by Edmund Burke
Upon the plan which I laid down, and to which I beg leave to return, I was considering the conduct of the Company to those nations which are indirectly subject to their authority. The most considerable of the dependent princes is the Nabob of Oude. My right honorable friend, to whom we owe the remedial bills on your table, has already pointed out to you, in one of the reports, the condition of that prince, and as it stood in the time he alluded to. I shall only add a few circumstances that may tend to awaken some sense of the manner in which the condition of the people is affected by that of the prince, and involved in it, — and to show you, that, when we talk of the sufferings of princes, we do not lament the oppression of individuals, — and that in these cases the high and the low suffer together.
In the year 1779, the Nabob of Oude represented, through the British resident at his court, that the number of Company’s troops stationed in his dominions was a main cause of his distress, — and that all those which he was not bound by treaty to maintain should be withdrawn, as they had greatly diminished his revenue and impoverished his country. I will read you, if you please, a few extracts from these representations.
He states, “that the country and cultivation are abandoned, and this year in particular, from the excessive drought of the season, deductions of many lacs having been allowed to the farmers, who are still left unsatisfied”; and then he proceeds with a long detail of his own distress, and that of his family and all his dependants; and adds, “that the new-raised brigade is not only quite useless to my government, but is, moreover, the cause of much loss both in revenues and customs. The detached body of troops under European officers bring nothing but confusion to the affairs of my government, and are entirely their own masters.” Mr. Middleton, Mr. Hastings’s confidential resident, vouches for the truth of this representation in its fullest extent. “I am concerned to confess that there is too good ground for this plea. The misfortune hat been general throughout the whole of the vizier’s [the Nabob of Oude] dominions, obvious to everybody; and so fatal have been its consequences, that no person of either credit or character would enter into engagements with government for farming the country.” He then proceeds to give strong instances of the general calamity, and its effects.
It was now to be seen what steps the Governor-General and Council took for the relief of this distressed country, long laboring under the vexations of men, and now stricken by the hand of God. The case of a general famine is known to relax the severity even of the most rigorous government. — Mr. Hastings does not deny or show the least doubt of the fact. The representation is humble, and almost abject. On this representation from a great prince of the distress of his subjects, Mr. Hastings falls into a violent passion, — such as (it seems) would be unjustifiable in any one who speaks of any part of his conduct. He declares “that the demands, the tone in which they were asserted, and the season in which they were made, are all equally alarming, and appear to him to require an adequate degree of firmness in this board in opposition to them.” He proceeds to deal out very unreserved language on the person and character of the Nabob and his ministers. He declares, that, in a division between him and the Nabob, “the strongest must decide.” With regard to the urgent and instant necessity from the failure of the crops, he says, “that perhaps expedients may be found for affording a gradual relief from the burden of which he so heavily complains, and it shall be my endeavor to seek them out”: and lest he should be suspected of too much haste to alleviate sufferings and to remove violence, he says, “that these must be gradually applied, and their complete effect may be distant; and this, I conceive, is all he can claim of right.”
This complete effect of his lenity is distant indeed. Rejecting this demand, (as he calls the Nabob’s abject supplication,) he attributes it, as he usually does all things of the kind, to the division in their government, and says, “This is a powerful motive with me (however inclined I might be, upon any other occasion, to yield to somepart of his demand) to give them an absolute and unconditional refusal upon the present, — and even to bring to punishment, if my influence can produce that effect, those incendiaries who have endeavored to make themselves the instruments of division between us.”
Here, Sir, is much heat and passion, — but no more consideration of the distress of the country, from a failure of the means of subsistence, and (if possible) the worse evil of an useless and licentious soldiery, than if they were the most contemptible of all trifles. A letter is written, in consequence, in such a style of lofty despotism as I believe has hitherto been unexampled and unheard of in the records of the East. The troops were continued. The gradual relief, whose effect was to be so distant, has never been substantially and beneficially applied, — and the country is ruined.
Mr. Hastings, two years after, when it was too late, saw the absolute necessity of a removal of the intolerable grievance of this licentious soldiery, which, under pretence of defending it, held the country under military execution. A new treaty and arrangement, according to the pleasure of Mr. Hastings, took place; and this new treaty was broken in the old manner, in every essential article. The soldiery were again sent, and again set loose. The effect of all his manoeuvres, from which it seems he was sanguine enough to entertain hopes, upon the state of the country, he himself informs us,— “The event has proved the reverse of these hopes, and accumulation of distress, debasement, and dissatisfaction to the Nabob, and disappointment and disgrace to me. — Every measure [which he had himself proposed] has been so conducted as to give him cause of displeasure. There are no officers established by which his affairs could be regularly conducted: mean, incapable, and indigent men have been appointed. A number of the districts without authority, and without the means of personal protection; some of them have been murdered by the zemindars, and those zemindars, instead of punishment, have been permitted to retain their zemindaries, with independent authority; all the other zemindars suffered to rise up in rebellion, and to insult the authority of the sircar, without any attempt made to suppress them; and the Company’s debt, instead of being discharged by the assignments and extraordinary sources of money provided for that purpose, is likely to exceed even the amount at which it stood at the time in which the arrangement with his Excellency was concluded.” The House will smile at the resource on which the Directors take credit as such a certainty in their curious account.
This is Mr. Hastings’s own narrative of the effects of his own settlement. This is the state of the country which we have been told is in perfect peace and order; and, what is curious, he informs us, that every part of this was foretold to him in the order and manner in which it happened, at the very time he made his arrangement of men and measures.
The invariable course of the Company’s policy is this: either they set up some prince too odious to maintain himself without the necessity of their assistance, or they soon render him odious by making him the instrument of their government. In that case troops are bountifully sent to him to maintain his authority. That he should have no want of assistance, a civil gentleman, called a Resident, is kept at his court, who, under pretence of providing duly for the pay of these troops, gets assignments on the revenue into his hands. Under his provident management, debts soon accumulate; new assignments are made for these debts; until, step by step, the whole revenue, and with it the whole power of the country, is delivered into his hands. The military do not behold without a virtuous emulation the moderate gains of the civil department. They feel that in a country driven to habitual rebellion by the civil government the military is necessary; and they will not permit their services to go unrewarded. Tracts of country are delivered over to their discretion. Then it is found proper to convert their commanding officers into farmers of revenue. Thus, between the well-paid civil and well-rewarded military establishment, the situation of the natives may be easily conjectured. The authority of the regular and lawful government is everywhere and in every point extinguished. Disorders and violences arise; they are repressed by other di
sorders and other violences. Wherever the collectors of the revenue and the farming colonels and majors move, ruin is about them, rebellion before and behind them. The people in crowds fly out of the country; and the frontier is guarded by lines of troops, not to exclude an enemy, but to prevent the escape of the inhabitants.
By these means, in the course of not more than four or five years, this once opulent and flourishing country, which, by the accounts given in the Bengal consultations, yielded more than three crore of sicca rupees, that is, above three millions sterling, annually, is reduced, as far as I can discover, in a matter purposely involved in the utmost perplexity, to less than one million three hundred thousand pounds, and that exacted by every mode of rigor that can be devised. To complete the business, most of the wretched remnants of this revenue are mortgaged, and delivered into the hands of the usurers at Benares (for there alone are to be found some lingering remains of the ancient wealth of these regions) at an interest of near thirty per cent per annum.
The revenues in this manner failing, they seized upon the estates of every person of eminence in the country, and, under the name of resumption, confiscated their property. I wish, Sir, to be understood universally and literally, when I assert that there is not left one man of property and substance for his rank in the whole of these provinces, in provinces which are nearly the extent of England and Wales taken together: not one landholder, not one banker, not one merchant, not one even of those who usually perish last, the ultimum moriens in a ruined state, not one farmer of revenue.
One country for a while remained, which stood as an island in the midst of the grand waste of the Company’s dominion. My right honorable friend, in his admirable speech on moving the bill, just touched the situation, the offences, and the punishment of a native prince, called Fizulla Khân. This man, by policy and force, had protected himself from the general extirpation of the Rohilla chiefs. He was secured (if that were any security) by a treaty. It was stated to you, as it was stated by the enemies of that unfortunate man, “that the whole of his country is what the whole country of the Rohillas was, cultivated like a garden, without one neglected spot in it.” Another accuser says,— “Fyzoolah Khan, though a bad soldier, [that is the true source of his misfortune,] has approved himself a good aumil, — having, it is supposed, in the course of a few years, at least doubled the population and revenue of his country.” In another part of the correspondence he is charged with making his country an asylum for the oppressed peasants who fly from the territories of Oude. The improvement of his revenue, arising from this single crime, (which Mr. Hastings considers as tantamount to treason,) is stated at an hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year.
Dr. Swift somewhere says, that he who could make two blades of grass grow where but one grew before was a greater benefactor to the human race than all the politicians that ever existed. This prince, who would have been deified by antiquity, who would have been ranked with Osiris, and Bacchus, and Ceres, and the divinities most propitious to men, was, for those very merits, by name attacked by the Company’s government, as a cheat, a robber, a traitor. In the same breath in which he was accused as a rebel, he was ordered at once to furnish five thousand horse. On delay, or (according to the technical phrase, when any remonstrance is made to them) “on evasion,” he was declared a violator of treaties, and everything he had was to be taken from him. Not one word, however, of horse in this treaty.
The territory of this Fizulla Khân, Mr. Speaker, is less than the County of Norfolk. It is an inland country, full seven hundred miles from any seaport, and not distinguished for any one considerable branch of manufacture whatsoever. From this territory several very considerable sums had at several times been paid to the British resident. The demand of cavalry, without a shadow or decent pretext of right, amounted to three hundred thousand a year more, at the lowest computation; and it is stated, by the last person sent to negotiate, as a demand of little use, if it could be complied with, — but that the compliance was impossible, as it amounted to more than his territories could supply, if there had been no other demand upon him. Three hundred thousand pounds a year from an inland country not so large as Norfolk!
The thing most extraordinary was to hear the culprit defend himself from the imputation of his virtues, as if they had been the blackest offences. He extenuated the superior cultivation of his country. He denied its population. He endeavored to prove that he had often sent back the poor peasant that sought shelter with him. — I can make no observation on this.
After a variety of extortions and vexations, too fatiguing to you, too disgusting to me, to go through with, they found “that they ought to be in a better state to warrant forcible means”; they therefore contented themselves with a gross sum of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds for their present demand. They offered him, indeed, an indemnity from their exactions in future for three hundred thousand pounds more. But he refused to buy their securities, — pleading (probably with truth) his poverty; but if the plea were not founded, in my opinion very wisely: not choosing to deal any more in that dangerous commodity of the Company’s faith; and thinking it better to oppose distress and unarmed obstinacy to uncolored exaction than to subject himself to be considered as a cheat, if he should make a treaty in the least beneficial to himself.
Thus they executed an exemplary punishment on Fizulla Khân for the culture of his country. But, conscious that the prevention of evils is the great object of all good regulation, they deprived him of the means of increasing that criminal cultivation in future, by exhausting his coffers; and that the population of his country should no more be a standing reproach and libel on the Company’s government, they bound him by a positive engagement not to afford any shelter whatsoever to the farmers and laborers who should seek refuge in his territories from the exactions of the British residents in Oude. When they had done all this effectually, they gave him a full and complete acquittance from all charges of rebellion, or of any intention to rebel, or of his having originally had any interest in, or any means of, rebellion.
These intended rebellions are one of the Company’s standing resources. When money has been thought to be heaped up anywhere, its owners are universally accused of rebellion, until they are acquitted of their money and their treasons at once. The money once taken, all accusation, trial, and punishment ends. It is so settled a resource, that I rather wonder how it comes to be omitted in the Directors’ account; but I take it for granted this omission will be supplied in their next edition.
The Company stretched this resource to the full extent, when they accused two old women, in the remotest corner of India, (who could have no possible view or motive to raise disturbances,) of being engaged in rebellion, with an intent to drive out the English nation, in whose protection, purchased by money and secured by treaty, rested the sole hope of their existence. But the Company wanted money, and the old women must be guilty of a plot. They were accused of rebellion, and they were convicted of wealth. Twice had great sums been extorted from them, and as often had the British faith guarantied the remainder. A body of British troops, with one of the military farmers-general at their head, was sent to seize upon the castle in which these helpless women resided. Their chief eunuchs, who were their agents, their guardians, protectors, persons of high rank according to the Eastern manners, and of great trust, were thrown into dungeons, to make them discover their hidden treasures; and there they lie at present. The lands assigned for the maintenance of the women were seized and confiscated. Their jewels and effects were taken, and set up to a pretended auction in an obscure place, and bought at such a price as the gentlemen thought proper to give. No account has ever been transmitted of the articles or produce of this sale. What money was obtained is unknown, or what terms were stipulated for the maintenance of these despoiled and forlorn creatures: for by some particulars it appears as if an engagement of the kind was made.
Let me here remark, once for all, that though the act of 1773 requires that an account of al
l proceedings should be diligently transmitted, that this, like all the other injunctions of the law, is totally despised, and that half at least of the most important papers are intentionally withheld.
I wish you, Sir, to advert particularly, in this transaction, to the quality and the numbers of the persons spoiled, and the instrument by whom that spoil was made. These ancient matrons, called the Begums, or Princesses, were of the first birth and quality in India: the one mother, the other wife, of the late Nabob of Oude, Sujah Dowlah, a prince possessed of extensive and flourishing dominions, and the second man in the Mogul Empire. This prince (suspicious, and not unjustly suspicious, of his son and successor) at his death committed his treasures and his family to the British faith. That family and household consisted of two thousand women, to which were added two other seraglios of near kindred, and said to be extremely numerous, and (as I am well informed) of about fourscore of the Nabob’s children, with all the eunuchs, the ancient servants, and a multitude of the dependants of his splendid court. These were all to be provided, for present maintenance and future establishment, from the lands assigned as dower, and from the treasures which he left to these matrons, in trust for the whole family.