suppressed in this case, and still more in the report; and turning from
the case to the proceedings of the persons who are supposed to have the
management of the inquiry, they bring forward, as an appendix to this
case, Mr. Hastings's own invectives and charge against these persons, at
the very same time that they suppress and do not bring forward, either
in the charge or upon the report, what the other party have said in
their own justification. The consequence of this management was, that a
body of evidence which would have made this case the clearest in the
world, and which I hope we shall make to appear so to your Lordships,
was rendered for the most part inapplicable, and the whole puzzled and
confused: I say, for the most part, for some parts did apply, but
miserably applied, to the case. From their own state of the case they
would have it inferred that the fault was not in their way of
representing it, but in the infirmity, confusion, and disorder of the
proofs themselves; but this, I trust we shall satisfy you, is by no
means the case. I rest, however, upon the proof of partiality in this
business, of the imposition upon the counsel, whether designed or not,
and of the bias given by adding an appendix with Mr. Hastings's own
remarks upon the case, without giving the reasons of the other parties
for their conduct. Now, if there was nothing else than the fallacious
recital, and afterwards the suppression, I believe any rational and
sober man would see perfect, good, and sufficient ground for laying
aside any authority that can be derived from the opinions of persons,
though of the first character (and I am sure no man living does more
homage to their learning, impartiality, and understanding than I do):
first, because the statement of the case has thrown the whole into
confusion; and secondly, as to the matter added as an appendix, which
gives the representation of the delinquent and omits the representation
of his prosecutors, it is observed very properly and very wisely by one
of the great men before whom this evidence was laid, that "the evidence,
as it is here stated, is still more defective, if the appendix is
adopted by the Directors and meant to make a part of the case; for that
throws discredit upon all the information so collected." Certainly it
does; for, if the delinquent party, who is to be prosecuted, be heard
with his own representation of the case, and that of his prosecutors be
suppressed, he is master both of the lawyers and of the mind of mankind.
My Lords, I have here attempted to point out the extreme inconsistencies
and defects of this proceeding; and I wish your Lordships to consider,
with respect to these proceedings of the India House in their
prosecutions, that it is in the power of some of their officers to make
statements in the manner that I have described, then to obtain the names
of great lawyers, and under their sanction to carry the accused through
the world as acquitted.
These are the material circumstances which will be submitted to your
Lordships' sober consideration in the course of this inquiry. I have now
stated them on these two accounts: first, to rebut the reason which Mr.
Hastings has assigned for not giving any satisfaction to the Court of
Directors, namely, because they did not want it, having dropped a
prosecution upon great authorities and opinions; and next, to show your
Lordships how a business begun in bribery is to be supported only by
fraud, deceit, and collusion, and how the receiving of bribes by a
Governor-General of Bengal tends to taint the whole service from
beginning to end, both at home and abroad.
But though upon the partial case that was presented to them these great
lawyers did not advise a prosecution, and though even upon a full
representation of a case a lawyer might think that a man ought not to be
prosecuted, yet he may consider him to be the vilest man upon earth. We
know men are acquitted in the great tribunals in which several Lords of
this country have presided, and who perhaps ought not to have been
brought there and prosecuted before them, and yet about whose
delinquency there could be no doubt. But though we have here sufficient
reason to justify the great lawyers whose names and authorities are
produced, yet Mr. Hastings has extended that authority beyond the length
of their opinions. For, being no longer under the terror of the law,
which, he said, restrained him from making his defence, he was then
bound to give that satisfaction to his masters and the world which every
man in honor is bound to do, when a grave accusation is brought against
him. But this business of the law I wish to sleep from this moment, till
the time when it shall come before you; though I suspect, and have had
reason (sitting in committees in the House of Commons) to believe, that
there was in the India House a bond of iniquity, somewhere or other,
which was able to impose in the first instance upon the solicitor, the
guilt of which, being of another nature, I shall state hereafter, that
your Lordships may be able to discover through whose means and whose
fraud Mr. Hastings obtained these opinions.
If, however, all the great lawyers had been unanimous upon that
occasion, still it would have been necessary for Mr. Hastings to say, "I
cannot, according to my opinion, be brought to give an account in a
court of justice, and I have got great lawyers to declare, that, upon
the case laid before them, they cannot advise a prosecution; but now is
the time for me to come forward, and, being no longer in fear that my
defence may be turned against me, I will produce my defence for the
satisfaction of my masters and the vindication of my own character." But
besides this doubtful opinion (for I believe your Lordships will find it
no better than a doubtful opinion) given by persons for whom I have the
highest honor, and given with a strong censure upon the state of the
case, there were also some great lawyers, men of great authority in the
kingdom, who gave a full and decided opinion that a prosecution ought to
be instituted against him; but the Court of Directors decided otherwise,
they overruled those opinions, and acted upon the opinions in favor of
Mr. Hastings. When, therefore, he knew that the great men in the law
were divided upon the propriety of a prosecution, but that the Directors
had decided in his favor, he was the more strongly bound to enter into a
justification of his conduct.
But there was another great reason which should have induced him to do
this. One great lawyer, known to many of your Lordships, Mr. Sayer, a
very honest, intelligent man, who had long served the Company and well
knew their affairs, had given an opinion concerning Mr. Hastings's
conduct in stopping these prosecutions. There was an abstract question
put to Mr. Sayer, and other great lawyers, separated from many of the
circumstances of this business, concerning a point which incidentally
arose; and this was, whether Mr. Hastings, as Governor-General, had a
power so to dissolve the Council, that, if he declared it dissolved,
they could not sit and do any legal and regular act. It was a great
question with the lawyers at the time, and there was a difference of
opinion on it. Mr. Sayer was one of those who were inclined to be of
opinion that the Governor-General had a power of dissolving the Council,
and that the Council could not legally sit after such dissolution. But
what was his remark upon Mr. Hastings's conduct?--and you must suppose
his remark of more weight, because, upon the abstract question, he had
given his opinion in favor of Mr. Hastings's judgment. "The meeting of
the Council depends on the pleasure of the Governor; and I think the
duration of it must do so, too. But it was as great a crime to dissolve
the Council upon base and sinister motives as it would be to assume the
power of dissolving, if he had it not. I believe he is the first
Governor that ever dissolved a Council inquiring into his behavior, when
he was innocent. Before he could summon three Councils and dissolve
them, he had time fully to consider what would be the result of such
conduct, _to convince everybody, beyond a doubt, of his conscious
guilt_."
Mr. Sayer, then, among other learned people, (and if he had not been the
man that I have described, yet, from his intimate connection with the
Company, his opinion must be supposed to have great weight,) having used
expressions as strong as the persons who have ever criminated Mr.
Hastings most for the worst of his crimes have ever used to qualify and
describe them, and having ascribed his conduct to base and sinister
motives, he was bound upon that occasion to justify that strong conduct,
allowed to be legal, and charged at the same time to be violent. Mr.
Hastings was obliged then to produce something in his justification. He
never did. Therefore, for all the reasons assigned by himself, drawn
from the circumstances of prosecution and non-prosecution, and from
opinions of lawyers and colleagues, the Court of Directors at the same
time censuring his conduct, and strongly applauding the conduct of those
who were adverse to him, Mr. Hastings was, I say, from those accumulated
circumstances, bound to get rid of the infamy of a conduct which could
be attributed to nothing but base and sinister motives, and which could
have no effect but to convince men of his consciousness that he was
guilty. From all these circumstances I infer that no man could have
endured this load of infamy, and to this time have given no explanation
of his conduct, unless for the reason which this learned counsel gives,
and which your Lordships and the world will give, namely, his conscious
guilt.
After leaving upon your minds that presumption, not to operate without
proof, but to operate along with the proof, (though, I take it, there
are some presumptions that go the full length of proof,) I shall not
press it to the length to which I think it would go, but use it only as
auxiliary, assisting, and compurgatory of all the other evidences that
go along with it.
There is another circumstance which must come before your Lordships in
this business. If you find that Mr. Hastings has received the two lac of
rupees, then you will find that he was guilty, without color or pretext
of any kind whatever, of acting in violation of his covenant, of acting
in violation of the laws, and all the rules of honor and conscience. If
you find that he has taken the lac and a half, which he admits, but
which he justifies under the pretence of an entertainment, I shall beg
to say something to your Lordships concerning that justification.
The justification set up is, that he went up from Calcutta to
Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three months, and that there an
allowance was made to him of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an
entertainment. Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine, if there
was such a custom, whether or no his covenant justifies his conformity
with it. I remember Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland,
says it is no law, but a lewd custom. A governor is to conform himself
to the laws of his own country, to the stipulations of those that employ
him, and not to the lewd customs of any other country: those customs are
more honored in the breach than in the observance. If Mr. Hastings was
really feasted and entertained with the magnificence of the country, if
there was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to amuse him in
his leisure hours, if he was feasted with the hookah and every other
luxury, there is something to be said for him, though I should not
justify a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner. But in fact
here was no entertainment that could amount to such a sum; and he has
nowhere proved the existence of such a custom.
But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is more honored in the
breach than in the observance, that custom is capable of being abused to
the grossest extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your
Lordships' minds in such a manner that I hardly need detail the
circumstances of it. What! two hundred pounds to be given to a man for
one day's entertainment? If there is an end of it there, it ruins
nobody, and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt anybody;
but when that entertainment is renewed day after day for three months,
it is no longer a compliment to the man, but a great pecuniary
advantage, and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a grievous,
an intolerable burden. It then becomes a matter of the most serious and
dreadful extortion, tending to hinder the people who give it not only
from giving entertainment, but from having bread to eat themselves.
Therefore, if any such entertainment was customary, the custom was
perverted by the abuse of its being continued for three months together.
It was longer than Ahasuerus's feast. There is a feast of reason and a
flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings's feast was a feast of avarice and a flow
of money. No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table: he
continued to sit at that table for three months.
In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take any allowance above
400_l._, and forbidden to take any allowance above 100_l._, without the
knowledge, consent, and approbation of the Council to which he belongs.
Now he takes 16,000_l._, not only without the consent of the Council,
but without their knowledge,--without the knowledge of any other human
being: it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own
black agents and confidants, and those of Munny Begum. Why is it a
secret? Hospitality, generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of
display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them; they want to be shown
to the world, not concealed. The concealment of acts of charity is what
makes them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to whom there can
be no concealment; but acts of corruption are kept secret, not to keep
them secret from the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the
secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to keep them secret
from the eyes of mankind, whose opinions he does fear, in the immediate
effect of them, and in their future consequences. Therefore he had but
one reason to keep this so dark and profound a secret, till it was
dragged into day in spite of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret,
but his knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the light.
Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its
retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread
abroad in the face of day. Such candles should not be hid under a
bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to
express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very
splendor is a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light up this
whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake
them. Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr.
Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the
dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their prey
into the jungles. Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment
for the flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it
is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.
But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit?
No: he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the
neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob.
On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly
called a _visitation_. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a
pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the
world,--as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread,
from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them
to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering. When you
consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing
fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not
conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not
upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both
to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.
It is mentioned and supposed in the observations upon this case, though
no circumstances relative to the persons or the nature of the visit are
stated, that this expense was something which he might have charged to
the Company and did not. It is first supposed by the learned counsel who
made the observation, that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged
thing; then, that he had not charged the Company anything for it. I have
looked into that business. In the first place, I see no such custom; and
if there was such a custom, there was the most abusive misemployment of
it. I find that in that year there was paid from the Company's cash
account to the Governor's travelling charges (and he had no other
journey at that end of the year) thirty thousand rupees, which is about
3,000_l._; and when we consider that he was in the receipt of near
30,000_l._, besides the nuzzers, which amount to several thousand a
year, and that he is allowed 3,000_l._ by the Company for his travelling
expenses, is it right to charge upon the miserable people whom he was
defrauding of their bread 16,000_l._ for his entertainment?
I find that there are also other great sums relative to the expenses of
the Committee of Circuit, which he was upon. How much of them is
applicable to him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three
thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not above a day or
two's journey to Moorshedabad, and by his taking his road by Kishenagur
he could not be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he must live
somewhere; and he was actually paid three thousand pounds for travelling
charges for three months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand
pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.
If you once admit that a man for an entertainment shall take sixteen
thousand pounds, there never will be any bribe, any corruption, that may
not be justified: the corrupt man has nothing to do but to make a visit,
and then that very moment he may receive any sum under the name of this
entertainment; that moment his covenants are annulled, his bonds and
obligations destroyed, the act of Parliament repealed, and it is no
longer bribery, it is no longer corruption, it is no longer peculation;
it is nothing but thanks for obliging inquiries, and a compliment
according to the mode of the country, by which he makes his fortune.
What hinders him from renewing that visit? If you support this
distinction, you will teach the Governor-General, instead of attending
his business at the capital, to make journeys through the country,
putting every great man of that country under the most ruinous
contributions; and as this custom is in no manner confined to the
Governor-General, but extends, as it must upon that principle, to every
servant of the Company in any station whatever, then, if each of them
were to receive an entertainment, I will venture to say that the
greatest ravage of an hostile army could not, indeed, destroy the
country more entirely than the Company's servants by such visits.
Your Lordships will see that there are grounds for suspicion, not
supported with the same evidence, but with evidence of great
probability, that there was another entertainment given at the expense
of another lac of rupees; and there is also great probability that Mr.
Hastings received two lac of rupees, and Mr. Middleton another lac. The
whole of the Nabob's revenues would have been exhausted by these two
men, if they had stayed there a whole year: and they stayed three
months. Nothing will be secured from the Company's servants, so long as
they can find, under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt custom
of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt practice. The excuse
is worse than the thing itself. I leave it, then, with your judgment to
decide whether you will or not, if this justification comes before you,
establish a principle which would put all Bengal in a worse situation
than an hostile army could do, and ruin all the Company's servants by
sending them from their duty to go round robbing the whole country under
the name of entertainments.
My Lords, I have now done with this first part,--namely, the presumption
arising from his refusal to make any defence, on pretence that the
charge brought against him might be referred to a court of justice, and
from the non-performance of his promise to give satisfaction to his
employers,--and when that pretence was removed, still refusing to give
that satisfaction, though suffering as he did under a load of infamy and
obloquy, and though urged to give it by persons of the greatest
character. I have stated this to your Lordships as the strongest
presumption of guilt, and that this presumption is strengthened by the
very excuse which he fabricated for a part of his bribes, when he knew
that the proof of them was irresistible, and that this excuse is a high
aggravation of his guilt,--that this excuse is not supported by law,
that it is not supported by reason, that it does not stand with his
covenant, but carries with it a manifest proof of corruption, and that
it cannot be justified by any principle, custom, or usage whatever. My
Lords, I say I have done with the presumption arising from his conduct
as it regarded the fact specifically charged against him, and with
respect to the relation he stood in to the Court of Directors, and from
the attempt he made to justify that conduct. I believe your Lordships
will think both one and the other strong presumptions of his
criminality, and of his knowledge that the act he was doing was
criminal.