business of money; but the applause of no other human creature will he
have for giving such an account as he admits this to be,--irregular,
uncertain, problematical, and of which no one can make either head or
tail. He despises us also, who are representatives of the people, and
have amongst us all the regular officers of finance, for expecting
anything like a regular account from him. He is hurt at it; he considers
it as a cruel treatment of him; he says, "Have I deserved this
treatment?" Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment, if
treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of which he complains.
The Court of Directors had, however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and
pusillanimous, begged of him, as if they were his dependants, and not
his masters, to give them some light into the account; they desire a
receiver of money to tell from whom he received it, and how he applied
it. He answers, They may be hanged for a parcel of mean, contemptible
book-keepers, and that he will give them no account at all. He says, "If
you sue me"--There is the point: he always takes security in a court of
law. He considers his being called upon by these people, to whom he
ought as a faithful servant to give an account, and to do which he was
bound by an act of Parliament specially intrusting him with the
administration of the revenues, as a gross affront. He adds, that he is
ready to resign his defence, and to answer upon honor or upon oath.
Answering upon honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your
Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But he forgets, that,
being the Company's servant, the Company may bring a bill in Chancery
against him, and force him upon oath to give an account. He has not,
however, given them light enough or afforded them sufficient ground for
a fishing bill in Chancery. Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a
Chancery way, or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms, and
give you some account." In consequence of this the Company did demand
from him an account, regularly, and as fully and formally as if they had
demanded it in a court of justice. He positively refused to give them
any account whatever; and they have never, to this very day in which we
speak, had any account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your
Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of fraud, falsification,
iniquity, and prevarication, that, in defiance of his promise, which
promise they quote upon him over and over again, he has never given them
any account of this matter.
He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming) that by calling
him to account they may provoke him--to what? "To appropriate," he says,
"to my own use the sums which I have already passed to your credit, by
the unworthy and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which you
have passed upon me for the first communication of this kind." They
passed no reflections: they said they would neither praise nor blame
him, but pressed him for an account of a matter which they could not
understand: and I believe your Lordships understand it no more than
they, for it is not in the compass of human understanding to conceive or
comprehend it. Instead of an account of it, he dares to threaten them:
"I may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be an honest
man,--to falsify your account a second time, and to reclaim those sums
which I have passed to your credit,--to alter the account again, by the
assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration is this of his
dominion over the public accounts, and of his power of altering them! a
declaration, that, having first falsified those accounts in order to
deceive them, and afterwards having told them of this falsification in
order to gain credit with them, if they provoke him, he shall take back
the money he had carried to their account, and make them his debtors for
it! He fairly avows the dominion he has over the Company's accounts; and
therefore, when he shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able
to rebut that evidence, and say, "The Company's accounts are corrupted
by you, through your agent, Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them,
because you not only told the Company you could do so, but we can prove
that you have actually done it." What a strange medley of evasion,
pretended discovery, real concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears
in every part of this letter!
But admitting this letter to have been written upon the 22d of May, and
kept back to the 16th of December, you would imagine that during all
that interval of time he would have prepared himself to give some light,
some illustration of these dark and mysterious transactions, which
carried fraud upon the very face of them. Did he do so? Not at all. Upon
the 16th of December, instead of giving them some such clear accounts as
might have been expected, he falls into a violent passion for their
expecting them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he tells them
they knew who had profited by these transactions: thus, in order to
strike terror into their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had
practised or protected. What weight this may have had with them I know
not; but your Lordships will expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after
giving four accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three must
necessarily be false,--after having thrown the Company's accounts into
confusion, and being unable to tell, as he says himself, why he did
so,--will at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who
continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints that he ought to do
it.--You have heard nothing yet but the consequences of their refusing
to give him the present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had taken
from the Nabob. They did right to refuse it to him; they did wrong to
take it to themselves.
We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges, in September, 1784,--that
Ganges whose purifying water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and
which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings's hands a little
clean of bribery, and would have rolled down its golden sands like
another Pactolus. Here we find him discovering another of his bribes.
This was a bribe taken upon totally a different principle, according to
his own avowal: it is a bribe not pretended to be received for the use
of the Company,--a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself. He tells
them that he had taken between thirty and forty thousand pounds. This
bribe, which, like the former, he had taken without right, he tells them
that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he insists upon their
sanction for so doing. He says, he had in vain, upon a former occasion,
appealed to their honor, liberality, and generosity,--that he now
appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing this
bribe--which he had taken without telling them from whom, where, or on
what account--to his own use.
Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which he wrote from Patna,
on the 20th of January, 1782, he there states that he was in tolerable
good circumstances, and that this had arisen from his having continued
long in their service. Now, he has continued two years longer in their
service, and he is reduced to beggary! "This," he says, "is a single
example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit,
and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want, and to
sink in obscurity."
So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could save an exceeding good
fortune out of his place. In 1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has
made a decent private competency; but in two years after he sunk to the
extremity of private want. And how does he seek to relieve that want? By
taking a bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the Company's
service, but for his own. He takes the bribe with an express intention
of keeping it for his own use, and he calls upon the Company for their
sanction. If the money was taken without right, no claim of his could
justify its being appropriated to himself: nor could the Company so
appropriate it; for no man has a right to be generous out of another's
goods. When he calls upon their justice and generosity, they might
answer, "If you have a just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we
will pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state your merits,
and we will consider them." "But I have paid myself by a bribe; I have
taken another man's money; and I call upon your justice--to do what? to
restore it to its owner? no--to allow me to keep it myself." Think, my
Lords, in what a situation the Company stands! "I have done a great
deal for you; this is the jackal's portion; you have been the lion; I
have been endeavoring to prog for you; I am your bribe-pander, your
factor of corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn and
ignominy, to insults even from you. I have been preying and plundering
for you; I have gone through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness,
wading through every species of dirt and corruption, for your advantage.
I am now sinking into the extremity of private want; do give me
this--what? money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me this
bribe; vote me--what? money of your own? that would be generous: money
you owe me? that would be just: no, money which I have extorted from
another man; and I call upon your justice to give it me." This is his
idea of justice. He says, "I am compelled to depart from that liberal
plan which I originally adopted, and to claim from your justice (for you
have forbid me to appeal to your generosity) the discharge of a debt
which I can with the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due,
and which I cannot sustain." Now, if any of the Company's servants may
say, "I have been extravagant, profuse,--it was all meant for your
good,--let me prey upon the country at my pleasure,--license my bribes,
frauds, and peculations, and then you do me justice,"--what country are
we in, where these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?
It might naturally be expected that in this letter he would have given
some account of the person from whom he had taken this bribe. But here,
as in the other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the Ganges,
like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw in Mr. Middleton; they
recollect nothing, they know nothing. He has not stated, from that day
to this, from whom he took that money. But we have made the discovery.
And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to the
present age and posterity, will be their use, that, if we pursue them
with the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon us demands, and
if your Lordships do firmly administer justice upon this man's frauds,
you will at once put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever.
Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry, it is the diligence of
the House of Commons, which he has the audacity to call _malice_, that
has discovered and brought to light the frauds which we shall be able to
prove against him.
I will now read to your Lordships an extract from that stuff, called a
defence, which he has either written himself or somebody else has
written for him, and which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases,
when, under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment, he
discovered at length from whom he got this last bribe.
"The last part of the charge states, that, in my letter to the Court of
Directors of the 21st February, 1784, I have confessed to have received
another sum of money, the amount of which is not declared, but which,
from the application of it, could not be less than thirty-four thousand
pounds sterling, &c. In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a
sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the Company not having at
that time sufficient cash in their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed
three lacs of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta, whom
I desired to call upon me with a bond properly filled up. He did so; but
at the time I was going to execute it he entreated I would rather
accept the money than execute the bond. I neither accepted the offer nor
refused it; and my determination upon it remained suspended between the
alternative of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid, and of taking
it, and applying it, as I had done other sums, to the Company's use. And
there the matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow, when I
determined to accept the money for the Company's use; and these were my
motives. Having made disbursements from my own cash for services, which,
though required to enable me to execute the duties of my station, I had
hitherto omitted to enter into my public accounts, I resolved to
reimburse myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the
Company's affairs, by charging these disbursements in my durbar accounts
of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received,
which was this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company were not
founded in justice, and _bonâ fide_ due, my acceptance of three lacs of
rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that
sum from me. No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of
the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts."
We do not _suspect_ him of presenting false accounts: we can prove, we
are now radically proving, that he presents false accounts. We suspect
no man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse no man who has
not given ground for accusation; and we do not attempt to bring before a
court of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively to
prove. This will put an end to all idle prattle of malice, of groundless
suspicions of guilt, and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring
the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test,
between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In
his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited
himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe
from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years
afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he
wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is,
for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great
number of years. He proceeds:--
"If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would
furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that
in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account
of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have
passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled
it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts
all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath
overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent
than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores
for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of
private want and to sink in obscurity."
Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the House of Commons that
he never made up any contingent accounts; and yet, as a set-off against
this bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended to apply
to the current use of the Company, he feigns and invents a claim upon
them, namely, that he had, without any authority of the Company,
squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and other idle services, a
sum amounting to 34,000_l._ But was it for the Company's service? Is
this language to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit to expend I
have expended for the Company's service. I intended, indeed, at that
time, to have been generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have
paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I was then in the
prime of my life, flowing in money, and had great expectations: I am now
old; I cannot afford to be generous: I will look back into all my former
accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I generously or prodigally
spent as my own humor might suggest; and though, at the same time, I
know you have given me a noble allowance, I now make a charge upon you
for this sum of money, and intend to take a bribe in discharge of it."
Now suppose Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope will long,
and honorably and worthily, fill the seat, which that gentleman
possessed,--suppose Lord Cornwallis, after never having complained of
the insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two years ago said
he had saved a sufficient competency out of it, should now tell you that
30,00_l._ a year was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into
want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged want taking a
bribe, and then make out a bill of contingent expenses to cover it,
would your Lordships bear this?
Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow money for his own
use, and that he applied to Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it
upon him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you will be astonished
to hear of generosity in a banian; there never was a banian and
generosity united together: but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at
once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings's face beams upon him.
"Here," says Mr. Hastings, "I have prepared bonds for you."
"Astonishing! how can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call upon
me to lend you 34,000_l._, and propose bonds? No, you shall have it: you
are the Governor-General, who have a large and ample salary; but I know
you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity: I give you all
this money." Nobkissin was quite shocked at Mr. Hastings's offering him
a bond. My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower, a little
more penurious, a little more exacting, a little more cunning, a little
more money-making, than a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner
of Duke's Place in London that is so crafty, so much a usurer, so
skilful how to turn money to profit, and so resolved not to give any
money but for profit, as a Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned.
But this man, however, at once grows generous, and will not suffer a
bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, is thrown into
very great distress. You see sentiment always prevailing in Mr.
Hastings. The sentimental dialogue which must have passed between him
and a Gentoo broker would have charmed every one that has a taste for
pathos and sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the money as a
gift. He really does not know what to do: whether to insist upon giving
a bond or not,--whether he shall take the money for his own use, or
whether he shall take it for the Company's use. But it may be said of
man as it is said of woman: the woman who deliberates is lost: the man
that deliberates about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he
deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is lost, the walls
shake, down it comes,--and at the same moment enters Nobkissin into the
citadel of his honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums
beating, and Mr. Hastings's garrison goes out, very handsomely indeed,
with the honors of war, all for the benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings
consents to take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the money,
and is perfectly satisfied.
Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it to the Company's
service. How? To pay his own contingent bills. "Everything that I do,"
says he, "and all the money I squander, is all for the Company's
benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look into them; they are
given you upon honor. Let me take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be
just or generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it." But in every
transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have got a name, there we have got
a crime. Nobkissin gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I
believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately afterwards enters
upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable
districts in Bengal. We know very well, and shall prove to your
Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from
the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had
been taken from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence of the
Company's service, but sooner or later they fall upon the Company's
treasury. And we shall prove that Nobkissin, within a year from the time
when he gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Company, as
their steward, to the amount of a sum the very interest of which,
according to the rate of interest in that country, amounted to more than
this bribe, taken, as was pretended, for the Company's service. Such are
the consequences of a banian's generosity, and of Mr. Hastings's
gratitude, so far as the interest of the country is concerned; and this
is a good way to pay Mr. Hastings's contingent accounts. But this is not
all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country to take the
management of it, and the fortunes of all the great families in it are
given entirely into his power. This is the way by which the Company are
to keep their own servants from falling into "the extremity of private
want." And the Company itself, in this pretended saving to their
treasury by the taking of bribes, lose more than the amount of the
bribes received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand, there is a
balance accruing on the other. No man, who had any share in the
management of the Company's revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not
either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in
balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both. In short,
Mr. Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did
not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit,
but the Company's treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.
And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic in bribes brought to
light by the Court of Directors? No: we got it in the House of Commons.
These bribes appear to have been taken at various times and upon various
occasions; and it was not till his return from Patna, in February, 1782,
that the first communication of any of them was made to the Court of
Directors. Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of Directors
wrote back to him, requiring some further explanation upon the subject.
No explanation was given, but a communication of other bribes was made
in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year, but not
dispatched to Europe till the December following. This produced another
requisition from the Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships
are to observe that this correspondence is never in the way of letters
written and answers given; but he and the Directors are perpetually
playing at hide-and-seek with each other, and writing to each other at
random: Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the Directors
requiring an explanation the next; Mr. Hastings giving an account of
another bribe on the third day, without giving any explanation of the
former. Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their chase. But it
was not till they learned that the committees of the House of Commons
(for committees of the House of Commons had then some weight) were
frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings, that at last
some honest men in the Direction were permitted to have some ascendency,
and that a proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your
Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact account of all the
bribes that he had received, and painting to him, in colors as strong at
least as those I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations,--and
what does them great honor for that moment, they particularly direct
that the money which was taken from the Nabob of Oude should be carried
to his account. These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee of
Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved by the Court of
Directors, but never were sent out to India. However, something was
sent, but miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings never
answered it, or gave them any explanation whatever. He now, being
prepared for his departure from Calcutta, and having finished all his
other business, went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now we cannot
follow him. He returned in great disgust to Calcutta, and soon after set
sail for England, without ever giving the Directors one word of the
explanation which he had so often promised, and they had repeatedly
asked.
We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where you will suppose some
satisfactory account of all these matters would be obtained from him.
One would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he would have been a
little quickened by a menace, as he expresses it, which had been thrown
out against him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would be made
into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive of the same thing,
thought it good gently to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom
and how we do not know, that he ought to give some explanation of these
accounts. This produced a letter which I believe in the business of the
whole world cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his parallel
in this. Never did inventive folly, working upon conscious guilt, and
throwing each other totally in confusion, ever produce such a false,
fraudulent, prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given to
you.