by Edmund Burke
My Lords, at this time very serious inquiries had begun in the House of Commons concerning peculation. They did not go directly to Bengal, but they began upon the coast of Coromandel, and with the principal governors there. There was, however, an universal opinion (and justly founded) that these inquiries would go to far greater lengths. Mr. Hastings was resolved, then, to change the whole course and order of his proceeding. Nothing could persuade him, upon any account, to lay aside his system of bribery: that he was resolved to persevere in. The point was now to reconcile it with his safety. The first thing he did was to attempt to conceal it; and accordingly we find him depositing very great sums of money in the public treasury through the means of the two persons I have already mentioned, namely, the deputy-treasurer and the accountant, — paying them in and taking bonds for them as money of his own, and bearing legal interest. This was his method of endeavoring to conceal some at least of his bribes: for I would not suggest, nor have your Lordships to think, that I believe that these were his only bribes, — for there is reason to think there was an infinite number besides; but it did so happen that they were those bribes which he thought might be discovered, some of which he knew were discovered, and all of which he knew might become the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry.
Mr. Hastings said he might have concealed them forever. Every one knows the facility of concealing corrupt transactions everywhere, in India particularly. But this is by himself proved not to be universally true, at least not to be true in his own opinion; for he tells you, in his letter from Cheltenham, that he would have concealed the Nabob’s 100,000l., but that the magnitude rendered it easy of discovery. He, therefore, avows an intention of concealment.
But it happens here, very singularly, that this sum, which his fears of discovery by others obliged him to discover himself, happens to be one of those of which no trace whatsoever appears, except merely from the operation of his own apprehensions. There is no collateral testimony: Middleton knew nothing of it; Anderson knew nothing of it; it was not directly communicated to the faithful Larkins or the trusty Croftes; — which proves, indeed, the facility of concealment. The fact is, you find the application always upon the discovery. But concealment or discovery is a thing of accident.
The bribes which I have hitherto brought before your Lordships belong to the first period of his bribery, before he thought of the doctrine on which he has since defended it. There are many other bribes which we charge him with having received during this first period, before an improving conversation and close virtuous connection with great lawyers had taught him how to practise bribes in such a manner as to defy detection, and instead of punishment to plead merit. I am not bound to find order and consistency in guilt: it is the reign of disorder. The order of the proceeding, as far as I am able to trace such a scene of prevarication, direct fraud, falsehood, and falsification of the public accounts, was this. From bribes he knew he could never abstain; and his then precarious situation made him the more rapacious. He knew that a few of his former bribes had been discovered, declared, recorded, — that for the moment, indeed, he was secure, because all informers had been punished and all concealers rewarded. He expected hourly a total change in the Council, and that men like Clavering and Monson might be again joined to Francis, that some great avenger should arise from their ashes,— “Exoriare, aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,” — and that a more severe investigation and an infinitely more full display would be made of his robbery than hitherto had been done. He therefore began, in the agony of his guilt, to cast about for some device by which he might continue his offence, if possible, with impunity, — and possibly make a merit of it. He therefore first carefully perused the act of Parliament forbidding bribery, and his old covenant engaging him not to receive presents. And here he was more successful than upon former occasions. If ever an act was studiously and carefully framed to prevent bribery, it is that law of the 13th of the King, which he well observes admits no latitudes of construction, no subterfuge, no escape, no evasion. Yet has he found a defence of his crimes even in the very provisions which were made for their prevention and their punishment. Besides the penalty which belongs to every informer, the East India Company was invested with a fiction of property in all such bribes, in order to drag them with more facility out of the corrupt hands which held them. The covenant, with an exception of one hundred pounds, and the act of Parliament, without any exception, declared that the Governor-General and Council should receive no presents for their own use. He therefore concluded that the system of bribery and extortion might be clandestinely and safely carried on, provided the party taking the bribes had an inward intention and mental reservation that they should be privately applied to the Company’s service in any way the briber should think fit, and that on many occasions this would prove the best method of supply for the exigencies of their service.
He accordingly formed, or pretended to form, a private bribe exchequer, collateral with and independent of the Company’s public exchequer, though in some cases administered by those whom for his purposes he had placed in the regular official department. It is no wonder that he has taken to himself an extraordinary degree of merit. For surely such an invention of finance, I believe, never was heard of, — an exchequer wherein extortion was the assessor, fraud the cashier, confusion the accountant, concealment the reporter, and oblivion the remembrancer: in short, such as I believe no man, but one driven by guilt into frenzy, could ever have dreamed of.
He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers. He is an eccentric book-keeper, a Pindaric accountant. I have heard of “the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling.” Here was a revenue exacted from whom he pleased, at what times he pleased, in what proportions he pleased, through what persons he pleased, by what means he pleased, to be accounted for or not, at his discretion, and to be applied to what service he thought proper. I do believe your Lordships stand astonished at this scheme; and indeed I should be very loath to venture to state such a scheme at all, however I might have credited it myself, to any sober ears, if, in his defence before the House of Commons, and before the Lords, he had not directly admitted the fact of taking the bribes or forbidden presents, and had not in those defences, and much more fully in his correspondence with the Directors, admitted the fact, and justified it upon these very principles.
As this is a thing so unheard-of and unexampled in the world, I shall first endeavor to account as well as I can for his motives to it, which your Lordships will receive or reject, just as you shall find them tally with the evidence before you: I say, his motives to it; because I contend that public valid reasons for it he could have none; and the idea of making the corruption of the Governor-General a resource to the Company never did or could for a moment enter into his thoughts. I shall then take notice of the juridical constructions upon which he justifies his acting in this extraordinary manner; and lastly, show you the concealments, prevarications, and falsehoods with which he endeavors to cover it. Because wherever you find a concealment you make a discovery. Accounts of money received and paid ought to be regular and official.
He wrote over to the Court of Directors, that there were certain sums of money he had received and which were not his own, but that he had received them for their use. By this time his intercourse with gentlemen of the law became more considerable than it had been before. When first attacked for presents, he never denied the receipt of them, or pretended to say they were for public purposes; but upon looking more into the covenants, and probably with better legal advice, he found that no money could be legally received for his own use; but as these bribes were directly given and received as for his own use, yet (says he) “there was an inward destination of them in my own mind to your benefit, and to your benefit have I applied them.”
Now here is a new system of bribery, contrary to law, very ingenious in the contrivance, but, I believe, as unlikely to produce its intended effect upon the mind of man as a
ny pretence that was ever used. Here Mr. Hastings changes his ground. Before, he was accused as a peculator; he did not deny the fact; he did not refund the money; he fought it off; he stood upon the defensive, and used all the means in his power to prevent the inquiry. That was the first era of his corruption, — a bold, ferocious, plain, downright use of power. In the second, he is grown a little more careful and guarded, — the effect of subtilty. He appears no longer as a defendant; he holds himself up with a firm, dignified, and erect countenance, and says, “I am not here any longer as a delinquent, a receiver of bribes, to be punished for what I have done wrong, or at least to suffer in my character for it. No: I am a great inventive genius, who have gone out of all the ordinary roads of finance, have made great discoveries in the unknown regions of that science, and have for the first time established the corruption of the supreme magistrate as a principle of resource for government.”
There are crimes, undoubtedly, of great magnitude, naturally fitted to create horror, and that loudly call for punishment, that have yet no idea of turpitude annexed to them; but unclean hands, bribery, venality, and peculation are offences of turpitude, such as, in a governor, at once debase the person and degrade the government itself, making it not only horrible, but vile and contemptible in the eyes of all mankind. In this humiliation and abjectness of guilt, he comes here not as a criminal on his defence, but as a vast fertile genius who has made astonishing discoveries in the art of government,— “Dicam insigne, recens, alio indictum ore” — who, by his flaming zeal and the prolific ardor and energy of his mind, has boldly dashed out of the common path, and served his country by new and untrodden ways; and now he generously communicates, for the benefit of all future governors and all future governments, the grand arcanum of his long and toilsome researches. He is the first, but, if we do not take good care, he will not be the last, that has established the corruption of the supreme magistrate among the settled resources of the state; and he leaves this principle as a bountiful donation, as the richest deposit that ever was made in the treasury of Bengal. He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced. It has been said of an ambassador, that he is a person employed to tell lies for the advantage of the court that sends him. His is patriotic bribery, and public-spirited corruption. He is a peculator for the good of his country. It has been said that private vices are public benefits. He goes the full length of that position, and turns his private peculation into a public good. This is what you are to thank him for. You are to consider him as a great inventor upon this occasion. Mr. Hastings improves on this principle. He is a robber in gross, and a thief in detail, — he steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he extorts, — all for the good of the dear East India Company, — all for the advantage of his honored masters, the Proprietors, — all in gratitude to the dear perfidious Court of Directors, who have been in a practice to heap “insults on his person, slanders on his character, and indignities on his station, — who never had the confidence in him that they had in the meanest of his predecessors.”
If you sanction this practice, if, after all you have exacted from the people by your taxes and public imposts, you are to let loose your servants upon them, to extort by bribery and peculation what they can from them, for the purpose of applying it to the public service only whenever they please, this shocking consequence will follow from it. If your Governor is discovered in taking a bribe, he will say, “What is that to you? mind your business; I intend it for the public service.” The man who dares to accuse him loses the favor of the Governor-General and the India Company. They will say, “The Governor has been doing a meritorious action, extorting bribes for our benefit, and you have the impudence to think of prosecuting him.” So that the moment the bribe is detected, it is instantly turned into a merit: and we shall prove that this is the case with Mr. Hastings, whenever a bribe has been discovered.
I am now to inform your Lordships, that, when he made these great discoveries to the Court of Directors, he never tells them who gave him the money, upon what occasion he received it, by what hands, or to what purposes he applied it.
When he can himself give no account of his motives, and even declares that he cannot assign any cause, I am authorized and required to find motives for him, — corrupt motives for a corrupt act. There is no one capital act of his administration that did not strongly imply corruption. When a man is known to be free from all imputation of taking money, and it becomes an established part of his character, the errors or even crimes of his administration ought to be, and are in general, traced to other sources. You know it is a maxim. But once convict a man of bribery in any instance, and once by direct evidence, and you are furnished with a rule of irresistible presumption that every other irregular act by which unlawful gain may arise is done upon the same corrupt motive. Semel malus præsumitur semper malus. As for good acts candor, charity, justice oblige me not to assign evil motives, unless they serve some scandalous purpose or terminate in some manifest evil end, so justice, reason, and common sense compel me to suppose that wicked acts have been done upon motives correspondent to their nature: otherwise I reverse all the principles of judgment which can guide the human mind, and accept even the symptoms, the marks and criteria of guilt, as presumptions of innocence. One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.
His conduct upon these occasions may be thought irrational. But, thank God, guilt was never a rational thing: it distorts all the faculties of the mind; it perverts them; it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason; it puts him into confusion. He has recourse to such miserable and absurd expedients for covering his guilt as all those who are used to sit in the seat of judgment know have been the cause of detection of half the villanies in the world. To argue that these could not be his reasons, because they were not wise, sound, and substantial, would be to suppose, what is not true, that bad men were always discreet and able. But I can very well from the circumstances discover motives which may affect a giddy, superficial, shattered, guilty, anxious, restless mind, full of the weak resources of fraud, craft, and intrigue, that might induce him to make these discoveries, and to make them in the manner he has done. Not rational, and well-fitted for their purposes, I am very ready to admit. For God forbid that guilt should ever leave a man the free, undisturbed use of his faculties! For as guilt never rose from a true use of our rational faculties, so it is very frequently subversive of them. God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices! No: it takes the lead, and is never found where justice does not accompany it; and if ever it is attempted to bring it into the service of the vices, it immediately subverts their cause. It tends to their discovery, and, I hope and trust, finally to their utter ruin and destruction.
In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and contradictory. Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts utterly irreconcilable with each other. He is asked, “How came you to take bonds for this money, if it was not your own? How came you to vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company’s records, and to state yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their debtor?” His answer was, “I really cannot tell; I have forgot my reasons; the distance of time is so great,” (namely, a time of about two years, or not so long,) “I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps I had this motive, perhaps I had another,” (but what is the most curious,) “perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect.” You shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions. “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 of 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.”
My Lords, you see, as to any direct explanation, that he fairly gives it up: he has used artifice and stratagem, which he knows will not do; and at last attempts to cover the treachery of his conduct by the treachery of his memory. Frequent applications were made to Mr. Hastings upon this article from the Company, — gentle hints, gemitus columbæ, — rather, little amorous complaints that he was not more open and communicative; but all these gentle insinuations were never able to draw from him any further account till he came to England. When he came here, he left not only his memory, but all his notes and references, behind in India. When in India the Company could get no account of them, because he himself was not in England; and when he was in England, they could get no account, because his papers were in India. He then sends over to Mr. Larkins to give that account of his affairs which he was not able to give himself. Observe, here is a man taking money privately, corruptly, and which was to be sanctified by the future application of it, taking false securities to cover it, and who, when called upon to tell whom he got the money from, for what ends, and on what occasion, neither will tell in India nor can tell in England, but sends for such an account as he has thought proper to furnish.