Chapter 12

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

It is a pleasant thing to see in these addresses the different character and modes of eloquence of different countries. In those that will be brought before your Lordships you will see the beauty of chaste European panegyric improved by degrees into high, Oriental, exaggerated, and inflated metaphor. You will see how the language is first written in English, then translated into Persian, and then retranslated into English. There may be something amusing to your Lordships in this, and the beauty of these styles may, in this heavy investigation, tend to give a little gayety and pleasure. We shall bring before you the European and Asiatic incense. You will have the perfume-shops of the two countries.

One of the accusations which we mean to bring against Mr. Hastings is upon the part of the Zemindar Radanaut, of the country of Dinagepore. Now hear what the Zemindar says himself. "As it has been learned by me, the mutsuddies, and the respectable officers of my zemindary, that the ministers of England are displeased with the late Governor, Warren Hastings, Esquire, upon the suspicion that he oppressed us, took money from us by deceit and force, and ruined the country, therefore we, upon the strength of our religion, which we think it incumbent on and necessary for us to abide by, following the rules laid down in giving evidence, declare the particulars of the acts and deeds of Warren Hastings, Esquire, full of circumspection and caution, civility and justice, superior to the conduct of the most learned, and, by representing what is fact, wipe away the doubts that have possessed the minds of the ministers of England; that Mr. Hastings is possessed of fidelity and confidence, and yielding protection to us; that he is clear of the contamination of mistrust and wrong, and his mind is free of covetousness or avarice. During the time of his administration no one saw other conduct than that of protection to the husbandman, and justice. No inhabitant ever experienced afflictions, no one ever felt oppression from him; our reputations have always been guarded from attacks by his prudence, and our families have always been protected by his justice. He never omitted the smallest instance of kindness towards us, but healed the wounds of despair with the salve of consolation by means of his benevolent and kind behavior, never permitting one of us to sink in the pit of despondence. He supported every one by his goodness, overset the designs of evil-minded men by his authority, tied the hand of oppression with the strong bandage of justice, and by these means expanded the pleasing appearance of happiness and joy over us. He reëstablished justice and impartiality. We were during his government in the enjoyment of perfect happiness and ease, and many of us are thankful and satisfied. As Mr. Hastings was well acquainted with our manners and customs, he was always desirous, in every respect, of doing whatever would preserve our religious rites, and guard them against every kind of accident and injury, and at all times protected us. Whatever we have experienced from him, and whatever happened from him, we have written without deceit or exaggeration."

My Lords, here is a panegyric; and, directly contrary to the usual mode of other accusers, we begin by producing the panegyrics made upon the person whom we accuse. We shall produce along with the charge, and give as evidence, the panegyric and certificate of the persons whom we suppose to have suffered these wrongs. We suffer ourselves even to abandon, what might be our last resource, his own confession, by showing that one of the princes from whom he confesses that he took bribes has given a certificate of the direct contrary.

All these things will have their weight upon your Lordships' minds; and when we have put ourselves under this disadvantage, (what disadvantage it is your Lordships will judge,) at least we shall stand acquitted of unfairness in charging him with crimes directly contrary to the panegyrics in this paper contained. Indeed, I will say this for him, that general charge and loose accusation may be answered by loose and general panegyric, and that, if ours were of that nature, this panegyric would be sufficient to overset our accusation. But we come before your Lordships in a different manner and upon different grounds. I am ordered by the Commons of Great Britain to support the charge that they have made, and persevere in making, against Warren Hastings, Esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal, and now a culprit at your bar: First, for having taken corruptly several bribes, and extorted by force, or under the power and color of his office, several sums of money from the unhappy natives of Bengal. The next article which we shall bring before you is, that he is not only personally corrupted, but that he has personally corrupted all the other servants of the Company,--those under him, whose corruptions he ought to have controlled, and those above him, whose business it was to control his corruptions.

We purpose to make good to your Lordships the first of these, by submitting to you, that part of those sums which are specified in the charge were taken by him with his own hand and in his own person, but that much the greater part have been taken from the natives by the instrumentality of his black agents, banians, and other dependants,--whose confidential connection with him, and whose agency on his part in corrupt transactions, if his counsel should be bold enough to challenge us to the proof, we shall fully prove before you. The next part, and the second branch of his corruption, namely, what is commonly called his active corruption, distinguishing the personal under the name of passive, will appear from his having given, under color of contracts, a number of corrupt and lucrative advantages from a number of unauthorized and unreasonable grants, pensions, and allowances, by which he corrupted actively the whole service of the Company. And, lastly, we shall show, that, by establishing a universal connivance from one end of the service to the other, he has not only corrupted and contaminated it in all its parts, but bound it in a common league of iniquity to support mutually each other against the inquiry that should detect and the justice that should punish their offences. These two charges, namely, of his active and passive corruption, we shall bring one after the other, as strongly and clearly illustrating and as powerfully confirming each other.

The first which we shall bring before you is his own passive corruption,--so we commonly call it. Bribes are so little known in this country that we can hardly get clear and specific technical names to distinguish them; but in future, I am afraid, the conduct of Mr. Hastings will improve our law vocabulary. The first, then, of these offences with which Mr. Hastings stands charged here is receiving bribes himself, or through his banians. Every one of these are overt acts of the general charge of bribery, and they are every one of them, separately taken, substantive crimes. But whatever the criminal nature of these acts was, (and the nature was very criminal, and the consequences to the country very dreadful,) yet we mean to prove to your Lordships that they were not single acts, that they were not acts committed as opportunity offered, or as necessity tempted or urged upon the occasion, but that they are parts of a general systematic plan of corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense of his integrity; that he has, for that purpose, not only taken the opportunity of his own power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and created complete revolutions in the country's government, for the purpose of making the power which ought to be subservient to legal government subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice, he endeavored to justify them by principle. These artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy, and subvert forever.

My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of collusion, concealment, and deceit, your Lordships will, perhaps, not feel the same degree of interest as in the others. Hitherto you have had before you crimes of dignity: you have had before you the ruin and expulsion of great and illustrious families, the breach of solemn public treaties, the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses in Asia. But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination are not always the most pernicious in their effects: in these high, eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort of corrective to their virulence. The occasions on which they can be exercised are rare; the persons upon whom they can be exercised few; the persons who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many. These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in eminent station.

But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect that high situation,--when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery--when all these follow in one train,--when these vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt government. They are reptile vices. There are situations in which the acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of little importance. In the other, the mischief of the example is infinite.

My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the inferior parts of the service. The bridles upon hard-mouthed passion are removed; they are taken away; they are broken. Fear and shame, the great guards to virtue next to conscience, are gone. Shame! how can it exist?--it will soon blush away its awkward sensibility. Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long, when it is seen that crimes which naturally bring disgrace are attended with all the outward symbols, characteristics, and rewards of honor and of virtue,--when it is seen that high station, great rank, general applause, vast wealth follow the commission of peculation and bribery. Is it to be believed that men can long be ashamed of that which they see to be the road to honor? As to fear, let a Governor-General once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service. What have they to fear? Is it the man whose example they follow that is to bring them before a tribunal for their punishment? Can he open any inquiry? He cannot: he that opens a channel of inquiry under these circumstances opens a high-road to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent it? None: for he can make no laws to restrain that practice without the breach of his own laws immediately in his own conduct. If we once can admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope left in the supreme justice of the country. We are sensible of all these difficulties; we have felt them; and perhaps it has required no small degree of exertion for us to get the better of these difficulties which are thrown in our way by a Governor-General accepting bribes, and thereby screening and protecting the whole service in such iniquitous proceedings.

With regard to this matter, we are to state to your Lordships, in order to bring it fully and distinctly before you, what the nature of this distemper of bribery is in the Indian government. We are to state what the laws and rules are which have been opposed to prevent it, and the utter insufficiency of all that have been proposed: to state the grievance, the instructions of the Company and government, the acts of Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of Parliament. We are to state to your Lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are to state the trust the Company had in him for the prevention of all those evils; and then we are to prove that every evil, that all those grievances which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a special, direct, and immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person collectively, has done more mischief than all those persons whose evil practices have produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own appointment.

The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company's affairs in India, from the time of their first establishment there. Very often there are no words nor any description which can adequately convey the state of a thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself: because the former might be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that which was really fact to be nothing but the coloring of the person that explained it; and therefore I think that it will be much better to give to your Lordships here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when the Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings entered into, and when they took those measures to prevent the very evils from persons placed in those very stations and in those very circumstances in which we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the offences we now bring before you.

I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to read a consultation of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming the state of the Company, in order to show the magnitude of the pecuniary corruptions that prevailed in it.

"It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and profess to your interests and to our own honor, that we think it indispensably necessary to lay open to your view a series of transactions too notoriously known to be suppressed, and too affecting to your interest, to the national character, and to the existence of the Company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured,--transactions which seem to demonstrate that every spring of this government was smeared with corruption, that principles of rapacity and oppression universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment and public spirit was lost and extinguished in the unbounded lust of unmerited wealth.

"To illustrate these positions, we must exhibit to your view a most unpleasing variety of complaints, inquiries, accusations, and vindications, the particulars of which are entered in our Proceedings and the Appendix,--assuring you that we undertake this task with peculiar reluctance, from the personal regard we entertain for some of the gentlemen whose characters will appear to be deeply affected.

"At Fort St. George we received the first advices of the demise of Mir Jaffier and of Sujah Dowlah's defeat. It was there firmly imagined that no definite measures would be taken, either in respect to a peace or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our arrival,--as the 'Lapwing' arrived in the month of January with your general letter, and the appointment of a committee with express powers to that purpose, for the successful exertion of which the happiest occasion now offered. However, a contrary resolution prevailed in the Council. The opportunity of acquiring immense fortunes was too inviting to be neglected, and the temptation too powerful to be resisted. A treaty was hastily drawn up by the board, or rather transcribed, with few unimportant additions, from that concluded with Mir Jaffier,--and a deputation, consisting of Messrs. Johnstone, senior, Middleton, and Leycester, appointed to raise the natural son of the deceased Nabob to the subahdarry, in prejudice of the claim of the grandson; and for this measure such reasons are assigned as ought to have dictated a diametrically opposite resolution. Meeran's son was a minor, which circumstance alone would have naturally brought the whole administration into our hands, at a juncture when it became indispensably necessary we should realize that shadow of power and influence which, having no solid foundation, was exposed to the danger of being annihilated by the first stroke of adverse fortune. But this inconsistence was not regarded; nor was it material to the views for precipitating the treaty, which was pressed on the young Nabob at the first interview, in so earnest and indelicate a manner as highly disgusted him and chagrined his ministers; while not a single rupee was stipulated for the Company, whose interests were sacrificed, that their servants might revel in the spoils of a treasury before impoverished, but now totally exhausted.