Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  My Lords, I have here attempted to point out the extreme inconsistencies and defects of this proceeding; and I wish your Lordships to consider, with respect to these proceedings of the India House in their prosecutions, that it is in the power of some of their officers to make statements in the manner that I have described, then to obtain the names of great lawyers, and under their sanction to carry the accused through the world as acquitted.

  These are the material circumstances which will be submitted to your Lordships’ sober consideration in the course of this inquiry. I have now stated them on these two accounts: first, to rebut the reason which Mr. Hastings has assigned for not giving any satisfaction to the Court of Directors, namely, because they did not want it, having dropped a prosecution upon great authorities and opinions; and next, to show your Lordships how a business begun in bribery is to be supported only by fraud, deceit, and collusion, and how the receiving of bribes by a Governor-General of Bengal tends to taint the whole service from beginning to end, both at home and abroad.

  But though upon the partial case that was presented to them these great lawyers did not advise a prosecution, and though even upon a full representation of a case a lawyer might think that a man ought not to be prosecuted, yet he may consider him to be the vilest man upon earth. We know men are acquitted in the great tribunals in which several Lords of this country have presided, and who perhaps ought not to have been brought there and prosecuted before them, and yet about whose delinquency there could be no doubt. But though we have here sufficient reason to justify the great lawyers whose names and authorities are produced, yet Mr. Hastings has extended that authority beyond the length of their opinions. For, being no longer under the terror of the law, which, he said, restrained him from making his defence, he was then bound to give that satisfaction to his masters and the world which every man in honor is bound to do, when a grave accusation is brought against him. But this business of the law I wish to sleep from this moment, till the time when it shall come before you; though I suspect, and have had reason (sitting in committees in the House of Commons) to believe, that there was in the India House a bond of iniquity, somewhere or other, which was able to impose in the first instance upon the solicitor, the guilt of which, being of another nature, I shall state hereafter, that your Lordships may be able to discover through whose means and whose fraud Mr. Hastings obtained these opinions.

  If, however, all the great lawyers had been unanimous upon that occasion, still it would have been necessary for Mr. Hastings to say, “I cannot, according to my opinion, be brought to give an account in a court of justice, and I have got great lawyers to declare, that, upon the case laid before them, they cannot advise a prosecution; but now is the time for me to come forward, and, being no longer in fear that my defence may be turned against me, I will produce my defence for the satisfaction of my masters and the vindication of my own character.” But besides this doubtful opinion (for I believe your Lordships will find it no better than a doubtful opinion) given by persons for whom I have the highest honor, and given with a strong censure upon the state of the case, there were also some great lawyers, men of great authority in the kingdom, who gave a full and decided opinion that a prosecution ought to be instituted against him; but the Court of Directors decided otherwise, they overruled those opinions, and acted upon the opinions in favor of Mr. Hastings. When, therefore, he knew that the great men in the law were divided upon the propriety of a prosecution, but that the Directors had decided in his favor, he was the more strongly bound to enter into a justification of his conduct.

  But there was another great reason which should have induced him to do this. One great lawyer, known to many of your Lordships, Mr. Sayer, a very honest, intelligent man, who had long served the Company and well knew their affairs, had given an opinion concerning Mr. Hastings’s conduct in stopping these prosecutions. There was an abstract question put to Mr. Sayer, and other great lawyers, separated from many of the circumstances of this business, concerning a point which incidentally arose; and this was, whether Mr. Hastings, as Governor-General, had a power so to dissolve the Council, that, if he declared it dissolved, they could not sit and do any legal and regular act. It was a great question with the lawyers at the time, and there was a difference of opinion on it. Mr. Sayer was one of those who were inclined to be of opinion that the Governor-General had a power of dissolving the Council, and that the Council could not legally sit after such dissolution. But what was his remark upon Mr. Hastings’s conduct? — and you must suppose his remark of more weight, because, upon the abstract question, he had given his opinion in favor of Mr. Hastings’s judgment. “The meeting of the Council depends on the pleasure of the Governor; and I think the duration of it must do so, too. But it was as great a crime to dissolve the Council upon base and sinister motives as it would be to assume the power of dissolving, if he had it not. I believe he is the first Governor that ever dissolved a Council inquiring into his behavior, when he was innocent. Before he could summon three Councils and dissolve them, he had time fully to consider what would be the result of such conduct, to convince everybody, beyond a doubt, of his conscious guilt.”

  Mr. Sayer, then, among other learned people, (and if he had not been the man that I have described, yet, from his intimate connection with the Company, his opinion must be supposed to have great weight,) having used expressions as strong as the persons who have ever criminated Mr. Hastings most for the worst of his crimes have ever used to qualify and describe them, and having ascribed his conduct to base and sinister motives, he was bound upon that occasion to justify that strong conduct, allowed to be legal, and charged at the same time to be violent. Mr. Hastings was obliged then to produce something in his justification. He never did. Therefore, for all the reasons assigned by himself, drawn from the circumstances of prosecution and non-prosecution, and from opinions of lawyers and colleagues, the Court of Directors at the same time censuring his conduct, and strongly applauding the conduct of those who were adverse to him, Mr. Hastings was, I say, from those accumulated circumstances, bound to get rid of the infamy of a conduct which could be attributed to nothing but base and sinister motives, and which could have no effect but to convince men of his consciousness that he was guilty. From all these circumstances I infer that no man could have endured this load of infamy, and to this time have given no explanation of his conduct, unless for the reason which this learned counsel gives, and which your Lordships and the world will give, namely, his conscious guilt.

  After leaving upon your minds that presumption, not to operate without proof, but to operate along with the proof, (though, I take it, there are some presumptions that go the full length of proof,) I shall not press it to the length to which I think it would go, but use it only as auxiliary, assisting, and compurgatory of all the other evidences that go along with it.

  There is another circumstance which must come before your Lordships in this business. If you find that Mr. Hastings has received the two lac of rupees, then you will find that he was guilty, without color or pretext of any kind whatever, of acting in violation of his covenant, of acting in violation of the laws, and all the rules of honor and conscience. If you find that he has taken the lac and a half, which he admits, but which he justifies under the pretence of an entertainment, I shall beg to say something to your Lordships concerning that justification.

  The justification set up is, that he went up from Calcutta to Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three months, and that there an allowance was made to him of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an entertainment. Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine, if there was such a custom, whether or no his covenant justifies his conformity with it. I remember Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland, says it is no law, but a lewd custom. A governor is to conform himself to the laws of his own country, to the stipulations of those that employ him, and not to the lewd customs of any other country: those customs are more honored in the breach than in the observance. If Mr. Hastings
was really feasted and entertained with the magnificence of the country, if there was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to amuse him in his leisure hours, if he was feasted with the hookah and every other luxury, there is something to be said for him, though I should not justify a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner. But in fact here was no entertainment that could amount to such a sum; and he has nowhere proved the existence of such a custom.

  But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is more honored in the breach than in the observance, that custom is capable of being abused to the grossest extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your Lordships’ minds in such a manner that I hardly need detail the circumstances of it. What! two hundred pounds to be given to a man for one day’s entertainment? If there is an end of it there, it ruins nobody, and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt anybody; but when that entertainment is renewed day after day for three months, it is no longer a compliment to the man, but a great pecuniary advantage, and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a grievous, an intolerable burden. It then becomes a matter of the most serious and dreadful extortion, tending to hinder the people who give it not only from giving entertainment, but from having bread to eat themselves. Therefore, if any such entertainment was customary, the custom was perverted by the abuse of its being continued for three months together. It was longer than Ahasuerus’s feast. There is a feast of reason and a flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings’s feast was a feast of avarice and a flow of money. No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table: he continued to sit at that table for three months.

  In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take any allowance above 400l., and forbidden to take any allowance above 100l., without the knowledge, consent, and approbation of the Council to which he belongs. Now he takes 16,000l., not only without the consent of the Council, but without their knowledge, — without the knowledge of any other human being: it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own black agents and confidants, and those of Munny Begum. Why is it a secret? Hospitality, generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them; they want to be shown to the world, not concealed. The concealment of acts of charity is what makes them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to whom there can be no concealment; but acts of corruption are kept secret, not to keep them secret from the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to keep them secret from the eyes of mankind, whose opinions he does fear, in the immediate effect of them, and in their future consequences. Therefore he had but one reason to keep this so dark and profound a secret, till it was dragged into day in spite of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret, but his knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the light. Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread abroad in the face of day. Such candles should not be hid under a bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very splendor is a part of their excellence. We upon our feasts light up this whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake them. Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr. Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their prey into the jungles. Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment for the flock he has destroyed. His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.

  But was it an entertainment upon a visit? Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit? No: he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob. On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly called a visitation. He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the world, — as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread, from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering. When you consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.

  It is mentioned and supposed in the observations upon this case, though no circumstances relative to the persons or the nature of the visit are stated, that this expense was something which he might have charged to the Company and did not. It is first supposed by the learned counsel who made the observation, that it was a public, allowed, and acknowledged thing; then, that he had not charged the Company anything for it. I have looked into that business. In the first place, I see no such custom; and if there was such a custom, there was the most abusive misemployment of it. I find that in that year there was paid from the Company’s cash account to the Governor’s travelling charges (and he had no other journey at that end of the year) thirty thousand rupees, which is about 3,000l.; and when we consider that he was in the receipt of near 30,000l., besides the nuzzers, which amount to several thousand a year, and that he is allowed 3,000l. by the Company for his travelling expenses, is it right to charge upon the miserable people whom he was defrauding of their bread 16,000l. for his entertainment?

  I find that there are also other great sums relative to the expenses of the Committee of Circuit, which he was upon. How much of them is applicable to him I know not. I say, that the allowance of three thousand pounds was noble and liberal; for it is not above a day or two’s journey to Moorshedabad, and by his taking his road by Kishenagur he could not be longer. He had a salary to live upon, and he must live somewhere; and he was actually paid three thousand pounds for travelling charges for three months, which was at the rate of twelve thousand pounds a year: a large and abundant sum.

  If you once admit that a man for an entertainment shall take sixteen thousand pounds, there never will be any bribe, any corruption, that may not be justified: the corrupt man has nothing to do but to make a visit, and then that very moment he may receive any sum under the name of this entertainment; that moment his covenants are annulled, his bonds and obligations destroyed, the act of Parliament repealed, and it is no longer bribery, it is no longer corruption, it is no longer peculation; it is nothing but thanks for obliging inquiries, and a compliment according to the mode of the country, by which he makes his fortune.

  What hinders him from renewing that visit? If you support this distinction, you will teach the Governor-General, instead of attending his business at the capital, to make journeys through the country, putting every great man of that country under the most ruinous contributions; and as this custom is in no manner confined to the Governor-General, but extends, as it must upon that principle, to every servant of the Company in any station whatever, then, if each of them were to receive an entertainment, I will venture to say that the greatest ravage of an hostile army could not, indeed, destroy the country more entirely than the Company’s servants by such visits.

  Your Lordships will see that there are grounds for suspicion, not supported with the same evidence, but with evidence of great probability, that there was another entertainment given at the expense of another lac of rupees; and there is also great probability that Mr. Hastings received two lac of rupees, and Mr. Middleton another lac. The whole of the Nabob’s revenues would have been exhausted by these two men, if they had stayed there a whole year: and they stayed three months. Nothing will be secured from the Company’s servants, so long as they can find, under this name, or under pretence of any corrupt custom of the country, a vicious excuse for this corrupt practice. The excuse is worse than the thing itself. I leave it, then, with your judgment to decide whether you will or not, if this justification comes bef
ore you, establish a principle which would put all Bengal in a worse situation than an hostile army could do, and ruin all the Company’s servants by sending them from their duty to go round robbing the whole country under the name of entertainments.