by Edmund Burke
I wish your Lordships to pause a moment. Here is a letter written in July, 1785. You see that from the 29th of December [November?], 1780, till that time, during which interval, though convinced in his own conscience and though he had declared his own opinion of the necessity of giving a full explanation of these money transactions, he had been imposing upon the Directors false and prevaricating accounts of them, they were never able to obtain a full disclosure from him.
He goes on:— “I have been kindly apprised that the information required as above is yet expected from me. I hope that the circumstances of my past situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for having thus long withheld it. The fact is, that I was not at the Presidency when the ‘Surprise’ arrived; and when I returned to it, my time and attention were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my final departure from it, by a variety of other more important occupations, of which, Sir, I may safely appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion contributed by myself of the volumes which compose our Consultations of that period,” —
These Consultations, my Lords, to which he appeals, form matter of one of the charges that the Commons have brought against Mr. Hastings, — namely, a fraudulent attempt to ruin certain persons employed in subordinate situations under him, for the purpose, by intruding himself into their place, of secretly carrying on his own transactions. These volumes of Consultations were written to justify that act.
He next says,— “The submission which my respect would have enjoined me to pay to the command imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it had left on my mind, that it was rather intended as a reprehension for something which had given offence in my report of the original transaction than an expression of any want of a further elucidation of it.”
Permit me to make a few remarks upon this extraordinary passage. A letter is written to him, containing a repetition of the request which had been made a thousand times before, and with which he had as often promised to comply. And here he says, “It was lost to my recollection.” Observe his memory: he can forget the command, but he has an obscure recollection that he thought it a reprehension rather than a demand! Now a reprehension is a stronger mode of demand. When I say to a servant, “Why have you not given me the account which I have so often asked for?” is he to answer, “The reason I have not given it is because I thought you were railing at and abusing me”?
He goes on:— “I will now endeavor to reply to the different questions which have been stated to me, in as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information as I can give the Honorable Court is fully entitled; and where that shall prove defective, I will point out the only means by which it may be rendered more complete.”
In order that your Lordships may thoroughly enter into the spirit of this letter, I must request that you will observe how handsomely and kindly these tools of Directors have expressed themselves to him, and that even their baseness and subserviency to him were not able to draw from him anything that could be satisfactory to his enemies: for as to these his friends, he cares but little about satisfying them, though they call upon him in consequence of his own promise; and this he calls a reprehension. They thus express themselves:— “Although it is not our intention to express any doubt of the integrity of the Governor-General, — on the contrary, after having received the presents, we cannot avoid expressing our approbation of his conduct in bringing them to the credit of the Company, — yet we must confess the statement of those transactions appears to us in many points so unintelligible, that we feel ourselves under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily made to us. We therefore desire to be informed of the different periods when each sum was received, and what were the Governor-General’s motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council and of the Court of Directors, and what were his reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums and paying other sums into the treasury as deposits upon his own account.” Such is their demand, and this is what his memory furnishes as nothing but a reprehension.
He then proceeds:— “First, I believe I can affirm with certainty that the several sums mentioned in the account transmitted with my letter above mentioned were received at or within a very few days of the dates which are affixed to them in the account. But as this contains only the gross sums, and each of these was received in different payments, though at no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign a great degree of accuracy to the account.” — Your Lordships see, that, after all, he declares he cannot make his account accurate. He further adds, “Perhaps the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient” — that is, this explanation, namely, that he can give none— “for any purpose to which their inquiry was directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave to refer, for a more minute information, and for the means of making any investigation which they may think it proper to direct, respecting the particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your accountant-general, who was privy to every process of it, and possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only account that I ever kept of it.”
Here is a man who of his bribe accounts cannot give an account in the country where they are carried on. When you call upon him in Bengal, he cannot give the account, because he is in Bengal; when he comes to England, he cannot give the account here, because his accounts are left in Bengal. Again, he keeps no accounts himself, but his accounts are in Bengal, in the hands of somebody else: to him he refers, and we shall see what that reference produced.
“In this, each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically inserted, with the name of the person by whom it was made; and I shall write to him to desire that he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still in being and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect concerning it.” — Here are accounts kept for the Company, and yet he does not know whether they are in existence anywhere.
“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.”
You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in the banian language, a painche, in English, a screw. It is a puzzled and studied involution of a period, framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and the detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better exemplified than in this sentence: “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.” Observe, that he says, not facts stated, but facts implied in the report. And of what was this to be a report? Of things which the Directors declared they did not understand. And then the inferences which are to follow these implied facts are to follow them — But how? With a strong probability. If you have a mind to study this Oriental figure of rhetoric, the painche, here it is for you in its most complete perfection. No rhetorician ever gave an example of any figure of oratory that can match this.
But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company’s accounts; but he affirms
the facts contained in the report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all, which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, “Why do you call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could not give you them? I cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you may learn something from them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr. Larkins for those papers, if you please.” Now, comparing this with his other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of fraud and concealment to cover his peculation. He tells them,— “I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the Company’s treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December [November?], 1780.” He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he received it: we have found it out by other collateral means.— “The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them.” — Allowable means of receiving bribes! for such I shall prove them to be in the particular instances.— “But neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid that I could thus procure; nor do I know how I could have stated it without appearing to court favor by an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have had an equal claim.”
Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for many years, he does find out his motive, which he could not verify at the time, — namely, that, if he let his colleagues know that he was receiving bribes, and gaining the glory of receiving them, they might take it into their heads likewise to have their share in the same glory, as they were joined in the same commission, enjoyed the same powers, and were subject to the same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous in Mr. Hastings, not behaving like a good, fair colleague in office, not to let them know that he was going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive them of their share in the glory of it: but they were grovelling creatures, who thought that keeping clean hands was some virtue.— “Well, but you have applied some of these bribes to your own benefit: why did you give no account of those bribes?” “I did not,” he says, “because it might have excited the envy of my colleagues.” To be sure, if he was receiving bribes for his own benefit, and they not receiving such bribes, and if they had a liking to that kind of traffic, it is a good ground of envy, that a matter which ought to be in common among them should be confined to Mr. Hastings, and he therefore did well to conceal it; and on the other hand, if we suppose him to have taken them, as he pretends, for the Company’s use, in order not to excite a jealousy in his colleagues for being left out of this meritorious service, to which they had an equal claim, he did well to take bonds for what ought to be brought to the Company’s account. These are reasons applicable to his colleagues, who sat with him at the same board, — Mr. Macpherson, Mr. Stables, Mr. Wheler, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis: he was afraid of exciting their envy or their jealousy.
You will next see another reason, and an extraordinary one it is, which he gives for concealing these bribes from his inferiors. But I must first tell your Lordships, what, till the proof is brought before you, you will take on credit, — indeed, it is on his credit, — that, when he formed the Committee of Revenue, he bound them by a solemn oath, “not, under any name or pretence whatever, to take from any zemindar, farmer, person concerned in the revenue, or any other, any gift, gratuity, allowance, or reward whatever, or anything beyond their salary”; and this is the oath to which he alludes. Now his reason for concealing his bribes from his inferiors, this Committee, under these false and fraudulent bonds, he states thus:— “I should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them: I was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the money to be brought to my own house, or that of any person known to be in trust for me.”
My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that he knew the practice of taking money from these people was a thing dishonorable in itself. “I should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them.” He held it particularly dishonorable to receive them; he had bound others by an oath not to receive them: but he received them himself; and why does he conceal it? “Why, because,” says he, “if the suspicion came upon me, the dishonor would fall upon my pate.” Why did he, by an oath, bind his inferiors not to take these bribes? “Why, because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and because it would be mischievous and ruinous to the Company’s affairs to suffer them to take bribes.” Why, then, did he take them himself? It was ten times more ruinous, that he, who was at the head of the Company’s government, and had bound up others so strictly, should practise the same himself; and “therefore,” says he, “I was more than ordinarily cautious.” What! to avoid it? “No; to carry it on in so clandestine and private a manner as might secure me from the suspicion of that which I know to be detestable, and bound others up from practising.”
We shall prove that the kind of men from whom he interdicted his Committee to receive bribes were the identical men from whom he received them himself. If it was good for him, it was good for them to be permitted these means of extorting; and if it ought at all to be practised, they ought to be admitted to extort for the good of the Company. Rajah Nobkissin was one of the men from whom he interdicted them to receive bribes, and from whom he received a bribe for his own use. But he says he concealed it from them, because he thought great mischief might happen even from their suspicion of it, and lest they should thereby be inclined themselves to practise it, and to break their oaths.
You take it, then, for granted that he really concealed it from them? No such thing. His principal confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr. Croftes, who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue, and whom he had made to swear not to take bribes: he is the confidant, and the very receiver, as we shall prove to your Lordships. What will your Lordships think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood, that he did it to conceal it from these men, when one of them was his principal confidant and agent in the transaction? What will you think of his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it? He ought to have avoided the crime, and the suspicion would take care of itself.
“For these reasons,” he says, “I caused it to be transported immediately to the treasury. There I well knew, Sir, it could not be received, without being passed to some credit; and this could only be done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant. Possibly it was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed.”
My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false or grou
ndless: it is completely fallacious in every part. The first sum, he says, was entered as a loan, the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because, when you enter moneys of this kind, you must enter them under some name, some head of account; “and I entered them,” he says, “under these, because otherwise there was no entering them at all.” Is this true? Will he stick to this? I shall desire to know from his learned counsel, some time or other, whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which he brought under a regular official head, namely, durbar charges; and there is no reason why he should not have brought these under the same head. Therefore what he says, that there is no other way of entering them but as loans and deposits, is not true. He next says, that in the second sum there was no reason for concealment, because it was avowed. But that false deposit was as much concealment as the false loan, for he entered that money as his own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any money to the Company’s account, he knew how to do it, for he had been accustomed to enter it under a general name, called durbar charges, — a name which, in its extent at least, was very much his own invention, and which, as he gives no account of those charges, is as large and sufficient to cover any fraudulent expenditure in the account as, one would think, any person could wish. You see him, then, first guessing one thing, then another, — first giving this reason, then another; at last, however, he seems to be satisfied that he has hit upon the true reason of his conduct.
Now let us open the next paragraph, and see what it is.— “Although I am firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the Court of Directors. They had answered my purpose of public utility, and I had almost dismissed them from my remembrance.”