment to whatever was ordered. What it was
may be thence judged. But when no possibility existed of complying with
the demand, the people by their cries sometimes prevailed on the tyrants
to have it commuted for cruel scourging, which was accepted as mercy. To
some Brahmins this mercy was denied, and the act of indelible infamy
executed. Of these men one came to the Company's commissioner with the
tale, and ended with these melancholy words: "I have suffered this
indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me: I call for
justice." He called in vain.
Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive
demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into
despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a
body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers
invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of
circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a
relief, into the prison of their native soil. Not suffered to quit the
district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had
scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of
tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to
exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair
drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most
quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an
universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults,
the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes
the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were
massacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire
to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person
with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been
the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all
these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops,
who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the
impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired
with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel
and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or
even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief
in that province.
In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to
exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into
content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every
moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces
in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers
all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was
feared it would go to England. The English Chief in the province, Mr.
Goodlad, represented it to Mr. Hastings's Revenue Committee to be (what
it was) the greatest and most serious disturbance that ever happened in
Bengal. But, good easy man, he was utterly unable to guess to what cause
it was to be attributed. He thought there was some irregularity in the
collection, but on the whole judged that it had little other cause than
a general conspiracy of the husbandmen and landholders, who, as Debi
Sing's lease was near expiring, had determined not to pay any more
revenue.
Mr. Hastings's Committee of Revenue, whilst these wounds were yet
bleeding, and whilst a total failure was threatened in the rents of
these provinces, thought themselves obliged to make an inquiry with some
sort of appearance of seriousness into the causes of it. They looked,
therefore, about them carefully, and chose what they judged would be
most plausible and least effective. They thought that it was necessary
to send a special commissioner into the province, and one, too, whose
character would not instantly blast the credit of his mission. They cast
their eyes on a Mr. Paterson, a servant of the Company, a man of fair
character, and long standing in the service. Mr. Paterson was a person
known to be of a very cool temper, placid manners, moderate and middle
opinions, unconnected with parties; and from such a character they
looked for (what sometimes is to be expected from it) a compromising,
balanced, neutralized, equivocal, colorless, confused report, in which
the blame was to be impartially divided between the sufferer and the
oppressor, and in which, according to the standing manners of Bengal, he
would recommend oblivion as the best remedy, and would end by remarking,
that retrospect could have no advantage, and could serve only to
irritate and keep alive animosities; and by this kind of equitable,
candid, and judge-like proceeding, they hoped the whole complaint would
calmly fade away, the sufferers remain in the possession of their
patience, and the tyrant of his plunder. In confidence of this event
from this presumed character, Mr. Hastings's Committee, in appointing
Mr. Paterson their commissioner, were not deficient in arming him with
powers equal to the object of his commission. He was enabled to call
before him all accountants, to compel the production of all accounts, to
examine all persons,--not only to inquire and to report, but to decide
and to redress.
Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally
failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their
man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a
firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling
heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and
excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of
chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is
now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son,
as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded
the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from
the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts.
He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was
the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This
letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He
laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of
integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather
than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper
frame of mind for doing his duty.
He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust
that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full
support in the execution of it,--as he, with every other white man in
Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact,
that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent,
had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold
them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known
this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other
man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi
Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.
But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to
perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the
universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people,
concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie,
with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and
saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the
exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished
wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no
sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first
letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable
words. "In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the
oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not
enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the
facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not
collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and
every insult of disgrace,--and this not confined to a few, but extended
over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to
servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to
resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot,
when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an
exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half
of that demand,--when he finds himself so far from being released, that
he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his
feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail,
adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the
reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their
attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these
prejudices under such circumstances."
He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every
discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft,
fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion
of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his
employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions
for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements
and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested
reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe,
never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of
Bengal,--of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so
absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in
those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before
Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports,
carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before
you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of
Governor Hastings's general system of bribery.
But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr.
Hastings's system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between
him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is
left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore,
Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is
received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled
their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been
usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing
made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his
Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.
Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that
all officers representing government, and making in that character an
authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their
proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence
of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for
truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is
their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would
impeach or shake the report.
Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other
maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings's devising.
In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the
protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant
shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.
This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and
of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned
their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty,
into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril;
the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but
appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a
culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be
juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive
board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to
proceed by strict rules of law.
By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the
credit due to the proceedings of government. They changed the natural
situation of proofs. They rejected the depositions of Paterson's
witnesses, as not on oath, though they had never ordered or authorized
them so to be taken.
They went further, and disabled, in a body, all the deponents
themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole
province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own
rebellion. They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead
of the culprit. They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves
ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on
him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) and made him a
complainant and a witness against him in the stupidest and most
improbable of all accusations,--namely, that Paterson had menaced him
with punishment, if he did not, in so many words, slander and calumniate
Debi Sing; and then the Committee, seating this wretch as an assessor at
their own board, who a few days before would have trembled like a
whipped slave at the look of an European, encouraged him to interrogate
their own commissioner.
[_Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit down. After some time
Mr. Burke again addressed the House._]
My Lords, I am sorry to break the attention of your Lordships in such a
way. It is a subject that agitates me. It is long, difficult, and
arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you any further
trouble, I will go through it this day.
I am to tell your Lordships, that the next step they took was, after
putting Mr. Paterson as an accuser to make good a charge which he made
out but too much to their satisfaction, they changed their battery.
[_Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House, on the motion of
His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, adjourned._]
SPEECH
IN
OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.
FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788.
My Lords,--In any great undertaking, a failure in the midst of it, even
from infirmity, though to be regarded principally as a misfortune, is
attended with some slight shadow of disgrace; but your Lordships'
humanity, and your love of justice, have remedied everything, and I
therefore proceed with confidence this day.
My Lords, I think (to the best of my remembrance) the House adjourned at
the period of time in which I was endeavoring to illustrate the
mischiefs that happened from Mr. Hastings's throwing off his
responsibility, by delegating his power to a nominal Council, and in
reality to a black bad man, a native of the country, of the worst
character that could be found in it,--and the consequence of it, in
preventing the detection and the punishment of the grossest abuses that
ever were known to be committed in India, or any other part of the
world.
My Lords, I stated to you that Mr. Commissioner Paterson was sent into
that country. I stated that he was sent into it with all the authority
of government, with power to hear, and not only to hear and to report,
but to redress, the grievances which he should find in the country. In
short, there was nothing wanting to his power but an honest support.
Your Lordships will be convinced that the road to fortune was easy to
him. Debi Sing for a favorable report would have given a large sum of
money. Your Lordships will be convinced that the Committee would not
have received such a report as a proof of bribery. They would rather
consider him as a man whose conduct tended to conciliate, and to soften
troublesome and difficult matters, and to settle the order of government
as soon as possible.
Some of the things contained in his reports I have taken the liberty of
laying before your Lordships, but very faintly, very imperfectly, and
far short of my materials. I have stated, that the criminal, against
whom the commissioner had made his report, instead of being punished by
that strong hand of power which Mr. Hastings has thought proper to use
upon other occasions, when he has endeavored to make princes, or persons
in the rank and with the attributes of sovereign princes, feel whenever
they have incurred his private resentments,--that this man was put into
every situation of offence or defence which the most litigious and
prevaricating laws that ever were invented in the very bosom of
arbitrary power could afford him, or by which peculation and power were
to be screened from the cries of an oppressed people.
Mr. Paterson, I stated, from being a commissioner directed to report,
under the authority of government, to that government, was considered as
a voluntary accuser, obliged to make good the articles of his charge.
But I believe I stated that he did not long remain in that condition.
I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that this Debi Sing,
fortified by this protection, which was extended even to the lowest of
his instruments, thought it high time to assume the superiority that
belonged to a personage who had the Governor-General for his
_pensioner_. No longer the sneaking tone of apology; no longer the
modest allegations that the commissioner was misinformed;--he boldly
accuses the representative of English government of forgery in order to
destroy him; he criminates and recriminates, and lays about him without
mercy.