by Edmund Burke
But there are persons whose fortitude could bear their own suffering; there are men who are hardened by their very pains, and the mind, strengthened even by the torments of the body, rises with a strong defiance against its oppressor. They were assaulted on the side of their sympathy. Children were scourged almost to death in the presence of their parents. This was not enough. The son and father were bound close together, face to face and body to body, and in that situation cruelly lashed together, so that the blow which escaped the father fell upon the son, and the blow which missed the son wound over the back of the parent. The circumstances were combined by so subtle a cruelty that every stroke which did not excruciate the sense should wound and lacerate the sentiments and affections of nature.
On the same principle, and for the same ends, virgins, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses, and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was to be sought against all wrong and all violence, (but where no judge or lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench,) these virgins, vainly invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all the people, publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of cleft bamboos. Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would think it incredible. But it did not end there. Growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire — (I cannot proceed for shame and horror!) — these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason, distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty, — there, where the reverence of nature and the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe their practices.
These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature. But there were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in mere sensitive nature can do.
The women thus treated lost their caste. My Lords, we are not here to commend or blame the institutions and prejudices of a whole race of people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of men, or foreign conquest, have been able to make the smallest impression. The aboriginal Gentoo inhabitants are all dispersed into tribes or castes, — each caste born to an invariable rank, rights, and descriptions of employment, so that one caste cannot by any means pass into another. With the Gentoos, certain impurities or disgraces, though without any guilt of the party, infer loss of caste; and when the highest caste, that of Brahmin, which is not only noble, but sacred, is lost, the person who loses it does not slide down into one lower, but reputable, — he is wholly driven from all honest society. All the relations of life are at once dissolved. His parents are no longer his parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his, are no longer to regard him as their father. It is something far worse than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal excommunication. It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death. Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned. No honest occupation can be followed. He becomes an halicore, if (which is rare) he survives that miserable degradation.
Upon those whom all the shocking catalogue of tortures I have mentioned could not make to flinch one of the modes of losing caste for Brahmins and other principal tribes was practised. It was to harness a bullock at the court-door, and to put the Brahmin on his back, and to lead him through the towns, with drums beating before him. To intimidate others, this bullock, with drums, (the instrument, according to their ideas, of outrage, disgrace, and utter loss of caste,) was led through the country; and as it advanced, the country fled before it. When any Brahmin was seized, he was threatened with this pillory, and for the most part he submitted in a moment to whatever was ordered. What it was may be thence judged. But when no possibility existed of complying with the demand, the people by their cries sometimes prevailed on the tyrants to have it commuted for cruel scourging, which was accepted as mercy. To some Brahmins this mercy was denied, and the act of indelible infamy executed. Of these men one came to the Company’s commissioner with the tale, and ended with these melancholy words: “I have suffered this indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me: I call for justice.” He called in vain.
Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a relief, into the prison of their native soil. Not suffered to quit the district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults, the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were massacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops, who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief in that province.
In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was feared it would go to England. The English Chief in the province, Mr. Goodlad, represented it to Mr. Hastings’s Revenue Committee to be (what it was) the greatest and most serious disturbance that ever happened in Bengal. But, good easy man, he was utterly unable to guess to what cause it was to be attributed. He thought there was some irregularity in the collection, but on the whole judged that it had little other cause than a general conspiracy of the husbandmen and landholders, who, as Debi Sing’s lease was near expiring, had determined not to pay any more revenue.
Mr. Hastings’s Committee of Revenue, whilst these wounds were yet bleeding, and whilst a total failure was threatened in the rents of t
hese provinces, thought themselves obliged to make an inquiry with some sort of appearance of seriousness into the causes of it. They looked, therefore, about them carefully, and chose what they judged would be most plausible and least effective. They thought that it was necessary to send a special commissioner into the province, and one, too, whose character would not instantly blast the credit of his mission. They cast their eyes on a Mr. Paterson, a servant of the Company, a man of fair character, and long standing in the service. Mr. Paterson was a person known to be of a very cool temper, placid manners, moderate and middle opinions, unconnected with parties; and from such a character they looked for (what sometimes is to be expected from it) a compromising, balanced, neutralized, equivocal, colorless, confused report, in which the blame was to be impartially divided between the sufferer and the oppressor, and in which, according to the standing manners of Bengal, he would recommend oblivion as the best remedy, and would end by remarking, that retrospect could have no advantage, and could serve only to irritate and keep alive animosities; and by this kind of equitable, candid, and judge-like proceeding, they hoped the whole complaint would calmly fade away, the sufferers remain in the possession of their patience, and the tyrant of his plunder. In confidence of this event from this presumed character, Mr. Hastings’s Committee, in appointing Mr. Paterson their commissioner, were not deficient in arming him with powers equal to the object of his commission. He was enabled to call before him all accountants, to compel the production of all accounts, to examine all persons, — not only to inquire and to report, but to decide and to redress.
Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son, as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts. He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper frame of mind for doing his duty.
He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full support in the execution of it, — as he, with every other white man in Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact, that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent, had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.
But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people, concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie, with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable words. “In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and every insult of disgrace, — and this not confined to a few, but extended over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot, when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half of that demand, — when he finds himself so far from being released, that he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail, adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these prejudices under such circumstances.”
He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft, fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe, never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of Bengal, — of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports, carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of Governor Hastings’s general system of bribery.
But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr. Hastings’s system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore, Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.
Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that all officers representing government, and making in that character an authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would impeach or shake the report.