Chapter 13

FULL VINDICATION OF FYZOOLA KHAN BY MAJOR PALMER AND MR. HASTINGS.

I. That, in the course of the said negotiation for establishing the rights of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, Major Palmer aforesaid did communicate to the Resident, Bristow, and through the said Resident to the Council-General of Bengal, the full and direct denial of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan to all and every of the charges made or pretended to be made against him, as follows.

"Fyzoola Khan persists in denying the infringement on his part of any one article in the treaty, or the neglect of any obligation which it imposed upon him.

"He does not admit of _the improvements reported to be made_ in his jaghire, and even asserts that the collections this year will fall short of the original _jumma_ [or estimate] by reason of the long drought.

"He denies having exceeded the limited number of Rohillas in his service;

"And having refused the required aid of cavalry, made by Johnson, to act with General Goddard.

"He observes, respecting the charge of evading the Vizier's requisition for the cavalry lately stationed at Daranagur, to be stationed at Lucknow, that he is not bound by treaty to maintain a stationary force for the service of the Vizier, but to supply an aid of two or three thousand troops in time of war.

"Lastly, he asserts, that, so far from encouraging the ryots [or peasants] of the Vizier to settle in his jaghire, it has been his constant practice to deliver them up to the Aumil of Rohilcund, whenever he could discover them."

II. That, in giving his opinions on the aforesaid denials of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, the said Palmer did not controvert any one of the constructions of the treaty advanced by the said Nabob.

That, although the said Palmer, "from general appearances as well as universal report, did not doubt that the jumma of the jaghire is _greatly increased_," yet he, the said Palmer, did not intimate that it was increased in any degree near _the amount reported_, as it was drawn out in a regular estimate transmitted to the said Palmer expressly for the purposes of his negotiation, which was of course by him produced to the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, and to which specifically the denial of Fyzoola Khan must be understood to apply.

That the said Palmer did not hint any doubt of the deficiency affirmed by Fyzoola Khan in the collections for the current year: and,

That, if any increase of jumma did truly exist, whatever it may have been, the said Palmer did acknowledge it "to have been solemnly relinquished (in a private agreement) by the Vizier."

That, although the said Palmer did suppose the number of Rohillas (employed "in ordinary occupations) in Rampoor alone to exceed that limited by the treaty for his [Fyzoola Khan's] service," yet the said Palmer did by no means imply that the Nabob Fyzoola Khan _maintained in his service_ a single man more than was allowed by treaty; and by a particular and minute account of the troops of Fyzoola Khan, transmitted by the Resident, Bristow, to the said Palmer, the number was stated but at 5,840, probably including officers, who were not understood to be comprehended in the treaty.

That the said Palmer did further admit it "_to be not clearly expressed_ in the treaty, whether the restriction included Rohillas of all descriptions"; but, at any rate, he adds, "it does not appear that their number is formidable, or that he [Fyzoola Khan] _could by any means subsist such numbers as could cause any serious alarm to the Vizier_; neither is there any appearance of their entertaining any views beyond the quiet possession of the advantages which they at present enjoy."

And that, in a subsequent letter, in which the said Palmer thought it prudent "to vindicate himself from any possible insinuation that he meant to sacrifice the Vizier's interest," he, the said Palmer, did positively attest the new claim on Fyzoola Khan for the protection of the Vizier's ryots to be wholly without foundation, as the Nabob Fyzoola Khan "had proved to him [Palmer], by producing receipts of various dates and for great numbers of these people surrendered upon requisition from the Vizier's officers."

III. That, over and above the aforesaid complete refutation of the different charges and pretexts under which exactions had been practised, or attempted to be practised, on the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, the said Palmer did further condemn altogether the principle of calculation assumed in such exactions (even if they had been founded in justice) by the following explanation of the nature of the tenure by which, under the treaty of Lall-Dang, the Nabob Fyzoola Khan held his possessions as a jaghiredar.

"There are no precedents in the ancient usage of the country for ascertaining the _nuzzerana_ [customary present] or _peshcush_ [regular fine] of grants of this nature: _they were bestowed by the prince as rewards or favors_; and the accustomary present in return was adapted to the dignity of the donor rather than to the value of the gift,--_to which it never, I believe, bore any kind of proportion_."

IV. That a sum of money ("which of course was to be received by the Company") being now obtained, and the "_interests both of the Company and the Vizier_" being thus much "_better promoted_" by "_establishing the rights_" of Fyzoola Khan than they could have been by "_depriving him of his independency_," when every undue influence of secret and criminal purposes was removed from the mind of the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, Esquire, he, the said Hastings, did also concur with his friend and agent, Major Palmer, in the vindication of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, and in the most ample manner.

That the said Warren Hastings did now clearly and explicitly understand the clauses of the treaty, "that Fyzoola Khan should send _two_ or _three_ [and not _five_] thousand men, or _attend in person, in case it was requisite_."

That the said Warren Hastings did now confess that the right of the Vizier under the treaty was at best "but _a precarious and unserviceable right_; and that he thought fifteen lacs, or 150,000_l._ and upwards, an ample equivalent," (or, according to the expression of Major Palmer, _an excellent bargain_,) as in truth it was, "for expunging an article of such a tenor and so loosely worded."

And, finally, that the said Hastings did give the following description of the general character, disposition, and circumstances of the Nabob Fyzoola Khan.

"The rumors which had been spread of his hostile designs against the Vizier were totally groundless, and if he had been inclined, he had not the means to make himself formidable; on the contrary, being in the decline of life, and possessing a very fertile and prosperous jaghire, it is more natural to suppose that Fyzoola Khan wishes to spend the remainder of his days in quietness than that he is preparing to embark in active and offensive scenes which must end in his own destruction."

V. Yet that, notwithstanding this virtual and implied crimination of his whole conduct toward the Nabob Fyzoola Khan, and after all the aforesaid acts systematically prosecuted in open violation of a positive treaty against a prince who had an hereditary right to more than he actually possessed, for whose protection the faith of the Company and the nation was repeatedly pledged, and who had deserved and obtained the public thanks of the British government,--when, in allusion to certain of the said acts, the Court of Directors had expressed to the said Hastings their wishes "to be considered rather as the guardians of the honor and property of the native powers than as the instruments of oppression," he, the said Hastings, in reply to the said Directors, his masters, did conclude his official account of the final settlement with Fyzoola Khan with the following indecent, because unjust, exultation:--

"Such are the measures which we shall ever wish to observe towards our allies or dependants upon our frontiers."

APPENDIX

TO THE

EIGHTH AND SIXTEENTH CHARGES.[26]

Copy of a Letter from Warren Hastings, Esquire, to William Devaynes, Esquire, Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, dated Cheltenham, 11th of July, 1785, and printed by order of the House of Commons.

_To William Devaynes, Esquire, Chairman of the Honorable the Court of Directors._

Sir,--The Honorable Court of Directors, in their general letter to Bengal by the "Surprise," dated the 16th March, 1784, were pleased to express their desire that I should inform them of the periods when each sum of the presents mentioned in my address of the 22d May, 1782, was received, what were my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and what were my reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums, and for paying other sums into the treasury as deposits on my own account.

I have been kindly apprised that the information required as above is yet expected from me. I hope that the circumstances of my past situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for having thus long withheld it. The fact is, that I was not at the Presidency when the "Surprise" arrived; and when I returned to it, my time and attention were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my final departure from it, by a variety of other more important occupations, of which, Sir, I may safely appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion contributed by myself of the volumes which compose our Consultations of that period, that the submission which my respect would have enjoined me to pay to the command imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it had left on my mind that it was rather intended as a reprehension for something which had given offence in my report of the original transaction than as expressive of any want of a further elucidation of it.

I will now endeavor to reply to the different questions which have been stated to me in as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information as I can give the Honorable Court is fully entitled; and where that shall prove defective, I will point out the easy means by which it may be rendered more complete.

First, I believe I can affirm with certainty, that the several sums mentioned in the account transmitted with my letter above mentioned were received at or within a very few days of the dates which are prefixed to them in the account; but as this contains only the gross sums, and each of these was received in different payments, though at no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign a greater degree of accuracy to the account. Perhaps the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient for any purpose to which their inquiry was directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave to refer for a more minute information, and for the means of making any investigation which they may think it proper to direct, respecting the particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your Accountant-General, who was privy to every process of it, and possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only account that I ever kept of it. In this each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically inserted, with the name of the person by whom it was made; and I shall write to him to desire that he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still in being and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect concerning it.

For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of these sums, and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the Court of Directors of the 22d May, 1782: namely, that "I either chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my memory at that distance of time could verify; and that I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest." It will not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, follow them.

I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th November, 1780. The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies of the government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them; but neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid which I could thus procure, nor do I know how I could have stated it, without appearing to court favor by an ostentation which I disdain, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have laid an equal claim. I should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them. I was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the money to be brought directly to my own house, or to that of any person known to be in trust for me: for these reasons I caused it to be transported immediately to the treasury. There, you well know, Sir, it could not be received without being passed to some credit, and this could only be done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit: the first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant: possibly it was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed.

Although I am firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the Court of Directors. They had answered my purpose of public utility, and I had almost totally dismissed them from my remembrance. But when fortune threw a sum in my way of a magnitude which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the time in which I received it made me more circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily and generally: hastily, perhaps to prevent the vigilance and activity of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of the sum, of which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession. I promised to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of it, and in the performance of my promise I thought it consistent with it to add to the account all the former appropriations of the same kind: my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution which might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards known, I might be asked what were my motives for withholding part of these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of Directors and informing them of the rest.

It being my wish to clear up every doubt upon this transaction, which either my own mind could suggest or which may have been suggested by others, I beg leave to suppose another question, and to state the terms of it in my reply, by informing you that the indorsement on the bonds was made about the period of my leaving the Presidency, in the middle of the year 1781, in order to guard against their becoming a claim on the Company, as part of my estate, in the event of my death occurring in the course of the service on which I was then entering.

This, Sir, is the plain history of the transaction. I should be ashamed to request that you would communicate it to the Honorable Court of Directors, whose time is too valuable for the intrusion of a subject so uninteresting, but that it is become a point of indispensable duty; I must therefore request the favor of you to lay it, at a convenient time, before them. In addressing it to you personally, I yield to my own feelings of the respect which is due to them as a body, and to the assurances which I derive from your experienced civilities that you will kindly overlook the trouble imposed by it.

I have the honor to be, Sir, Your very humble and most obedient servant, (Signed) WARREN HASTINGS.

CHELTENHAM, 11 July, 1785.

SPEECHES

IN

THE IMPEACHMENT

OF

WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE,

LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.

SPEECH IN OPENING.

FEBRUARY, 1788.

SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

FIRST DAY: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1788.

My Lords,--The gentlemen who have it in command to support the impeachment against Mr. Hastings have directed me to open the cause with a general view of the grounds upon which the Commons have proceeded in their charge against him. They have directed me to accompany this with another general view of the extent, the magnitude, the nature, the tendency, and the effect of the crimes which they allege to have been by him committed. They have also directed me to give an explanation (with their aid I may be enabled to give it) of such circumstances, preceding the crimes charged on Mr. Hastings, or concomitant with them, as may tend to elucidate whatever may be found obscure in the articles as they stand. To these they wished me to add a few illustrative remarks on the laws, customs, opinions, and manners of the people concerned, and who are the objects of the crimes we charge on Mr. Hastings. The several articles, as they appear before you, will be opened by other gentlemen with more particularity, with more distinctness, and, without doubt, with infinitely more ability, when they come to apply the evidence which naturally belongs to each article of this accusation. This, my Lords, is the plan which we mean to pursue on the great charge which is now to abide your judgment.

My Lords, I must look upon it as an auspicious circumstance to this cause, in which the honor of the kingdom and the fate of many nations are involved, that, from the first commencement of our Parliamentary process to this the hour of solemn trial, not the smallest difference of opinion has arisen between the two Houses.

My Lords, there are persons who, looking rather upon what was to be found in our records and histories than what was to be expected from the public justice, had formed hopes consolatory to themselves and dishonorable to us. They flattered themselves that the corruptions of India would escape amidst the dissensions of Parliament. They are disappointed. They will be disappointed in all the rest of their expectations which they have formed upon everything, except the merits of their cause. The Commons will not have the melancholy unsocial glory of having acted a solitary part in a noble, but imperfect work. What the greatest inquest of the nation has begun its highest tribunal will accomplish. At length justice will be done to India. It is true that your Lordships will have your full share in this great achievement; but the Commons have always considered that whatever honor is divided with you is doubled on themselves.

My Lords, I must confess, that, amidst these encouraging prospects, the Commons do not approach your bar without awe and anxiety. The magnitude of the interests which we have in charge will reconcile some degree of solicitude for the event with the undoubting confidence with which we repose ourselves upon your Lordships' justice. For we are men, my Lords; and men are so made, that it is not only the greatness of danger, but the value of the adventure, which measures the degree of our concern in every undertaking. I solemnly assure your Lordships that no standard is sufficient to estimate the value which the Commons set upon the event of the cause they now bring before you. My Lords, the business of this day is not the business of this man, it is not solely whether the prisoner at the bar be found innocent or guilty, but whether millions of mankind shall be made miserable or happy.

Your Lordships will see, in the progress of this cause, that there is not only a long, connected, systematic series of misdemeanors, but an equally connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify them. Upon both of these you must judge. According to the judgment that you shall give upon the past transactions in India, inseparably connected as they are with the principles which support them, the whole character of your future government in that distant empire is to be unalterably decided. It will take its perpetual tenor, it will receive its final impression, from the stamp of this very hour.

It is not only the interest of India, now the most considerable part of the British empire, which is concerned, but the credit and honor of the British nation itself will be decided by this decision. We are to decide by this judgment, whether the crimes of individuals are to be turned into public guilt and national ignominy, or whether this nation will convert the very offences which have thrown a transient shade upon its government into something that will reflect a permanent lustre upon the honor, justice, and humanity of this kingdom.

My Lords, there is another consideration, which augments the solicitude of the Commons, equal to those other two great interests I have stated, those of our empire and our national character,--something that, if possible, comes more home to the hearts and feelings of every Englishman: I mean, the interests of our Constitution itself, which is deeply involved in the event of this cause. The future use and the whole effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in this cause. This tribunal will be found (I hope it will always be found) too great for petty causes: if it should at the same time be found incompetent to one of the greatest,--that is, if little offences, from their minuteness, escape you, and the greatest, from their magnitude, oppress you,--it is impossible that this form of trial should not in the end vanish out of the Constitution. For we must not deceive ourselves: whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long. And if the Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually, of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is valuable in it. For this process is the cement which binds the whole together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what England is. In this court it is that no subject, in no part of the empire, can fail of competent and proportionable justice; here it is that we provide for that which is the substantial excellence of our Constitution,--I mean, the great circulation of responsibility, by which (excepting the supreme power) no man, in no circumstance, can escape the account which he owes to the laws of his country. It is by this process that magistracy, which tries and controls all other things, is itself tried and controlled. Other constitutions are satisfied with making good subjects; this is a security for good governors. It is by this tribunal that statesmen who abuse their power are accused by statesmen and tried by statesmen, not upon the niceties of a narrow jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state morality. It is here that those who by the abuse of power have violated the spirit of law can never hope for protection from any of its forms; it is here that those who have refused to conform themselves to its perfections can never hope to escape through any of its defects. It ought, therefore, my Lords, to become our common care to guard this your precious deposit, rare in its use, but powerful in its effect, with a religious vigilance, and never to suffer it to be either discredited or antiquated. For this great end your Lordships are invested with great and plenary powers: but you do not suspend, you do not supersede, you do not annihilate any subordinate jurisdiction; on the contrary, you are auxiliary and supplemental to them all.

Whether it is owing to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am not called upon to determine,--but, whatever may be the cause, it is now sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before this tribunal. The last is that of Lord Macclesfield, which happened in the year 1725. So that the oldest process known to the Constitution of this country has, upon its revival, some appearance of novelty. At this time, when all Europe is in a state of, perhaps, contagious fermentation, when antiquity has lost all its reverence and all its effect on the minds of men, at the same time that novelty is still attended with the suspicions that always will be attached to whatever is new, we have been anxiously careful, in a business which seems to combine the objections both to what is antiquated and what is novel, so to conduct ourselves that nothing in the revival of this great Parliamentary process shall afford a pretext for its future disuse.

My Lords, strongly impressed as they are with these sentiments, the Commons have conducted themselves with singular care and caution. Without losing the spirit and zeal of a public prosecution, they have comported themselves with such moderation, temper, and decorum as would not have ill become the final judgment, if with them rested the final judgment, of this great cause.

With very few intermissions, the affairs of India have constantly engaged the attention of the Commons for more than fourteen years. We may safely affirm we have tried every mode of legislative provision before we had recourse to anything of penal process. It was in the year 1774 [1773?] we framed an act of Parliament for remedy to the then existing disorders in India, such as the then information before us enabled us to enact. Finding that the act of Parliament did not answer all the ends that were expected from it, we had, in the year 1782, recourse to a body of monitory resolutions. Neither had we the expected fruit from them. When, therefore, we found that our inquiries and our reports, our laws and our admonitions, were alike despised, that enormities increased in proportion as they were forbidden, detected, and exposed,--when we found that guilt stalked with an erect and upright front, and that legal authority seemed to skulk and hide its head like outlawed guilt,--when we found that some of those very persons who were appointed by Parliament to assert the authority of the laws of this kingdom were the most forward, the most bold, and the most active in the conspiracy for their destruction,--then it was time for the justice of the nation to recollect itself. To have forborne longer would not have been patience, but collusion; it would have been participation with guilt; it would have been to make ourselves accomplices with the criminal.

We found it was impossible to evade painful duty without betraying a sacred trust. Having, therefore, resolved upon the last and only resource, a penal prosecution, it was our next business to act in a manner worthy of our long deliberation. In all points we proceeded with selection. We have chosen (we trust it will so appear to your Lordships) such a crime, and such a criminal, and such a body of evidence, and such a mode of process, as would have recommended this course of justice to posterity, even if it had not been supported by any example in the practice of our forefathers.

First, to speak of the process: we are to inform your Lordships, that, besides that long previous deliberation of fourteen years, we examined, as a preliminary to this proceeding, every circumstance which could prove favorable to parties apparently delinquent, before we finally resolved to prosecute. There was no precedent to be found in the Journals, favorable to persons in Mr. Hastings's circumstances, that was not applied to. Many measures utterly unknown to former Parliamentary proceedings, and which, indeed, seemed in some degree to enfeeble them, but which were all to the advantage of those that were to be prosecuted, were adopted, for the first time, upon this occasion. In an early stage of the proceeding, the criminal desired to be heard. He was heard; and he produced before the bar of the House that insolent and unbecoming paper which lies upon our table. It was deliberately given in by his own hand, and signed with his own name. The Commons, however, passed by everything offensive in that paper with a magnanimity that became them. They considered nothing in it but the facts that the defendant alleged, and the principles he maintained; and after a deliberation not short of judicial, we proceeded with confidence to your bar.

So far as to the process; which, though I mentioned last in the line and order in which I stated the objects of our selection, I thought it best to dispatch first.

As to the crime which we chose, we first considered well what it was in its nature, under all the circumstances which attended it. We weighed it with all its extenuations and with all its aggravations. On that review, we are warranted to assert that the crimes with which we charge the prisoner at the bar are substantial crimes,--that they are no errors or mistakes, such as wise and good men might possibly fall into, which may even produce very pernicious effects without being in fact great offences. The Commons are too liberal not to allow for the difficulties of a great and arduous public situation. They know too well the domineering necessities which frequently occur in all great affairs. They know the exigency of a pressing occasion, which, in its precipitate career, bears everything down before it,--which does not give time to the mind to recollect its faculties, to reinforce its reason, and to have recourse to fixed principles, but, by compelling an instant and tumultuous decision, too often obliges men to decide in a manner that calm judgment would certainly have rejected. We know, as we are to be served by men, that the persons who serve us must be tried as men, and with a very large allowance indeed to human infirmity and human error. This, my Lords, we knew and we weighed before we came before you. But the crimes which we charge in these articles are not lapses, defects, errors of common human frailty, which, as we know and feel, we can allow for. We charge this offender with no crimes that have not arisen from passions which it is criminal to harbor,--with no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper,--in short, in [with?] nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, dyed in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core. If we do not plant his crimes in those vices which the breast of man is made to abhor, and the spirit of all laws, human and divine, to interdict, we desire no longer to be heard upon this occasion. Let everything that can be pleaded on the ground of surprise or error, upon those grounds be pleaded with success: we give up the whole of those predicaments. We urge no crimes that were not crimes of forethought. We charge him with nothing that he did not commit upon deliberation,--that he did not commit against advice, supplication, and remonstrance,--that he did not commit against the direct command of lawful authority,--that he did not commit after reproof and reprimand, the reproof and reprimand of those who were authorized by the laws to reprove and reprimand him. The crimes of Mr. Hastings are crimes not only in themselves, but aggravated by being crimes of contumacy. They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice which are our rule and our birthright. His offences are, not in formal, technical language, but in reality, in substance and effect, _high_ crimes and high misdemeanors.

So far as to the crimes. As to the criminal, we have chosen him on the same principle on which we selected the crimes. We have not chosen to bring before you a poor, puny, trembling delinquent, misled, perhaps, by those who ought to have taught him better, but who have afterwards oppressed him by their power, as they had first corrupted him by their example. Instances there have been many, wherein the punishment of minor offences, in inferior persons, has been made the means of screening crimes of an high order, and in men of high description. Our course is different. We have not brought before you an obscure offender, who, when his insignificance and weakness are weighed against the power of the prosecution, gives even to public justice something of the appearance of oppression: no, my Lords, we have brought before you the first man of India, in rank, authority, and station. We have brought before you the chief of the tribe, the head of the whole body of Eastern offenders, a captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the fraud, all the peculation, all the tyranny in India are embodied, disciplined, arrayed, and paid. This is the person, my Lords, that we bring before you. We have brought before you such a person, that, if you strike at him with the firm and decided arm of justice, you will not have need of a great many more examples. You strike at the whole corps, if you strike at the head.

So far as to the crime: so far as to the criminal. Now, my Lords, I shall say a few words relative to the evidence which we have brought to support such a charge, and which ought to be equal in weight to the charge itself. It is chiefly evidence of record, officially signed by the criminal himself in many instances. We have brought before you his own letters, authenticated by his own hand. On these we chiefly rely. But we shall likewise bring before you living witnesses, competent to speak to the points to which they are brought.

When you consider the late enormous power of the prisoner,--when you consider his criminal, indefatigable assiduity in the destruction of all recorded evidence,--when you consider the influence he has over almost all living testimony,--when you consider the distance of the scene of action,--I believe your Lordships, and I believe the world, will be astonished that so much, so clear, so solid, and so conclusive evidence of all kinds has been obtained against him. I have no doubt that in nine instances in ten the evidence is such as would satisfy the narrow precision supposed to prevail, and to a degree rightly to prevail, in all subordinate power and delegated jurisdiction. But your Lordships will maintain, what we assert and claim as the right of the subjects of Great Britain, that you are not bound by any rules of evidence, or any other rules whatever, except those of natural, immutable, and substantial justice.

God forbid the Commons should desire that anything should be received as proof from them which is not by nature adapted to prove the thing in question! If they should make such a request, they would aim at overturning the very principles of that justice to which they resort; they would give the nation an evil example that would rebound back on themselves, and bring destruction upon their own heads, and on those of all their posterity.

On the other hand, I have too much confidence in the learning with which you will be advised, and the liberality and nobleness of the sentiments with which you are born, to suspect that you would, by any abuse of the forms, and a technical course of proceeding, deny justice to so great a part of the world that claims it at your hands. Your Lordships always had an ample power, and almost unlimited jurisdiction; you have now a boundless object. It is not from this district or from that parish, not from this city or the other province, that relief is now applied for: exiled and undone princes, extensive tribes, suffering nations, infinite descriptions of men, different in language, in manners, and in rites, men separated by every barrier of Nature from you, by the Providence of God are blended in one common cause, and are now become suppliants at your bar. For the honor of this nation, in vindication of this mysterious Providence, let it be known that no rule formed upon municipal maxims (if any such rule exists) will prevent the course of that imperial justice which you owe to the people that call to you from all parts of a great disjointed world. For, situated as this kingdom is, an object, thank God, of envy to the rest of the nations, its conduct in that high and elevated situation will undoubtedly be scrutinized with a severity as great as its power is invidious.

It is well known that enormous wealth has poured into this country from India through a thousand channels, public and concealed; and it is no particular derogation from our honor to suppose a possibility of being corrupted by that by which other empires have been corrupted, and assemblies almost as respectable and venerable as your Lordships' have been directly or indirectly vitiated. Forty millions of money, at least, have within our memory been brought from India into England. In this case the most sacred judicature ought to look to its reputation. Without offence we may venture to suggest that the best way to secure reputation is, not by a proud defiance of public opinion, but by guiding our actions in such a manner as that public opinion may in the end be securely defied, by having been previously respected and dreaded. No direct false judgment is apprehended from the tribunals of this country; but it is feared that partiality may lurk and nestle in the abuse of our forms of proceeding. It is necessary, therefore, that nothing in that proceeding should appear to mark the slightest trace, should betray the faintest odor of chicane. God forbid, that, when you try the most serious of all causes, that, when you try the cause of Asia in the presence of Europe, there should be the least suspicion that a narrow partiality, utterly destructive of justice, should so guide us that a British subject in power should appear in substance to possess rights which are denied to the humble allies, to the attached dependants of this kingdom, who by their distance have a double demand upon your protection, and who, by an implicit (I hope not a weak and useless) trust in you, have stripped themselves of every other resource under heaven!

I do not say this from any fear, doubt, or hesitation concerning what your Lordships will finally do,--none in the world; but I cannot shut my ears to the rumors which you all know to be disseminated abroad. The abusers of power may have a chance to cover themselves by those fences and intrenchments which were made to secure the liberties of the people against men of that very description. But God forbid it should be bruited from Pekin to Paris, that the laws of England are for the rich and the powerful, but to the poor, the miserable, and defenceless they afford no resource at all! God forbid it should be said, no nation is equal to the English in _substantial_ violence and in _formal_ justice,--that in this kingdom we feel ourselves competent to confer the most extravagant and inordinate powers upon public ministers, but that we are deficient, poor, helpless, lame, and impotent in the means of calling them to account for their use of them! An opinion has been insidiously circulated through this kingdom, and through foreign nations too, that, in order to cover our participation in guilt, and our common interest in the plunder of the East, we have invented a set of scholastic distinctions, abhorrent to the common sense and unpropitious to the common necessities of mankind, by which we are to deny ourselves the knowledge of what the rest of the world knows, and what so great a part of the world both knows and feels. I do not deprecate any appearance which may give countenance to this aspersion from suspicion that any corrupt motive can influence this court; I deprecate it from knowing that hitherto we have moved within the narrow circle of municipal justice. I am afraid, that, from the habits acquired by moving within a circumscribed sphere, we may be induced rather to endeavor at forcing Nature into that municipal circle than to enlarge the circle of national justice to the necessities of the empire we have obtained.

This is the only thing which does create any doubt or difficulty in the minds of sober people. But there are those who will not judge so equitably. Where two motives, neither of them perfectly justifiable, may be assigned, the worst has the chance of being preferred. If, from any appearance of chicane in the court, justice should fail, all men will say, better there were no tribunals at all. In my humble opinion, it would be better a thousand times to give all complainants the short answer the Dey of Algiers gave a British ambassador, representing certain grievances suffered by the British merchants,--"My friend," (as the story is related by Dr. Shaw,) "do not you know that my subjects are a band of robbers, and that I am their captain?"--better it would be a thousand times, and a thousand thousand times more manly, than an hypocritical process, which, under a pretended reverence to punctilious ceremonies and observances of law, abandons mankind without help and resource to all the desolating consequences of arbitrary power. The conduct and event of this cause will put an end to such doubts, wherever they may be entertained. Your Lordships will exercise the great plenary powers with which you are invested in a manner that will do honor to the protecting justice of this kingdom, that will completely avenge the great people who are subjected to it. You will not suffer your proceedings to be squared by any rules but by their necessities, and by that law of a common nature which cements them to us and us to them. The reports to the contrary have been spread abroad with uncommon industry; but they will be speedily refuted by the humanity, simplicity, dignity, and nobleness of your Lordships' justice.

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Having said all that I am instructed to say concerning the process which the House of Commons has used, concerning the crimes which they have chosen, concerning the criminal upon whom they attach the crimes, and concerning the evidence which they mean to produce, I am now to proceed to open that part of the business which falls to my share. It is rather an explanation of the circumstances than an enforcement of the crimes.

Your Lordships of course will be apprised that this cause is not what occurs every day, in the ordinary round of municipal affairs,--that it has a relation to many things, that it touches many points in many places, which are wholly removed from the ordinary beaten orbit of our English affairs. In other affairs, every allusion immediately meets its point of reference; nothing can be started that does not immediately awaken your attention to something in your own laws and usages which you meet with every day in the ordinary transactions of life. But here you are caught, as it were, into another world; you are to have the way pioneered before you. As the subject is new, it must be explained; as it is intricate as well as new, that explanation can be only comparatively short: and therefore, knowing your Lordships to be possessed, along with all other judicial virtues, of the first and foundation of them all, judicial patience, I hope that you will not grudge a few hours to the explanation of that which has cost the Commons fourteen years' assiduous application to acquire,--that your Lordships will not disdain to grant a few hours to what has cost the people of India upwards of thirty years of their innate, inveterate, hereditary patience to endure.

* * * * *

My Lords, the powers which Mr. Hastings is charged with having abused are the powers delegated to him by the East India Company. The East India Company itself acts under two very dissimilar sorts of powers, derived from two sources very remote from each other. The first source of its power is under charters which the crown of Great Britain was authorized by act of Parliament to grant; the other is from several charters derived from the Emperor of the Moguls, the person in whose dominions they were chiefly conversant,--particularly that great charter by which, in the year 1765, they acquired the high-stewardship of the kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Under those two bodies of charters, the East India Company, and all their servants, are authorized to act.

As to those of the first description, it is from the British charters that they derive the capacity by which they are considered as a public body, or at all capable of any public function. It is from thence they acquire the capacity to take from any power whatsoever any other charter, to acquire any other offices, or to hold any other possessions. This, being the root and origin of their power, renders them responsible to the party from whom all their immediate and consequential powers are derived. As they have emanated from the supreme power of this kingdom, the whole body and the whole train of their servants, the corporate body as a corporate body, individuals as individuals, are responsible to the high justice of this kingdom. In delegating great power to the East India Company, this kingdom has not released its sovereignty; on the contrary, the responsibility of the Company is increased by the greatness and sacredness of the powers that have been intrusted to it. Attempts have been made abroad to circulate a notion that the acts of the East India Company and their servants are not cognizable here. I hope on this occasion your Lordships will show that this nation never did give a power without annexing to it a proportionable degree of responsibility.

As to their other powers, the Company derives them from the Mogul empire by various charters from that crown, and from the great magistrates of that crown, and particularly by the Mogul charter of 1765, by which they obtained the _dewanny_, that is, the office of lord high-steward, of the kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. By that charter they bound themselves (and bound inclusively all their servants) to perform all the duties belonging to that new office, and to be held by all the ties belonging to that new relation. If the Mogul empire had existed in its vigor, they would have been bound, under that responsibility, to observe the laws, rights, usages, and customs of the natives, and to pursue their benefit in all things: for this duty was inherent in the nature, institution, and purpose of the office which they received. If the power of the sovereign from whom they derived these powers should by any revolution in human affairs be annihilated or suspended, their duty to the people below them, which was created under the Mogul charter, is not annihilated, is not even suspended; and for their responsibility in the performance of that duty, they are thrown back upon that country (thank God, not annihilated) from whence their original power, and all subsequent derivative powers, have flowed. When the Company acquired that high office in India, an English corporation became an integral part of the Mogul empire. When Great Britain virtually assented to that grant of office, and afterwards took advantage of it, Great Britain guarantied the performance of all its duties. Great Britain entered into a virtual act of union with that country, by which we bound ourselves as securities to preserve the people in all the rights, laws, and liberties which their natural, original sovereign was bound to support, if he had been in condition to support them. By the disposition of events, the two duties, flowing from two different sources, are now united in one. The people of India, therefore, come in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, but in their own right, to the bar of this House, before the supreme royal justice of this kingdom, from whence originally all the powers under which they have suffered were derived.

It may be a little necessary, when we are stating the powers the Company have derived from their charter, and which we state Mr. Hastings to have abused, to state in as short and as comprehensive words as I can (for the matter is large indeed) what the constitution of that Company is,--I mean chiefly, what it is in reference to its Indian service, the great theatre of the abuse. Your Lordships will naturally conceive that it is not to inform you, but to revive circumstances in your memory, that I enter into this detail.

You will therefore recollect, that the East India Company had its origin about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, a period of projects, when all sorts of commercial adventures, companies, and monopolies were in fashion. At that time the Company was constituted with extensive powers for increasing the commerce and the honor of this country; because increasing its commerce, without increasing its honor and reputation, would have been thought at that time, and will be thought now, a bad bargain for the country. The powers of the Company were, under that charter, merely commercial. By degrees, as the theatre of operation was distant, as its intercourse was with many great, some barbarous, and all of them armed nations, nations in which not only the sovereign, but the subjects, were armed, it was found necessary to enlarge their powers. The first power they obtained was a power of naval discipline in their ships,--a power which has been since dropped; the next was a power of law martial; the next was a power of civil, and, to a degree, of criminal jurisdiction, within their own factories, upon their own people and their own servants; the next was (and here was a stride indeed) the power of peace and war. Those high and almost incommunicable prerogatives of sovereignty, which were hardly ever known before to be parted with to any subjects, and which in several states were not wholly intrusted to the prince or head of the commonwealth himself, were given to the East India Company. That Company acquired these powers about the end of the reign of Charles the Second; and they were afterwards more fully, as well as more legally, given by Parliament after the Revolution. From this time, the East India Company was no longer merely a mercantile company, formed for the extension of the British commerce: it more nearly resembled a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East. From that time the Company ought to be considered as a subordinate sovereign power: that is, sovereign with regard to the objects which it touched; subordinate with regard to the power from whence its great trust was derived.

Under these successive arrangements things took a course very different from their usual order. A new disposition took place, not dreamt of in the theories of speculative politicians, and of which few examples in the least resembling it have been seen in the modern world, none at all in the ancient. In other instances, a political body that acts as a commonwealth was first settled, and trade followed as a consequence of the protection obtained by political power; but here the course of affairs was reversed. The constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in empire. Indeed, wherever the sovereign powers of peace and war are given, there wants but time and circumstance to make these powers supersede every other. The affairs of commerce will fall at last into their proper rank and situation. However primary in their original intention, they will become secondary. The possession, therefore, and the power of assertion of these great authorities coinciding with the improved state of Europe, with the improved state of arts in Europe, with the improved state of laws, and, what is much more material, the improved state of military discipline, more and more perfected every day with us,--universal improvement in Europe coinciding with the general decay of Asia, (for the proud day of Asia is passed,) this improvement coinciding with the relaxation and dissolution of the Mogul government, with the decline of its warlike spirit, with the total disuse of the ancient strictness of the military discipline established by Tamerlane, the India Company came to be what it is, a great empire, carrying on, subordinately, a great commerce; it became that thing which was supposed by the Roman law irreconcilable to reason and propriety,--_eundem negotiatorem et dominum_: the same power became the general trader, the same power became the supreme lord.

In this exalted situation, the India Company, however, still preserves traces of its original mercantile character. The whole exterior order of its political service is carried on upon a mercantile plan and mercantile principles. In fact, the East India Company in Asia is a state in the disguise of a merchant. Its whole service is a system of public offices in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly, the whole external order and series of the service, as I observed, is commercial; the principal, the inward, the real, is almost entirely political.

This system of the Company's service, its order and discipline, is necessary to be explained to your Lordships, that you may see in what manner the abuses have affected it. In the first place, all the persons who go abroad in the Company's civil service enter as clerks in the counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to it,--_writers_. In that condition they are obliged to serve five years. The second step is that of a _factor_, in which they are obliged to serve three years. The third step they take is that of a _junior merchant_, in which they are obliged to serve three years more. At that period they become _senior merchants_, which is the highest stage of advance in the Company's service,--a rank by which they had pretensions, before the year 1774, to the Council, to the succession of the Presidency, and to whatever other honors the Company has to bestow.

The Company had, in its early times, established factories in certain places; which factories by degrees grew to the name of Presidencies and Council, in proportion as the power and influence of the Company increased, and as the political began first to struggle with, and at length to predominate over, the mercantile. In this form it continued till the year 1773, when the legislature broke in, for proper reasons urging them to it, upon that order of the service, and appointed to the superior department persons who had no title to that place under the ordinary usage of the service. Mr. Hastings and Mr. Harwell, whatever other titles they might have had, held solely under the act of Parliament nominating them to that authority; but in all other respects, except where the act and other subsequent acts have not broken in upon it, the whole course of the service remains upon the ancient footing, that is, the commercial footing, as to the gradation and order of service.

Your Lordships see here a regular series of gradation, which requires eleven years before any persons can arrive at the highest trusts and situations. You will therefore be astonished, when so long a probationary service was required, that effects very different from those to be expected from long probation have happened, and that in a much shorter time than those eleven years you have seen persons returning into this kingdom with affluent, with overbearing fortunes. It will be a great part of your inquiry, when we come before your Lordships to substantiate evidence against Mr. Hastings, to discover how that order came to be so completely broken down and erased that scarce a trace of it for any good purpose remains. Though I will not deny that that order, or that any order in a state, may be superseded by the ruling power, when great talents, upon pressing exigencies, are to be called forth, yet I must say the order itself was formed upon wise principles. It furnished the persons who were put in that course of probation with an opportunity (if circumstances enabled them) of acquiring experience in business of revenue, trade, and policy. It gave to those who watched them a constant inspection of their conduct through all their progress. On the expectants of office it imposed the necessity of acquiring a character in proportion to their standing, in order that all which they had gained by the good behavior of years should not be lost by the misconduct of an hour. It was a great substantial regulation. But scarce a trace of the true spirit of it remains to be discovered in Mr. Hastings's government; for Mr. Hastings established offices, nay, whole systems of offices, and especially a system of offices in 1781, which being altogether new, none of the rules of gradation applied to them; and he filled those offices in such a manner as suited best, not the constitution nor the spirit of the service, but his own particular views and purposes. The consequence has been, that persons in the most immature stages of life have been appointed to conduct affairs which required the greatest maturity of judgment, the greatest possible temper and moderation. Effects naturally consequent have followed upon it.--I shall not trouble your Lordships with any further observations on this system of gradation.

I must, however, remark, before I go further, that there is something in the representation of the East India Company in their Oriental territory different from that, perhaps, of any other nation that has ever transported any part of its power from one country to another. The East India Company in India is not properly a branch of the British nation: it is only a deputation of individuals. When the Tartars entered into China, when the Arabs and Tartars successively entered into Hindostan, when the Goths and Vandals penetrated into Europe, when the Normans forced their way into England, indeed, in all conquests, migrations, settlements, and colonizations, the new people came as the offset of a nation. The Company in India does not exist as a national colony. In effect and substance nobody can go thither that does not go in its service. The English in India are nothing but a seminary for the succession of officers. They are a nation of placemen; they are a commonwealth without a people; they are a state made up wholly of magistrates. There is nothing to be in propriety called people, to watch, to inspect, to balance against the power of office. The power of office, so far as the English nation is concerned, is the sole power in the country: the consequence of which is, that, being a kingdom of magistrates, what is commonly called the _esprit du corps_ is strong in it. This spirit of the body predominates equally in all its parts; by which the members must consider themselves as having a common interest, and that common interest separated both from that of the country which sent them out and from that of the country in which they act. No control upon them exists,--none, I mean, in persons who understand their language, who understand their manners, or can apply their conduct to the laws. Therefore, in a body so constituted, confederacy is easy, and has been general. Your Lordships are not to expect that that should happen in such a body which never happened in any body or corporation,--that is, that they should, in any instance, be a proper check and control upon themselves. It is not in the nature of things. The fundamental principle of the whole of the East India Company's system is monopoly, in some sense or other. The same principle predominates in the service abroad and the service at home; and both systems are united into one, animated with the same spirit, that is, with the corporate spirit. The whole, taken together, is such as has not been seen in the examples of the Moors, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Romans,--in no old, in no recent examples. The Dutch may resemble it, but they have not an empire properly so denominated. By means of this peculiar circumstance it has not been difficult for Mr. Hastings to embody abuse, and to put himself at the head of a regular system of corruption.

Another circumstance in that service is deserving of notice. Except in the highest parts of all, the emoluments of office do not in any degree correspond with the trust, nor the nature of the office with its name. In other official systems, the style, in general, is above the function; here it is the reverse. Under the name of junior merchant, senior merchant, writer, and other petty appellations of the counting-house, you have magistrates of high dignity, you have administrators of revenues truly royal, you have judges, civil, and in some respects criminal, who pass judgment upon the greatest properties of a great country. The legal public emoluments that belong to them are very often so inadequate to the real dignity of the character, that it is impossible, almost absolutely impossible, for the subordinate parts of it, which, though subordinate, are stations of power, to exist, as Englishmen, who look at a fortune to be enjoyed at home as their ultimate object, and to exist in a state of perfect incorruption in that service.

In some parts of Europe, it is true that the greatest situations are often attended with but little emolument; yet still they are filled. Why? Because reputation, glory, fame, the esteem, the love, the tears of joy which flow from happy sensibility, the honest applauses of a grateful country, sometimes pay the cares, anxieties, and toils which wait on great situations in the commonwealth; and in these they pay in money what cannot be paid in fame and reputation. It is the reverse in the service of the India Company. Glory is not the lot of subordinated merit,--and all the subordinate parts of the gradation are officers who, in comparison with the offices and duties intrusted to them, are miserably provided for; whereas the chief of each great Presidency has emoluments securing him against every mode of temptation. But if this has not secured the head, we may easily judge how the members are to be coerced. Mr. Hastings, at the head of the service, with high legal emoluments, has fouled his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has substituted oppression and tyranny in the place of legal government. With all that unbounded, licentious power which he has assumed over the public revenues, instead of endeavoring to find a series of gradual, progressive, honorable, and adequate rewards for the persons who serve the public in the subordinate, but powerful situations, he has left them to prey upon the people without the smallest degree of control. In default of honest emolument, there is the unbounded license of power; and, as one of the honestest and ablest servants of the Company said to me in conversation, the civil service of the Company resembled the military service of the Mahrattas,--little pay, but unbounded license to plunder. I do not say that some of the salaries given in India would not sound well here; but when you consider the nature of the trusts, the dignity of the situation, whatever the name of them may be, the powers that are granted, the hopes that every man has of establishing himself at home, I repeat, it is a source of infinite grievance, of infinite abuse: of which source of corrupt power we charge Mr. Hastings with having availed himself, in filling up the void of direct pay by finding out and countenancing every kind of oblique and unjust emolument; though it must be confessed that he is far from being solely guilty of this offence.

Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority, at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,--they are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers that despotism involves.

It is further remarkable, these servants exercise what your Lordships are now exercising, high judicial powers, and they exercise them without the smallest study of any law, either general or municipal. It is made a sort of rule in the service, a rule confirmed even by the attempts that were made to correct it, (I mean confirmed by Sir Elijah Impey, when, under the auspices of Mr. Hastings, he undertook to be legislator for India,) that the judicial character, the last in the order of legal progress, that to which all professional men look up as the crown of their labors, that ultimate hope of men grown gray in professional practice, is among the first experimental situations of a Company's servant. It is expressly said in that body of regulations to which I allude, that the office and situation of a judge of the Dewanny Courts of Adawlut is to be filled by the _junior_ servants of the Company; and as the judicial emolument is not substantially equal to that of other situations, the office of a judge is to be taken, as it were, _in transitu_, as a passage to other offices not of a judicial nature. As soon, therefore, as a young man has supplied the defects of his education by the advantage of some experience, he is immediately translated to a totally different office; and another young man is substituted, to learn, at the expense of the property of India, to fill a situation which, when he may be qualified to fill, he is no longer to hold.

It is in a great measure the same with regard to the other situations. They are the situations of great statesmen, which, according to the practice of the world, require, to fill properly, rather a large converse with men and much intercourse in life than deep study of books,--though that, too, has its eminent service. We know that in the habits of civilized life, in cultivated society, there is imbibed by men a good deal of the solid practice of government, of the true maxims of state, and everything that enables a man to serve his country. But these men are sent over to exercise functions at which a statesman here would tremble, without any theoretical study, and without any of that sort of experience which, in mixed societies of business and converse, form men gradually and insensibly to great affairs. Low cunning, intrigue, and stratagem are soon acquired; but manly, durable policy, which never sacrifices the general interest to a partial or momentary advantage, is not so cheaply formed in the human understanding.

Mr. Hastings, in his defence before the House of Commons, and in the defences he has made before your Lordships, has lamented his own situation in this particular. It was much to be lamented, indeed. How far it will furnish justification, extenuation, or palliation of his conduct, when we come to examine that conduct, will be seen.

These circumstances in the system have in a great degree vitiated and perverted what is in reality (and many things are in reality) excellent in it. They have rendered the application of all correctives and remedies to abuse, at best, precarious in their operation. The laws that we have made, the covenants which the Company has obliged its servants to enter into, the occasional orders that have been given, at least ostensibly good, all have proved noxious to the country, instead of beneficial.

To illustrate this point, I beg leave to observe to your Lordships, that the servants of the Company are obliged to enter into that service not only with an impression of the general duty which attaches upon all servants, but are obliged to engage in a specific covenant with their masters to perform all the duties described in that covenant (which are all the duties of their relation) under heavy penalties. They are bound to a repetition of these covenants at every step of their progress, from writer to factor, from factor to junior merchant, and from junior merchant to senior merchant. They ought, according to the rule, to renew these covenants at these times by something (I speak without offence) which may be said to resemble confirmation in the Church. They are obliged to renew their obligation in particular to receive no gifts, gratuities, or presents whatsoever.

This scheme of covenants would have been wise and proper, if it had belonged to a judicious order, and rational, consistent scheme of discipline. The orders of the Company have forbidden their servants to take any extraneous emoluments. The act of Parliament has fulminated against them. Clear, positive laws, and clear, positive private engagements, have no exception of circumstances in them, no difference _quoad majus et minus_; but every one who offends against the law is liable to the law. The consequence is this: he who has deviated but an inch from the straight line, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful emolument, (and all have taken many pennies of unlawful emolument,) does not dare to complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel oppression in any of his fellow-servants. He who has taken a trifle, perhaps as the reward of a good action, is obliged to be silent, when he sees whole nations desolated around him. The great criminal at the head of the service has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the small offence, and crush the person who has committed it. This is one grand source of Mr. Hastings's power. After he had got the better of the Parliamentary commission, no complaint from any part of the service has appeared against Mr. Hastings. He is bold enough to state it as one presumption of his merit, that there has been no such complaint. No such complaint, indeed, can exist. The spirit of the corps would of itself almost forbid it,--to which spirit an informer is the most odious and detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been hunted down, as a common enemy. But here is a new security. Who can complain, or dares to accuse? The whole service is irregular: nobody is free from small offences; and, as I have said, the great offender can always crush the small one.

If you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine, from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption; but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes, you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary perfection. He was fourteen years at the head of that service; and there is not an instance, no, not one single instance, in which he endeavored to detect corruption, or that he ever, in any one single instance, attempted to punish it; but the whole service, with that whole mass of enormity which he attributes to it, slept, as it were, at once, under his terror and his protection: under his protection, if they did not dare to move against him; under terror, from his power to pluck out individuals and make a public example of them, whenever he thought fit. And therefore that service, under his guidance and influence, was, beyond even what its own nature disposed it to, a service of confederacy, a service of connivance, a service composed of various systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head and the protector. But this general connivance he did not think sufficient to secure to him the general support of the Indian interest. He went further. We shall prove to your Lordships, that, when the Company were driven by shame, not by inclination, to order several prosecutions against delinquents in their service, Mr. Hastings, directly contrary to the duty of his office, directly contrary to the express and positive law of the Court of Directors, which law Parliament had bound upon him as his rule of action, not satisfied with his long tacit connivance, ventured, before he left his government, and among his last acts, to pass a general act of pardon and indemnity, and at once ordered the whole body of the prosecutions directed by his masters, the Company, to be discharged.

Having had fourteen years' lease of connivance to bestow, and giving at the end a general release of all suits and actions, he now puts himself at the head of a vast body enriched by his bounties, connivances, and indemnities, and expects the support of those whom he had thus fully rewarded and discharged from the pursuit of the laws. You will find, in the course of this business, that, when charges have been brought against him of any bribery, corruption, or other malversation, his course has been to answer little or nothing to that specific bribery, corruption, or malversation: his way has been to call on the Court of Directors to inquire of every servant who comes to Europe, and to say whether there was any one man in it that will give him an ill word. He has put himself into a situation in which he may always safely call to his character, and will always find himself utterly incapable of justifying his conduct.

So far I have troubled your Lordships with the system of confederacy and connivance, which, under his auspices, was the vital principle of almost the whole service. There is one member of the service which I have omitted: but whether I ought to have put it first, or, as I do now, last, I must confess I am at some loss; because, though it appears to be the lowest (if any regular) part of the service, it is by far the most considerable and the most efficient, without a full consideration and explanation of which hardly any part of the conduct of Mr. Hastings, and of many others that may be in his situation, can be fully understood.

I have given your Lordships an account of writers, factors, merchants, who exercise the office of judges, lord chancellors, chancellors of the exchequer, ministers of state, and managers of great revenues. But there is another description of men, of more importance than them all, a description you have often heard of, but which has not been sufficiently explained: I mean the _banian_. When the Company's service was no more than mercantile, and the servants were generally unacquainted with the country, they used the intervention of certain factors among the natives, which were called _banians_: we called them so, because they were of the tribe or caste of the banians or merchants,--the Indians being generally distributed into trades according to their tribes. The name still continues, when the functions of the banians are totally altered. The banian is known by other appellations. He is called _dewan_, or steward; and, indeed, this is a term with more propriety applied to him in several of his functions. He is, by his name of office, the steward of the household of the European gentleman: he has the management of his affairs, and the ordering of his servants. He is himself a domestic servant, and generally chosen out of that class of natives who, by being habituated to misery and subjection, can submit to any orders, and are fit for any of the basest services. Trained under oppression, (it is the true education,) they are fit to oppress others. They serve an apprenticeship of servitude to qualify them for the trade of tyranny. They know all the devices, all the little frauds, all the artifices and contrivances, the whole panoply of the defensive armor by which ingenious slavery secures itself against the violence of power. They know all the lurking-holes, all the winding recesses, of the unfortunate; and they hunt out distress and misery even to their last retreats. They have suffered themselves; but, far from being taught by those sufferings to abstain from rigor, they have only learned the methods of afflicting their fellow-slaves. They have the best intelligence of what is done in England. The moment a Company's servant arrives in India, and his English connections are known to be powerful, some of that class of people immediately take possession of him, as if he were their inheritance. They have knowledge of the country and its affairs; they have money; they have the arts of making money. The gentleman who comes from England has none of these; he enters into that world, as he enters into the world at large, naked. His portion is great simplicity, great indigence, and a strong disposition to relieve himself. The banian, once in possession, employs his tyranny, not only over the native people of his country, but often over the master himself, who has little other share in the proceedings of his servant but in giving him the ticket of his name to mark that he is connected with and supported by an European who is himself well connected and supported at home. This is a commission which nothing can resist. From that moment forward it is not the Englishman, it is the black banian, that is the master. The nominal master often lives from his hand. We know how young men are sent out of this country; we know how happy we are to hear soon that they are no longer a burden to their friends and parents. The banian knows it, too. He supplies the young servant with money. He has him under his power: first, from the necessity of employing such a man; and next, (and this is the more important of the two,) he has that dreadful power over his master which every creditor has over his debtor. Actions the most abhorrent to his nature he must see done before his face, and thousands and thousands worse are done in his absence, and he dare not complain. The banian extorts, robs, plunders, and then gives him just what proportion of the spoil he pleases. If the master should murmur, the very power that was sent over to protect the people of India from these very abuses, (the best things being perverted, when applied to unknown objects and put into unsuitable situations,) the very laws of England, by making the recovery of debts more easy, infinitely increase the power of the banian over his master. Thus the Supreme Court of Justice, the destined corrector of all abuses, becomes a collateral security for that abominable tyranny exercised by the moneyed banians over Europeans as well as the natives. So that, while we are here boasting of the British power in the East, we are in perhaps more than half our service nothing but the inferior, miserable instruments of the tyranny which the lowest part of the natives of India exercise, to the disgrace of the British authority, and to the ruin of all that is respectable among their own countrymen. They have subverted the first houses, totally ruined and undone the country, cheated and defrauded the revenue,--the master a silent, sometimes a melancholy spectator, until some office of high emolument has emancipated him. This has often been the true reason that the Company's servants in India, in order to free themselves from this horrid and atrocious servitude, are obliged to become instruments of another tyranny, and must prostitute themselves to men in power, in order to obtain some office that may enable them to escape the servitudes below, and enable them to pay their debts. And thus many have become the instruments of Mr. Hastings.

These banians, or dewans, were originally among the lower castes in the country. But now, it is true, that, after seeing the power and profits of these men,--that there is neither power, profession, nor occupation to be had, which a reputable person can exercise, but through that channel,--men of higher castes, and born to better things, have thrown themselves into that disgraceful servitude, have become menial servants to Englishmen, that they might rise by their degradation. But whoever they are, or of whatever birth, they have equally prostituted their integrity, they have equally lost their character; and, once entered into that course of life, there is no difference between the best castes and the worst. That system Mr. Hastings confirmed, established, increased, and made the instrument of the most austere tyranny, of the basest peculations, and the most scandalous and iniquitous extortions.

In the description I have given of banians a distinction is to be made. Your Lordships must distinguish the banians of the British servants in subordinate situations and the banians who are such to persons in higher authority. In the latter case the banian is in strict subordination, because he may always be ruined by his superior; whereas in the former it is always in his power to ruin his nominal superior. It was not through fear, but voluntarily, and not for the banian's purposes, but his own, Mr. Hastings has brought forward his banian. He seated him in the houses of the principal nobility, and invested him with farms of the revenue; he has given him enormous jobs; he has put him over the heads of a nobility which, for their grandeur, antiquity, and dignity, might almost be matched with your Lordships. He has made him supreme ecclesiastical judge, judge even of the very castes, in the preservation of the separate rules and separate privileges of which that people exists. He who has dominion over the caste has an absolute power over something more than life and fortune.

Such is that first, or last, (I know not which to call it,) order in the Company's service called a banian. The _mutseddies_, clerks, accountants, of Calcutta, generally fall under this description. Your Lordships will see hereafter the necessity of giving you, in the opening the case, an idea of the situation of a banian. You will see, as no Englishman, properly speaking, acts by himself, that he must be made responsible for that person called his banian,--for the power he either uses under him, or the power he has acquired over him. The banian escapes, in the night of his complexion and situation, the inquiry that a white man cannot stand before in this country. Through the banians, or other black natives, a bad servant of the Company receives his bribes. Through them he decides falsely against the titles of litigants in the court of castes, or in the offices of public registry. Through them Mr. Hastings has exercised oppressions which, I will venture to say, in his own name, in his own character, daring as he is, (and he is the most daring criminal that ever existed,) he never would dare to practise. Many, if not most, of the iniquities of his interior bad administration have been perpetrated through these banians, or other native agents and confidants; and we shall show you that he is not satisfied with one of them, confiding few of his secrets to Europeans, and hardly any of his instruments, either native or European, knowing the secrets of each other. This is the system of banianism, and of concealment, which Mr. Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into that dark and insidious character.

I have explained, or endeavored to explain, to your Lordships these circumstances of the true spirit, genius, and character, more than the ostensible institutions of the Company's service: I now shall beg leave to bring before you one institution, taken from the mercantile constitution of the Company, so excellent, that I will venture to say that human wisdom has never exceeded it. In this excellent institution the counting-house gave lessons to the state. The active, awakened, and enlightened principle of self-interest will provide a better system for the guard of that interest than the cold, drowsy wisdom of those who provide for a good out of themselves ever contrived for the public. The plans sketched by private prudence for private interest, the regulations by mercantile men for their mercantile purposes, when they can be applied to the discipline and order of the state, produce a discipline and order which no state should be ashamed to copy. The Company's mercantile regulations are admirably fitted for the government of a remote, large, disjointed empire. As merchants, having factors abroad in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public ministers. The Company has made it a fundamental part of their constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written government. Your Lordships will observe, in the course of the proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in the government of India,--that is, that the Company's government is a government of writing, a government of record. The strictest court of justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of record as the India Company's executive service is, or ought to be, in all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or diary of all their transactions, public and private: they are bound to do this by an express covenant. They oblige them, as a corrective upon that diary, to keep a letter-book, in which all their letters are to be regularly entered. And they are bound by the same covenant to produce all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life. But as the great corrective of all, they have contrived that every proceeding in public council shall be written,--no debates merely verbal. The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and recorded. All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council, Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves, decisions, and final resolutions of affairs: the argument, the discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear. But the Company has proceeded much further, and done much more wisely, because they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided, either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written,--the proposition, the argument, the dissent. This is not confined to their great Council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, (and I see considerable traces of it in practice,) in every Provincial Council, whilst the Provincial Councils existed, and even down to the minutest ramification of their service. These books, in a progression from the lowest Councils to the highest Presidency, are ordered to be transmitted, duplicate and triplicate, by every ship that sails to Europe. On this system an able servant of the Company, and high in their service, has recorded his opinion, and strongly expressed his sentiments. Writing to the Court of Directors, he says, "It ought to be remembered, that the basis upon which you rose to power, and have been able to stand the shock of repeated convulsions, has been the accuracy and simplicity of mercantile method, which makes every transaction in your service and every expenditure a matter of record."

My Lords, this method not only must produce to them, if strictly observed, a more accurate idea of the nature of their affairs and the nature of their expenditures, but it must afford them no trivial opportunity and means of knowing the true characters of their servants, their capacities, their ways of thinking, the turn and bias of their minds. If well employed, and but a little improved, the East India Company possessed an advantage unknown before to the chief of a remote government. In the most remote parts of the world, and in the minutest parts of a remote service, everything came before the principal with a domestic accuracy and local familiarity. It was, in the power of a Director, sitting in London, to form an accurate judgment of every incident that happened upon the Ganges and the Gogra.

The use of this recorded system did not consist only in the facility of discovering what the nature of their affairs and the character and capacity of their servants was, but it furnished the means of detecting their misconduct, frequently of proving it too, and of producing the evidence of it judicially under their own hands. For your Lordships must have observed that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct, and simple: guilt is a crooked, intricate, inconstant, and various thing. The iniquitous job of to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons that have colored the first crime may expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates, conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records. They are flown out of their hands, they are in Europe, they are safe in the registers of the Company, perhaps they are under the eye of Parliament, before the writers of them have time to invent an excuse for a direct contrary conduct to that to which their former pretended principles applied. This is a great, a material part of the constitution of the Company. My Lords, I do not think it to be much apologized for, if I repeat, that this is the fundamental regulation of that service, and which, if preserved in the first instance, as it ought to be, in official practice in India, and then used as it ought to be in England, would afford such a mode of governing a great, foreign, dispersed empire, as, I will venture to say, few countries ever possessed, even in governing the most limited and narrow jurisdiction.

It was the great business of Mr. Hastings's policy to subvert this great political edifice. His first mode of subverting it was by commanding the public ministers, paid by the Company, to deliver their correspondence upon the most critical and momentous affairs to him, in order to be suppressed and destroyed at his pleasure. To support him in this plan of spoliation, he has made a mischievous distinction in public business between public and private correspondence. The Company's orders and covenants made none. There are, readily I admit, thousands of occasions in which it is not proper to divulge promiscuously a private correspondence, though on public affairs, to the world; but there is no occasion in which it is not a necessary duty, on requisition, to communicate your correspondence to those who form the paramount government, on whose interests and on whose concerns and under whose authority this correspondence has been carried on. The very same reasons which require secrecy with regard to others demand the freest communication to them. But Mr. Hastings has established principles of confidence and secrecy towards himself which have cut off all confidence between the Directors and their ministers, and effectually kept them at least out of the secret of their own affairs.

Without entering into all the practices by which he has attempted to maim the Company's records, I shall state one more to your Lordships,--that is, his avowed appointment of spies and under-agents, who shall carry on the real state business, while there are public and ostensible agents who are not in the secret. The correspondence of those private agents he holds in his own hands, communicates as he thinks proper, but most commonly withholds. There remains nothing for the Directors but the shell and husk of a dry, formal, official correspondence, which neither means anything nor was intended to mean anything.

These are some of the methods by which he has defeated the purposes of the excellent institution of a recorded administration. But there are cases to be brought before this court in which he has laid the axe at once to the root,--which was, by delegating out of his own hands a great department of the powers of the Company, which he was himself bound to execute, to a board which was not bound to record their deliberations with the same strictness as he himself was bound. He appointed of his own usurped authority a board for the administration of the revenue, the members of which were expressly dispensed from recording their dissents, until they chose it; and in that office, as in a great gulf, a most important part of the Company's transactions has been buried.

Notwithstanding his unwearied pains in the work of spoliation, some precious fragments are left, which we ought infinitely to value,--by which we may learn, and lament, the loss of what he has destroyed. If it were not for those inestimable fragments and wrecks of the recorded government which have been saved from the destruction which Mr. Hastings intended for them all, the most shameful enormities that have ever disgraced a government or harassed a people would only be known in this country by secret whispers and unauthenticated anecdotes; the disgracer's of government, the vexers and afflicters of mankind, instead of being brought before an awful public tribunal, might have been honored with the highest distinctions and rewards their country has to bestow; and sordid bribery, base peculation, iron-handed extortion, fierce, unrelenting tyranny, might themselves have been invested with those sacred robes of justice before which this day they have cause to tremble.

Mr. Hastings, sensible of what he suffers from this register of acts and opinions, has endeavored to discredit and ruin what remains of it. He refuses, in his defence to the House of Commons, in letters to the Court of Directors, in various writings and declarations, he refuses to be tried by his own recorded declarations; he refuses to be bound by his own opinions, delivered under his own hand. He knows that he and the record cannot exist together. He knows that what remains of the written constitution which he has not destroyed is enough to destroy him. He claims a privilege of systematic inconstancy, a privilege of prevarication, a privilege of contradiction,--a privilege of not only changing his conduct, but the principles of his conduct, whenever it suits his occasions. But I hope your Lordships will show the destroyers of that wise constitution, and the destroyers of those records which are to be the securities against malversation in office, the discoverers and avengers of it, that whoever destroys the discoverer establishes the iniquity; that, therefore, your Lordships will bind him to his own declarations, given on record under his own hand; that you will say to this unfaithful servant of the Company, what was said to another unfaithful person upon a far less occasion by a far greater authority, "Out of thy own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant."

* * * * *

Having gone through what I have been instructed might be necessary to state to your Lordships concerning the Company's constitution, (I mean the real inside, and not the shell of its constitution,)--having stated the abuses that existed in it,--having stated how Mr. Hastings endeavored to perpetuate and to increase and to profit of the abuse, and how he has systematically endeavored to destroy, and has in some instances in fact destroyed, many things truly excellent in that constitution,--if I have not wasted your time in explanation of matters that you are already well acquainted with, I shall next beg leave to state to you the abuse in some particulars of the other part of the public authority which the Company acquired over the natives of India, in virtue of the royal charter of the present Mogul emperor, in the year 1766 [1765?].

My Lords, that you may the better judge of the abuse Mr. Hastings has made of the powers vested in him, it will be expedient to consider a little who the people are to whose prejudice he has abused these powers. I shall explain this point with as much brevity as is consistent with the distinctness with which I mean to bring the whole before your Lordships; and I beg to observe to you that this previous discourse, rather explanatory than accusatorial, (if I may use the expression,) is meant rather to elucidate the nature of the matter to come before you in regular charges than as proof of the charges themselves.

I know that a good deal of latitude is allowed to advocates, when opening a cause in a private court, to indulge themselves in their narratives leading to the charges they intend to bring. They are not always called to the strictest account for such prefatory matter, because the court, when it comes to judge, sifts and distinguishes it from the points to be strictly proved, and on whose merits the cause relies. But I wish your Lordships to know, that, with the high opinion I have of your gravity, (and it is impossible for a man to conceive a higher,) and sensible of the weight of those I represent at this place, namely, the Commons of Great Britain, I should be sorry that any one substantial fact, even in this explanatory opening, or even the color of the fact, should be alleged, which, when called upon, I should not be ready to make good to you by proof,--I mean, by proof adapted to its nature: public opinion, by evidence of public opinion; by record, that to which record is applicable; by oral testimony, things to which oral testimony alone can be produced; and, last of all, that which is matter of historic proof, by historic evidence. This I hope to do with the usual allowance to errors and mistakes, which is the claim of human infirmity.

Then, my Lords, two distinct people inhabit India. Two sorts of people inhabit the same country, as totally distinct from each other, in characters, lives, opinions, prejudices, and manners, as the inhabitants of countries most remote from each other. For both of these descriptions Mr. Hastings was bound to provide equally, agreeable to the terms of the charter which the Company received from the lawful governing power of that country: a charter received at its own solicitation; a charter not forced upon us by a superior power, but given at the immediate solicitation of the principal servants belonging to the Company; a charter solemnly accepted by the Company, and by them, I am very sorry to say, little regarded,--or, at least, little regarded by their principal servants.

My Lords, the first description of people who are subjected virtually to the British empire through those mediums which I have described to you are the original inhabitants of Hindostan, who have in all time, and beyond all the eras which we use, (I mean always the two grand eras excepted,) been the aboriginal inhabitants and proprietors of that country,--with manners, religion, customs, and usages appropriated to themselves, and little resembling those of the rest of mankind. This description of men is commonly called Gentoos. The system and principle of that government is locality. Their laws, their manners, their religion are all local.

Their legislator, whoever he was, (for who he was is a matter lost in the mists of a most obscure antiquity,) had it as a great leading principle of his policy to connect the people with their soil. Accordingly, by one of those anomalies which a larger acquaintance with our species daily discovers, and which perhaps an attentive reflection might explain in the nature of man, this aboriginal people of India,--who are the softest in their manners of any of our race, approaching almost to feminine tenderness,--who are formed constitutionally benevolent, and, in many particulars, made to fill a larger circle of benevolence than our morals take in,--who extend their good-will to the whole animal creation,--these people are, of all nations, the most unalliable to any other part of mankind. They cannot, the highest orders of them, at least, cannot, come into contact with any other. That bond which is one of the chief instruments of society, and which, supporting the individual, connects the species, can have no existence with them: I mean the convivial bond. That race can be held to no other by that great link of life. No Hindoo can mix at meals even with those on whom he depends for the meat he eats. This circumstance renders it difficult for us to enter with due sympathy into their concerns, or for them to enter into ours, even when we meet on the same ground. But there are other circumstances which render our intercourse, in our mutual relation, very full of difficulty. The sea is between us. The mass of that element, which, by appearing to disconnect, unites mankind, is to them a forbidden road. It is a great gulf fixed between you and them,--not so much that elementary gulf, but that gulf which manners, opinions, and laws have radicated in the very nature of the people. None of their high castes, without great danger to his situation, religion, rank, and estimation, can ever pass the sea; and this forbids, forever, all direct communication between that country and this. That material and affecting circumstance, my Lords, makes it ten times more necessary, since they cannot come to us, to keep a strict eye upon all persons who go to them. It imposes upon us a stricter duty to guard with a firm and powerful vigilance those whose principles of conscience weaken their principles of self-defence. If we undertake to govern the inhabitants of such a country, we must govern them upon their own principles and maxims, and not upon ours. We must not think to force them into the narrow circle of our ideas; we must extend ours to take in their system of opinions and rites, and the necessities which result from both: all change on their part is absolutely impracticable. We have more versatility of character and manners, and it is we who must conform. We know what the empire of opinion is in human nature. I had almost said that the law of opinion was human nature itself. It is, however, the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind; and more of the happiness and unhappiness of mankind resides in that inward principle than in all external circumstances put together. But if such is the empire of opinion even amongst us, it has a pure, unrestrained, complete, and despotic power amongst them. The variety of balanced opinions in our minds weakens the force of each: for in Europe, sometimes, the laws of religion differ from the laws of the land; sometimes the laws of the land differ from our laws of honor; our laws of honor are full of caprice, differing from those other laws, and sometimes differing from themselves: but there the laws of religion, the laws of the land, and the laws of honor are all united and consolidated in one invariable system, and bind men by eternal and indissoluble bonds to the rules of what, amongst them, is called his _caste_.

It may be necessary just to state to your Lordships what a _caste_ is. The Gentoo people, from the oldest time, have been distributed into various orders, all of them hereditary: these family orders are called castes; these castes are the fundamental part of the constitution of the Gentoo commonwealth, both in their church and in their state.

Your Lordships are born to hereditary honors in the chief of your houses; the rest mix with the people. With the Gentoos, they who are born noble can never fall into any second rank. They are divided into four orders,--the Brahmins, the Chittery, the Bice, and the Soodur, with many subdivisions in each. An eternal barrier is placed between them. The higher cannot pass into the lower; the lower cannot rise into the higher. They have all their appropriated rank, place, and situation, and their appropriated religion too, which is essentially different in its rites and ceremonies, sometimes in its object, in each of those castes. A man who is born in the highest caste, which at once unites what would be tantamount in this country to the dignity of the peerage and the ennobled sanctity of the episcopal character,--the Brahmin, who sustains these characters, if he loses his caste, does not fall into an inferior order, the Chittery, the Bice, or the Soodur, but he is thrown at once out of all ranks of society. He is precipitated from the proudest elevation of respect and honor to a bottomless abyss of contempt,--from glory to infamy,--from purity to pollution,--from sanctity to profanation. No honest occupation is open to him; his children are no longer his children; their parent loses that name; the conjugal bond is dissolved. Few survive this most terrible of all calamities. To speak to an Indian of his caste is to speak to him of his all.

But the rule of caste has, with them, given one power more to fortune than the manners of any other nation were ever known to do. For it is singular, the caste may be lost, not only by certain voluntary crimes, but by certain involuntary sufferings, disgraces, and pollutions, that are utterly out of their power to prevent. Those who have patiently submitted to imprisonment,--those who have not flinched from the scourge,--those who have been as unmoved as marble under torture,--those who have laughed at the menaces of death itself,--have instantly given way, when it has been attempted to subject them to any of those pollutions by which they lose caste. To this caste they are bound by all laws of all descriptions, human and divine; and inveterate usage has radicated it in them to a depth and with an adhesion with which no other known prejudice has been known to exist. Tyranny is therefore armed against them with a greater variety of weapons than are found in its ordinary stores.

This, amongst a thousand other considerations, speaks to us in very authoritative language with what care and circumspection we ought to handle people so delicate. In the course of this trial your Lordships will see with horror the use which Mr. Hastings made, through several of his wicked and abominable instruments, chosen from the natives themselves, of these superadded means of oppression. I shall prove, in the course of this trial, that he has put his own menial domestic servant,--a wretch totally dependent,--a wretch grossly ignorant,--the common instrument of his bribery and peculation,--he has enthroned him, I say, on the first seat of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which was to decide upon the castes of all those people, including their rank, their family, their honor, and their happiness here, and, in their judgment, their salvation hereafter. Under the awe of this power, no man dared to breathe a murmur against his tyranny. Fortified in this security, he says, "Who complains of me!"--"No, none of us dare complain of you," says the trembling Gentoo. "No! your menial servant has my caste in his power."--I shall not trouble your Lordships with mentioning others; it was enough that Cantoo Baboo, and Ginga Govind Sing, names to which your Lordships are to be familiarized hereafter,--it is enough that those persons had the caste and character of all the people of Bengal in their hands. Through them he has taken effectual security against all complaint. Your Lordships will hence discern how very necessary it is become that some other personage should intervene, should take upon him their representation, and by his freedom and his power should supply the defects arising from their servitude and their impotence. The Commons of Great Britain charge themselves with this character.

My Lords, these Gentoo people are the original people of Hindostan. They are still, beyond comparison, the most numerous. Faults this nation may have; but God forbid we should pass judgment upon people who framed their laws and institutions prior to our insect origin of yesterday! With all the faults of their nature and errors of their institutions, their institutions, which act so powerfully on their natures, have two material characteristics which entitle them to respect: first, great force and stability; and next, excellent moral and civil effects.

Their stability has been proved by their holding on an uniform tenor for a duration commensurate to all the empires with which history has made us acquainted; and they still exist in a green old age, with all the reverence of antiquity, and with all the passion that people have to novelty and change. They have stood firm on their ancient base; they have cast their roots deep in their native soil,--perhaps because they have never spread them anywhere else than in their native soil. Their blood, their opinions, and the soil of their country make one consistent piece, admitting no mixture, no adulteration, no improvement: accordingly, their religion has made no converts, their dominion has made no conquests; but in proportion as their laws and opinions were concentred within themselves, and hindered from spreading abroad, they have doubled their force at home. They have existed in spite of Mahomedan and Portuguese bigotry,--in spite of Tartarian and Arabian tyranny,--in spite of all the fury of successive foreign conquest,--in spite of a more formidable foe, the avarice of the English dominion.

I have spoken now, my Lords, of what their principles are, their laws and religious institutions, in point of force and stability; I have given instances of their force in the very circumstance in which all the institutions of mankind in other respects show their weakness. They have existed, when the country has been otherwise subdued. This alone furnishes full proof that there must be some powerful influence resulting from them beyond all our little fashionable theories upon such subjects.

The second consideration in the Gentoo institutions is their beneficial effects, moral and civil. The policy, civil or religious, or, as theirs is, composed of both, that makes a people happy and a state flourishing, (putting further and higher considerations out of the way, which are not now before us,) must undoubtedly, so far as human considerations prevail, be a policy wisely conceived in any scheme of government. It is confirmed by all observation, that, where the Hindoo religion has been established, that country has been flourishing. We have seen some patterns remaining to this day. The very country which is to be the subject of your Lordships' judicial inquiry is an instance, by an entire change of government, of the different effects resulting from the rapacity of a foreign hand, and the paternal, lenient, protecting arm of a native government, formed on the long connection of prejudice and power. I shall give you its state under the Hindoo government from a book written by a very old servant of the Company, whose authority is of the greater weight, as the very destruction of all this scheme of government is the great object of the author.

The author, Mr. Holwell, divides the country of Bengal into its different provinces. He supposes what they then paid to the supreme government; he supposes what the country is capable of yielding; and his project is, to change entirely the application of the revenues of the country, and to secure the whole into the hands of government. In enumerating these provinces, at last he comes to the province of Burdwan.

"In truth," (says this author,) "it would be almost cruelty to molest this happy people; for in this district are the only vestiges of the beauty, purity, piety, regularity, equity, and strictness of the ancient Hindostan government. Here the property as well as the liberty of the people are inviolate. Here no robberies are heard of, either public or private. The traveller, either with or without merchandise, becomes the immediate care of the government, which allots him guards, without any expense, to conduct him from stage to stage; and these are accountable for the safety and accommodation of his person and effects. At the end of the first stage he is delivered over, with certain benevolent formalities, to the guards of the next, who, after interrogating the traveller as to the usage he had received in his journey, dismiss the first guard with a written certificate of their behavior, and a receipt for the traveller and his effects; which certificate and receipt are returnable to the commanding officer of the first stage, who registers the same, and regularly reports it to the rajah.

"In this form the traveller is passed through the country; and if he only passes, he is not suffered to be at any expense for food, accommodation, or carriage for his merchandise or baggage: but it is otherwise, if he is permitted to make any residence in one place above three days, unless occasioned by sickness, or any unavoidable accident. If anything is lost in this district,--for instance, a bag of money or other valuables,--the person who finds it hangs it upon the next tree, and gives notice to the nearest _chowkey_, or place of guard, the officer of which orders immediate publication of the same by beat of _tomtom_, or drum."

These, my Lords, are the effects universally produced by the Hindoo polity throughout that vast region, before it was distorted and put out of frame by the barbarism of foreign conquests. Some choice, reserved spots continued to flourish under it to the year 1756. Some remained till Mr. Hastings obtained the means of utterly defacing them. Such was the prospect of Benares under the happy government of Bulwant Sing. Such was the happy state of the same Benares in the happy days of Cheyt Sing, until, in the year 1781, Mr. Hastings introduced _his_ reform into that country.

Having stated the general outline of the manners of the original people of Hindostan, having stated the general principles of their policy, which either prohibit connection, or oblige us to a connection very different from what we have hitherto used towards them, I shall leave it to your Lordships' judgment whether you will suffer such fair monuments of wisdom and benevolence to be defaced by the rapacity of your governors. I hope I have not gone out of my way to bring before you any circumstance relative to the Gentoo religion and manners, further than as they relate to the spirit of our government over them; for though there never was such food for the curiosity of the human mind as is found in the manners of this people, I pass it totally over.

* * * * *

I wish to divide this preliminary view into six periods; and your Lordships will consider that of the Hindoos, which I have now mentioned, as the first era.

The second era is an era of great misfortune to that country, and to the world in general: I mean, the time of the prophet Mahomed. The enthusiasm which animated his first followers, the despotic power which religion obtained through that enthusiasm, and the advantages derived from both over the enervated great empires, and broken, disunited, lesser governments of the world, extended the influence of that proud and domineering sect from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Loire.

This second period is the era of the Arabs. These people made a great and lasting impression on India. They established, very early, Mahomedan sovereigns in all parts of it, particularly in the kingdom of Bengal, which is the principal object of our present inquiry. They held that kingdom for a long series of years, under a dynasty of thirty-three kings,--having begun their conquest and founded their dominion in Bengal not very long after the time of their prophet.

These people, when they first settled in India, attempted, with the ferocious arm of their prophetic sword, to change the religion and manners of that country; but at length perceiving that their cruelty wearied out itself, and never could touch the constancy of the sufferers, they permitted the native people of the country to remain in quiet, and left the Mahomedan religion to operate upon them as it could, by appealing to the ambition or avarice of the great, or by taking the lower people, who had lost their castes, into this new sect, and thus, from the refuse of the Gentoo, increasing the bounds of the Mahomedan religion. They left many of the ancient rajahs of the country possessed of an inferior sovereignty; and where the strength of the country, or other circumstances, would not permit this subordination, they suffered them to continue in a separate state, approaching to independence, if not wholly independent.

The Mahomedans, during the period of the Arabs, never expelled or destroyed the native Gentoo nobility, zemindars, or landholders of the country. They all, or almost all, remained fixed in their places, properties, and dignities; and the shadows of several of them remain under our jurisdiction.

The next, which is the third era, is an era the more necessary to observe upon, because Mr. Hastings has made many applications to it in his defence before the Commons: namely, the invasion of the Tartars, or the era of Tamerlane. These Tartars did not establish themselves on the ruins of the Hindoos. Their conquests were over the other Mahomedans: for Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, as he invaded other countries, in the character of the great reformer of the Mahomedan religion. He came as a sort of successor to the rights of the Prophet, upon a divine title. He struck at all the Mahomedan princes who reigned at that time. He considered them as apostates, or at least as degenerated from the faith, and as tyrants abusing their power. To facilitate his conquests over these, he was often obliged to come to a sort of a composition with the people of the country he invaded. Tamerlane had neither time nor means nor inclination to dispossess the ancient rajahs of the country.

Your Lordships will observe that I propose nothing more than to give you an idea of the principles of policy which prevailed in these several revolutions, and not an history of the furious military achievements of a barbarous invader. Historians, indeed, are generally very liberal of their information concerning everything but what we ought to be very anxious to know. They tell us that India was conquered by Tamerlane, and conquered in such a year. The year will be found to coincide somewhere, I believe, with the end of the fourteenth century. Thinking the mere fact as of little moment, and its chronology as nothing, but thinking the policy very material, which, indeed, is to be collected only here and there, in various books written with various views, I shall beg leave to lay before you a very remarkable circumstance relative to that policy, and taken from the same book to which I formerly referred, Mr. Holwell's.

"When the Hindoo rajahs, or princes of Hindostan, submitted to Tamerlane, it was on these capital stipulations: that the emperor should marry a daughter of Rajah Cheyt Sing's house; that the head of this house should be in perpetuity governors of the citadel of Agra, and anoint the king at his coronation; and that the emperors should never impose the _jessera_ (or poll-tax) upon the Hindoos."

Here was a conqueror, as he is called, coming in upon terms; mixing his blood with that of the native nobility of the country he conquered, and, in consequence of this mixture, placing them in succession upon the throne of the country he subdued; making one of them even hereditary constable of the capital of his kingdom, and thereby putting his posterity as a pledge into their hands. What is full as remarkable, he freed the Hindoos forever from that tax which the Mahomedans have laid upon every country over which the sword of Mahomet prevailed,--namely, a capitation tax upon all who do not profess the religion of the Mahomedans. But the Hindoos, by express charter, were exempted from that mark of servitude, and thereby declared not to be a conquered people. The native princes, in all their transactions with the Mogul government, carried the evident marks of this free condition in a noble independency of spirit. Within their own districts the authority of many of them seemed entire. We are often led into mistakes concerning the government of Hindostan, by comparing it with those governments where the prince is armed with a full, speculative, entire authority, and where the great people have, with great titles, no privileges at all, or, having privileges, have those privileges only as subjects. But in Hindostan the modes, the degrees, the circumstances of subjection varied infinitely. In some places hardly a trace at all of subjection was to be discerned; in some the rajahs were almost assessors of the throne, as in this case of the Rajah Cheyt Sing. These circumstances mark, that Tamerlane, however he may be indicated by the odious names of Tartar and Conqueror, was no barbarian; that the people who submitted to him did not submit with the abject submission of slaves to the sword of a conqueror, but admitted a great supreme emperor, who was just, prudent, and politic, instead of the ferocious, oppressive, lesser Mahomedan sovereigns, who had before forced their way by the sword into the country.

That country resembled more a republic of princes with a great chief at their head than a territory in absolute, uniform, systematic subjection from one end to the other,--in which light Mr. Hastings and others of late have thought proper to consider it. According to them, if a subordinate prince, like Cheyt Sing, was not ready to pay any exorbitant sum on instant demand, or submit to any extent of fine which should be inflicted upon him by the mere will of the person who called _robbery_ a _fine_, and who took the measure of that fine without either considering the means of paying or the degree of delinquency that justified it, their properties, liberties, and lives were instantly forfeited. The rajahs of that country were armed; they had fortresses for their security; they had troops. In the receipt of both their own and the imperial revenue, their securities for justice were in their own hands: but the policy of the Mogul princes very rarely led them to push that people to such extremity as it is supposed that on every slight occasion we have a right to push those who are the subjects of our pretended conquest.

Mr. Holwell throws much light on this policy, which became the standing law of the empire.

In the unfortunate wars which followed the death of Mauz-o-Din, "Sevajee Cheyt Sing," (the great rajah we have just mentioned,) "with a select body of Rajpoots, by a well-conducted retreat recovered Agra, and was soon after reconciled to the king [the Mogul] and admitted to his favor,--conformable to the steady policy of this government, in keeping a good understanding with the principal rajahs, and more especially with the head of this house, who is ever capable of raising and fomenting a very formidable party upon any intended revolution in this despotic and precarious monarchy."

You see that it was the monarchy that was precarious, not the rights of the subordinate chiefs. Your Lordships see, that, notwithstanding our ideas of Oriental despotism, under the successors of Tamerlane, these principal rajahs, instead of being called wretches, and treated as such, as Mr. Hastings has thought it becoming to call and treat them, when they were in arms against their sovereign, were regarded with respect, and were admitted to easy reconciliations; because, in reality, in their occasional hostilities, they were not properly rebellious subjects, but princes often asserting their natural rights and the just constitution of the country.

This view of the policy which prevailed during the dynasty of Tamerlane naturally conducts me to the next, which is the fourth era in this history: I mean the era of the Emperor Akbar. He was the first of the successors of Tamerlane who obtained possession of Bengal. It is easy to show of what nature his conquest was. It was over the last Mahomedan dynasty. He, too, like his predecessor, Tamerlane, conquered the prince, not the country. It is a certain mark that it was not a conquered country in the sense in which we commonly call a country conquered, that the natives, great men and landholders, continued in every part in the possession of their estates, and of the jurisdictions annexed to them. It is true, that, in the several wars for the succession to the Mogul empire, and in other of their internal wars, severe revenges were taken, which bore resemblance to those taken in the wars of the Roses in this country, where it was the common course, in the heat of blood,--"Off with his head!--so much for Buckingham!" Yet, where the country again recovered its form and settlement, it recovered the spirit of a mild government. Whatever rigor was used with regard to the Mahomedan adventurers from Persia, Turkey, and other parts, who filled the places of servile grandeur in the Mogul court, the Hindoos were a favored, protected, gently treated people.

The next, which is the fifth era, is a troubled and vexatious period,--the era of the independent Subahs of Bengal. Five of these subahs, or viceroys, governed from about the year 1717, or thereabouts. They grew into independence partly by the calamities and concussions of that empire, which happened during the disputes for the succession of Tamerlane, and partly, and indeed principally, by the great shook which the empire received when Thamas Kouli Khan broke into that country, carried off its revenues, overturned the throne, and massacred not only many of the chief nobility, but almost all the inhabitants of the capital city. This rude shock, which that empire was never able to recover, enabled the viceroys to become independent; but their independence led to their ruin. Those who had usurped upon their masters had servants who usurped upon them. Aliverdy Khan murdered his master, and opened a way into Bengal for a body of foreign invaders, the Mahrattas, who cruelly harassed the country for several years. Their retreat was at length purchased, and by a sum which is supposed to amount to five millions sterling. By this purchase he secured the exhausted remains of an exhausted kingdom, and left it to his grandson, Surajah Dowlah, in peace and poverty. On the fall of Surajah Dowlah, in 1756, commenced the last, which is the sixth,--the era of the British empire.

On the fifth dynasty I have only to remark to your Lordships, that at its close the Hindoo chiefs were almost everywhere found in possession of the country; that, although Aliverdy Khan was a cruel tyrant, though he was an untitled usurper, though he racked and tormented the people under his government, urged, however, by an apparent necessity from an invading army of one hundred thousand horse in his dominions,--yet, under him, the rajahs still preserved their rank, their dignity, their castles, their houses, their seigniories, all the insignia of their situation, and always the right, sometimes also the means, of protecting their subordinate people, till the last and unfortunate era of 1756.

Through the whole of this sketch of history I wish to impress but one great and important truth upon your minds: namely, that, through all these revolutions in government and changes in power, an Hindoo polity, and the spirit of an Hindoo government, did more or less exist in that province with which he was concerned, until it was finally to be destroyed by Mr. Hastings.

* * * * *

My Lords, I have gone through all the eras precedent to those of the British power in India, and am come to the first of those eras. Mr. Hastings existed in India, and was a servant of the Company before that era, and had his education between both. He is an antediluvian with regard to the British dominion in Bengal. He was coexistent with all the acts and monuments of that revolution, and had no small share in all the abuses of that abusive period which preceded his actual government. Bat as it was during that transit from Eastern to Western power that most of the abuses had their origin, it will not be perfectly easy for your Lordships thoroughly to enter into the nature and circumstances of them without an explanation of the principal events that happened from the year 1756 until the commencement of Mr. Hastings's government,--during a good part of which time we do not often lose sight of him. If I find it agreeable to your Lordships, if I find that you wish to know these annals of Indian suffering and British delinquency, if you desire that I should unfold the series of the transactions from 1756 to the period of Mr. Hastings's government in 1771, that you may know how far he promoted what was good, how far he rectified what was evil, how far he abstained from innovation in tyranny, and contented himself with the old stock of abuse, your Lordships will have the goodness to consult the strength which from late indisposition, begins almost to fail me. And if you think the explanation is not time lost in this new world and in this new business, I shall venture to sketch out, as briefly and with as much perspicuity as I can give them, the leading events of that obscure and perplexed period which intervened between the British settlement in 1757 and Mr. Hastings's government. If I should be so happy as to succeed in that attempt, your Lordships' minds will be prepared for hearing this cause. Then your Lordships will have a clear view of the origin and nature of the abuses which prevailed in that government before Mr. Hastings obtained his greatest power, and since that time; and then we shall be able to enter fully and explicitly into the nature of the cause: and I should hope that it will pave the way and make everything easy for your subsequent justice.

I therefore wish to stop at this period, in which Mr. Hastings became active in the service, pretty near the time when he began his political career: and here, my Lords, I pause, wishing your indulgence at such time as will suit your convenience for pursuing the rest of this eventful history.

SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1788.

My Lords,--In what I had the honor of laying before your Lordships yesterday, and in what I may further trouble you with to-day, I wish to observe a distinction, which if I did not lay down so perfectly as I ought, I hope I shall now be able to mark it out with sufficient exactness and perspicuity.

First, I beg leave to observe that what I shall think necessary to state, as matter of preliminary explanation, in order to give your Lordships a true idea of the scene of action, of the instruments which Mr. Hastings employed, and the effects which they produced,--all this I wish to be distinguished from matter brought to criminate. Even the matter, as stated by me, which may be hereafter brought to criminate, so far as it falls to my share at present, is only to be considered, in this stage of the business, as merely illustrative. Your Lordships are to expect, as undoubtedly you will require, substantial matter of crimination to be laid open for that purpose at the moment when the evidence to each charge is ready to be produced to you. Thus your Lordships will easily separate historical illustration from criminal opening. For instance, if I stated yesterday to your Lordships, as I did, the tyranny and cruelty of one of the usurping viceroys, whose usurpation and whose vices led the way to the destruction of his country and the introduction of a foreign power, I do not mean to charge Mr. Hastings with any part of that guilt: what bears upon Mr. Hastings is his having avowedly looked to such a tyrant and such a usurper as his model, and followed that pernicious example with a servile fidelity. When I have endeavored to lay open to your Lordships anything abusive, or leading to abuse, from defects or errors in the constitution of the Company's service, I did not mean to criminate Mr. Hastings on any part of those defects and errors: I state them to show that he took advantage of the imperfections of the institution to lot in his abuse of the power with which he was intrusted. If, for a further instance, I have stated that in general the service of the India Company was insufficient in legal pay or emolument and abundant in the means of illegal profit, I do not state that defect as owing to Mr. Hastings; but I state it as a fact, to show in what manner and on what pretences he did, fraudulently, corruptly, and for the purposes of his own ambition, take advantage of that defect, and, under color of reformation, make an illegal, partial, corrupt rise of emoluments to certain favored persons without regard to the interests of the service at large,--increasing rather than lessening the means of illicit emolument, as well as loading the Company with many heavy and ruinous expenses in avowed salaries and allowances.

Having requested your Lordships to keep in mind, which I trust you would do even without my taking the liberty of suggesting it to you, these necessary distinctions, I shall revert to the period at which I closed yesterday, that great and memorable period which has remotely given occasion to the trial of this day.

* * * * *

My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed. To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people. Hitherto we have not furnished our contingent to the records of honor. We have been confounded with the herd of conquerors. Our dominion has been a vulgar thing. But we begin to emerge; and I hope that a severe inspection of ourselves, a purification of our own offences, a lustration of the exorbitances of our own power, is a glory reserved to this time, to this nation, and to this august tribunal.

The year 1756 is a memorable era in the history of the world: it introduced a new nation from the remotest verge of the Western world, with new manners, new customs, new institutions, new opinions, new laws, into the heart of Asia.

My Lords, if, in that part of Asia whose native regular government was then broken up,--if, at the moment when it had fallen into darkness and confusion from having become the prey and almost the sport of the ambition of its home-born grandees,--if, in that gloomy season, a star had risen from the West, that would prognosticate a better generation, and would shed down the sweet influences of order, peace, science, and security to the natives of that vexed and harassed country, we should have been covered with genuine honor. It would have been a beautiful and noble spectacle to mankind.

Indeed, something might have been expected of the kind, when a new dominion emanated from a learned and enlightened part of the world in the most enlightened period of its existence. Still more might it have been expected, when that dominion was found to issue from the bosom of a free country, that it would have carried with it the full benefit of the vital principle of the British liberty and Constitution, though its municipal forms were not communicable, or at least the advantage of the liberty and spirit of the British Constitution. Had this been the case, (alas! it was not,) you would have been saved the trouble of this day. It might have been expected, too, that, in that enlightened state of the world, influenced by the best religion, and from an improved description of that best religion, (I mean the Christian reformed religion,) that we should have done honor to Europe, to letters, to laws, to religion,--done honor to all the circumstances of which in this island we boast ourselves, at the great and critical moment of that revolution.

My Lords, it has happened otherwise. It is now left for us to repair our former errors. Resuming the history where I broke off yesterday by your indulgence to my weakness,--Surajah Dowlah was the adopted grandson of Aliverdy Khan, a cruel and ferocious tyrant, the manner of whose acquisition of power I have already stated. He came too young and unexperienced to that throne of usurpation. It was a usurpation yet green in the country, and the country felt uneasy under it. It had not the advantage of that prescriptive usage, that inveterate habit, that traditionary opinion, which a long continuance of any system of government secures to it. The only real security which Surajah Dowlah's government could possess was the security of an army. But the great aim of this prince and his predecessor was to supply the weakness of his government by the strength of his purse; he therefore amassed treasures by all ways and on all hands. But as the Indian princes, in general, are as unwisely tenacious of their treasure as they are rapacious in getting it, the more money he amassed, the more he felt the effects of poverty. The consequence was, that their armies were unpaid, and, being unpaid or irregularly paid, were undisciplined, disorderly, unfaithful. In this situation, a young prince, confiding more in the appearances than examining into the reality of things, undertook (from motives which the House of Commons, with all their industry to discover the circumstances, have found it difficult to make out) to attack a little miserable trading fort that we had erected at Calcutta. He succeeded in that attempt only because success in that attempt was easy. A close imprisonment of the whole settlement followed,--not owing, I believe, to the direct will of the prince, but, what will always happen when the will of the prince is but too much the law, to a gross abuse of his power by his lowest servants,--by which one hundred and twenty or more of our countrymen perished miserably in a dungeon, by a fate too tragical for me to be desirous to relate, and too well known to stand in need of it.

At the time that this event happened, there was at the same time a concurrence of other events, which, from this partial and momentary weakness, displayed the strength of Great Britain in Asia. For some years before, the French and English troops began, on the coast of Coromandel, to exhibit the power, force, and efficacy of European discipline. As we daily looked for a war with France, our settlements on that coast were in some degree armed. Lord Pigot, then Governor of Madras,--Lord Pigot, the preserver and the victim of the British dominion in Asia,--detached such of the Company's force as could he collected and spared, and such of his Majesty's ships as were on that station, to the assistance of Calcutta. And--to hasten this history to its conclusion--the daring and commanding genius of Clive, the patient and firm ability of Watson, the treachery of Mir Jaffier, and the battle of Plassey gave us at once the patronage of a kingdom and the command of all its treasures. We negotiated with Mir Jaffier for the viceroyal throne of his master. On that throne we seated him. And we obtained, on our part, immense sums of money. We obtained a million sterling for the Company, upwards of a million for individuals, in the whole a sum of about two millions two hundred and thirty thousand pounds for various purposes, from the prince whom we had set up. We obtained, too, the town of Calcutta more completely than we had before possessed it, and the twenty-four districts adjoining. This was the first small seminal principle of the immense territorial acquisitions we have since made in India.

Many circumstances of this acquisition I pass by. There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments. Ours in India had an origin like those which time has sanctified by obscurity. Time, in the origin of most governments, has thrown this mysterious veil over them; prudence and discretion make it necessary to throw something of the same drapery over more recent foundations, in which otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents, and military virtue of this nation never shone more conspicuously. But whatever necessity might hide or excuse or palliate, in the acquisition of power, a wise nation, when it has once made a revolution upon its own principles and for its own ends, rests there. The first step to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred; the next is good laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability. I am sorry to say that the reverse of this policy was the principle on which the gentlemen in India acted. It was such as tended to make the new government as unstable as the old. By the vast sums of money acquired by individuals upon this occasion, by the immense sudden prodigies of fortune, it was discovered that a revolution in Bengal was a mine much more easily worked and infinitely more productive than the mines of Potosi and Mexico. It was found that the work was not only very lucrative, but not at all difficult. Where Clive forded a deep water upon an unknown bottom, he left a bridge for his successors, over which the lame could hobble and the blind might grope their way. There was not at that time a knot of clerks in a counting-house, there was not a captain of a band of ragged _topasses_, that looked for anything less than the deposition of subahs and the sale of kingdoms. Accordingly, this revolution, which ought to have precluded other revolutions, unfortunately became fruitful of them; and when Lord Clive returned to Europe, to enjoy his fame and fortune in his own country, there arose another description of men, who thought that a revolution might be made upon his revolution, and as lucrative to them as his was to the first projectors. Scarcely was Mir Jaffier, Lord Olive's nabob, seated on his _musnud_, than they immediately, or in a short time, projected another revolution, a revolution which was to unsettle all the former had settled, a revolution to make way for new disturbances and new wars, and which led to that long chain of peculation which ever since has afflicted and oppressed Bengal.

If ever there was a time when Bengal should have had respite from internal revolutions, it was this. The governor forced upon the natives was now upon the throne. All the great lords of the country, both Gentoos and Mahomedans, were uneasy, discontented, and disobedient, and some absolutely in arms, and refusing to recognize the prince we had set up. An imminent invasion of the Mahrattas, an actual invasion headed by the son of the Mogul, the revenues on account of the late shock very ill collected even where the country was in some apparent quiet, an hungry treasury at Calcutta, an empty treasury at Moorshedabad,--everything demanded tranquillity, and with it order and economy. In this situation it was resolved to make a new and entirely mercenary revolution, and to set up to sale the government, secured to its present possessor by every tie of public faith and every sacred obligation which could bind or influence mankind. This second revolution forms that period in the Bengal history which had the most direct influence upon all the subsequent transactions. It introduces some of the persons who were most active in the succeeding scenes, and from that time to this has given its tone and character to the British affairs and government. It marks and specifies the origin and true principle of all the abuses which Mr. Hastings was afterwards appointed to correct, and which the Commons charge that he continued and aggravated: namely, the venal depositions and venal exaltations of the country powers; the taking of bribes and corrupt presents from all parties in those changes; the vitiating and maiming the Company's records; the suppression of public correspondence; corrupt combinations and conspiracies; perfidy in negotiation established into principle; acts of the most atrocious wickedness justified upon purity of intention; mock-trials and collusive acquittals among the parties in common guilt; and in the end, the Court of Directors supporting the scandalous breach of their own orders. I shall state the particulars of this second revolution more at large.

Soon after the revolution which had seated Mir Jaffier on the viceroyal throne, the spirit of the Mogul empire began, as it were, to make one faint struggle before it finally expired. The then heir to that throne, escaping from the hands of those who had held his father prisoner, had put himself at the head of several chiefs collected under the standard of his house, and appeared in force on the frontiers of the provinces of Bengal and Bahar, upon both which he made some impression. This alarmed the new powers, the Nabob Mir Jaffier, and the Presidency of Calcutta; and as in a common cause, and by the terms of their mutual alliance, they took the field against him. The Nabob's eldest son and heir-apparent commanded in chief. Major Calliaud commanded the English forces under the government of Calcutta. Mr. Holwell was in the temporary possession of the Presidency. Mr. Vansittart was hourly expected to supersede him. Mr. Warren Hastings, a young gentleman about twenty-seven years of age, was Resident for the Company at the durbar, or court, of Mir Jaffier, our new-created Nabob of Bengal, allied to this country by the most solemn treaties that can bind men; for which treaties he had paid, and was then paying, immense sums of money. Mr. Warren Hastings was the pledge in his hands for the honor of the British nation, and their fidelity to their engagements.

In this situation, Mr. Holwell, whom the terrible example of the Black Hole at Calcutta had not cured of ambition, thought an hour was not to be lost in accomplishing a revolution and selling the reigning Nabob.

My Lords, there was in the house of Mir Jaffier, in his court, and in his family, a man of an intriguing, crafty, subtle, and at the same time bold, daring, desperate, bloody, and ferocious character, called Cossim Ali Khan. He was the son-in-law of Mir Jaffier; and he made no other use of this affinity than to find some means to dethrone and to murder him. This was the person in whose school of politics Mr. Hastings made his first studies, and whose conduct he quotes as his example, and for whose friends, agents, and favorites he has always shown a marked predilection. This dangerous man was not long without finding persons who observed his talents with admiration, and who thought fit to employ him.

The Council at Calcutta was divided into two departments: one, the Council in general; the other a Select Committee, which they had arranged for the better carrying on their political affairs. But the Select Committee had no power of acting wholly without the Council at large,--at least, finally and conclusively. The Select Committee thought otherwise. Between these litigant parties for power I shall not determine on the merits,--thinking of nothing but the use that was made of the power, to whomsoever it belonged. This Secret Committee, then, without communicating with the rest of the Council, formed the plan for a second revolution. But the concurrence of Major Calliaud, who commanded the British troops, was essential to the purpose, as it could not be accomplished without force. Mr. Hastings's assistance was necessary, as it could not be accomplished without treachery.

These are the parties concerned in the intended revolution. Mr. Holwell, who considered himself in possession only of temporary power, was urged to precipitate the business; for if Mr. Vansittart should arrive before his plot could be finally put into execution, he would have all the leading advantages of it, and Mr. Holwell would be considered only as a secondary instrument. But whilst Mr. Holwell, who originally conceived this plot, urged forward the execution of it, in order that the chief share of the profits might fall to him, the Major, and possibly the Resident, held back, till they might receive the sanction of the permanent governor, who was hourly expected, with whom one of them was connected, and who was to carry with him the whole weight of the authority of this kingdom. This difference produced discussions. Holwell endeavored by his correspondence to stimulate Calliaud to this enterprise, which without him could not be undertaken at all. But Major Calliaud had different views. He concurred inwardly, as he tells us himself, in all the principles of this intended revolution, in the propriety and necessity of it. He only wished delay. But he gave such powerful, solid, and satisfactory reasons, not against the delay, but the very merits of the design itself, exposing the injustice and the danger of it, and the impossibility of mending by it their condition in any respect, as must have damned it in the minds of all rational men: at least it ought to have damned it forever in his own. But you will see that Holwell persevered in his plan, and that Major Calliaud thought two things necessary: first, not wholly to destroy the scheme, which he tells us he always approved, but to postpone the execution,--and in the mean time to delude the Nabob by the most strong, direct, and sanguine assurances of friendship and protection that it was possible to give to man.

Whilst the projected revolution stood suspended,--whilst Mr. Holwell urged it forward, and Mr. Vansittart was expected every day to give it effect,--whilst Major Calliaud, with this design of ruining the Nabob lodged in his breast, suspended in execution, and condemned in principle, kept the fairest face and the most confidential interviews with that unfortunate prince and his son,--as the operations of the campaign relaxed, the army drew near to Moorshedabad, the capital, when a truly extraordinary scene happened, such I am sure the English annals before that time had furnished no example of, nor will, I trust, in future. I shall state it as one piece from beginning to end, reserving the events which intervened; because, as I do not produce any part of this series for the gratification of historical curiosity, the con-texture is necessary to demonstrate to your Lordships the spirit of our Bengal politics, and the necessity of some other sort of judicial inquiries than those which that government institute for themselves. The transaction so manifestly marks the character of the whole proceeding that I hope I shall not be blamed for suspending for a moment the narrative of the steps taken towards the revolution, that you may see the whole of this episode together,--that by it you may judge of the causes which led progressively to the state in which the Company's affairs stood, when Mr. Hastings was sent for the express purpose of reforming it.

The business I am going to enter into is commonly known by the name of the Story of the Three Seals. It is to be found in the Appendix, No. 10, to the First Report of the state and condition of the East India Company, made in 1773. The word _Report_, my Lords, is sometimes a little equivocal, and may signify sometimes, not what is made known, but what remains in obscurity: the detail and evidence of many facts referred to in the Report being usually thrown into the Appendix. Many people, and I among the rest, (I take shame to myself for it,) may not have fully examined that Appendix. I was not a member of either of the India committees of 1773. It is not, indeed, till within this year that I have been thoroughly acquainted with that memorable history of the Three Seals.

The history is this. In the year 1760 the allies were in the course of operations against the son of the Mogul, now the present Mogul, who, as I have already stated, had made an irruption into the kingdom of Bahar, in order to reduce the lower provinces to his obedience. The parties opposing him were the Nabob of Bengal and the Company's troops under Major Calliaud. It was whilst they faced the common enemy as one body, this negotiation for the destruction of the Nabob of Bengal by his faithful allies of the Company was going on with diligence. At that time the Nabob's son, Meeran, a youth in the flower of his age, bold, vigorous, active, full of the politics in which those who are versed in usurpation are never wanting, commanded the army under his father, but was in reality the efficient person in all things.

About the 15th of April, 1760, as I have it from Major Calliaud's letter of that date, the Nabob came into his tent, and, with looks of the utmost embarrassment, big with some design which swelled his bosom, something that was too large and burdensome to conceal, and yet too critical to be told, appeared to be in a state of great distraction. The Major, seeing him in this condition, kindly, gently, like a fast and sure friend, employed (to use his own expression) _some of those assurances that tend to make men fully open their hearts_; and accordingly, fortified by his assurances, and willing to disburden himself of the secret that oppressed him, he opens his heart to the commanding officer of his new friends, allies, and protectors. The Nabob, thus assured, did open himself, and informed Major Calliaud that he had just received a message from the Prince, or his principal minister, informing him that the Prince Royal, now the Mogul, had an intention (as, indeed, he rationally might, supposing that we were as well disposed to him as we showed ourselves afterwards) to surrender himself into the hands of him, the Nabob, but at the same time wished, as a guaranty, that the commander-in-chief of the English forces should give him security for his life and his honor, when he should in that manner surrender himself to the Nabob. I do not mean, my Lords, by surrendering, that it was supposed he intended to surrender himself prisoner of war, but as a sovereign dubious of the fidelity of those about him would put himself into the hands of his faithful subjects, of those who claimed to derive all their power, as both we and the Nabob did, under his authority. The Nabob stated to the English general, that without this English security the Prince would not deliver himself into his hands. Here he confessed he found a difficulty. For the giving this faith, if it were kept, would defeat his ultimate view, which was, when the Prince had delivered himself into his hands, in plain terms to murder him. This grand act could not be accomplished without the English general. In the first place, the Prince, without the English security, would not deliver himself into the Nabob's hands; and afterwards, without the English concurrence, he could not be murdered. These were difficulties that pressed upon the mind of the Nabob.

The English commander heard this astonishing proposition without any apparent emotion. Being a man habituated to great affairs, versed in revolutions, and with a mind fortified against extraordinary events, he heard it and answered it without showing any signs of abhorrence or detestation,--at the same time with a protestation that he would indeed serve him, the Nabob, but it should be upon such terms as honor and justice could support: informing him, that an assurance for the Prince's safety could not be given by him, until he had consulted Mr. Holwell, who was Governor, and his superior.

This conversation passed in the morning. On that very morning, and whilst the transaction was hot, Major Calliaud writes to Mr. Holwell an account of it. In his letter he informs him that he made an inquiry, without stating from whom, but that he did inquire the probability of the Nabob's getting possession of the Prince from some persons, who assured him that there was no probability of the Prince's intention to deliver himself to the Nabob on any terms. Be that as it may, it is impossible not to remark that the whole transaction of the morning of the 15th of April was not very discouraging to the Nabob,--not such as would induce him to consider this most detestable of all projects as a thing utterly unfeasible, and as such to abandon it. The evening came on without anything to alter his opinion. Major Calliaud that evening came to the Nabob's tent to arrange some matters relative to the approaching campaign. The business soon ended with regard to the campaign; but the proposal of the morning to Major Calliaud, as might be expected to happen, was in effect renewed. Indeed, the form was a little different; but the substantial part remained the same. Your Lordships will see what these alterations were.

In the evening scene the persons were more numerous. On the part of the Company, Major Calliaud, Mr. Lushington, Mr. Knox, and the ambassador at the Nabob's court, Mr. Warren Hastings. On the part of the Moorish government, the Nabob himself, his son Meeran, a Persian secretary, and the Nabob's head spy, an officer well known in that part of the world, and of some rank. These were the persons of the drama in the evening scene. The Nabob and his son did not wait for the Prince's committing himself to their faith, which, it seems, Major Calliaud did not think likely to happen; so that one act of treachery is saved: but another opened of as extraordinary a nature. Intent and eager on the execution, and the more certain, of their design, they accepted the plan of a wicked wretch, principal servant of the then prime-minister to the Mogul, or themselves suggested it to him. A person called Conery, dewan or principal steward to Camgar Khan, a great chief in the service of the Shahzada, or Prince, (now the Great Mogul, the sovereign under whom the Company holds their charter,) had, it seems, made a proposal to the Nabob, that, if a considerable territory then held by his master was assured to him, and a reward of a lac of rupees (ten or twelve thousand, pounds) secured to him, he would for that consideration deliver the Prince, the eldest son of the Mogul, alive into the hands of the Nabob; or if that could not be effected, he engaged to murder him for the same reward. But as the assassin could not rely on the Nabob and his son for his reward for this meritorious action, and thought better of English honor and fidelity in such delicate cases, he required that Major Calliaud should set his seal to the agreement. This proposition was made to an English commander: what discourse happened upon it is uncertain. Mr. Hastings is stated by some evidence to have acted as interpreter in this memorable congress. But Major Calliaud agreed to it without any difficulty. Accordingly, an instrument was drawn, an indenture tripartite prepared by the Persian secretary, securing to the party the reward of this infamous, perfidious, murderous act. First, the Nabob put his own seal to the murder. The Nabob's son, Meeran, affixed _his_ seal. A third seal, the most important of all, was yet wanting. A pause ensued: Major Calliaud's seal was not at hand; but Mr. Lushington was sent near half a mile to bring it. It was brought at length; and the instrument of blood and treachery was completely executed. Three seals were set to it.

This business of the three seals, by some means not quite fully explained, but (as suspected by the parties) by means of the information of Mr. Holwell, who soon after came home, was conveyed to the ears of the Court of Directors. The Court of Directors wrote out, under date of the 7th of October, 1761, within a little more than a year after this extraordinary transaction, to this effect:--that, in conjunction with the Nabob, Major Calliaud had signed a paper offering a reward of a lac of rupees, or some such sum, to several black persons, for the assassination of the Shahzada, or Prince heir-apparent,--which paper was offered to the then Chief of Patna to sign, but which he refused on account of the infamy of the measure. As it appeared in the same light to them, the Directors, they ordered a strict inquiry into it. The India Company, who here did their duty with apparent manliness and vigor, were resolved, however, to do it with gentleness, and to proceed in a manner that could not produce any serious mischief to the parties charged; for they directed the commission of inquiry to the very clan and set of people who, from a participation in their common offences, stood in awe of one another,--in effect, to the parties in the transaction. Without a prosecutor, without an impartial director of the inquiry, they left it substantially to those persons to try one another for their common acts.

Here I come upon the principle which I wish most strongly to mark to your Lordships: I mean collusive trials and collusive acquittals. When this matter came to be examined, according to the orders of the Court, which was on the 4th of October, 1762, the Council consisted of Peter Maguire, Warren Hastings, and Hugh Watts. Mr. Hastings had by this time accomplished the business of Resident with the Nabob, and had taken the seat to which his seniority entitled him in Council. Here a difficulty arose _in limine_. Mr. Hastings was represented to have acted as interpreter in this business; he was therefore himself an object of the inquisition; he was doubtful as evidence; he was disqualified as a judge. It likewise appeared that there might be some objection to others whose evidence was wanting, but who were themselves concerned in the guilt. Mr. Lushington's evidence would be useful, but there were two circumstances rather unlucky. First, he had put the seal to the instrument of murder; and, secondly, and what was most material, he had made an affidavit at Patna, whilst the affair was green and recent, that he had done so; and in the same affidavit had deposed that Warren Hastings was interpreter in that transaction. Here were difficulties both on him and Mr. Hastings. The question was, how to get Mr. Hastings, the interpreter, out of his interpretation, and to put him upon the seat of judgment. It was effected, however, and the manner in which it was effected was something curious. Mr. Lushington, who by this time was got completely over, himself tells you that in conferences with Major Calliaud, and by arguments and reasons by him delivered, he was persuaded to unsay his swearing, and to declare that he believed that the affidavit which he made at Patna, and while the transaction was recent or nearly recent, must be a mistake: that he _believed_ (what is amazing indeed for any belief) that not Mr. Hastings, but he himself, interpreted. Mr. Lushington completely loses his own memory, and he accepts an offered, a given memory, a memory supplied to him by a party in the transaction. By this operation all difficulties are removed: Mr. Hastings is at once put into the capacity of a judge. He is declared by Mr. Lushington not to have been an interpreter in the transaction. After this, Mr. Hastings is himself examined. Your Lordships will look at the transaction at your leisure, and I think you will consider it as a pattern for inquiries of this kind. Mr. Hastings is examined: he does not recollect. His memory also fails on a business in which it is not easy to suppose a man could be doubtful,--whether he was present or not: he thinks he was not there,--for that, if he had been there, and acted as interpreter, he could not have forgot it.

I think it is pretty nearly as I state it: if I have fallen into any error or inaccuracy, it is easily rectified; for here is the state of the transaction given by the parties themselves. On this inaccurate memory of Mr. Hastings, not venturing, however, to say positively that he was not the interpreter, or that he was not present, he is discharged from being an accomplice,--he is removed from the bar, and leaps upon the seat of justice. The court thus completed, Major Calliaud comes manfully forward to make his defence. Mr. Lushington is taken off his back in the manner we have seen, and no one person remains but Captain Knox. Now, if Captain Knox was there and assenting, he is an accomplice too. Captain Knox asserts, that, at the consultation about the murder, he said it was a pity to cut off so fine a young fellow in such a manner,--meaning that fine young fellow the Prince, the descendant of Tamerlane, the present reigning Mogul, from whom the Company derive their present charter. The purpose to be served by this declaration, if it had any purpose, was, that Captain Knox did not assent to the murder, and that therefore his evidence might be valid.

The defence set up by Major Calliaud was to this effect. He was apprehensive, he said, that the Nabob was alarmed at the violent designs that were formed against him by Mr. Holwell, and that therefore, to quiet his mind, (to quiet it by a proposition compounded of murder and treason,--an odd kind of mind he had that was to be quieted by such means!)--but to quiet his mind, and to show that the English were willing to go all lengths with him, to sell body and soul to him, he did put his seal to this extraordinary agreement, he put his seal to this wonderful paper. He likewise stated, that he was of opinion at the time that nothing at all sinister could happen from it, that no such murder was likely to take place, whatever might be the intention of the parties. In fact, he had very luckily said in a letter of his, written a day after the setting the seal, "I think nothing will come of this matter, but it is no harm to try." This experimental treachery, and these essays of conditional murder, appeared to him good enough to make a trial of; but at the same time he was afraid nothing would come of it. In general, the whole gest of his defence comes to one point, in which he persists,--that, whatever the act might be, his mind is clear: "My hands are guilty, but my heart is free." He conceived that it would be very improper, undoubtedly, to do such an act, if he suspected anything could happen from it: he, however, let the thing out of his own hands; he put, it into the hands of others; he put the commission into the hands of a murderer. The fact was not denied; it was fully before these severe judges. The extenuation was the purity of his heart, and the bad situation of the Company's affairs,--the perpetual plea, which your Lordships will hear of forever, and which if it will justify evil actions, they will take good care that the most nefarious of their deeds shall never want a sufficient justification. But then he calls upon his life and his character to oppose to his seal; and though he has declared that Mr. Holwell had intended ill to the Nabob, and that he approved of those measures, and only postponed them, yet he thought it necessary, he says, to quiet the fears of the Nabob; and from this motive he did an act abhorrent to his nature, and which, he says, he expressed his abhorrence of the morning after he signed it: not that he did so; but if he had, I believe it would only have made the thing so many degrees worse. Your Lordships will observe, that, in this conference, as stated by himself, these reasons and apologies for it did not appear, nor did they appear in the letter, nor anywhere else, till next year, when he came upon his trial. Then it was immediately recollected that Mr. Holwell's designs were so wicked they certainly must be known to the Nabob, though he never mentioned them in the conference of the morning or the evening of the 15th; yet such was now the weight and prevalence of them upon the Major's mind, that he calls upon Mr. Hastings to know whether the Nabob was not informed of these designs of Mr. Holwell against him. Mr. Hastings's memory was not quite correct upon the occasion. He does not recollect anything of the matter. He certainly seems not to think that he ever mentioned it to the Nabob, or the Nabob to him; but he does recollect, he thinks, speaking something to some of the Nabob's attendants upon it, and further this deponent sayeth not. On this state of things, namely, the purity of intention, the necessities of the Company, the propriety of keeping the Nabob in perfect good-humor and removing suspicions from his mind, which suspicions he had never expressed, they came to the resolution I shall have the honor to read to you: "That the representation, given in the said defence, of the state of the affairs of the country at that time" (that is, about the month of April, 1760) "is true and just" (that is, the bad state of the country, which we shall consider hereafter); "that, in such circumstances, the Nabob's urgent account of his own distresses, the Colonel's desire of making him easy," (for here is a recapitulation of the whole defence,) "as the first thing necessary for the good of the service, and the suddenness of the thing proposed, might deprive him for a moment of his recollection, and surprise him into a measure which, as to the measure itself, he could not approve. That such only were the motives which did or could influence Colonel Calliaud to assent to the proposal is fully evinced by the deposition of Captain Knox and Mr. Lushington, that _his_ [_Calliaud's_] _conscience, at the time, never reproached him with a bad design_."

Your Lordships have heard of the testimony of a person to his own conscience; but the testimony of another man to any one's conscience--this is the first time, I believe, it ever appeared in a judicial proceeding. It is natural to say, "My conscience acquits me of it"; but _they_ declare, that "_his_ conscience never reproached him with a bad design, and therefore, upon the whole, they are satisfied that his intention was good, though he erred in the measure."

I beg leave to state one thing that escaped me: that the Nabob, who was one of the parties to the design, was, at the time of the inquiry, a sort of prisoner or an exile at Calcutta; that his _moonshee_ was there, or might have been had; and that his spy was likewise there; and that they, though parties to this transaction, were never called to account for it in any sense or in any degree, or to show how far it was _necessary_ to quiet the Nabob's mind.

The accomplices, by acquitting him upon _their_ testimony to _his conscience_, did their business nobly. But the good Court of Directors, who were so easily satisfied, so ready to condemn at the first proposition and so ready afterwards to acquit, put the last finishing hand of a master to it. For the accomplices acquit him of evil intentions and excuse his act. The Court of Directors, disapproving indeed the measure, but receiving the testimony of his conscience in justification of his conduct, and taking up the whole ground, honorably acquit him, and commend this action as an instance of heroic zeal in their service.

The great end and purpose for which I produce this to your Lordships is to show you the necessity there is for other inquiries, other trials, other acquittals of parties, than those made by a collusive clan abroad, or by the Directors at home, who had required the parties to inquire of themselves, and to take the testimony of the judges at second-hand, as to the conscience of the party accused, respecting acts which neither they nor any man living can look upon but with horror.

I have troubled your Lordships with the story of the Three Seals, as a specimen of the then state of the service, and the politics of the servants, civil and military, in the horrid abuses which then prevailed, and which render at length the most rigorous reformation necessary. I close this episode to resume the proceedings at the second revolution.

This affair of the three seals was, we have seen, to quiet the fears of the Nabob. His fears it was indeed necessary to quiet; for your Lordships will see that the man whose fears were to be set asleep by Major Calliaud's offering him, in a scheme for murdering his sovereign, an odd sort of opiate, made up of blood and treason, was now in a fair way of being murdered himself by the machinations of him whose seal was set to his murderous security of peace, and by those his accomplices, Holwell and Hastings: at least they resolved to put him in a situation in which his murder was in a manner inevitable, as you will see in the sequel of the transaction. Now the plan proceeds. The parties continued in the camp; but there was another _remora_. To remove a nabob and to create a revolution is not easy: houses are strong who have sons grown up with vigor and fitness for the command of armies. They are not easily overturned by removing the principal, unless the secondary is got rid of: and if this _remora_ could be removed, everything was going on in a happy way in the business. This plan, which now (that is, about the month of July) began to get into great ripeness and forwardness, Mr. Holwell urged forward, Mr. Vansittart being hourly expected.

I do not know whether I am going to state a thing, though it is upon the records, which will not have too theatrical an appearance for the grave state in which we are. But here it is,--the difficulty, the knot, and the solution, as recorded by the parties themselves. It was the object of this bold, desperate, designing man, Cossim All Khan, who aimed at everything, and who scrupled not to do anything in attaining what he aimed at, to be appointed the lieutenant of the Nabob Jaffier Ali, and thus to get possession of his office during his lifetime under that name, with a design of murdering him: for that office, according to many usages of that country, totally supersedes the authority of the first magistrate, renders him a cipher in his hand, gives the administration of his affairs and command of his troops to the lieutenant. It was a part of his plan, that he was, after his appointment to the lieutenancy, to be named to the succession of the Nabob, who had several other children; but the eldest son stood in the way.

But as things hastened to a crisis, this difficulty was removed in the most extraordinary and providential unheard-of manner, by the most extraordinary event that, I believe, is recorded in history. Just in the nick of time, in the moment of projection, on the 3d of July, this Prince Meeran, in the flower of his age, bold, active, enterprising, lying asleep in his tent, is suddenly, without any one's knowing it, without any alarm or menace in the heavens that ever was heard of or mentioned, without any one whatever being hurt or even alarmed in the camp, killed with a flash of lightning. My Lords, thus was the Gordian knot cut. This prince dies of a flash of lightning, and Mr. Lushington (of whom you have heard) comes in the morning with his hair standing erect, comes frightened into the presence of Major Calliaud, and, with the utmost alarm, tells him of a circumstance that was afterwards to give them so much pleasure. The alarm was immediately communicated to the Major, who was seized with a fright; and fearing lest the army should mutiny upon the death of their chief, it was contrived, in a manner that I believe was most difficult to contrive, that what might have excited a general mutiny was concealed by the ability, the good conduct, and dexterity of Major Calliaud for seven days together, till he led the army out of the place of danger. Thus a judgment fell upon one of the (innocent) murderers in the scene of the Three Seals. This man, who was probably guilty in his conscience as well as in act, thus fell by that most lucky, providential, and most useful flash of lightning.

There were at that time, it seems, in Calcutta, a wicked, skeptical set of people, who somehow or other believed that _human_ agency was concerned in this elective flash, which came so very opportunely, and which was a favor so thankfully acknowledged. These wicked, ill-natured skeptics disseminated reports (which I am sure I do not mean to charge or prove, leaving the effect of them to you) very dishonorable, I believe, to Cossim Ali Khan in the business, and to some Englishmen who were concerned.

The difficulty of getting rid of Meeran being thus removed, Mr. Vansittart comes upon the scene. I verily believe he was a man of good intentions, and rather debauched by that amazing flood of iniquity which prevailed at that time, or hurried and carried away with it. In a few days he sent for Major Calliaud. All his objections vanish in _an instant_: like that flash of lightning, everything is _instant_. The Major agrees to perform his part. They send for Cossim Ali Khan and Mr. Hastings; they open a treaty and conclude it with him, leaving the management of it to two persons, Mr. Holwell and another person, whom we have heard of, an Armenian, called Coja Petruse, who afterwards played his part in another illustrious scene. By this Petruse and Mr. Holwell the matter is settled. The moment Mr. Holwell is raised to be a Secretary of State, the revolution is accomplished. By it Cossim Ali Khan is to have the lieutenancy at present, and the succession. Everything is put into his hands, and he is to make for it large concessions, which you will hear of afterwards, to the Company. Cossim Ali Khan proposed to Mr. Holwell, what would have been no bad supplement to the flash of lightning, the murder of the Nabob; but Mr. Holwell was a man of too much honor and conscience to suffer that. He instantly flew out at it, and declared the whole business should stop, unless the affair of the murder was given up. Accordingly things were so settled. But if he gave the Nabob over to an intended murderer, and delivered his person, treasure, and everything into his hands, Cossim Ali Khan might have had no great reason to complain of being left to the execution of his own projects in his own way. The treaty was made, and amounted to this,--that the Company was to receive three great provinces: for here, as we proceed, you will have an opportunity of observing, with the progress of these plots, one thing which has constantly and uniformly pervaded the whole of these projects, and which the persons concerned in them have avowed as a principle of their actions,--that they were first to take care of the Company's interest, then of their own; that is, first to secure to the Company an enormous bribe, and under the shadow of that bribe to take all the little emoluments they could to themselves. Three great, rich, southern provinces, maritime, or nearly maritime, Burdwan, Midnapoor, and Chittagong, were to be dissevered from the Subah and to be ceded to the Company. There were other minor stipulations, which it is not necessary at present to trouble you with, signed, sealed, and executed at Calcutta between these parties with the greatest possible secrecy. The lieutenancy and the succession were secured to Cossim Ali, and he was likewise to give somewhere about the sum of 200,000_l._ to the gentlemen who were concerned, as a reward for serving him so effectually, and for serving their country so well. Accordingly, these stipulations, actual or understood, (for they were eventually carried into effect,) being settled, a commission of delegation, consisting chiefly of Mr. Vansittart and Major Calliaud, was sent up to Moorshedabad: the new Governor taking this opportunity of paying the usual visit of respect to the Nabob, and in a manner which a new Governor coming into place would do, with the detail of which it is not necessary to trouble you. Mr. Hastings was at this time at the durbar; and having everything prepared, and the ground smoothed, they first endeavored to persuade the Nabob to deliver over the power negotiated for into the hands of their friend Cossim Ali Khan. But when the old man, frightened out of his wits, asked, "What is it he has bid for me?" and added, "I will give half as much again to save myself; pray let me know what my price is,"--he entreated in vain. They were true, firm, and faithful to their word and their engagement. When he saw they were resolved that he should be delivered into the hands of Cossim Ali Khan, he at once surrenders the whole to him. They instantly grasp it. He throws himself into a boat, and will not remain at home an hour, but hurries down to Calcutta to leave his blood at our door, if we should have a mind to take it. But the life of the Nabob was too great a stake (partly as a security for the good behavior of Cossim Ali Khan, and still more for the future use that might be made of him) to be thrown away, or left in the hands of a man who would certainly murder him, and who was very angry at being refused the murder of his father-in-law. The price of this second revolution was, according to their shares in it, (I believe I have it here,) somewhere about 200,000_l._ This little effusion to private interest settled the matter, and here ended the second revolution in the country: effected, indeed, without bloodshed, but with infinite treachery, with infinite mischief, consequent to the dismemberment of the country, and which had nearly become fatal to our concerns there, like everything else in which Mr. Hastings had any share.

This prince, Cossim Ali Khan, the friend of Mr. Hastings, knew that those who could give could take away dominion. He had scarcely got upon the throne, procured for him by our public spirit and his own iniquities, than he began directly and instantly to fortify himself, and to bend all his politics against those who were or could be the donors of such fatal gifts. He began with the natives who were in their interest, and cruelly put to death, under the eye of Mr. Hastings and his clan, all those who, by their moneyed wealth or landed consideration, could give any effect to their dispositions in favor of those ambitious strangers. He removed from Moorshedabad higher up into the country, to Monghir, in order to be more out of our view. He kept his word pretty well, but not altogether faithfully, with the gentlemen; and though he had no money, for his treasury was empty, he gave obligations which are known by the name of _jeeps_--(the Indian vocabulary will by degrees become familiar to your Lordships, as we develop the modes and customs of the country). As soon as he had done this, he began to rack and tear the provinces that were left to him, to get as much from them as should compensate him for the revenues of those great provinces he had lost; and accordingly he began a scene of extortion, horrible, nefarious, without precedent or example, upon almost all the landed interest of that country. I mention this, because he is one of those persons whose governments Mr. Hastings, in a paper called his Defence, delivered in to the House of Commons, has produced as precedents and examples which he has thought fit to follow, and which he thought would justify him in the conduct he has pursued. This Cossim Ali Khan, after he had acted the tyrant on the landed interest, fell upon the moneyed interest. In that country there was a person called Juggut Seit. There were several of the family, who were bankers to such a magnitude as was never heard of in the world. Receivers of the public revenue, their correspondence extended all over Asia; and there are those who are of opinion that the house of Juggut Seit, including all its branches, was not worth less than six or seven millions sterling. This house became the prey of Cossim Ali Khan; but Mr. Holwell had predicted that _it should be delivered over to Satan to be buffeted_ (his own pious expression). He predicted the misfortunes that should befall them; and we chose a Satan to buffet them, and who did so buffet them, by the murder of the principal persons of the house, and by robbing them of great sums of their wealth, that I believe such a scene of nefarious tyranny, destroying and cutting up the root of public credit in that country, was scarce ever known. In the mean time Cossim was extending his tyranny over all who were obnoxious to him; and the persons he first sought were those traitors who had been friends to the English. Several of the principal of these he murdered. There was in the province of Bahar a man named Ramarain; he had got the most positive assurances of English faith; but Mr. Macguire, a member of the Council, on the receipt of five thousand gold mohurs, or something more than 8,000_l._ sterling, delivered him up to be first imprisoned, then tortured, then robbed in consequence of the torture, and finally murdered, by Cossim Ali Khan. In this way Cossim Ali Khan acted, while our government looked on. I hardly choose to mention to you the fate of a certain native in consequence of a dispute with Mr. Mott, a friend of Mr. Hastings, which is in the Company's records,--records which are almost buried by their own magnitude from the knowledge of this country. In a contest with this native for his house and property, some scuffle having happened between the parties, the one attempting to seize and the other to defend, the latter made a complaint to the Nabob, who was in an entire subjection at that time to the English, and who ordered this unfortunate man, on account of this very scuffle, arising from defending his property, to be blown off from the mouth of a cannon. In short, I am not able to tell your Lordships of all the nefarious transactions of this man, whom the intrigues of Mr. Holwell and Mr. Hastings had set upon the throne of Bengal. But there is a circumstance in this business that comes across here, and will tend to show another grievance that vexed that country, which vexed it long, and is one of the causes of its chief disasters, and which, I fear, is not so perfectly extirpated but that some part of its roots may remain in the ground at this moment.

Commerce, which enriches every other country in the world, was bringing Bengal to total ruin. The Company, in former times, when it had no sovereignty or power in the country, had large privileges under their _dustuck_, or permit: their goods passed, without paying duties, through the country. The servants of the Company made use of this dustuck for their own private trade, which, while it was used with moderation, the native government winked at in some degree; but when it got wholly into private hands, it was more like robbery than trade. These traders appeared everywhere; they sold at their own prices, and forced the people to sell to them at their own prices also. It appeared more like an army going to pillage the people, under pretence of commerce, than anything else. In vain the people claimed the protection of their own country courts. This English army of traders in their march ravaged worse than a Tartarian conqueror. The trade they carried on, and which more resembled robbery than commerce, anticipated the resources of the tyrant, and threatened to leave him no materials for imposition or confiscation. Thus this miserable country was torn to pieces by the horrible rapaciousness of a double tyranny. This appeared to be so strong a case, that a deputation was sent to him at his new capital, Monghir, to form a treaty for the purpose of giving some relief against this cruel, cursed, and oppressive trade, which was worse even than the tyranny of the sovereign. This trade Mr. Vansittart, the President about this time, that is, in 1763, who succeeded to Mr. Holwell, and was in close union of interests with the tyrant Cossim Ali Khan, by a treaty known by the name of the treaty of Monghir, agreed very much to suppress and to confine within something like reasonable bounds. There never was a doubt on the face of that treaty, that it was a just, proper, fair transaction. But as nobody in Bengal did then believe that rapine was ever forborne but in favor of bribery, the persons who lost every advantage by the treaty of Monghir, when they thought they saw corrupt negotiation carrying away the prizes of unlawful commerce, and were likely to see their trade crippled by Cossim Ali Khan, fell into a most violent fury at this treaty; and as the treaty was made without the concurrence of the rest of the Council, the Company's servants grew divided: one part were the advocates of the treaty, the other of the trade. The latter were universally of opinion that the treaty was bought for a great sum of money. The evidence we have on our records of the sums of money that are stated to have been paid on this occasion has never been investigated to the bottom; but we have it on record, that a great sum (70,000_l._) was paid to persons concerned in that negotiation. The rest were exceedingly wroth to see themselves not profiting by the negotiation, and losing the trade, or likely to be excluded from it; and they were the more so, because, as we have it upon our journals, during all that time the trade of the negotiators was not proscribed, but a purwannah was issued by Cossim Ali Khan, that the trade of his friends Mr. Vansittart and Mr. Hastings should not be subject to the general regulations. This filled the whole settlement with ill blood; but in the regulation itself (I put the motive and the secret history out of the case) undoubtedly Mr. Hastings and Mr. Vansittart were on the right side. They had shown to a demonstration the mischief of this trade. However, as the other party were strong, and did not readily let go their hold of this great advantage, first, dissensions, murmurs, various kinds of complaints, and ill blood arose. Cossim Ali was driven to the wall; and having at the same time made what he thought good preparations, a war broke out at last. And how did it break out? This Cossim Ali Khan signalized his first acts of hostility by an atrocity committed against the faith of treaties, against the rules of war, against every principle of honor. This intended murderer of his father-in-law, whom Mr. Hastings had assisted to raise to the throne of Bengal, well knowing his character and his disposition, and well knowing what such a man was capable of doing,--this man massacred the English wherever he met them. There were two hundred, or thereabouts, of the Company's servants, or their dependants, slaughtered at Patna with every circumstance of the most abominable cruelty. Their limbs were cut to pieces. The tyrant whom Mr. Hastings set up cut and hacked the limbs of British subjects in the most cruel and perfidious manner, threw them into wells, and polluted the waters of the country with British blood. Immediately war is declared against him in form. That war sets the whole country in a blaze; and then other parties begin to appear upon the scene, whose transactions you will find yourselves deeply concerned in hereafter.

As soon as war was declared against Cossim, it was necessary to resolve to put up another Nabob, and to have another revolution: and where do they resort, but to the man whom, for his alleged tyranny, for his incapacity, for the numberless iniquities he was said to have committed, and for his total unfitness and disinclination to all the duties of government, they had dethroned? This very man they take up again, to place on the throne from which they had about two years before removed him, and for the effecting of which they had committed so many iniquities. Even this revolution was not made without being paid for. According to the usual order of procession, in which the youngest walk first, first comes the Company; and the Company had secured to it in perpetuity those provinces which Cossim Ali Khan had ceded, as it was thought, rather in the way of mortgage than anything else. Then, under the name of compensation for sufferings to the people concerned in the trade, and in the name of donation to an army and a navy which had little to do in this affair, they tax him--what sum do you think? They tax that empty and undone treasury of that miserable and undone country 500,000_l._ for a private emolument to themselves,--for the compensation for this iniquitous trade,--for the compensation for abuses of which he was neither the author nor the abettor, they tax this miserable prince 500,000_l._ That sum was given to individuals. Now comes the Company at home, which, on hearing this news, was all inflamed. The Directors were on fire. They were shocked at it, and particularly at this donation to the army and navy. They resolved they would give it no countenance and support. In the mean time the gentlemen did not trouble their heads upon that subject, but meant to exact and get their 500,000_l._ as they could.

Here was a third revolution, bought at this amazing sum, and this poor, miserable prince first dragged from Moorshedabad to Calcutta, then dragged back from Calcutta to Moorshedabad, the sport of fortune and the plaything of avarice. This poor man is again set up, but is left with no authority: his troops limited,--his person, everything about him, in a manner subjugated,--a British Resident the master of his court: he is set up as a pageant on this throne, with no other authority but what would be sufficient to give a countenance to presents, gifts, and donations. That authority was always left, when all the rest was taken away. One would have thought that this revolution might have satisfied these gentlemen, and that the money gained by it would have been sufficient. No. The partisans of Cossim Ali wanted another revolution. The partisans of the other side wished to have something more done in the present. They now began to think that to depose Cossim instantly, and to sell him to another, was too much at one time,--especially as Cossim Ali was a man of vigor and resolution, carrying on a fierce war against them. But what do you think they did? They began to see, from the example of Cossim Ali, that the lieutenancy, the ministry of the king, was a good thing to be sold, and the sale of that might turn out as good a thing as the sale of the prince.

For this office there were two rival candidates, persons of great consideration, in Bengal: one, a principal Mahomedan, called Mahomed Reza Khan, a man of high authority, great piety in his own religion, great learning in the law, of the very first class of Mahomedan nobility; but at the same time, on all these accounts, he was abhorred and dreaded by the Nabob, who necessarily feared that a man of Mahomed Reza Khan's description would be considered as better entitled and fitter for his seat, as Nabob of the provinces. To balance him, there was another man, known by the name of the Great Rajah Nundcomar. This man was accounted the highest of his caste, and held the same rank among the Gentoos that Mahomed Reza Khan obtained among the Mahomedans. The prince on the throne had no jealousy of Nundcomar, because he knew, that, as a Gentoo, he could not aspire to the office of Subahdar. For that reason he was firmly attached to him; he might depend completely on his services; he was _his_ against Mahomed Reza Khan, and against the whole world. There was, however, a flaw in the Nabob's title, which it was necessary should be hid. And perhaps it lay against Mahomed Reza Khan as well as him. But it was a source of apprehension to the Nabob, and contributed to make him wish to keep all Mahomedan influence at a distance. For he was a Syed, that is to say, a descendant of Mahomet, and as such, though of the only acknowledged nobility among Mussulmen, would be by that circumstance excluded, by the known laws of the Mogul empire, from being Subahdar in any of the Mogul provinces, in case the revival of the constitution of that empire should ever again take place.

An auction was now opened before the English Council at Calcutta. Mahomed Reza Khan bid largely; Nundcomar bid largely. The circumstances of these two rivals at the Nabob court were equally favorable to the pretensions of each. But the preponderating merits of Mahomed Reza Khan, arising from the subjection in which he was likely to keep the Nabob, and make him fitter for the purpose of continued exactions, induced the Council to take his money, which amounted to about 220,000_l._ Be the sum paid what it may, it was certainly a large one; in consequence of which the Council attempted to invest Mahomed Reza Khan with the office of Naib Subah, or Deputy Viceroy. As to Nundcomar, they fell upon him with a vengeful fury. He fought his battle as well as he could; he opposed bribe to bribe, eagle to eagle; but at length he was driven to the wall. Some received his money, but did him no service in return; others, more conscientious, refused to receive it; and in this battle of bribes he was vanquished. A deputation was sent from Calcutta to the miserable Nabob, to tear Nundcomar, his only support, from his side, and to put the object of all his terrors, Mahomed Reza Khan, in his place.

Thus began a new division that split the Presidency into violent factions; but the faction which adhered to Nundcomar was undoubtedly the weakest. That most miserable of men, Mir Jaffier Ali Khan, clinging, as to the last pillar, to Nundcomar, trembling at Mahomed Reza Khan, died in the struggle, a miserable victim to all the revolutions, to all the successive changes and versatile politics at Calcutta. Like all the rest of the great personages whom we have degraded and brutalized by insult and oppression, he betook himself to the usual destructive resources of unprincipled misery,--sensuality, opium, and wine. His gigantic frame of constitution soon gave way under the oppression of this relief, and he died, leaving children and grandchildren by wives and concubines. On the old Nabob's death, Mahomed Reza Khan was acknowledged Deputy Nabob, the money paid, and this revolution completed.

Here, my Lords, opened a new source of plunder, peculation, and bribery, which was not neglected. Revolutions were no longer necessary; succession supplied their places: and well the object agreed with the policy. Rules of succession could not be very well ascertained to an office like that of the Nabob, which was hereditary only by the appointment of the Mogul. The issue by lawful wives would naturally be preferred by those who meant the quiet of the country. But a more doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the purposes of extortion and peculation. This miserable succession was sold, and the eldest of the issue of Munny Begum, an harlot, brought in to pollute the harem of the seraglio, of whom you will hear much hereafter, was chosen. He soon succeeded to the grave. Another son of the same prostitute succeeded to the same unhappy throne, and followed to the same untimely grave. Every succession was sold; and between venal successions and venal revolutions, in a very few years seven princes and six sales were seen successively in Bengal. The last was a minor, the issue of a legitimate wife, admitted to succeed because a minor, and because there was none illegitimate left. He was instantly stripped of the allowance of his progenitors, and reduced to a pension of 160,000 a year. He still exists, and continued to the end of Mr. Hastings's government to furnish constant sources of bribery and plunder to him and his creatures.

The offspring of Munny Begum clinging, as his father did, to Nundcomar, they tore Nundcomar from his side, as they had done from the side of his father, and carried him down as a sort of prisoner to Calcutta; where, having had the weakness to become the first informer, he was made the first example. This person, pushed to the wall, and knowing that the man he had to deal with was desperate and cruel in his resentments, resolves on the first blow, and enters before the Council a regular information in writing of bribery against Mr. Hastings. In his preface to that charge he excuses himself for what is considered to be an act equally insane and wicked, and as the one inexpiable crime of an Indian, the discovery of the money he gives,--that Mr. Hastings had declaredly determined on his ruin, and to accomplish it had newly associated himself with one Mohun Persaud, a name I wish your Lordships to remember, a bitter enemy of his, an infamous person, whom Mr. Hastings knew to be such, and as such had turned him out of his house,--that Mr. Hastings had lately recalled, and held frequent communications with this Mohun Persaud, the subject of which he had no doubt was his ruin. In the year 1775 he was hanged by those incorrupt English judges who were sent to India by Parliament to protect the natives from oppression.

Your Lordships will observe that this new sale of the office of ministers succeeded to the sale of that of nabobs. All these varied and successive sales shook the country to pieces. As if those miserable exhausted provinces were to be cured of inanition by phlebotomy, while Cossim Ali was racking it above, the Company were drawing off all its nutriment below. A dreadful, an extensive, and most chargeable war followed. Half the northern force of India poured down like a torrent on Bengal, endangered our existence, and exhausted all our resources. The war was the fruit of Mr. Hastings's cabals. Its termination, as usual, was the result of the military merit and the fortune of this nation. Cossim Ali, after having been defeated toy the military genius and spirit of England, (for the Adamses, Monroes, and others of that period, I believe, showed as much skill and bravery as any of their predecessors,) in his flight swept away above three millions in money, jewels, or effects, out of a country which he had plundered and exhausted by his unheard-of exactions. However, he fought his way like a retiring lion, turning his face to his pursuers. He still fought along his frontier. His ability and his money drew to his cause the Subahdar of Oude, the famous Sujah ul Dowlah. The Mogul entered into these wars, and penetrated into the lower provinces on one side, whilst Bulwant Sing, the Rajah of Benares, entered them on another. After various changes of party and changes of fortune, the loss which began in the treachery of the civil service was, as I have before remarked, redeemed by military merit. Many examples of the same sort have since been seen.

Whilst these things were transacted in India, the Court of Directors in London, hearing of so many changes, hearing of such an incredible mass of perfidy and venality, knowing that there was a general market made of the country and of the Company, that the flame of war spread from province to province, that, in proportion as it spread, the fire glowed with augmented fierceness, and that the rapacity which originally gave rise to it was following it in all its progress,--the Company, my Lords, alarmed not only for their acquisitions, but their existence, and finding themselves sinking lower and lower by every victory they obtained, thought it necessary at length to come to some system and some settlement. After composing their differences with Lord Clive, they sent him out to that country about the year 1765, in order, by his name, weight, authority, and vigor of mind, to give some sort of form and stability to government, and to rectify the innumerable abuses which prevailed there, and particularly that great source of disorders, that fundamental abuse, presents: for the bribes by which all these revolutions were bought had not the name of conditions, stipulations, or rewards; they even had the free and gratuitous style of presents. The receivers contended that they were mere gratuities given for service done, or mere tokens of affection and gratitude to the parties. They may give them what names they please, and your Lordships will think of them what you please; but they were the donations of misery to power, the gifts of sufferers to the oppressors; and consequently, where they prevailed, they left no certain property or fixed situation to any man in India, from the highest to the lowest.

The Court of Directors sent out orders to enlarge the servants' covenants with new and severe clauses, strongly prohibiting the practice of receiving presents. Lord Clive himself had been a large receiver of them. Yet, as it was in the moment of a revolution which gave them all they possessed, the Company would hear no more of it. They sent him out to reform: whether they chose well or ill does not signify. I think, upon the whole, they chose well; because his name and authority could do much. They sent him out to redress the grievances of that country, and it was necessary he should be well armed for that service. They sent him out with such powers as no servant of the Company ever held before. I would not be understood here in my own character, much less in the delegated character in which I stand, to contend for any man in the totality of his conduct. Perhaps in some of his measures he was mistaken, and in some of his acts reprehensible; but justice obliges me to say, that the plan which he formed and the course which he pursued were in general great and well imagined,--that he laid great foundations, if they had been properly built upon. For, in the first place, he composed all the neighboring countries torn to pieces by the wars of Cossim Ali, and quieted the apprehensions raised by the opinion of the boundless ambition of England. He took strong measures to put an end to a great many of the abuses that prevailed in the country subject to the Company. He then proceeded to the upper provinces, and formed a plan which, for a military man, has great civil and political merit. He put a bound to the aspiring spirit of the Company's servants; he limited its conquests; he prescribed bounds to its ambition. "First" (says he) "quiet the minds of the country; what you have obtained regulate; make it known to India that you resolve to acquire no more."

On this solid plan he fixed every prince that was concerned in the preceding wars, on the one side and on the other, in an happy and easy settlement. He restored Sujah ul Dowlah, who had been driven from his dominions by the military arm of Great Britain, to the rank of Vizier, and to the dominion of the territories of Oude. With a generosity that astonished all Asia, he reinstated this expelled enemy of his nation peaceably upon his throne. And this act of politic generosity did more towards quieting the minds of the people of Asia than all the terror, great as it was, of the English arms. At the same time, Lord Clive, generous to all, took peculiar care of our friends and allies. He took care of Bulwant Sing, the great Rajah of Benares, who had taken our part in the war. He secured him from the revenge of Sujah ul Dowlah. The Mogul had granted us the superiority over Bulwant Sing. Lord Clive reestablished him in a secure, easy independency. He confirmed him, under the British guaranty, in the rich principality which he held.

The Mogul, the head of the Mussulman religion in India, and of the Indian empire, a head honored and esteemed even in its ruins, he procured to be recognized by all the persons that were connected with his empire. The rents that ought to be paid to the Vizier of the Empire he gave to the Vizierate. Thus our alliances were cemented, our enemies were reconciled, all Asia was conciliated by our settlement with the king. To that unhappy fugitive king, driven from place to place, the sport of fortune, now an emperor and now a prisoner, prayed for in every mosque in which his authority was conspired against, one day opposed by the coin struck in his name and the other day sold for it,--to this descendant of Tamerlane he allotted, with a decent share of royal dignity, an honorable fixed residence, where he might be useful and could not be dangerous.

As to the Bengal provinces, he did not take for the Company the viceroyalty, as Mr. Holwell would have persuaded, almost forced, the Company to do; but, to satisfy the prejudices of the Mahomedans, the country was left in the hands nominally of the Subah, or viceroy, who was to administer the criminal justice and the exterior forms of royalty. He obtained from the sovereign the _dewanny_. This is the great act of the constitutional entrance of the Company into the body politic of India. It gave to the settlement of Bengal a fixed constitutional form, with a legal title, acknowledged and recognized now for the first time by all the natural powers of the country, because it arose from the charter of the undoubted sovereign. The _dewanny_, or high-stewardship, gave to the Company the collection and management of the revenue; and in this modest and civil character they appeared, not the oppressors, but the protectors of the people. This scheme had all the real power, without any invidious appearance of it; it gave them the revenue, without the parade of sovereignty. On this double foundation the government was happily settled. The minds of the natives were quieted. The Company's territories and views were circumscribed. The arm of force was put out of sight. The imperial name covered everything. The power of the purse was in the hand of the Company. The power of the sword was in effect so, as they contracted for the maintenance of the army. The Company had a revenue of a million and a half. The Nabob had, indeed, fallen from any real and effective power, yet the dignity of the court was maintained. The prejudices and interests of the Mahomedans, and particularly of their nobility, who had suffered more by this great revolution even than the old inhabitants of the country, were consulted; for by this plan a revenue of 500,000_l._ was settled on the viceroyalty, which was thus enabled to provide in some measure for those great families. The Company likewise, by this plan, in order to enjoy their revenues securely, and to avoid envy and murmur, put them into the hands of Mahomed Reza Khan, whom Lord Clive found in the management of affairs, and did not displace; and he was now made deputy-steward to the Company, as he had been before lieutenant-viceroy to the Nabob. A British Resident at Moorshedabad was established as a control. The Company exercised their power over the revenue in the first instance through the natives, but the British Resident was in reality the great mover.

If ever this nation stood in a situation of glory throughout Asia, it was in that moment. But, as I have said, some material errors and mistakes were committed. After the formation of this plan, Lord Clive unfortunately did not stay long enough in the country to give consistency to the measures of reformation he had undertaken, but rapidly returned to England; and after his departure, the government that continued had not vigor or authority to support the settlement then made, and considerable abuses began to prevail in every quarter. Another capital period in our history here commences. Those who succeeded (though I believe one of them was one of the honestest men that ever served the Company, I mean Governor Verelst) had not weight enough to poise the system of the service, and consequently many abuses and grievances again prevailed. Supervisors were appointed to every district, as a check on the native collectors, and to report every abuse as it should arise. But they who were appointed to redress grievances were themselves accused of being guilty of them. However, the disorders were not of that violent kind which preceded Mr. Hastings's departure, nor such as followed his return: no mercenary wars, no mercenary revolutions, no extirpation of nations, no violent convulsions in the revenue, no subversion of ancient houses, no general sales of any descriptions of men,--none of these, but certainly such grievances as made it necessary for the Company to send out another commission in 1769, with instructions pointing out the chief abuses. It was composed of Mr. Vansittart, Mr. Ford, and Mr. Scrafton. The unfortunate end of that commission is known to all the world; but I mention it in order to state that the receipt of presents was considered as one of the grievances which then prevailed in India, and that the supervisors under that commission were ordered upon no account whatever to take presents. Upon the unfortunate catastrophe which happened, the Company was preparing to send out another for the rectification of these grievances, when Parliament thought it necessary to supersede that commission, to take the matter into their own hands, and to appoint another commission in a Parliamentary way (of which Mr. Hastings was one) for the better government of that country. Mr. Hastings, as I must mention to your Lordships, soon after the deposition and restoration of Jaffier Ali Khan, and before Lord Clive arrived, quitted for a while the scene in which he had been so mischievously employed, and returned to England to strengthen himself by those cabals which again sent him out with new authority to pursue the courses which were the natural sequel to his former proceedings. He returned to India with great power, indeed,--first to a seat in Council at Fort St. George, and from thence to succeed to the Presidency of Fort William. On him the Company placed their chief reliance. Happy had it been for them, happy for India and for England, if his conduct had been such as to spare your Lordships and the Commons the exhibition of this day!

When this government, with Mr. Hastings at the head of it, was settled, Moorshedabad did still continue the seat of the native government, and of all the collections. Here the Company was not satisfied with placing a Resident at the durbar, which was the first step to our assuming the government in that country. These steps must be traced by your Lordships; for I should never have given you this trouble, if it was not necessary to possess you clearly of the several progressive steps by which the Company's government came to be established and to supersede the native. The next step was the appointment of supervisors in every province, to oversee the native collector. The third was to establish a general Council of Revenue at Moorshedabad, to superintend the great steward, Mahomed Reza Khan. In 1772 that Council by Mr. Hastings was overturned, and the whole management of the revenue brought to Calcutta. Mahomed Reza Khan, by orders of the Company, was turned out of all his offices, and turned out for reasons and principles which your Lordships will hereafter see; and at last the dewanny was entirely taken out of the native hands, and settled in the Supreme Council and Presidency itself in Calcutta; and so it remained until the year 1781, when Mr. Hastings made another revolution, took it out of the hands of the Supreme Council, in which the orders of the Company, an act of Parliament, and their own act had vested it, and put it into a subordinate council: that is, it was entirely vested in himself.

* * * * *

Now your Lordships see the whole of the revolutions. I have stated them, I trust, with perspicuity,--stated the grounds and principles upon which they were made,--stated the abuses that grew upon them,--and that every revolution produced its abuse. You saw the native government vanish by degrees, until it was reduced to a situation fit for nothing but to become a private perquisite, as it has been, to Mr. Hastings, and to be granted to whom he pleased. The English government succeeded, at the head of which Mr. Hastings was placed by an act of Parliament, having before held the office of President of the Council,--the express object of both these appointments being to redress grievances; and within these two periods of his power, as President and Governor-General, were those crimes committed of which he now stands accused. All this history is merely by way of illustration: his crimination begins from his nomination to the Presidency; and we are to consider how he comported himself in that station, and in his office of Governor-General.

The first thing, in considering the merits or demerits of any governor, is to have some test by which they are to be tried. And here, my Lords, we conceive, that, when a British governor is sent abroad, he is sent to pursue the good of the people as much as possible in the spirit of the laws of this country, which in all respects intend their conservation, their happiness, and their prosperity. This is the principle upon which Mr. Hastings was bound to govern, and upon which he is to account for his conduct here. His rule was, what a British governor, intrusted with the power of this country, was bound to do or to forbear. If he has performed and if he has abstained as he ought, dismiss him honorably acquitted from your bar; otherwise condemn him. He may resort to other principles and to other maxims; but this country will force him to be tried by its laws. The law of this country recognizes that well-known crime called misconduct in office; it is a head of the law of England, and, so far as inferior courts are competent to try it, may be tried in them. Here your Lordships' competence is plenary: you are fully competent both to inquire into and to punish the offence.

And, first, I am to state to your Lordships, by the direction of those whom I am bound to obey, the principles on which Mr. Hastings declares he has conducted his government,--principles which he has avowed, first in several letters written to the East India Company, next in a paper of defence delivered to the House of Commons explicitly, and more explicitly in his defence before your Lordships. Nothing in Mr. Hastings's proceedings is so curious as his several defences; and nothing in the defences is so singular as the principles upon which he proceeds. Your Lordships will have to decide not only upon a large, connected, systematic train of misdemeanors, but an equally connected system of principles and maxims of government, invented to justify those misdemeanors. He has brought them forward and avowed them in the face of day. He has boldly and insultingly thrown them in the face of the representatives of a free people, and we cannot pass them by without adopting them. I am directed to protest against those grounds and principles upon which he frames his defence; for, if those grounds are good and valid, they carry off a great deal at least, if not entirely, the foundation of our charge.

My Lords, we contend that Mr. Hastings, as a British governor, ought to govern on British principles, not by British forms,--God forbid!--for if ever there was a case in which the letter kills and the spirit gives life, it would be an attempt to introduce British forms and the substance of despotic principles together into any country. No! We call for that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice, that spirit of protection, that spirit of lenity, which ought to characterize every British subject in power; and on these, and these principles only, he will be tried.

But he has told your Lordships, in his defence, that actions in Asia do not bear the same moral qualities which the same actions would bear in Europe.

My Lords, we positively deny that principle. I am authorized and called upon to deny it. And having stated at large what he means by saying that the same actions have not the same qualities in Asia and in Europe, we are to let your Lordships know that these gentlemen have formed a plan of _geographical morality_, by which the duties of men, in public and in private situations, are not to be governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues die, as they say some insects die when they cross the line; as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and after which a new order and system of things commenced.

This geographical morality we do protest against; Mr. Hastings shall not screen himself under it; and on this point I hope and trust many words will not be necessary to satisfy your Lordships. But we think it necessary, in justification of ourselves, to declare that the laws of morality are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over. This I contend for not in the technical forms of it, but I contend for it in the substance.

Mr. Hastings comes before your Lordships not as a British governor answering to a British tribunal, but as a subahdar, as a bashaw of three tails. He says, "I had an arbitrary power to exercise: I exercised it. Slaves I found the people: slaves they are,--they are so by their constitution; and if they are, I did not make it for them. I was unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I did exercise it. It was disagreeable to me, but I did exercise it; and no other power can be exercised in that country." This, if it be true, is a plea in bar. But I trust and hope your Lordships will not judge by laws and institutions which you do not know, against those laws and institutions which you do know, and under whose power and authority Mr. Hastings went out to India. Can your Lordships patiently hear what _we_ have heard with indignation enough, and what, if there were nothing else, would call these principles, as well as the actions which are justified on such principles, to your Lordships' bar, that it may be known whether the peers of England do not sympathize with the Commons in their detestation of such doctrine? Think of an English governor tried before you as a British subject, and yet declaring that he governed on the principles of arbitrary power! His plea is, that he did govern there on arbitrary and despotic, and, as he supposes, Oriental principles. And as this plea is boldly avowed and maintained, and as, no doubt, all his conduct was perfectly correspondent to these principles, the principles and the conduct must be tried together.

If your Lordships will now permit me, I will state one of the many places in which he has avowed these principles as the basis and foundation of all his conduct. "The sovereignty which they assumed, it fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such power, or powers of that nature, were delegated to me by any provisions of any act of Parliament, I confess myself too little of a lawyer to pronounce. I only know that the acceptance of the sovereignty of Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any act of Parliament; and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the Council, the Company is clearly and indisputably seized of that sovereignty." So that this gentleman, because he is not a lawyer, nor clothed with those robes which distinguish, and well distinguish, the learning of this country, is not to know anything of his duty; and whether he was bound by any, or what act of Parliament, is a thing he is not lawyer enough to know! Now, if your Lordships will suffer the laws to be broken by those who are not of the long robe, I am afraid those of the long robe will have none to punish but those of their own profession. He therefore goes to a law he is better acquainted with,--that is, the law of arbitrary power and force, if it deserves to be called by the name of law. "If, therefore," says he, "the _sovereignty_ of Benares, as ceded to us by the Vizier, have _any rights whatever_ annexed to it, and be not a mere empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as are held, countenanced, and established by the law, custom, and usage of the Mogul empire, and not by the provisions of any British act of Parliament hitherto enacted. _Those rights_, and none other, I have been the involuntary instrument of enforcing. And if any future act of Parliament shall positively or by implication tend to annihilate those very rights, or their exertion as I have exerted them, I much fear that the boasted sovereignty of Benares, which was held up as an acquisition, almost obtruded on the Company against my consent and opinion, (for I acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and inconveniences in its future exercise,)--I fear, I say, that this sovereignty will be found a burden instead of a benefit, a heavy clog rather than a precious gem to its present possessors: I mean, unless the whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made an uniform compact body by one grand and systematic arrangement.--such an arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass.

"Every part of Hindostan has been constantly exposed to these and similar disadvantages ever since the Mahomedan conquests. The Hindoos, who never incorporated with their conquerors, were kept in order only by the strong hand of power. The constant necessity of similar exertions would increase at once their energy and extent; so that rebellion itself is the parent and promoter of despotism. Sovereignty in India implies nothing else. For I know not how we can form an estimate of its powers, but from its visible effects; and those are everywhere the same, from Cabool to Assam. The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power. To all this I strongly alluded in the minutes I delivered in Council, when the treaty with the new Vizier was on foot in 1775; and I wished to make Cheyt Sing independent, because in India dependence included a thousand evils, many of which I enumerated at that time, and they are entered in the ninth clause of the first section of this charge. I knew the powers with which an Indian sovereignty is armed, and the dangers to which tributaries are exposed. I knew, that, from the history of Asia, and from the very nature of mankind, the subjects of a despotic empire are always vigilant for the moment to rebel, and the sovereign is ever jealous of rebellious intentions. A zemindar is an Indian subject, and as such exposed to the common lot of his fellows. _The mean and depraved state of a mere zemindar_ is therefore this very dependence above mentioned on a despotic government, this very proneness to shake off his allegiance, and this very exposure to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, which are consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments. Bulwant Sing, if he had been, and Cheyt Sing, as long as he was a zemindar, stood exactly in this _mean and depraved state_ by the constitution of his country. I did not make it for him, but would have secured him from it. Those who made him a zemindar entailed upon him the consequences of so mean and depraved a tenure. Aliverdy Khan and Cossim Ali fined all their zemindars on the necessities of war, and on every pretence either of court necessity or court extravagance."

My Lords, you have now heard the principles on which Mr. Hastings governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. You have heard his opinion of the mean and depraved state of those who are subject to it. You have heard his lecture upon arbitrary power, which he states to be the constitution of Asia. You hear the application he makes of it; and you hear the practices which he employs to justify it, and who the persons were on whose authority he relies, and whose example he professes to follow. In the first place, your Lordships will be astonished at the audacity with which he speaks of his own administration, as if he was reading a speculative lecture on the evils attendant upon some vicious system of foreign government in which he had no sort of concern whatsoever. And then, when in this speculative way he has established, or thinks he has, the vices of the government, he conceives he has found a sufficient apology for his own crimes. And if he violates the most solemn engagements, if he oppresses, extorts, and robs, if he imprisons, confiscates, banishes at his sole will and pleasure, when we accuse him for his ill-treatment of the people committed to him as a sacred trust, his defence is,--"To be robbed, violated, oppressed, is their privilege. Let the constitution of their country answer for it. I did not make it for them. Slaves I found them, and as slaves I have treated them. I was a despotic prince. Despotic governments are jealous, and the subjects prone to rebellion. This very proneness of the subject to shake off his allegiance exposes him to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, and this is consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments." He lays it down as a rule, that despotism is the genuine constitution of India, that a disposition to rebellion in the subject or dependent prince is the necessary effect of this despotism, and that jealousy and its consequences naturally arise on the part of the sovereign,--that the government is everything, and the subject nothing,--that the great landed men are in a mean and depraved state, and subject to many evils.

Such a state of things, if true, would warrant conclusions directly opposite to those which Mr. Hastings means to draw from them, both argumentatively and practically, first to influence his conduct, and then to bottom his defence of it.

Perhaps you will imagine that the man who avows these principles of arbitrary government, and pleads them as the justification of acts which nothing else can justify, is of opinion that they are on the whole good for the people over whom they are exercised. The very reverse. He mentions them as horrible things, tending to inflict on the people a thousand evils, and to bring on the ruler a continual train of dangers. Yet he states, that your acquisitions in India will be a detriment instead of an advantage, if you destroy arbitrary power, unless you can reduce all the religious establishments, all the civil institutions, and tenures of land, into one uniform mass,--that is, unless by acts of arbitrary power you extinguish all the laws, rights, and religious principles of the people, and force them to an uniformity, and on that uniformity build a system of arbitrary power.

But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any country in Asia that we are acquainted with. It is certainly not true of any Mahomedan constitution. But if it were, do your Lordships really think that the nation would bear, that any human creature would bear, to hear an English governor defend himself on such principles? or, if he can defend himself on such principles, is it possible to deny the conclusion, that no man in India has a security for anything, but by being totally independent of the British government? Here he has declared his opinion, that he is a despotic prince, that he is to use arbitrary power; and of course all his acts are covered with that shield. "_I know_," says he, "_the constitution of Asia only from its practice_." Will your Lordships submit to hear the corrupt practices of mankind made the principles of government? No! it will be your pride and glory to teach men intrusted with power, that, in their use of it, they are to conform to principles, and not to draw their principles from the corrupt practice of any man whatever. Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a governor would dare to heap up all the evil practices, all the cruelties, oppressions, extortions, corruptions, briberies, of all the ferocious usurpers, desperate robbers, thieves, cheats, and jugglers, that ever had office, from one end of Asia to another, and, consolidating all this mass of the crimes and absurdities of barbarous domination into one code, establish it as the whole duty of an English governor? I believe that till this time so audacious a thing was never attempted by man.

_He_ have arbitrary power! My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons, nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in subjection,--all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, preexistent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.

This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have. It does not arise from our vain institutions. Every good gift is of God; all power is of God; and He who has given the power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. If, then, all dominion of man over man is the effect of the Divine disposition, it is bound by the eternal laws of Him that gave it, with which no human authority can dispense,--neither he that exercises it, nor even those who are subject to it; and if they were mad enough to make an express compact that should release their magistrate from his duty, and should declare their lives, liberties, and properties dependent upon, not rules and laws, but his mere capricious will, that covenant would be void. The acceptor of it has not his authority increased, but he has his crime doubled. Therefore can it be imagined, if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine wisdom and justice?

The title of conquest makes no difference at all. No conquest can give such a right; for conquest, that is, force, cannot convert its own injustice into a just title, by which it may rule others at its pleasure. By conquest, which is a more immediate designation of the hand of God, the conqueror succeeds to all the painful duties and subordination to the power of God which belonged to the sovereign whom he has displaced, just as if he had come in by the positive law of some descent or some election. To this at least he is strictly bound: he ought to govern them as he governs his own subjects. But every wise conqueror has gone much further than he was bound to go. It has been his ambition and his policy to reconcile the vanquished to his fortune, to show that they had gained by the change, to convert their momentary suffering into a long benefit, and to draw from the humiliation of his enemies an accession to his own glory. This has been so constant a practice, that it is to repeat the histories of all politic conquerors in all nations and in all times; and I will not so much distrust your Lordships' enlightened and discriminating studies and correct memories as to allude to one of them. I will only show you that the Court of Directors, under whom he served, has adopted that idea,--that they constantly inculcated it to him, and to all the servants,--that they run a parallel between their own and the native government, and, supposing it to be very evil, did not hold it up as an example to be followed, but as an abuse to be corrected,--that they never made it a question, whether India is to be improved by English law and liberty, or English law and liberty vitiated by Indian corruption.

No, my Lords, this arbitrary power is not to be had by conquest. Nor can any sovereign have it by succession; for no man can succeed to fraud, rapine, and violence. Neither by compact, covenant, or submission,--for men cannot covenant themselves out of their rights and their duties,--nor by any other means, can arbitrary power be conveyed to any man. Those who give to others such rights perform acts that are void as they are given,--good indeed and valid only as tending to subject themselves, and those who act with them, to the Divine displeasure; because morally there can be no such power. Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal; and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world. It is a crime to bear it, when it can be rationally shaken off. Nothing but absolute impotence can justify men in not resisting it to the utmost of their ability.

Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist? To suppose for power is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains, if we will, but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute _will_ in the place of it is an enemy to GOD.

Despotism does not in the smallest degree abrogate, alter, or lessen any one duty of any one relation of life, or weaken the force or obligation of any one engagement or contract whatsoever. Despotism, if it means anything that is at all defensible, means a mode of government bound by no written rules, and coerced by no controlling magistracies or well-settled orders in the state. But if it has no written law, it neither does nor can cancel the primeval, indefeasible, unalterable law of Nature and of nations; and if no magistracies control its exertions, those exertions must derive their limitation and direction either from the equity and moderation of the ruler, or from downright revolt on the part of the subject by rebellion, divested of all its criminal qualities. The moment a sovereign removes the idea of security and protection from his subjects, and declares that he is everything and they nothing, when he declares that no contract he makes with them can or ought to bind him, he then declares war upon them: he is no longer sovereign; they are no longer subjects.

No man, therefore, has a right to arbitrary power. But the thought which is suggested by the depravity of him who brings it forward is supported by a gross confusion of ideas and principles, which your Lordships well know how to discern and separate. It is manifest, that, in the Eastern governments, and the Western, and in all governments, the supreme power in the state cannot, whilst that state subsists, be rendered criminally responsible for its actions: otherwise it would not be the supreme power. It is certainly true: but the actions do not change their nature by losing their responsibility. The arbitrary acts which are unpunished are not the less vicious, though none but God, the conscience, and the opinions of mankind take cognizance of them.

It is not merely so in this or that government, but in all countries. The king in this country is undoubtedly unaccountable for his actions. The House of Lords, if it should ever exercise, (God forbid I should suspect it would ever do what it has never done!)--but if it should ever abuse its judicial power, and give such a judgment as it ought not to give, whether from fear of popular clamor on the one hand, or predilection to the prisoner on the other,--if they abuse their judgments, there is no calling them to an account for it. And so, if the Commons should abuse their power, nay, if they should have been so greatly delinquent as not to have prosecuted this offender, they could not be accountable for it; there is no punishing them for their acts, because we exercise a part of the supreme power. But are they less criminal, less rebellious against the Divine Majesty? are they less hateful to man, whose opinions they ought to cultivate as far as they are just? No: till society fall into a state of dissolution, they cannot be accountable for their acts. But it is from confounding the unaccountable character inherent in the supreme power with arbitrary power, that all this confusion of ideas has arisen.

Even upon a supposition that arbitrary power can exist anywhere, which we deny totally, and which your Lordships will be the first and proudest to deny, still, absolute supreme dominion was never conferred or delegated by you,--much less, arbitrary power, which never did in any case, nor ever will in any case, time, or country, produce any one of the ends of just government.

It is true that the supreme power in every constitution of government must be absolute, and this may be corrupted into the arbitrary. But all good constitutions have established certain fixed rules for the exercise of their functions, which they rarely or ever depart from, and which rules form the security against that worst of evils, the government of will and force instead of wisdom and justice.

But though the supreme power is in a situation resembling arbitrary, yet never was there heard of in the history of the world, that is, in that mixed chaos of human wisdom and folly, such a thing as an _intermediate_ arbitrary power,--that is, of an officer of government who is to exert authority over the people without any law at all, and who is to have the benefit of all laws, and all forms of law, when he is called to an account. For that is to let a wild beast (for such is a man without law) loose upon the people to prey on them at his pleasure, whilst all the laws which ought to secure the people against the abuse of power are employed to screen that abuse against the cries of the people.

This is _de facto_ the state of our Indian government. But to establish it so in right as well as in fact is a thing left for us to begin with, the first of mankind. For a subordinate arbitrary or even despotic power never was heard of in right, claim, or authorized practice; least of all has it been heard of in the Eastern governments, where all the instances of severity and cruelty fall upon governors and persons intrusted with power. This would be a gross contradiction. Before Mr. Hastings, none ever came before his superiors to claim it; because, if any such thing could exist, he claims the very power of that sovereign who calls him to account.

But suppose a man to come before us, denying all the benefits of law to the people under him,--and yet, when he is called to account, to claim all the benefits of that law which was made to screen mankind from the excesses of power: such a claim, I will venture to say, is a monster that never existed, except in the wild imagination of some theorist. It cannot be admitted, because it is a perversion of the fundamental principle, that every power given for the protection of the people below should be responsible to the power above. It is to suppose that the people shall have no laws with regard to _him_, yet, when _he_ comes to be tried, he shall claim the protection of those laws which were made to secure the people from his violence,--that he shall claim a fair trial, an equitable hearing, every advantage of counsel, (God forbid he should not have them!) yet that the people under him shall have none of those advantages. The reverse is the principle of every just and rational procedure. For the people, who have nothing to use but their natural faculties, ought to be gently dealt with; but those who are intrusted with an artificial and instituted authority have in their hands a great deal of the force of other people; and as their temptations to injustice are greater, so their moans are infinitely more effectual for mischief by turning the powers given for the preservation of society to its destruction: so that, if an arbitrary procedure be justifiable, (a strong one I am sure is,) it is when used against those who pretend to use it against others.

My Lords, I will venture to say of the governments of Asia, that none of them ever had an arbitrary power; and if any governments had an arbitrary power, they cannot delegate it to any persons under them: that is, they cannot so delegate it to others as not to leave them accountable on the principles upon which it was given. As this is a contradiction in terms, a gross absurdity, as well as a monstrous wickedness, let me say, for the honor of human nature, that, although undoubtedly we may speak it with the pride of England that we have better institutions for the preservation of the rights of men than any other country in the world, yet I will venture to say that no country has wholly meant, or ever meant, to give this power.

As it cannot exist in right on any rational and solid principles of government, so neither does it exist in the constitution of Oriental governments,--and I do insist upon it, that Oriental governments know nothing of arbitrary power. I have taken as much pains as I could to examine into the constitutions of them. I have been endeavoring to inform myself at all times on this subject; of late my duty has led me to a more minute inspection of them; and I do challenge the whole race of man to show me any of the Oriental governors claiming to themselves a right to act by arbitrary will.

The greatest part of Asia is under Mahomedan governments. To name a Mahomedan government is to name a government by law. It is a law enforced by stronger sanctions than any law that can bind a Christian sovereign. Their law is believed to be given by God; and it has the double sanction of law and of religion, with which the prince is no more authorized to dispense than any one else. And if any man will produce the Koran to me, and will but show me one text in it that authorizes in any degree an arbitrary power in the government, I will confess that I have read that book, and been conversant in the affairs of Asia, in vain. There is not such a syllable in it; but, on the contrary, against oppressors by name every letter of that law is fulminated. There are interpreters established throughout all Asia to explain that law, an order of priesthood, whom they call _men of the law_. These men are conservators of the law; and to enable them to preserve it in its perfection, they are secured from the resentment of the sovereign: for he cannot touch them. Even their kings are not always vested with a real supreme power, but the government is in some degree republican.

To bring this point a little nearer home,--since we are challenged thus, since we are led into Asia, since we are called upon to make good our charge on the principles of the governments there, rather than on those of our own country, (which I trust your Lordships will oblige him finally to be governed by, puffed up as he is with the insolence of Asia,)--the nearest to us of the governments he appeals to is that of the Grand Seignior, the Emperor of the Turks.--_He_ an arbitrary power! Why, he has not the supreme power of his own country. Every one knows that the Grand Seignior is exalted high in _titles_, as our prerogative lawyers exalt an abstract sovereign,--and he cannot be exalted higher in our books. I say he is destitute of the first character of sovereign power: he cannot lay a tax upon his people. The next part in which he misses of a sovereign power is, that he cannot dispose of the life, of the property, or of the liberty of any of his subjects, but by what is called the _fetwah_, or sentence of the law. He cannot declare peace or war without the same sentence of the law: so much is _he_, more than European sovereigns, a subject of strict law, that he cannot declare war or peace without it. Then, if he can neither touch life nor property, if he cannot lay a tax on his subjects, or declare peace or war, I leave it to your Lordships' judgment, whether he can be called, according to the principles of that constitution, an arbitrary power. A Turkish sovereign, if he should be judged by the body of that law to have acted against its principles, (unless he happens to be secured by a faction of the soldiery,) is liable to be deposed on the sentence of that law, and his successor comes in under the strict limitations of the ancient law of that country: neither can he hold his place, dispose of his succession, or take any one step whatever, without being bound by law. Thus much may be said, when gentlemen talk of the affairs of Asia, as to the nearest of Asiatic sovereigns: and he is more Asiatic than European, he is a Mahomedan sovereign; and no Mahomedan is born who can exercise any arbitrary power at all, consistently with their constitution; insomuch that this chief magistrate, who is the highest executive power among them, is the very person who, by the constitution of the country, is the most fettered by law.

Corruption is the true cause of the loss of all the benefits of the constitution of that country. The _practice of Asia_, as the gentleman at your bar has thought fit to say, is what he holds to; the constitution he flies away from. The question is, whether you will take the constitution of the country as your rule, or the base practices of those usurpers, robbers, and tyrants who have subverted it. Undoubtedly, much blood, murder, false imprisonment, much peculation, cruelty, and robbery are to be found in Asia; and if, instead of going to the sacred laws of the country, he chooses to resort to the iniquitous practices of it, and practices authorized only by public tumult, contention, war, and riot, he may indeed find as clear an acquittal in the practices as he would find condemnation in the institutions of it. He has rejected the law of England. Your Lordships will not suffer it. God forbid! For my part, I should have no sort of objection to let him choose his law,--Mahomedan, Tartarian, Gentoo. But if he disputes, as he does, the authority of an act of Parliament, let him state to me that law to which he means to be subject, or any law which he knows that will justify his actions. I am not authorized to say that I shall, even in that case, give up what is not in me to give up, because I represent an authority of which I must stand in awe; but, for myself, I shall confess that I am brought to public shame, and am not fit to manage the great interests committed to my charge. I therefore again repeat of that Asiatic government with which we are best acquainted, which has been constituted more in obedience to the laws of Mahomet than any other, that the sovereign cannot, agreeably to that constitution, exercise any arbitrary power whatever.

The next point for us to consider is, whether or no the Mahomedan constitution of India authorizes that power. The gentleman at your Lordships' bar has thought proper to say, that it will be happy for India, (though soon after he tells you it is an happiness they can never enjoy,) "when the despotic institutes of Genghiz Khan or Tamerlane shall give place to the liberal spirit of a British legislature; and," says he, "I shall be amply satisfied in my present prosecution, if it shall tend to hasten the approach of an event so beneficial to the great interests of mankind."

My Lords, you have seen what he says about an act of Parliament. Do you not now think it rather an extraordinary thing, that any British subject should, in vindication of the authority which he has exercised, here quote the names and institutes, as he calls them, of fierce conquerors, of men who were the scourges of mankind, whose power was a power which they held by force only?

As to the institutes of Genghiz Khan, which he calls arbitrary institutes, I never saw them. If he has that book, he will oblige the public by producing it. I have seen a book existing, called Yassa of Genghiz Khan; the other I never saw. If there be any part of it to justify arbitrary power, he will produce it. But if we may judge by those ten precepts of Genghiz Khan which we have, there is not a shadow of arbitrary power to be found in any one of them. Institutes of arbitrary power! Why, if there is arbitrary power, there can be no institutes.

As to the institutes of Tamerlane, here they are in their original, and here is a translation. I have carefully read every part of these institutes; and if any one shows me one word in them in which the prince claims in himself arbitrary power, I again repeat, that I shall for my own part confess that I have brought myself to great shame. There is no book in the world, I believe, which contains nobler, more just, more manly, more pious principles of government than this book, called the Institutions of Tamerlane. Nor is there one word of arbitrary power in it, much less of that arbitrary power which Mr. Hastings supposes himself justified by,--namely, a delegated, subordinate, arbitrary power. So far was that great prince from permitting this gross, violent, intermediate arbitrary power, that I will venture to say the chief thing by which he has recommended himself to posterity was a most direct declaration of all the wrath and indignation of the supreme government against it. But here is the book. It contains the institutes of the founder of the Mogul empire, left as a sacred legacy to his posterity, as a rule for their conduct, and as a means of preserving their power.

* * * * *

"Be it known to my fortunate sons, the conquerors of kingdoms, to my mighty descendants, the lords of the earth, that, since I have hope in Almighty God that many of my children, descendants, and posterity shall sit upon the throne of power and regal authority, upon this account, having established laws and regulations for the well governing of my dominions, I have collected together those regulations and laws as a model for others, to the end that, every one of my children, descendants, and posterity acting agreeably thereto, my power and empire, which I acquired through hardships and difficulties and perils and bloodshed, by the Divine favor, and by the influence of the holy religion of Mahomet, (God's peace be up on him!) and with the assistance of the powerful descendants and illustrious followers of that prophet, may be by them preserved. And let them make these regulations the rule of their conduct in the affairs of their empire, that the fortune and the power which shall descend from me to them may be safe from discord and dissolution.

"Now, therefore, be it known to my sons, the fortunate and the illustrious, to my descendants, the mighty subduers of kingdoms, that, in like manner as I by twelve maxims, which I established as the rule of my conduct, attained to regal dignity, and with the assistance of these maxims conquered and governed kingdoms, and decorated and adorned the throne of my empire, let them also act according to these regulations, and preserve the splendor of mine and their dominions.

"And among the rules which I established for the support of my glory and empire, the _first_ was this,--that I promoted the worship of Almighty God, and propagated the religion of the sacred Mahomet throughout the world, and at all times and in all places supported the true faith.

"_Secondly_. With the people of the twelve classes and tribes I conquered and governed kingdoms, and with them I strengthened the pillars of my fortune, and from them I formed my assembly.

"_Thirdly_. By consultation and deliberation and provident measures, by caution and by vigilance, I vanquished armies, and I reduced kingdoms to my authority. And I carried on the business of my empire by complying with times and occasions, and by generosity, and by patience, and by policy; and I acted with courteousness towards my friends and towards my enemies.

"_Fourthly_. By order and by discipline I regulated the concerns of my government; and by discipline and by order I so firmly established my authority, that the emirs and the viziers and the soldiers and the subjects could not aspire beyond their respective degrees; and every one of them was the keeper of his own station.

"_Fifthly_. I gave encouragement to my emirs and to my soldiers, and with money and with jewels I made them glad of heart; and I permitted them to come into the banquet; and in the field of blood they hazarded their lives. And I withheld not from them my gold nor my silver. And I educated and trained them to arms; and to alleviate their sufferings, I myself shared in their labors and in their hardships, until with the arm of fortitude and resolution, and with the unanimity of my chiefs and my generals and my warriors, by the edge of the sword, I obtained possession of the thrones of seven-and-twenty kings, and became the king and the ruler of the kingdoms of Eraun, and of Tooraun, and of Room, and of Mughrib, and of Shaum, and of Missur, and of Erauk-a-Arrub, and of Ajjum, and of Mauzinduraun, and of Kylaunaut, and of Shurvaunaut, and of Azzurbauejaun, and of Fauris, and of Khorausaun, and of the Dusht of Jitteh, and the Dusht of Kipchauk, and of Khauruzm, and Khuttun, and of Kauboolistaun, and of Hindostaun, and of Bauktur Zemeen.

"And when I clothed myself in the robe of empire, I shut my eyes to safety, and to the repose which is found on the bed of ease. And from the twelfth year of my age I travelled over countries, and combated difficulties, and formed enterprises, and vanquished armies, and experienced mutinies amongst my officers and my soldiers, and was familiarized to the language of disobedience; and I opposed them with policy and with fortitude, and I hazarded my person in the hour of danger; until in the end I vanquished kingdoms and empires, and established the glory of my name.

"_Sixthly_. By justice and equity I gained the affections of the people of God; and I extended my clemency to the guilty as well as to the innocent; and I passed that sentence which truth required; and by benevolence I gained a place in the hearts of men; and by rewards and punishments I kept both my troops and my subjects divided between hope and fear. And I compassionated the lower ranks of my people, and those who were distressed. And I gave gifts to the soldiers.

"And I delivered the oppressed from the hand of the oppressor; and after proof of the oppression, whether on the property or the person, the decision which I passed between them was agreeable to the sacred law. And I did not cause any one person to suffer for the guilt of another.

"Those who had done me injuries, who had attacked my person in battle, and had counteracted my schemes and enterprises, when they threw themselves on my mercy, I received them with kindness, I conferred on them additional honors, and I drew the pen of oblivion over their evil actions; and I treated them in such sort, that, if suspicion remained in their hearts, it was plucked out entirely.

"_Seventhly_, I selected out, and treated with esteem and veneration, the posterity of the Prophet, and the theologians, and the teachers of the true faith, and the philosophers, and the historians. And I loved men of courage and valor; for God Almighty loveth the brave. And I associated with good and learned men; and I gained their affections, and I entreated their support, and I sought success from their holy prayers. And I loved the dervishes and the poor; and I oppressed them not, neither did I exclude them from my favor. And I permitted not the evil and the malevolent to enter into my council; and I acted not by their advice; and I listened not to their insinuations to the prejudice of others.

"_Eighthly_. I acted with resolution; and on whatever undertaking I resolved, I made that undertaking the only object of my attention; and I withdrew not my hand from that enterprise, until I had brought it to a conclusion. And I acted according to that which I said. And I dealt not with severity towards any one, and I was not oppressive in any of my actions; that God Almighty might not deal severely towards me, nor render my own actions oppressive unto me.

"And I inquired of learned men into the laws and regulations of ancient princes, from the days of Adam to those of the Prophet, and from the days of the Prophet down to this time. And I weighed their institutions and their actions and their opinions, one by one. And from their approved manners and their good qualities I selected models. And I inquired into the causes of the subversion of their power, and I shunned those actions which tend to the destruction and overthrow of regal authority. And from cruelty and from oppression, which are the destroyers of posterity and the bringers of famine and of plagues, I found it was good to abstain.

"_Ninthly_. The situation of my people was known unto me. And those who were great among them I considered as my brethren; and I regarded the poor as my children. And I made myself acquainted with the tempers and the dispositions of the people of every country and of every city. And I contracted intimacies with the citizens and the chiefs and the nobles; and I appointed over them governors adapted to their manners and their dispositions and their wishes. And I knew the circumstances of the inhabitants of every province. And in every kingdom I appointed writers of intelligence, men of truth and integrity, that they might send me information of the conduct and the behavior and the actions and the manners of the troops and of the inhabitants, and of every occurrence that might come to pass amongst them. And if I discovered aught contrary to their information, I inflicted punishment on the intelligencer; and every circumstance of cruelty and oppression in the governors and in the troops and in the inhabitants, which reached my ears, I chastised agreeably to justice and equity.

"_Tenthly_. Whatever tribe, and whatever horde, whether Toork, or Taucheek, or Arrub, or Ajjum, came in unto me, I received their chiefs with distinction and respect, and their followers I honored according to their degrees and their stations; and to the good among them I did good, and the evil I delivered over to their evil actions.

"And whoever attached himself unto me, I forgot not the merit of his attachment, and I acted towards him with kindness and generosity; and whoever had rendered me services, I repaid the value of those services unto him. And whoever had been my enemy, and was ashamed thereof, and, flying to me for protection, humbled himself before me, I forgot his enmity, and I purchased him with liberality and kindness.

"In such manner Share Behraum, the chief of a tribe, was along with me. And he left me in the hour of action, and he united with the enemy, and he drew forth his sword against me. And at length my salt, which he had eaten, seized upon him; and he again fled to me for refuge, and humbled himself before me. As he was a man of illustrious descent, and of bravery, and of experience, I covered my eyes from his evil actions; and I magnified him, and I exalted him to a superior rank, and I pardoned his disloyalty in consideration of his valor.

"_Eleventhly_. My children, and my relations, and my associates, and my neighbors, and such as had been connected with me, all these I distinguished in the days of my fortune and prosperity, and I paid unto them their due. And with respect to my family, I rent not asunder the bands of consanguinity and mercy; and I issued not commands to slay them, or to bind them with chains.

"And I dealt with every man, whatever the judgment I had formed of him, according to my own opinion of his worth. As I had seen much of prosperity and adversity, and had acquired knowledge and experience, I conducted myself with caution and with policy towards my friends and towards my enemies.

"_Twelfthly_. Soldiers, whether associates or adversaries, I held in esteem,--those who sell their permanent happiness to perishable honor, and throw themselves into the field of slaughter and battle, and hazard their lives in the hour of danger.

"And the man who drew his sword on the side of my enemy, and committed hostilities against me, and preserved his fidelity to his master, him I greatly honored; and when such a man came unto me, knowing his worth, I classed him with my faithful associates; and I respected and valued his fidelity and his attachment.

"And the soldier who forgot his duty and his honor, and in the hour of action turned his face from his master, and came in unto me, I considered as the most detestable of men.

"And in the war between Touktummish Khaun, his emirs forgot their duty to Touktummish, who was their master and my foe, and sent proposals and wrote letters unto me. And I uttered execrations upon them, because, unmindful of that which they owed to their lord, they had thrown aside their honor and their duty, and came in unto me. I said unto myself, 'What fidelity have they observed to their liege lord? what fidelity will they show unto me?'

"And, behold, it was known unto me by experience, that every empire which is not established in morality and religion, nor strengthened by regulations and laws, from that empire all order, grandeur, and power shall pass away. And that empire may be likened unto a naked man, who, when exposed to view, commandeth the eye of modesty to be covered; and it is like unto a house which hath neither roof nor gates nor defences, into which whoever willeth may enter unmolested.

"THEREFORE I established the foundation of my empire on the morality and the religion of Islaum; and by regulations and laws I gave it stability. And by laws and by regulations I executed every business and every transaction that came before me in the course of my government."

* * * * *

I need not read any further, or I might show your Lordships the noble principles, the grand, bold, and manly maxims, the resolution to abstain from oppression himself, and to crush it in the governors under him, to be found in this book, which Mr. Hastings has thought proper to resort to as containing what he calls arbitrary principles.

But it is not in this instance only that I must do justice to the East. I assert that their morality is equal to ours, in whatever regards the duties of governors, fathers, and superiors; and I challenge the world to show in any modern European book more true morality and wisdom than is to be found in the writings of Asiatic men in high trust, and who have been counsellors to princes. If this be the true morality of Asia, as I affirm and can prove that it is, the plea founded on Mr. Hastings's geographical morality is annihilated.

I little regard the theories of travellers, where they do not relate the facts on which they are founded. I have two instances of facts attested by Tavernier, a traveller of power and consequence, which are very material to be mentioned here, because they show that in some of the instances recorded, in which the princes of the country have used any of those cruel and barbarous executions which make us execrate them, it has been upon governors who have abused their trust,--and that this very Oriental authority to which Mr. Hastings appeals would have condemned him to a dreadful punishment. I thank God, and I say it from my heart, that even for his enormous offences there neither is nor can be anything like such punishments. God forbid that we should not as much detest out-of-the-way, mad, furious, and unequal punishments as we detest enormous and abominable crimes! because a severe and cruel penalty for a crime of a light nature is as bad and iniquitous as the crime which it pretends to punish. As the instances I allude to are curious, and as they go to the principles of Mr. Hastings's defence, I shall beg to quote them.

The first is upon a governor who did what Mr. Hastings says he has a power delegated to him to do: he levied a tax without the consent of his master. "Some years after my departure from Com," says Tavernier, "the governor had, of his own accord, and without any communication with the king, laid a small impost upon every pannier of fruit brought into the city, for the purpose of making some necessary reparations in the walls and bridges of the town. It was towards the end of the year 1632 that the event I am going to relate happened. The king, being informed of the impost which the governor had laid upon the fruit, ordered him to be brought in chains to court. The king ordered him to be exposed to the people at one of the gates of the palace; then he commanded the son to pluck off the mustachios of his father, to cut off his nose and ears, to put out his eyes, and then cut off his head. The king then told the son to go and take possession of the government of his father, saying, _See that you govern better than this deceased dog, or thy doom shall be a death more exquisitely tormenting_."

My Lords, you are struck with horror, I am struck with horror, at this punishment. I do not relate it to approve of such a barbarous act, but to prove to your Lordships, that, whatever power the princes of that country have, they are jealous of it to such a degree, that, if any of their governors should levy a tax, even the most insignificant, and for the best purposes, he meets with a cruel punishment. I do not justify the punishment; but the severity of it shows how little of their power the princes of that country mean to delegate to their servants, the whole of which the gentleman at your bar says was delegated to him.

There is another case, a very strong one, and that is the case of presents, which I understand is a custom admitted throughout Asia in all their governments. It was of a person who was raised to a high office; no business was suffered to come before him without a previous present. "One morning, the king being at this time on a hunting party, the _nazar_ came to the tent of the king, but was denied entrance by the _meter_, or master of the wardrobe. About the same time the king came forth, and, seeing the nazar, commanded his officers to take off the bonnet from the head of that dog that took gifts from his people, and that he should sit three days bareheaded in the heat of the sun, and as many nights in the air. Afterwards he caused him to be chained about the neck and arms, and condemned him to perpetual imprisonment, with a _mamoudy_ a day for his maintenance; but he died for grief within eight days after he was put in prison."

Do I mean, by reading this to your Lordships, to express or intimate an approbation either of the cruelty of the punishment or of the coarse barbarism of the language? Neither one nor the other. I produce it to your Lordships to prove to you, from this dreadful example, the horror which that government felt, when any person subject to it assumed to himself a privilege to receive presents. The cruelty and severity exercised by these princes is not levelled at the poor unfortunate people who complain at their gates, but, to use their own barbarous expression, _to dogs that impose taxes and take presents_. God forbid I should use that language! The people, when they complain, are not called dogs and sent away, but the governors, who do these things against the people: they are called dogs, and treated in that cruel manner. I quote them to show that no governors in the East, upon any principle of their constitution or any good practice of their government, can lay arbitrary imposts or receive presents. When they escape, it is probably by bribery, by corruption, by creating factions for themselves in the seraglio, in the country, in the army, in the divan. But how they escape such punishments is not my business to inquire; it is enough for me that the constitution disavows them, that the princes of the country disavow them,--that they revile them with the most horrible expressions, and inflict dreadful punishments on them, when they are called to answer for these offences. Thus much concerning the Mahomedan laws of Asia. That the people of Asia have no laws, rights, or liberty, is a doctrine that wickedly is to be disseminated through this country. But I again assert, every Mahomedan government is, by its principles, a government of law.

I shall now state, from what is known of the government of India, that it does not and cannot delegate, as Mr. Hastings has frequently declared, the whole of its powers and authority to him. If they are absolute, as they must be in the supreme power, they ought to be arbitrary in none; they were, however, never absolute in any of their subordinate parts, and I will prove it by the known provincial constitutions of Hindostan, which are all Mahomedan, the laws of which are as clear, as explicit, and as learned as ours.

The first foundation of their law is the _Koran_. The next part is the _Fetwah_, or adjudged cases by proper authority, well known there. The next, the written interpretations of the principles of jurisprudence: and their books are as numerous upon the principles of jurisprudence as in any country in Europe. The next part of their law is what they call the _Kanon_,--that is, a positive rule equivalent to acts of Parliament, the law of the several powers of the country, taken from the Greek word [Greek: Kanon], which was brought into their country, and is well known. The next is the _Rawaj-ul-Mulk_, or common law and custom of the kingdom, equivalent to our common law. Therefore they have laws from more sources than we have, exactly in the same order, grounded upon the same authority, fundamentally fixed to be administered to the people upon these principles.

The next thing is to show that in India there is a partition of the powers of the government, which proves that there is no absolute power delegated.

In every province the first person is the _Subahdar_ or _Nazim_, or Viceroy: he has the power of the sword, and the administration of criminal justice only. Then there is the _Dewan_, or High Steward: he has the revenue and all exchequer causes under him, to be governed according to the law and custom and institutions of the kingdom. The law of inheritances, successions, and everything that relates to them, is under the _Cadi_, in whose court these matters are tried. But this, too, was subdivided. The Cadi could not judge, but by the advice of his assessors. Properly in the Mahomedan law there is no appeal, only a removal of the cause; but when there is no judgment, as none can be when the court is not unanimous, it goes to the general assembly of all the men of the law. There are, I will venture to say, other divisions and subdivisions; for there are the _Kanongoes_, who hold their places for life, to be the conservators of the canons, customs, and good usages of the country: all these, as well as the Cadi and the Mufti, hold their places and situations, not during the wanton pleasure of the prince, but on permanent and fixed terms for life. All these powers of magistracy, revenue, and law are all different, consequently not delegated in the whole to any one person.

This is the provincial constitution, and these the laws of Bengal; which proves, if there were no other proof, by the division of the functions and authorities, that the supreme power of the state in the Mogul empire did by no means delegate to any of its officers the supreme power in its fulness. Whether or no we have delegated to Mr. Hastings the supreme power of King and Parliament, that he should act with the plenitude of authority of the British legislature, you are to judge.

Mr. Hastings has no refuge here. Let him run from law to law; let him fly from the common law and the sacred institutions of the country in which he was born; let him fly from acts of Parliament, from which his power originated; let him plead his ignorance of them, or fly in the face of them. Will he fly to the Mahomedan law? That condemns him. Will he fly to the high magistracy of Asia to defend taking of presents? Padishah and the Sultan would condemn him to a cruel death. Will he fly to the Sophis, to the laws of Persia, or to the practice of those monarchs? I cannot utter the pains, the tortures, that would be inflicted on him, if he were to govern there as he has done in a British province. Let him fly where he will, from law to law; law, I thank God, meets him everywhere, and enforced, too, by the practice of the most impious tyrants, which he quotes as if it would justify his conduct. I would as willingly have him tried by the law of the Koran, or the Institutes of Tamerlane, as on the common law or statute law of this kingdom.

The next question is, whether the Gentoo laws justify arbitrary power: and if he finds any sanctuary there, let him take it, with the cow in the pagoda. The Gentoos have a law which positively proscribes in magistrates any idea of will,--a law with which, or rather with extracts of it, that gentleman himself has furnished us. These people in many points are governed by their own ancient written law, called the _Shaster_. Its interpreters and judges are the _Pundits_. This law is comprehensive, extending to all the concerns of life, affording principles and maxims and legal theories applicable to all cases, drawn from the sources of natural equity, modified by their institutions, full of refinement and subtilty of distinction equal to that of any other law, and has the grand test of all law, that, wherever it has prevailed, the country has been populous, flourishing, and happy.

Upon the whole, then, follow him where you will, let him have Eastern or Western law, you find everywhere arbitrary power and peculation of governors proscribed and horribly punished,--more so than I should ever wish to punish any, the most guilty, human creature. And if this be the case, as I hope and trust it has been proved to your Lordships, that there is law in these countries, that there is no delegation of power which exempts a governor from the law, then I say at any rate a British governor is to answer for his conduct, and cannot be justified by wicked examples and profligate practices.

But another thing which he says is, that he was left to himself, to govern himself by his own practice: that is to say, when he had taken one bribe, he might take another; when he had robbed one man of his property, he might rob another; when he had imprisoned one man arbitrarily, and extorted money from him, he might do so by another. He resorts at first to the practice of barbarians and usurpers; at last he comes to his own. Now, if your Lordships will try him by such maxims and principles, he is certainly clear: for there is no manner of doubt that there is nothing he has practised once which he has not practised again; and then the repetition of crimes becomes the means of his indemnity.

The next pleas he urges are not so much in bar of the impeachment as in extenuation. The first are to be laid by as claims to be made on motion for arrest of judgment, the others as an extenuation or mitigation of his fine. He says, and with a kind of triumph, "The ministry of this country have great legal assistance,--commercial lights of the greatest commercial city in the world,--the greatest generals and officers to guide and direct them in military affairs: whereas I, poor man, was sent almost a school-boy from England, or at least little better,--sent to find my way in that new world as well as I could. I had no men of the law, no legal assistance, to supply my deficiencies." _At Sphingem habebas domi._ Had he not the chief-justice, the tamed and domesticated chief-justice, who waited on him like a familiar spirit, whom he takes from province to province, his amanuensis at home, his postilion and riding express abroad?

Such a declaration would in some measure suit persons who had acted much otherwise than Mr. Hastings. When a man pleads ignorance in justification of his conduct, it ought to be an humble, modest, unpresuming ignorance, an ignorance which may have made him lax and timid in the exercise of his duty; but an assuming, rash, presumptuous, confident, daring, desperate, and disobedient ignorance heightens every crime that it accompanies. Mr. Hastings, if through ignorance he left some of the Company's orders unexecuted, because he did not understand them, might well say, "I was an ignorant man, and these things were above my capacity." But when he understands them, and when he declares he will not obey them, positively and dogmatically,--when he says, as he has said, and we shall prove it, _that he never succeeds better than when he acts in an utter defiance of those orders_, and sets at nought the laws of his country,--I believe this will not be thought the language of an ignorant man. But I beg your Lordships' pardon: it is the language of an ignorant man; for no man who was not full of a bold, determined, profligate ignorance could ever think of such a system of defence. He quitted Westminster School almost a boy. We have reason to regret that he did not finish his education in that noble seminary, which has given so many luminaries to the Church and ornaments to the State. Greatly it is to be lamented that he did not go to those Universities where arbitrary power will I hope never be heard of, but the true principles of religion, of liberty, and law will ever be inculcated, instead of studying in the school of Cossim Ali Khan.

If he had lived with us, he would have quoted the example of Cicero in his government, he would have quoted several of the sacred and holy prophets, and made _them_ his example. His want of learning, profane as well as sacred, reduces him to the necessity of appealing to every name and authority of barbarism, tyranny, and usurpation that are to be found; and from these he says, "From the practice of one part of Asia or other I have taken my rule." But your Lordships will show him that in Asia as well as in Europe the same law of nations prevails, the same principles are continually resorted to, and the same maxims sacredly held and strenuously maintained, and, however disobeyed, no man suffers from the breach of them who does not know how and where to complain of that breach,--that Asia is enlightened in that respect as well as Europe; but if it were totally blinded, that England would send out governors to teach them better, and that he must justify himself to the piety, the truth, the faith of England, and not by having recourse to the crimes and criminals of other countries, to the barbarous tyranny of Asia, or any other part of the world.

I will go further with Mr. Hastings, and admit, that, if there be a boy in the fourth form of Westminster School, or any school in England, who does not know, when these articles are read to him, that he has been guilty of gross and enormous crimes, he may have the shelter of his present plea, as far as it will serve him. There are none of us, thank God, so uninstructed, who have learned our catechisms or the first elements of Christianity, who do not know that such conduct is not to be justified, and least of all by examples.

There is another topic he takes up more seriously, and as a general rebutter to the charge. Says he, "After a great many of these practices with which I am charged, Parliament appointed me to my trust, and consequently has acquitted me."--Has it, my Lords? I am bold to say that the Commons are wholly guiltless of this charge. I will admit, if Parliament, on a full state of his offences before them, and full examination of those offences, had appointed him to the government, that then the people of India and England would have just reason to exclaim against so flagitious a proceeding. A sense of propriety and decorum might have restrained us from prosecuting. They might have been restrained by some sort of decorum from pursuing him criminally. But the Commons stand before your Lordships without shame. First, in their name we solemnly assure your Lordships that we had not in our Parliamentary capacity (and most of us, myself I can say surely, heard very little, and that in confused rumors) the slightest knowledge of any one of the acts charged upon this criminal at either of the times of his being appointed to office, and that we were not guilty of the nefarious act of collusion and flagitious breach of trust with which he presumes obliquely to charge us; but from the moment we knew them, we never ceased to condemn them by reports, by votes, by resolutions, and that we admonished and declared it to be the duty of the Court of Directors to take measures for his recall, and when frustrated in the way known to that court we then proceeded to an inquiry. Your Lordships know whether you were better informed. We are, therefore, neither guilty of the precedent crime of colluding with the criminal, nor the subsequent indecorum of prosecuting what we had virtually and practically approved.

Secondly, several of his worst crimes have been committed since the last Parliamentary renewal of his trust, as appears by the dates in the charge.

But I believe, my Lords, the judges--judges to others, grave and weighty counsellors and assistants to your Lordships--will not, on reference, assert to your Lordships, (which God forbid, and we cannot conceive, or hardly state in argument, if but for argument,) that, if one of the judges had received bribes before his appointment to an higher judiciary office, he would not still be open to prosecution.

So far from admitting it as a plea in bar, we charge, and we hope your Lordships will find it an extreme aggravation of his offences, that no favors heaped upon him could make him grateful, no renewed and repeated trusts could make him faithful and honest.

We have now gone through most of the general topics.

But he is not responsible, as being thanked by the Court of Directors. He has had the thanks and approbation of the India Company for his services.--We know too well here, I trust the world knows, and you will always assert, that a pardon from the crown is not pleadable here, that it cannot bar the impeachment of the Commons,--much less a pardon of the East India Company, though it may involve them in guilt which might induce us to punish them for such a pardon. If any corporation by collusion with criminals refuse to do their duty in coercing them, the magistrates are answerable.

It is the use, virtue, and efficacy of Parliamentary judicial procedure, that it puts an end to this dominion of faction, intrigue, cabal, and clandestine intelligences. The acts of men are put to their proper test, and the works of darkness tried in the face of day,--not the corrupted opinions of others on them, but their own intrinsic merits. We charge it as his crime, that he bribed the Court of Directors to thank him for what they had condemned as breaches of his duty.

The East India Company, it is true, have thanked him. They ought not to have done it; and it is a reflection upon their character that they did it. But the Directors praise him in the gross, after having condemned each act in detail. His actions are _all_, every one, censured one by one as they arise. I do not recollect any one transaction, few there are, I am sure, in the whole body of that succession of crimes now brought before you for your judgment, in which the India Company have not censured him. Nay, in one instance he pleads their censure in bar of this trial;[27] for he says, "In that censure I have already received my punishment." If, for any other reasons, they come and say, "We thank you, Sir, for all your services," to that I answer, Yes; and _I_ would thank him for his services, too, if I knew them. But _I_ do not;--perhaps _they_ do. Let them thank him for those services. I am ordered to prosecute him for these crimes. Here, therefore, we are on a balance with the India Company; and your Lordships may perhaps think it some addition to his crimes, that he has found means to obtain the thanks of the India Company for the whole of his conduct, at the same time that their records are full of constant, uniform, particular censure and reprobation of every one of those acts for which he now stands accused.

He says, there is the testimony of Indian princes in his favor. But do we not know how seals are obtained in that country? Do we not know how those princes are imposed upon? Do we not know the subjection and thraldom in which they are held, and that they are obliged to return thanks for the sufferings which they have felt? I believe your Lordships will think that there is not, with regard to some of these princes, a more dreadful thing that can be said of them than that he has obtained their thanks.

I understand he has obtained the thanks of the miserable Princesses of Oude, whom he has cruelly imprisoned, whose treasure he has seized, and whose eunuchs he has tortured.[28] They thank him for going away; they thank him for leaving them the smallest trifle of their subsistence; and I venture to say, if he wanted a hundred more panegyrics, provided he never came again among them, he might have them. I understand that Mahdajee Sindia has made his panegyric, too. Mahdajee Sindia has not made his panegyric for nothing; for, if your Lordships will suffer him to enter into such a justification, we shall prove that he has sacrificed the dignity of this country and the interests of all its allies to that prince. We appear here neither with panegyric nor with satire; it is for substantial crimes we bring him before you, and amongst others for cruelly using persons of the highest rank and consideration in India; and when we prove he has cruelly injured them, you will think the panegyrics either gross forgeries or most miserable aggravations of his offences, since they show the abject and dreadful state into which he has driven those people. For let it be proved that I have cruelly robbed and maltreated any persons, if I produce a certificate from them of my good behavior, would it not be a corroborative proof of the terror into which those persons are thrown by my misconduct?

* * * * *

My Lords, these are, I believe, the general grounds of our charge. I have now closed completely, and I hope to your Lordships' satisfaction, the whole body of history of which I wished to put your Lordships in possession. I do not mean that many of your Lordships may not have known it more perfectly by your own previous inquiries; but, bringing to your remembrance the state of the circumstances of the persons with whom he acted, the persons and power he has abused, I have gone to the principles he maintains, the precedents he quotes, the laws and authorities which he refuses to abide by, and those on which he relies; and at last I have refuted all those pleas in bar on which he depends, and for the effect of which he presumes on the indulgence and patience of this country, or on the corruption of some persons in it. And here I close what I had to say upon this subject,--wishing and hoping, that, when I open before your Lordships the case more particularly, so as to state rather a plan of the proceeding than the direct proof of the crimes, your Lordships will hear me with the same goodness and indulgence I have hitherto experienced,--that you will consider, if I have detained you long, it was not with a view of exhausting my own strength, or putting your patience to too severe a trial, but from the sense I feel that it is the most difficult and the most complicated cause that was ever brought before any human tribunal. Therefore I was resolved to bring the whole substantially before you. And now, if your Lordships will permit me, I will state the method of my future proceeding, and the future proceeding of the gentlemen assisting me.

I mean first to bring before you the crimes as they are classed, and are of the same species and genus, and how they mutually arose from one another. I shall first show that Mr. Hastings's crimes had root in that which is the root of all evil, I mean avarice; that avarice and rapacity were the groundwork and foundation of all his other vicious system; that he showed it in setting to sale the native government of the country, in setting to sale the whole landed interest of the country, in setting to sale the British government and his own fellow-servants, to the basest and wickedest of mankind.

I shall then show your Lordships, that, when, in consequence of such a body of corruption and peculation, he justly dreaded the indignation of his country and the vengeance of its laws, in order to raise himself a faction embodied by the same guilt and rewarded in the same manner, he has, with a most abandoned profusion, thrown away the revenues of the country to form such a faction here.

I shall next show your Lordships, that, having exhausted the resources of the Company, and brought it to extreme difficulties within, he has looked to his _external_ resources, as he calls them; he has gone up into the country. I will show that he has plundered, or attempted to plunder, every person dependent upon, connected, or allied with this country.

We shall afterwards show what infinite mischief has followed in the case of Benares, upon which he first laid his hands; next, in the case of the Begums of Oude.

We shall then lay before you the profligate system by which he endeavored to oppress that country: first by Residents; next by spies under the name of British Agents; and lastly, that, pursuing his way up to the mountains, he has found out one miserable chief, whose crimes were the prosperity of his country,--that him he endeavored to torture and destroy,--I do not mean in his body, but by exhausting the treasures which he kept for the benefit of his people.

In short, having shown your Lordships that no man who is in his power is safe from his arbitrary will,--that no man, within or without, friend, ally, rival, has been safe from him,--having brought it to this point, if I am not able in my own person immediately to go up into the country and show the ramifications of the system, (I hope and trust I shall be spared to take my part in pursuing him through both,) if I am not, I shall go at least to the root of it, and some other gentleman, with a thousand times more ability than I possess, will take up each separate part in its proper order. And I believe it is proposed by the managers that one of them shall as soon as possible begin with the affair of Benares.

The point I now mean first to bring before your Lordships is the corruption of Mr. Hastings, his system of peculation and bribery, and to show your Lordships the horrible consequences which resulted from it: for, at first sight, bribery and peculation do not seem to be so horrid a matter; they may seem to be only the transferring a little money out of one pocket into another; but I shall show that by such a system of bribery the country is undone.

I shall inform your Lordships in the best manner I can, and afterwards submit the whole, as I do with a cheerful heart and with an easy and assured security, to that justice which is the security for all the other justice in the kingdom.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 2d year of George II.

[2] See his letter of the 11th of July, 1785, at the end of the Charges.

[3] 13 Geo. III. c. 63, Sec. 10.

[4] 29 February, 1784.

[5] Dated, Benares, 4th of November, 1781.

[6] Revenue Consultation, 28th January, 1775.

[7] Revenue Board, 14th May, 1772.

[8] Address to the Court of Directors, 25th March, 1775.

[9] 3d November, 1772.

[10] 24th October, 1774.

[11] 22d April, 1775.

[12] 5th February, 1777; 4th July, 1777.

[13] 3d November, 1772.

[14] 14th May, 1772.

[15] See his letter of the 11th July, 1785, at the end of the Charges.

[16] Sic orig.

[17] 28th May, 1782.

[18] 15th Dec, 1775.

[19] On the 15th of November.

[20] Resolution of the House of Commons, 28th May, 1782.

[21] Anderson's letter of 26th January, 1782.

[22] Anderson's letter of 24th February, 1782.

[23] Sic orig.

[24] Sic orig.

[25] Observations on Mr. Bristow's Defence.

[26] As the letter referred to in the Eighth and Sixteenth Articles of Charge is not contained in any of the Appendixes to the Reports of the Select Committee, it has been thought necessary to annex it as an Appendix to these Charges.

[27] See Mr. Hastings's answer to the first charge.

[28] A Latin sentence, which was quoted here, is omitted in the MS of the short-hand writer.--Ed.

END OF VOL. IX.