by Edmund Burke
So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could save an exceeding good fortune out of his place. In 1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has made a decent private competency; but in two years after he sunk to the extremity of private want. And how does he seek to relieve that want? By taking a bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the Company’s service, but for his own. He takes the bribe with an express intention of keeping it for his own use, and he calls upon the Company for their sanction. If the money was taken without right, no claim of his could justify its being appropriated to himself: nor could the Company so appropriate it; for no man has a right to be generous out of another’s goods. When he calls upon their justice and generosity, they might answer, “If you have a just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we will pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state your merits, and we will consider them.” “But I have paid myself by a bribe; I have taken another man’s money; and I call upon your justice — to do what? to restore it to its owner? no — to allow me to keep it myself.” Think, my Lords, in what a situation the Company stands! “I have done a great deal for you; this is the jackal’s portion; you have been the lion; I have been endeavoring to prog for you; I am your bribe-pander, your factor of corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn and ignominy, to insults even from you. I have been preying and plundering for you; I have gone through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness, wading through every species of dirt and corruption, for your advantage. I am now sinking into the extremity of private want; do give me this — what? money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me this bribe; vote me — what? money of your own? that would be generous: money you owe me? that would be just: no, money which I have extorted from another man; and I call upon your justice to give it me.” This is his idea of justice. He says, “I am compelled to depart from that liberal plan which I originally adopted, and to claim from your justice (for you have forbid me to appeal to your generosity) the discharge of a debt which I can with the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due, and which I cannot sustain.” Now, if any of the Company’s servants may say, “I have been extravagant, profuse, — it was all meant for your good, — let me prey upon the country at my pleasure, — license my bribes, frauds, and peculations, and then you do me justice,” — what country are we in, where these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?
It might naturally be expected that in this letter he would have given some account of the person from whom he had taken this bribe. But here, as in the other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the Ganges, like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw in Mr. Middleton; they recollect nothing, they know nothing. He has not stated, from that day to this, from whom he took that money. But we have made the discovery. And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to the present age and posterity, will be their use, that, if we pursue them with the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon us demands, and if your Lordships do firmly administer justice upon this man’s frauds, you will at once put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever. Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry, it is the diligence of the House of Commons, which he has the audacity to call malice, that has discovered and brought to light the frauds which we shall be able to prove against him.
I will now read to your Lordships an extract from that stuff, called a defence, which he has either written himself or somebody else has written for him, and which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases, when, under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment, he discovered at length from whom he got this last bribe.
“The last part of the charge states, that, in my letter to the Court of Directors of the 21st February, 1784, I have confessed to have received another sum of money, the amount of which is not declared, but which, from the application of it, could not be less than thirty-four thousand pounds sterling, &c. In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the Company not having at that time sufficient cash in their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed three lacs of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta, whom I desired to call upon me with a bond properly filled up. He did so; but at the time I was going to execute it he entreated I would rather accept the money than execute the bond. I neither accepted the offer nor refused it; and my determination upon it remained suspended between the alternative of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid, and of taking it, and applying it, as I had done other sums, to the Company’s use. And there the matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow, when I determined to accept the money for the Company’s use; and these were my motives. Having made disbursements from my own cash for services, which, though required to enable me to execute the duties of my station, I had hitherto omitted to enter into my public accounts, I resolved to reimburse myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the Company’s affairs, by charging these disbursements in my durbar accounts of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received, which was this of Nobkissin’s. If my claim on the Company were not founded in justice, and bonâ fide due, my acceptance of three lacs of rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that sum from me. No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts.”
We do not suspect him of presenting false accounts: we can prove, we are now radically proving, that he presents false accounts. We suspect no man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse no man who has not given ground for accusation; and we do not attempt to bring before a court of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively to prove. This will put an end to all idle prattle of malice, of groundless suspicions of guilt, and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test, between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is, for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great number of years. He proceeds: —
“If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want and to sink in obscurity.”
Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the House of Commons that he never made up any contingent accounts; and yet, as a set-off against this bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended to apply to the current use of the Company, he feigns and invents a claim upon them, namely, that he had, without any authority of the Company, squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and other idle services, a sum amounting to 34,000l. But was it for the Company’s service? Is this language to be listened to? “Everything I thought fit to expend I have expended for the Company’s service. I intended, indeed, at that time, to have been generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I was then in the prime of my life, flowing in money, and had great expectations: I am now old; I cannot afford to be generous: I will look back into all my former accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I generously or prodigally spent as my own humor might suggest; and though, at the same time, I know you have given me a noble allowance, I now make a charge upon
you for this sum of money, and intend to take a bribe in discharge of it.” Now suppose Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope will long, and honorably and worthily, fill the seat, which that gentleman possessed, — suppose Lord Cornwallis, after never having complained of the insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two years ago said he had saved a sufficient competency out of it, should now tell you that 30,00l. a year was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged want taking a bribe, and then make out a bill of contingent expenses to cover it, would your Lordships bear this?
Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow money for his own use, and that he applied to Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it upon him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you will be astonished to hear of generosity in a banian; there never was a banian and generosity united together: but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings’s face beams upon him. “Here,” says Mr. Hastings, “I have prepared bonds for you.” “Astonishing! how can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call upon me to lend you 34,000l., and propose bonds? No, you shall have it: you are the Governor-General, who have a large and ample salary; but I know you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity: I give you all this money.” Nobkissin was quite shocked at Mr. Hastings’s offering him a bond. My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower, a little more penurious, a little more exacting, a little more cunning, a little more money-making, than a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner of Duke’s Place in London that is so crafty, so much a usurer, so skilful how to turn money to profit, and so resolved not to give any money but for profit, as a Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned. But this man, however, at once grows generous, and will not suffer a bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, is thrown into very great distress. You see sentiment always prevailing in Mr. Hastings. The sentimental dialogue which must have passed between him and a Gentoo broker would have charmed every one that has a taste for pathos and sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the money as a gift. He really does not know what to do: whether to insist upon giving a bond or not, — whether he shall take the money for his own use, or whether he shall take it for the Company’s use. But it may be said of man as it is said of woman: the woman who deliberates is lost: the man that deliberates about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is lost, the walls shake, down it comes, — and at the same moment enters Nobkissin into the citadel of his honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums beating, and Mr. Hastings’s garrison goes out, very handsomely indeed, with the honors of war, all for the benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings consents to take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the money, and is perfectly satisfied.
Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it to the Company’s service. How? To pay his own contingent bills. “Everything that I do,” says he, “and all the money I squander, is all for the Company’s benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look into them; they are given you upon honor. Let me take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be just or generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it.” But in every transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have got a name, there we have got a crime. Nobkissin gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately afterwards enters upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable districts in Bengal. We know very well, and shall prove to your Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had been taken from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence of the Company’s service, but sooner or later they fall upon the Company’s treasury. And we shall prove that Nobkissin, within a year from the time when he gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Company, as their steward, to the amount of a sum the very interest of which, according to the rate of interest in that country, amounted to more than this bribe, taken, as was pretended, for the Company’s service. Such are the consequences of a banian’s generosity, and of Mr. Hastings’s gratitude, so far as the interest of the country is concerned; and this is a good way to pay Mr. Hastings’s contingent accounts. But this is not all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country to take the management of it, and the fortunes of all the great families in it are given entirely into his power. This is the way by which the Company are to keep their own servants from falling into “the extremity of private want.” And the Company itself, in this pretended saving to their treasury by the taking of bribes, lose more than the amount of the bribes received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand, there is a balance accruing on the other. No man, who had any share in the management of the Company’s revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both. In short, Mr. Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit, but the Company’s treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.
And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic in bribes brought to light by the Court of Directors? No: we got it in the House of Commons. These bribes appear to have been taken at various times and upon various occasions; and it was not till his return from Patna, in February, 1782, that the first communication of any of them was made to the Court of Directors. Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of Directors wrote back to him, requiring some further explanation upon the subject. No explanation was given, but a communication of other bribes was made in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year, but not dispatched to Europe till the December following. This produced another requisition from the Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships are to observe that this correspondence is never in the way of letters written and answers given; but he and the Directors are perpetually playing at hide-and-seek with each other, and writing to each other at random: Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the Directors requiring an explanation the next; Mr. Hastings giving an account of another bribe on the third day, without giving any explanation of the former. Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their chase. But it was not till they learned that the committees of the House of Commons (for committees of the House of Commons had then some weight) were frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings, that at last some honest men in the Direction were permitted to have some ascendency, and that a proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact account of all the bribes that he had received, and painting to him, in colors as strong at least as those I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations, — and what does them great honor for that moment, they particularly direct that the money which was taken from the Nabob of Oude should be carried to his account. These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee of Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved by the Court of Directors, but never were sent out to India. However, something was sent, but miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings never answered it, or gave them any explanation whatever. He now, being prepared for his departure from Calcutta, and having finished all his other business, went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now we cannot follow him. He returned in great disgust to Calcutta, and soon after set sail for England, without ever giving the Directors one word of the explanation which he had so often promised, and they had repeatedly asked.
We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where you will suppose some satisfactory account of all these matters would be obtained from him. One would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he would have been a little quickened by a menace, as he expresses it, which had been thrown out against him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would be made into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive of the same thing, thought it good gently to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom and how we do not
know, that he ought to give some explanation of these accounts. This produced a letter which I believe in the business of the whole world cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his parallel in this. Never did inventive folly, working upon conscious guilt, and throwing each other totally in confusion, ever produce such a false, fraudulent, prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given to you.
You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the country, on the Ganges: now you see him at the waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his letter from that place to comprehend the substance of all his former letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity, fraud, and nonsense contained in the whole of them. Here it is, and your Lordships will suffer it to be read. I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that it has been the most difficult of all things to explain, but much more difficult to make pleasant and not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued through all its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication, so there is nothing that more calls for the attention, the patience, the vigilance, and the scrutiny of an exact court of justice. But as you have already had almost the whole of the man, do not think it too much to hear the rest in this letter from Cheltenham. It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of July, 1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire; and it begins thus: —
“Sir, — The Honorable Court of Directors, in their general letter to Bengal by the ‘Surprise,’ dated the 16th of March, 1784, were pleased to express their desire that I should inform them of the periods when each sum of the presents mentioned in my address of the 22d May, 1782, was received, — what were my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, — and what were my reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums, and for paying other sums into the treasury as deposits, on my own account.”