The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)

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 40,000l. in bribes for Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the people nothing more than 40,000l. 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 62,000l. 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."

My Lords, these are the securities which we have in all the constituent parts of the body of this House. We know them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your hands. Therefore it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons,

I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.

SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.

April and May, 1789

NOTE

After Mr. Burke had concluded the opening speeches, the first article of the impeachment was brought forward, on the 22d of February, 1788, by Mr. Fox, and supported by Mr. Grey on the 25th. After the evidence upon this article had been adduced, it was summed up and enforced by Mr. Anstruther, on the 11th day of April following.

The next article with which the Commons proceeded was brought forward on the 15th of April, 1788, by Mr. Adam, and supported by Mr. Pelham; and the evidence, in part upon the second article of charge, was summed up and enforced, on the 3d of June, by Mr. Sheridan.

On the 21st of April, 1789, Mr. Burke opened the sixth charge, bribery and corruption, in the following speech, which was continued on the 25th of April, and on the 6th and 7th May, in the same session.

FIRST DAY: TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 1789

My Lords,—An event which had spread for a considerable time an universal grief and consternation through this kingdom, and which in its issue diffused as universal and transcendent a joy, has in the circumstances both of our depression and of our exaltation produced a considerable delay, if not a total suspension, of the most important functions of government.

My Lords, we now resume our office,—and we resume it with new and redoubled alacrity, and, we trust, under not less propitious omens than when we left it, in this House, at the end of the preceding session. We come to this duty with a greater degree of earnestness and zeal, because we are urged to it by many and very peculiar circumstances. This day we come from an House where the last steps were taken (and I suppose something has happened similar in this) to prepare our way to attend with the utmost solemnity, in another place, a great national thanksgiving for having restored the sovereign to his Parliament and the Parliament to its sovereign.

But, my Lords, it is not only in the house of prayer that we offer to the First Cause the acceptable homage of our rational nature,—my Lords, in this House, at this bar, in this place, in every place where His commands are obeyed, His worship is performed. And, my Lords, I must boldly say, (and I think I shall hardly be contradicted by your Lordships, or by any persons versed in the law which guides us all,) that the highest act of religion, and the highest homage which we can and ought to pay, is an imitation of the Divine perfections, as far as such a nature can imitate such perfections, and that by this means alone we can make our homage acceptable to Him.

My Lords, in His temple we shall not forget that His most distinguished attribute is justice, and that the first link in the chain by which we are held to the Supreme Judge of All is justice; and that it is in this solemn temple of representative justice we may best give Him praise, because we can here best imitate His divine attributes. If ever there was a cause in which justice and mercy are not only combined and reconciled, but incorporated, it is in this cause of suffering nations, which we now bring before your Lordships this second session of Parliament, unwearied and unfatigued in our persevering pursuit; and we feel it to be a necessary preliminary, a necessary fact, a necessary attendant and concomitant of every public thanksgiving, that we should express our gratitude by our virtues, and not merely with our mouths, and that, when we are giving thanks for acts of mercy, we should render ourselves worthy of them by doing acts of mercy ourselves. My Lords, these considerations, independent of those which were our first movers in this business, strongly urge us at present to pursue with all zeal and perseverance the great cause we have now in hand. And we feel this to be the more necessary, because we cannot but be sensible that light, unstable, variable, capricious, inconstant, fastidious minds soon tire in any pursuit that requires strength, steadiness, and perseverance. Such persons, who we trust are but few, and who certainly do not resemble your Lordships nor us, begin already to say, How long is this business to continue? Our answer is, It is to continue till its ends are obtained.

We know, that, by a mysterious dispensation of Providence, injury is quick and rapid, and justice slow; and we may say that those who have not patience and vigor of mind to attend the tardy pace of justice counteract the order of Providence, and are resolved not to be just at all. We, therefore, instead of bending the order of Nature to the laxity of our characters and tempers, must rather confirm ourselves by a manly fortitude and virtuous perseverance to continue within those forms, and to wrestle with injustice, until we have shown that those virtues which sometimes wickedness debauches into its cause, such as vigor, energy, activity, fortitude of spirit, are called back and brought to their true and natural service,—and that in the pursuit of wickedness, in the following it through all the winding recesses and mazes of its artifices, we shall show as much vigor, as much constancy, as much diligence, energy, and perseverance, as any others can do in endeavoring to elude the laws and triumph over the justice of their country. My Lords, we have thought it the more necessary to say this, because it has been given out that we might faint in this business. No: we follow, and trust we shall always follow, that great emblem of antiquity, in which the person who held out to the end of a long line of labors found the reward of all the eleven in the twelfth. Our labor, therefore, will be our reward; and we will go on, we will pursue with vigor and diligence, in a manner suitable to the Commons of Great Britain, every mode of corruption, till we have thoroughly eradicated it.

I think it necessary to say a word, too, upon another circumstance, of which there is some complaint, as if some injustice had arisen from voluntary delay on our part.

I have already alluded to, first, the melancholy, then the joyful occasion of this delay; and I shall now make one remark on another part of the complaint, which I understand was formally made to your Lordships soon after we had announced our resolution to proceed in this great cause of suffering nations before you. It has been alleged, that the length of the pursuit had already very much distressed the person who is the object of it,—that it leaned upon a fortune unequal to support it,—and that 30,000l. had been already spent in the preliminary preparations for the defence.

My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and unadulterated justice considers with a certain degree of tenderness the person whom it is called to punish, and never oppresses those by the process who ought not to be oppressed but by the sentence of the court before which they are brought. The Commons have heard, indeed, with some degree of astonishment, that 30,000l. hath been laid out by Mr. Hastings in this business. We, who have some experience in the conduct of affairs of this nature, we, who profess to proceed with regard not to the economy so much as to the rigor of this prosecution, (and we are justified by our country in so doing,) upon a collation and comparison of the public expenses with those which the defendant is supposed to have incurred, are much surprised to hear it. We suppose that his solicitors can give a good account to him of those expenses,—that the thing is true,—and that he has actually, through them, incurred this expense. We have nothing to do with this: but we shall remove any degree of uneasiness from your Lordships' minds, and from our own, when we show you in the charge which we shall bring before you this day, that one bribe only received by Mr. Hastings, the smallest of his bribes, or nearly the smallest, the bribe received from Rajah Nobkissin, is alone more than equal to have paid all the charges Mr. Hastings is stated to have incurred; and if this be the case, your Lordships will not be made very uneasy in a case of bribery by finding that you press upon the sources of peculation.

It has also been said that we weary out the public patience in this cause. The House of Commons do not call upon your Lordships to do anything of which they do not set the example. They have very lately sat in the Colchester Committee as many, within one or two, days successively as have been spent in this trial interruptedly in the course of two years. Every cause deserves that it should be tried according to its nature and circumstances; and in the case of the Colchester Committee, in the trial of paltry briberies of odd pounds, shillings, and pence, in the corruption of a returning officer, who is but a miller, they spent nearly the same number of days that we have been inquiring into the ruin of kingdoms by the peculation and bribery of the chief governor of the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Therefore God forbid that we should faint at thrice thirty days, if the proceedings should be drawn into such a length, when for a small crime as much time has been spent as has yet been spent in this great cause!

Having now cleared the way with regard to the local and temporary circumstances of this case,—having shown your Lordships that too much time has not been spent in it,—having no reason to think, from the time which has hitherto been spent, that time will be unnecessarily spent in future,—I trust your Lordships will think that time ought neither to be spared nor squandered in this business: we will therefore proceed, article by article, as far as the discretion of the House of Commons shall think fit, for the justice of the case, to limit the inquiry, or to extend it.

We are now going to bring before your Lordships the sixth article. It is an article of charge of bribery and corruption against Mr. Hastings; but yet we must confess that we feel some little difficulty in limine. We here appear in the name and character not only of representatives of the Commons of Great Britain, but representatives of the inhabitants of Bengal: and yet we have had lately come into our hands such ample certificates, such full testimonials, from every person in whose cause we complain, that we shall appear to be in the strangest situation in the world,—the situation of persons complaining, who are disavowed by the persons in whose name and character they complain. This would have been a very great difficulty in the beginning, especially as it is come before us in a flood-tide of panegyric. No encomium can be more exalted or more beautifully expressed. No language can more strongly paint the perfect satisfaction, the entire acquiescence, of all the nations of Bengal, and their wonderful admiration of the character of the person whom we have brought as a criminal to your bar upon their part. I do admit that it is a very awkward circumstance; but yet, at the same time, the same candor which has induced the House of Commons to bring before you the bosom friends and confidants of Mr. Hastings as their evidence will not suffer them to suppress or withhold for a moment from your Lordships this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation in Mr. Hastings's favor, and we shall produce it as a part of our evidence. Oh, my Lords, consider the situation of a people who are forced to mix their praises with their groans, who are forced to sign, with hands which have been in torture, and with the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an attestation in favor of the person from whom all their sufferings have been derived! When we prove to you the things that we shall prove, this will, I hope, give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory proof of the misery to which these people have been reduced. You will see before you, what is so well expressed by one of our poets as the homage of tyrants, "that homage with the mouth which the heart would fain deny, but dares not." Mr. Hastings has received that homage, and that homage we mean to present to your Lordships: we mean to present it, because it will show your Lordships clearly, that, after Mr. Hastings has ransacked Bengal from one end to the other, and has used all the power which he derives from having every friend and every dependant of his in every office from one end of that government to the other, he has not, in all those panegyrics, those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums, got one word of refutation or one word of evidence against any charge whatever which we produce against him. Every one knows, that, in the course of criminal trials, when no evidence of alibi can be brought, when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted, the last thing produced is evidence to character. His cause, therefore, is gone, when, having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at length appeals to his character. In those little papers which are given us of our proceedings in our criminal courts, it is always an omen of what is to follow: after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or robbery, it ends in his character: "He has an admirable character; I have known him from a boy; he is wonderfully good; he is the best of men; I would trust him with untold gold": and immediately follows, "Guilty,—Death." This is the way in which, in our courts, character is generally followed by sentence. The practice is not modern. Undoubtedly Mr. Hastings has the example of criminals of high antiquity; for Caius Verres, Antonius, and every other man who has been famous for the pillage and destruction of provinces, never failed to bring before their judges the attestations of the injured to their character. Voltaire says, "Les bons mots sont toujours redits." A similar occasion has here produced a similar conduct. He has got just the same character as Caius Verres got in another cause; and the laudationes, which your Lordships know always followed, to save trouble, we mean ourselves to give your Lordships; we mean to give them with this strong presumption of guilt, that in all this panegyric there is not one word of defence to a single article of charge; they are mere lip-honors: but we think we derive from those panegyrics, which Mr. Hastings has had sent over as evidence to supply the total want of it, an indication of the impossibility of attaining it. Mr. Hastings has brought them here, and I must say we are under some difficulty about them, and the difficulty is this. We think we can produce before your Lordships proofs of barbarity and peculation by Mr. Hastings; we have the proofs of them in specific provinces, where those proofs may be met by contrary proofs, or may lose their weight from a variety of circumstances. We thought we had got the matter sure, that everything was settled, that he could not escape us, after he had himself confessed the bribes he had taken from the specific provinces. But in what condition are we now? We have from those specific provinces the strongest attestations that there is not any credit to be paid to his own acknowledgments. In short, we have the complaints, concerning these crimes of Mr. Hastings, of the injured persons themselves; we have his own confessions; we shall produce both to your Lordships. But these persons now declare, that not only their own complaints are totally unfounded, but that Mr. Hastings's confessions are not true, and not to be credited. These are circumstances which your Lordships will consider in the view you take of this wonderful body of attestation.