transactions by my intermixing with them, as I shall endeavor to do, as
much as possible of the grounds of them. I will venture to say, that no
description that I can give, no painting, if I was either able or
willing to paint, could make these transactions appear to your Lordships
with the strength which they have in themselves; and your Lordships
will be convinced of this, when you see, what nobody could hardly
believe, that a man can say, "It was given to others without right,
title, or purchase,--give it to me without right, title, or purchase;
give me the estates of minors without right, title, or purchase, because
Mr. Hastings gave the estates of widows without right, title, or
purchase."
Of this exemplary grant, of this pattern for future proceedings, I will
show your Lordships the consequence. I will read to your Lordships part
of the examination of a witness, taken from a report of a committee of
the House of Commons.
"Are you acquainted with the situation of the zemindary of
Baharbund?--It lies to the eastward of Dinagepore and Rungpore. I was
stationed in that neighborhood.--To whom did it originally belong?--I
believe, to the zemindary of Radshi, belonging to Ranny Bhowanny.--For
what reason was it taken from the Ranny of Radshi and given to Cantoo
Baboo?--I do not exactly recollect: I believe, on some plea of
incapacity or insufficiency in her to manage it, or some pretended
decline in the revenue, owing to mismanagement.--On what terms was it
granted to Cantoo Baboo or his son?--I believe it was a grant in
perpetuity, at the revenue of Rupees 82,000 or 83,000 per annum.--What
amount did he collect from the country?--I cannot tell. The year I was
in that neighborhood, the settlement with his under-tenants was
something above 3,53,000 rupees. The inhabitants of the country objected
to it. They assembled in a body of about five thousand, and were
proceeding to Calcutta to make known their grievances to the Committee
of Revenue. They were stopped at Cossimbazar by Noor Sing Baboo, the
brother of Cantoo Baboo, and there the matter was compromised,--in what
manner I cannot say."
Your Lordships see, Mr. Hastings's banian got this zemindary belonging
to this venerable lady; unable to protect herself; that it was granted
to him without right, title, or purchase. To show you that Mr. Hastings
had been in a constant course of such proceeding, here is a petition
from a person called ---- for some favor from government which it is not
necessary now to state. In order to make good his claim, he states what
nobody denied, but which is universally known in fact. Says he, "I have
never entertained any such intention or idea," that is, of seizing upon
other people's zemindaries; "neither am I at all desirous of acquiring
any other person's zemindary in this country," &c....
[_The document read here is wanting, ending_] "as several Calcutta
banians have done," &c.
He states it as a kind of constant practice, by which the country had
been robbed under Mr. Hastings, known and acknowledged to be so, to
seize upon the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless. In this
manner did Gunga Govind Sing govern himself, upon the direct precedent
of Cantoo Baboo, the banian of Mr. Hastings; and this other instrument
of his in like manner calls upon government for favor of some kind or
other, upon the same principle and the same precedent.
Your Lordships now see how necessary it was to say something about
arbitrary power. For, first, the wicked people of that country (Mr.
Hastings's instruments, I mean) pretend right, title, purchase, grant;
and when their frauds in all these legal means are discovered, then they
fly off, and have recourse to arbitrary power, and say, "It is true I
can make out no right, title, grant, or purchase; the parties are
minors; I am bound to take care of their right: but you have arbitrary
power; you have exercised it upon other occasions; exercise it upon
this; give me the rights of other people." This was the last act, and I
hope will be the last act, of Mr. Hastings's wicked power, done by the
wickedest man in favor of the wickedest man, and by the wickedest means,
which failed upon his own testimony.
To bring your Lordships to the end of this business, which I hope will
lead me very near to the end of what I have to trouble your Lordships
with, I will now state the conduct of the Council, and the resolution
about Gunga Govind Sing. I am to inform your Lordships that there was a
reference made by the Council to the Committee of Revenue, namely, to
Gunga Govind Sing himself,--a reference with regard to the right, title,
mode, and proceeding, and many other circumstances; upon which the
Committee, being such as I have described, very naturally were silent.
Gunga Govind Sing _loquitur solus_,--in the manner you have just heard;
the Committee were the chorus,--they sometimes talk, fill up a vacant
part,--but Gunga Govind Sing was the great actor, the sole one. The
report of this Committee being laid before the Council, Mr. Stables, one
of the board, entered the following minute on the 15th of May, 1785.
"I have perused the several papers upon this subject, and am sorry to
observe that the Committee of Revenue are totally silent on the most
material points therein, and sending the petition to them has only been
so much time thrown away: I mean, on the actual value of the lands in
question, what the amount derived from them has been in the last year,
and what advantages or disadvantages to government by the sale, and
whether, in their opinion, the supposed sale was compulsive or not. But
it is not necessary for the discussion of the question respecting the
regularity or irregularity of the pretended sale of Salbarry to Gunga
Govind Sing, the dewan, to enter into the particular assertions of each
party.
"The representations of the Rajah's agent, confirmed by the petitions of
his principal, positively assert the sale to have been compulsive and
violent; and the dewan as positively denies it, though the fears he
expresses, 'that their common enemies would set aside the act before it
was complete,' show clearly that they were sensible the act was
unjustifiable, if they do not tend to falsify his denial.
"But it is clearly established and admitted by the language and writings
of both parties, that there has been a most unwarrantable collusion in
endeavoring to alienate the rights of government, contrary to the most
positive original laws of the constitution of these provinces, 'that no
zemindar and other landholder, paying revenue to government, shall be
permitted to alienate his lands without the express authority of that
government.'
"The defence set up by Gunga Govind Sing does not go to disavow the
transaction; for, if it did, the deed of sale, &c., produced by himself,
and the petition to the board for its confirmation, would detect him: on
the contrary, he openly admits its existence, and only strives to show
that it was a voluntary one on the part of the Ranny and the servants of
the Rajah. Whether voluntary or not, it was equally criminal in Gunga
Govind Sing, as the public officer of government: because diametrically
opposite to the positive and repeated standing orders of that government
for the rule of his conduct, as dewan, and native guardian of the public
rights intrusted especially to his care; because it was his duty, not
only not to be guilty of a breach of those rules himself, but, as dewan,
and exercising the efficient office of _kanungo_, to prevent, detect,
expose, and apprise his employers of every instance attempted to the
contrary; because it was his duty to prevent the government being
defrauded, and the Rajah, a child of nine years old, robbed of his
hereditary possessions, as he would have been, if this transaction had
not been detected: whereas, on the contrary, the dewan is himself the
principal mover and sole instrument in that fraud and robbery, if I am
rightly informed, to the amount of 42,474 rupees[1] in perpetuity, by
which he alone was to benefit; and because he has even dared to stand
forward in an attempt to obtain our sanction, and thereby make us
parties to (in my opinion) a false deed and fraudulent transaction, as
his own defence now shows the bill of sale and all its collateral papers
to be.
"If offences of this dark tendency and magnitude were not to be punished
in a public manner, the high example here set the natives employed
under the government by their first native officer would very soon
render our authority contemptible, and operate to the destruction of the
public revenues. I will not dwell further on the contradictions in these
papers before us on this subject.
"But I beg leave to point out how tenacious the government have been of
insuring implicit obedience to their rules on this subject in
particular, and in prohibiting conduct like that here exhibited against
their public officer, and how sacredly they have viewed the public
institutes on this subject, which have been violated and trampled on;
and it will suffice to show their public orders on a similar instance
which happened some time ago, and which the dewan, from his official
situation, must have been a party in detecting.
"I desire the board's letter to the Committee on this subject, dated the
31st May, 1782, may be read, and a copy be annexed to this minute.
"I therefore move the board that Gunga Govind Sing may be forthwith
required to surrender the original deeds produced by him as a title to
the grant of Salbarry, in order that they may be returned to the Rajah's
agents, to be made null and void.
"I further move the board, that the dewan, Gunga Govind Sing, together
with his naib, Prawn Kishin Sing, his son, and all his dependants, be
removed from their offices, and that the Roy Royan, Rajah Rajebullub,
whose duty only Gunga Govind Sing virtually is to perform, be reinstated
in the exercise of the duties of his department; and that Gunga Govind
Sing be ordered to deliver up all official papers of the circar to the
Committee of Revenue and the Roy Royan, and that they be ordered
accordingly to take charge of them, and finally settle all accounts."
This motion was overruled, and no final proceeding appears.
My Lords, you have heard the proceedings of the court before which Gunga
Govind Sing thought proper to appeal, in consequence of the power and
protection of Mr. Hastings being understood to exist after he left
India, and authenticated by his last parting deed. Your Lordships will
judge by that last act of Mr. Hastings what the rest of his whole life
was.
My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than just to remind your
Lordships of this, that Mr. Hastings's government was one whole system
of oppression, of robbery of individuals, of destruction of the public,
and of suppression of the whole system of the English government, in
order to vest in the worst of the natives all the powers that could
possibly exist in any government,--in order to defeat the ends which all
governments ought in common to have in view. Thus, my Lords, I show you
at one point of view what you are to expect from him in all the rest. I
have, I think, made out as clear as can be to your Lordships, so far as
it was necessary to go, that his bribery and peculation was not
occasional, but habitual,--that it was not urged upon him at the moment,
but was regular and systematic. I have shown to your Lordships the
operation of such a system on the revenues.
My Lords, Mr. Hastings pleads one constant merit to justify those
acts,--namely, that they produce an increase of the public revenue; and
accordingly he never sells to any of those wicked agents any trusts
whatever in the country, that you do not hear that it will considerably
tend to the increase of the revenue. Your Lordships will see, when he
sold to wicked men the province of Bahar in the same way in which Debi
Sing had this province of Dinagepore, that consequences of a horrid and
atrocious nature, though not to so great an extent, followed from it. I
will just beg leave to state to your Lordships, that the kingdom of
Bahar is annexed to the kingdom of Bengal; that this kingdom was
governed by another Provincial Council; that he turned out that
Provincial Council, and sold that government to two wicked men: one of
no fortune at all, and the other of a very suspicious fortune; one a
total bankrupt, the other justly excommunicated for his wickedness in
his country, and then in prison for misdemeanors in a subordinate
situation of government. Mr. Hastings destroyed the Council that
imprisoned him; and, instead of putting one of the best and most
reputable of the natives to govern it, he takes out of prison this
excommunicated wretch, hated by God and man,--this bankrupt, this man of
evil and desperate character, this mismanager of the public revenue in
an inferior station; and, as he had given Bengal to Gunga Govind Sing,
he gave this province to Rajahs Kelleram and Cullian Sing. It was done
upon this principle, that they would increase and very much better the
revenue. These men seemed to be as strange instruments for improving a
revenue as ever were chosen, I suppose, since the world began. Perhaps
their merit was giving a bribe of 40,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings. How he
disposed of it I don't know. He says, "I disposed of it to the public,
and it was in a case of emergency." You will see in the course of this
business the falsehood of that pretence; for you will see, though the
obligation is given for it as a round sum of money, that the payment
was not accomplished till a year after; that therefore it could not
answer any immediate exigence of the Company. Did it answer in an
increase of the revenue? The very reverse. Those persons who had given
this bribe of 40,000_l._ at the end of that year were found 80,000_l._
in debt to the Company. The Company always loses, when Mr. Hastings
takes a bribe; and when he proposes an increase of the revenue, the
Company loses often double. But I hope and trust your Lordships will
consider this idea of a monstrous rise of rent, given by men of
desperate fortunes and characters, to be one of the grievances instead
of one of the advantages of this system.
It has been necessary to lay these facts before you, (and I have stated
them to your Lordships far short of their reality, partly through my
infirmity, and partly on account of the odiousness of the task of going
through things that disgrace human nature,) that you may be enabled
fully to enter into the dreadful consequences which attend a system of
bribery and corruption in a Governor-General. On a transient view,
bribery is rather a subject of disgust than horror,--the sordid practice
of a venal, mean, and abject mind; and the effect of the crime seems to
end with the act. It looks to be no more than the corrupt transfer of
property from one person to another,--at worst a theft. But it will
appear in a very different light, when you regard the consideration for
which the bribe is given,--namely, that a Governor-General, claiming an
arbitrary power in himself, for that consideration delivers up the
properties, the liberties, and the lives of an whole people to the
arbitrary discretion of any wicked and rapacious person, who will be
sure to make good from their blood the purchase he has paid for his
power over them. It is possible that a man may pay a bribe merely to
redeem himself from some evil. It is bad, however, to live under a power
whose violence has no restraint except in its avarice. But no man ever
paid a bribe for a power to charge and tax others, but with a view to
oppress them. No man ever paid a bribe for the handling of the public
money, but to peculate from it. When once such offices become thus
privately and corruptly venal, the very worst men will be chosen (as Mr.
Hastings has in fact constantly chosen the very worst); because none but
those who do not scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently
with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands of a severe public
revenue and the private bribes of a rapacious chief magistrate. Not only
the worst men will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no
dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions. Their
protection is sure. The authority that is to restrain, to control, to
punish them is previously engaged; he has his retaining fee for the
support of their crimes. Mr. Hastings never dared, because he could not,
arrest oppression in its course, without drying up the source of his own
corrupt emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the fact, to punish
extortion in others, because he could not, without risking the discovery
of bribery in himself. The same corruption, the same oppression, and the
same impunity will reign through all the subordinate gradations.
A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of wicked, violent, and
unjust instruments. But when once the line of just and legal demand is
transgressed, such instruments are of absolute necessity; and they
comport themselves accordingly. When we know that men must be well paid
(and they ought to be well paid) for the performance of honorable duty,
can we think that men will be found to commit wicked, rapacious, and
oppressive acts with fidelity and disinterestedness for the sole
emolument of dishonest employers? No: they must have their full share of
the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer and more
necessary instruments of the general extortion. We must not, therefore,
flatter ourselves, when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000_l._ in bribes for
Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the people nothing more
than 40,000_l._ is extorted. I speak within compass, four times forty
must be levied on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent
purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable tortures,
imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general despair, general
insurrection, the massacre of the officers of revenue by the people, the
massacre of the people by the soldiery, and the total waste and
destruction of the finest provinces in India, are things of course,--and
all a necessary consequence involved in the very substance of Mr.
Hastings's bribery.
I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed, for private
purposes, the whole system of government by the six Provincial Councils,
which he had no right to destroy.
I charge him with having delegated to others that power which the act of
Parliament had directed him to preserve unalienably in himself.
I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere instruments and
tools, at the enormous expense of 62,000_l._ per annum.
I charge him with having appointed a person their dewan to whom these
Englishmen were to be subservient tools,--whose name, to his own
knowledge, was, by the general voice of India, by the general recorded
voice of the Company, by recorded official transactions, by everything
that can make a man known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy;
and with giving him the whole power which he had thus separated from the
Council-General, and from the Provincial Councils.
I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.
I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which fidelity even
in iniquity requires at the hands of the worst of men.
I charge him with having robbed those people of whom he took the bribes.
I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.
I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, taken the
lands of orphans, and given them to wicked persons under him.
I charge him with having removed the natural guardians of a minor Rajah,
and with having given that trust to a stranger, Debi Sing, whose
wickedness was known to himself and all the world, and by whom the
Rajah, his family, and dependants were cruelly oppressed.
I charge him with having committed to the management of Debi Sing three
great provinces; and thereby with having wasted the country, ruined the
landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses,
seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed
the honor of the whole female race of that country.
In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villany upon
Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.
My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national
justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords? You have the cause of oppressed
princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and
of wasted kingdoms.
Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever
laid to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish
any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left
substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.
My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons
of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, that the sun,
in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more
glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the
material bounds and barriers of Nature, united by the bond of a social
and moral community,--all the Commons of England resenting, as their
own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of
India.
Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the
modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us
with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the
mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the crown, under whose authority you
sit, and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority,
what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent powers and
protecting justice of his Majesty. We have here the heir-apparent to the
crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England wish an
heir-apparent of the crown to be. We have here all the branches of the
royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the
sovereign and the subject,--offering a pledge in that situation for the
support of the rights of the crown and the liberties of the people, both
which extremities they touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary
peerage here,--those who have their own honor, the honor of their
ancestors and of their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they
have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which
justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new
nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves by various merits,--by
great military services which have extended the fame of this country
from the rising to the setting sun. We have those who, by various civil
merits and various civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which
they well deserve, and in which they will justify the favor of their
sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and make them
rejoice to see those virtuous characters that were the other day upon a
level with them now exalted above them in rank, but feeling with them in
sympathy what they felt in common with them before. We have persons
exalted from the practice of the law, from the place in which they
administered high, though subordinate, justice, to a seat here, to
enlighten with their knowledge and to strengthen with their votes those
principles which have distinguished the courts in which they have
presided.
My Lords, you have here also the lights of our religion, you have the
bishops of England. My Lords, you have that true image of the primitive
Church, in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from
the superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will
bring upon the best institutions. You have the representatives of that
religion which says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit
of their institution is charity,--a religion which so much hates
oppression, that, when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, He
did not appear in a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with
the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling
principle that their welfare was the object of all government, since the
Person who was the Master of Nature chose to appear Himself in a
subordinate situation. These are the considerations which influence
them, which animate them, and will animate them, against all
oppression,--knowing that He who is called first among them, and first
among us all, both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it,
made Himself "the servant of all."