Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  LXXIII. That, among the reasons assigned for putting to death the said Almas Ali, which the said Hastings did recommend directly and repeatedly to the Resident, “as one of the first and most essential duties of his office,” was, in substance, “that, by his extensive trust with regard to the revenues, he had been permitted to acquire independency; that the means thereof had been long seen and the effects thereof foretold by every person acquainted with the state of government, except those immediately interested in it”; and he, the said Warren Hastings, did also charge the said Almas Ali with embezzlement of the revenues and oppression of the people; and nothing appears to disprove the same, but much to give ground to a presumption that the said Almas Ali did grievously abuse the power committed to him, as farmer and collector of the revenue, to the great oppression of the inhabitants of the countries which had been rented to him by Hyder Beg Khân with the knowledge and consent of the said Warren Hastings.

  LXXIV. That the Resident, Bristow, declining the violent attempt on the life of Almas Ali deceitfully ordered by the said Warren Hastings, did, on weighty reasons, drawn from the spirit of the said Hastings’s own instructions, recommend that his, the said Almas Ali Khân’s, farms of revenue, or a great part of them, should be, on the expiration of his lease, taken out of his hands, as being too extensive, and supplying the means of a dangerous power in the country; but yet he, the said Warren Hastings, did not only continue him in the possession of the said revenues, but did give to him a new lease thereof for the term of five years. And on this renovation and increase of trust, the said Warren Hastings did not consent to produce the informer upon whose credit he had made his charge of capital crimes on the said Almas Ali, and had directed him to be put to death, or call upon him to make good his charges; but, instead of this, totally changing his relation to the said Almas Ali, did himself labor to procure from all parts attestations to prove him not guilty of the perfidy and disloyalty of which the said Hastings himself appears to have been to that very time his sole accuser, as he hath since been his most anxious advocate: but though he did use many endeavors to acquit Almas Ali of his intended flight, yet concerning his embezzlements and oppressions, the most important of all charges relative to that of the revenue and collection, he, the said Hastings, hath made no inquiry whatever; by which it might appear that he was not as fully guilty thereof as he had always represented him to be. But some time after he, the said Warren Hastings, had arrived at Lucknow, in the year 1784, he suggested to the said Almas Ali Khân the advance to the Company’s use of a sum of money amounting to fifty thousand pounds or thereabouts; and the said suggested advance was (as the said Warren Hastings asserts, no witness or document of the transaction appearing) “cheerfully and without hesitation complied with, considering it as an evidence seasonably offered for the general refutation of the charges of perfidy and disloyalty”: which practice of charging wealthy persons with treason and disloyalty, and afterwards acquitting them on the payment of a sum of money, is highly scandalous to the honor, justice, and government of Great Britain; and the offence is highly aggravated by the said Hastings’s declaration to the Court of Directors that the charges against Almas Ali Khân have been too laboriously urged against him, and carried at one time to such an excess as had nearly driven him to abandon his country “for the preservation of his life and honor,” and thus to give a “color to the charges themselves,” when he, the said Warren Hastings, did well know that he himself did consider as a crime, and did make it an article in a formal accusation against the Resident Middleton, that he did not inform him, the said Hastings, of the supposed treasons of Almas Ali Khân, and of his design to abandon the country, when he himself did most laboriously urge the charges against him, and when no attempt appears to have been made against the life of the said Almas Ali Khân except by the said Warren Hastings himself.

  LXXV. That the sum of fifty thousand pounds sterling, or thereabouts, publicly taken by the said Warren Hastings, as an advance for the use of the Company, if given as a consideration or fine, on account of the renewal for a long term of civil authority and military command, and the collection of the revenues to an immense amount, the same being at least eight hundred thousand pounds sterling yearly, was so totally inadequate to the interest granted, that it may justly be presumed it was not on that, or on any public ground or condition, that the said Hastings did delegate, out of all reach of resumption or correction, a lease of boundless power and enormous profit, for so long a term, to a known oppressor of the country.

  LXXVI. That Warren Hastings, being at Lucknow in consequence of his deputation aforesaid, did, in his letter from that city, dated 30th of April, 1784, recommend to the Court of Directors, “as his last and ultimate hope, that their wisdom would put a final period to the ruinous and disreputable system of interference, whether avowed or secret, in the affairs of the Nabob of Oude, and withdraw forever the influence by which it is maintained,” and that they ought to confine their views to the sole maintenance of the old brigade stationed in Oude by virtue of the first treaty with the reigning Nabob, expressing himself in the following words to the Court of Directors. “If you transgress that line, you may extend the distribution of patronage, and add to the fortunes of individuals, and to the nominal riches of Great Britain; but your own interests will suffer by it; and the ruin of a great and once flourishing nation will he recorded as the work of your administration, with an everlasting reproach to the British name. To this reasoning I shall join the obligations of justice and good faith, which cut off every pretext for your exercising any power or authority in this country, as long as the sovereign of it fulfils the engagements he has articled with you.”

  LXXVII. That it appears by the extraordinary recommendation aforesaid, asserted by him, the said Hastings, to be enforced by the “obligations of justice and good faith,” that the said Warren Hastings, at the time of writing the said letter, had made an agreement to withdraw the British interference, represented by him as a “ruinous and disreputable system,” out of the dominions of the Nabob of Oude. But the instrument itself, in which the said agreement is made, (if at all existing,) does not appear; nor hath the said Hastings transmitted any documents relative to the said treaty, which is a neglect highly criminal, — especially as he has informed the Company, in his letter from Benares, “that he has promised the Nabob that he will not abandon him to the chance of any other mode of relation, and most confidently given him assurance of the ratification and confirmation of that which he [the said Hastings] had established between his government and the Company”: the said confident assurance being given to an agreement never produced, and made without any sort of authority from the Court of Directors, — an agreement precluding, on the one hand, the operation of the discretion of his masters in the conduct of their affairs, or, on the other, subjecting them to the hazard of an imputation on their faith, by breaking an engagement confidently made in their name, though without their consent, by the first officer of their government.

  That the said Hastings, further to preclude the operation of such discretionary conduct in the administration of this kingdom as circumstances might call for, has informed the Directors that he has gone so far as even to condition the existence of the revenue itself with the exclusion of the Company, his masters, from all interference whatsoever: for in his letter to Mr. Wheler, dated Benares, 20th September, 1784, are the following words. “The aumils [collectors] demanded that a clause should be inserted in their engagements, that they were to be in full force for the complete term of their leases, provided that no foreign authority was exercised over them, — or, in other words, that their engagements were to cease whenever they should be interrupted in their functions by the interference of an English agent. This requisition was officially notified to me by the acting minister, and referred to me in form by the Nabob Vizier, for my previous consent to it. I encouraged it, and I gave my consent to it.” And the said Hastings has been guilty of the high presumption to inform his said mas
ters, that he has taken that course to compel them not to violate the assurances given by him in their name: “There is one condition” (namely, the above condition) “which essentially connects the confirmation of the settlement itself with the interests of the Company.”

  LXXVIII. That the said Warren Hastings, who did show an indecent distrust of the Company’s faith, did endeavor, before that time, at other times, namely, in his instructions to his secret agent, Major Palmer, dated the 6th of May, 1782, to limit the confidence to be reposed in the British government to the duration of his own power, in the following words in the fifth article. “It is very much my desire to impress the Nabob with a thorough confidence in the faith and justice of our government, — that is to say, in my own, while I am at the head of it: I cannot be answerable for the acts of others independent of me.”

  LXXIX. That the said Warren Hastings did, in his letter, dated Benares, the 1st of October, 1784, to the Court of Directors, write, “that, if they [the Directors] manifested no symptoms of an (1.) intended interference, the objects of his engagements will be obtained; (2.) but if a different policy shall be adopted, — if new agents are sent into the country, and armed with authority for the purposes of vengeance or corruption (for to no other will they be applied), — if new demands are made on the Nabob Vizier, (4.) and accounts overcharged on one side, with a wide latitude taken on the other, to swell his debt beyond the means of payment, — (5.) if political dangers are portended, to ground on them the plea of burdening his country with unnecessary defences and enormous subsidies, — (6.) or if, even abstaining from direct encroachment on the Nabob’s rights, your government shall show but a degree of personal kindness to the partisans of the late usurpation, or by any constructive indication of partiality and dissatisfaction furnish grounds for the expectation of an approaching change of system, — I am sorry to say, that all my labors will prove abortive.”

  LXXX. That all the measures deprecated in future by the said Warren Hastings, with a reference to former conduct, in his several letters aforesaid, being (so far as the same are intelligible) six in number, have been all of them the proper acts and measures of the said Warren Hastings himself. For he did himself first of all introduce, and did afterwards continue and support, that interference which he now informs the Court of Directors “is ruinous and disreputable, and which the very symptoms of an intention to renew” he considers in the highest degree dangerous; he did direct, with a controlling and absolute authority, in every department of government, and in every district in the dominions of the Nabob of Oude. Secondly, the appointment of agents, which was eminently the act of his own administration: he not only retaining many agents in the country of Oude, both “secret and avowed,” but also sending some of them, in defiance to the orders of that very Court of Directors, to whom, in his said letter of the 1st of October, 1784, he assigns “vengeance and corruption” as the only motives that can produce such appointments. Thirdly, that he, the said Warren Hastings, did instruct one of the said agents, and did charge him upon pain of “a dreadful responsibility,” to perform sundry acts of violence against persons of the highest distinction and nearest relation to the prince; which acts were justly liable to the imputation of “vengeance” in the execution, and which he, in his reply to the defence of Middleton to one of his charges, did declare to be liable to the suspicion of “corruption in the relaxation.” Fourthly, that he did raise new demands on the Vizier, “and overcharge accounts on one side and take a wide latitude on the other,” by sending up a new and before unheard-of overcharge of four hundred thousand pounds and upwards, not made by the Resident or admitted by the Vizier, and, by adding the same, did swell his debt “beyond the means of payment”; and did even insert, as the ninth article of his charge against Middleton, “his omitting to take any notice of the additional balance of Rupees 26,48,571, stated by the Accountant-General to be due from the Vizier on the 30th of April, 1780,” to which he did add fourteen lac more, making together the above sum. Fifthly, that he, the said Warren Hastings, did assign “political dangers,” in his minute of the 13th December, 1779, for burdening the said Nabob of Oude “with unnecessary defences and enormous subsidies,” with regard to which he then declared, that “it was our part, not his [the Nabob’s], to judge and to determine.” And, sixthly, that he did not only show the design, but the fact, of personal kindness to the partisans of what he here calls, as well as in another letter, and in one Minute of Consultation, a “late usurpation,” — he having rewarded the principal and most obnoxious of the instruments of the said late usurpation, (if such it was,) Richard Johnson, Esquire, with an honorable and profitable embassy to the court of the Nizam.

  LXXXI. That the said Warren Hastings, therefore, — by assuming an authority which he himself did consider as an usurpation, and by acts in virtue of that usurped authority, done in his own proper person and by agents appointed by himself, and proceeding (though with some mitigation, for which one of them was by him censured and accused) under his own express and positive orders and instructions, and thereby establishing, as he himself observed, “a system of interference, disreputable and ruinous, which could only be subservient to promote patronage, private interest, private embezzlement, corruption, and vengeance,” to the public detriment of the Company, “and to the ruin of a once flourishing nation, and eternally reproachful to the British name,” and for the evil effects of which system, “as his sole and ultimate hope” and remedy, he recommends an entire abdication, forever, not only of all power and authority, but even of the interference and influence of Great Britain, — is guilty of an high crime and misdemeanor.

  LXXXII. That the said Warren Hastings, in his letter from Chunar of the 29th of November, 1781, has represented that very influence and interference, which in three public papers he denominates “a late usurpation” as being authorized by a regular treaty and agreement, voluntarily made with the Nabob himself, at a place called Chunar, on the 19th of September, 1781, a copy of which hath been transmitted to the Court of Directors, — and that three persons were present at the execution of the same, two whereof were Middleton and Johnson, his agents and Residents at Oude, the third the minister of the Nabob. And he did, in his paper written to the Council-General, and transmitted to the Court of Directors, not only declare that the said interference was agreed to by the said Nabob, and sealed with his seal, but would be highly beneficial to him: assuring the said Council, “that, if the Resident performed his duty in the execution of his [the said Hastings’s] instructions, the Nabob’s part of the engagement will prove of still greater benefit to him than to our government, in whose behalf it was exacted; and that the participation which is allowed our Resident in the inspection of the public treasure will secure the receipt of the Company’s demands, whilst the influence which our government will ALWAYS possess over the public minister of the Nabob, and the authority of our own, will be an effectual means of securing an attentive and faithful discharge of their several trusts, both towards the Company and the Vizier.”

  LXXXIII. And the said Warren Hastings did not only settle a plan, of which the agency and interference aforesaid was a part, and assert the beneficial consequences thereof, but did also record, that the same “was a great public measure, constituted on a large and established system, and destructive, in its instant effects, of the interest and fortune of many patronized individuals”; and in consequence of the said treaty, he, the said Warren Hastings, did authorize and positively require his agent aforesaid to interfere in and control and regulate all the Nabob’s affairs whatsoever: and the said Warren Hastings having made for the Company, and in its name, an acquisition of power and authority, even if it had been abused by others, he ought to have remedied the abuse, and brought the guilty to condign punishment, instead of making another treaty without their approbation, consent, or knowledge, and to this time not communicated to them, by which it appears he has annulled the former treaty, and the authority thereby acquired to the Company, as a grievan
ce and usurpation, to which, from the general corruption of their service, no other remedy could be applied than a formal renunciation of their power and influence: for which said actings and doings the said Warren Hastings is guilty of an high crime and misdemeanor.

  LXXXIV. That the Company’s army in India is an object requiring the most vigilant and constant inspection, both to the happiness of the natives, the security of the British power, and to its own obedience and discipline, and does require that inspection in proportion as it is removed from the principal seat of government; and the number and discipline of the troops kept up by the native princes, along with British troops, is also of great moment and importance to the same ends. That Warren Hastings, Esquire, pretending to pursue the same, did, in virtue of an authority acquired by the treaty of Chunar aforesaid, give strict orders, and to which he did demand a most implicit obedience, that all officers of the Nabob’s army should be appointed “with the concurrence of the Resident,” and supposing the case that persons of obnoxious description or of known disaffection to the British government should be appointed, (of which he left the Resident to be the judge,) he did direct in the following words: “You are in such case to remonstrate against it; and if the Vizier should persist in his choice, you are peremptorily, and in my name, to oppose it as a breach of his agreement”; and he did also direct that the “mootiana [or soldiers employed for the collection of revenue] should be reformed, and reduced into one corps for the whole service, and that no infantry should be left in the Nabob’s service but what may be necessary for his bodyguard”; and he did further order and direct as follows: “That in quelling disturbances the commander of the forces should assist you [the said Resident] on the requisition of the Vizier communicated through you to him [the said commander], or at your own tingle application. It is directed that the regiment ordered for the immediate protection of your office and person at Lucknow shall be relieved every three months, and during its stay there shall act solely and exclusively under your orders.” And it appears in the course of the Company’s correspondence, that the country troops under the Nabob’s sole direction would be ill-disciplined and unserviceable, if not worse, and therefore the said Warren Hastings did order that “no infantry should be kept in his service”; yet it appears that the said Warren Hastings did make an arrangement for a body of native troops wholly out of the control or inspection of the British government, and left a written order in the hands of Major Palmer (one of his agents, who had been continued there, though the Company was not permitted to employ any) to be transmitted to Colonel Cumming as soon as an adequate force shall be provided for the defence of the Nabob’s frontier by detachments from the Nabob’s own battalions, — the said Colonel Cumming’s forces, whom the others were to supersede and replace, consisting wholly of infantry, and which, being intended for the same service, were probably of the same constitution.