by Edmund Burke
I shall now proceed with his letter of explanation. “The particulars,” he goes on to say, “of the paper No. 1 were read to me from a Bengal paper by Mr. Hastings’s banian, Cantoo Baboo; and if I am not mistaken, the three first lines of that No. 2 were read over to me from a Persian paper by his moonshee. The translation of these particulars, made by me, was, as I verily believe, the first complete memorandum that he ever possessed of them in the English language; and I am confident, that, if I had not suggested to him the necessity of his taking this precaution, he would at this moment have been unable to have afforded any such information concerning them.”
Now, my Lords, if he had not got, on the intimation of Mr. Larkins, some scraps of paper, your Lordships might have at this day wanted that valuable information which Mr. Larkins has laid before you. These, however, contain, Mr. Larkins says, “the first complete” — what? — account, do you imagine? — no, “the first complete memorandum.” You would imagine that he would himself, for his own use, have notched down, somewhere or other, in short-hand, in Persian characters, short without vowels, or in some other way, memorandums. But he had not himself even a memorandum of this business; and consequently, when he was at Cheltenham, and even here at your bar, he could never have had any account of a sum of 200,000l., but by this account of Mr. Larkins, taken, as people read them, from detached pieces of paper.
One would have expected that Mr. Larkins, being warned that day, and cautioned by the strange memory of Mr. Hastings, and the dangerous situation, therefore, in which he himself stood, would at least have been very guarded and cautious. Hear what he next says upon this subject. “As neither of the other sums passed through his hands, these” (meaning the scraps) “contained no such specification, and consequently could not enable him to afford the information with which he has requested me to furnish you; and it is more than probable, that, if the affidavit which I took on the 16th December, 1782, had not exposed my character to the suspicion of my being capable of committing one of the basest trespasses upon the confidence of mankind, I should, at this distance of time, have been equally unable to have complied with this request: but after I became acquainted with the insinuation suggested in the Eleventh Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, I thought it but too probable, that, unless I was possessed of the original memorandum which I had made of these transactions, I might not at some distant period be able to prove that I had not descended to commit so base an action. I have therefore always most carefully preserved every paper which I possessed regarding these transactions.”
You see that Mr. Hastings had no memorandums of his accounts; you see, that, after Mr. Larkins had made his memorandums of them, he had no design of guarding or keeping them; and you will commend those wicked and malicious committees who by their reports have told an accountant-general and first public officer of revenue, that, in order to guard his character from their suspicions, it was necessary that he should keep some paper or other of an account. We have heard of the base, wicked, and mercenary license that has been used by these gentlemen of India towards the House of Commons: a license to libel and traduce the diligence of the House of Commons, the purity of their motives, and the fidelity of their actions, by which the very means of informing the people are attempted to be used for the purpose of leaving them in darkness and delusion. But, my Lords, when the accountant-general declares, that, if the House of Commons had not expressed, as they ought to express, much diffidence and distrust respecting these transactions, and even suspected him of perjury, this very day that man would not have produced a scrap of those papers to you, but might have turned them to the basest and most infamous of uses. If, I say, we have saved these valuable fragments by suspecting his integrity, your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use: and I hope the world will learn that punishment will be of use, too, in preventing such transactions.
Your Lordships have seen that no two persons knew anything of these transactions; you see that even memorandums of transactions of very great moment, some of which had passed in the year 1779, were not even so much as put in the shape of complete memoranda until May, 1782; you see that Mr. Hastings never kept them: and there is no reason to imagine that a black banian and a Persian moonshee would have been careful of what Mr. Hastings himself, who did not seem to stimulate his accountants to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity, was negligent. You see that Mr. Larkins, our last, our only hope, if he had not been suspected by the House of Commons, probably would never have kept these papers; and that you could not have had this valuable cargo, such as it is, if it had not been for the circumstance Mr. Larkins thinks proper to mention.
From the specimen which we have given of Mr. Hastings’s mode of accounts, of its vouchers, checks, and counter-checks, your Lordships will have observed that the mode itself is past describing, and that the checks and counter-checks, instead of being put upon one another to prevent abuse, are put upon each other to prevent discovery and to fortify abuse. When you hear that one man has an account of receipt, another of expenditure, another of control, you say that office is well constituted: but here is an office constituted by different persons without the smallest connection with each other; for the only purpose which they have ever answered is the purpose of base concealment.
We shall now proceed a little further with Mr. Larkins. The first of the papers from which he took the memoranda was a paper of Cantoo Baboo. It contained detached payments, amounting in the whole, with the cabooleat, or agreement, to about 95,000l. sterling, and of which it appears that there was received by Mr. Croftes 55,000l., and no more.
Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest in your memory what sort of an exchequer this is, even with regard to its receipts? As your Lordships have seen the economy and constitution of this office, so now see the receipt. It appears that in the month of May, 1782, out of the sums beginning to be received in the month of Shawal, that is in July, 1779, there was, during that interval, 40,000l. out of 95,000l. sunk somewhere, in some of the turnings over upon the gridiron, through some of those agents and panders of corruption which Mr. Hastings uses. Here is the valuable revenue of the Company, which is to supply them in their exigencies, which is to come from sources which otherwise never would have yielded it, — which, though small in proportion to the other revenue, yet is a diamond, something that by its value makes amends for its want of bulk, — falling short by 40,000l. out of 95,000l. Here is a system made for fraud, and producing all the effects of it.
Upon the face of this account, the agreement was to yield to Mr. Hastings, some way or other, to be paid to Mr. Croftes, 95,000l., and there was a deficiency of 40,000l. Would any man, even with no more sense than Mr. Hastings, who wants all the faculties of the human mind, who has neither memory nor judgment, any man who was that poor half-idiot creature that Mr. Hastings pretends to be, engage in a dealing that was to extort from some one or other an agreement to pay 95,000l. which was not to produce more than 55,000l.? What, then, is become of it? Is it in the hands of Mr. Hastings’s wicked bribe-brokers, or in his own hands? Is it in arrear? Do you know anything about it? Whom are you to apply to for information? Why, to G.G.S. — G.G.S. I find to be, what indeed I suspected him to be, a person that I have mentioned frequently to your Lordships, and that you will often hear of, commonly called Gunga Govind Sing, — in a short word, the wickedest of the whole race of banians: the consolidated wickedness of the whole body is to be found in this man.
Of the deficiency which appears in this agreement with somebody or other on the part of Mr. Hastings through Gunga Govind Sing you will expect to hear some explanation. Of the first sum, which is said to have been paid through Gunga Govind Sing, amounting on the cabooleat to four lac, and of which no more than two lac was actually received, — that is to say, half of it was sunk, — we have this memorandum only: “Although Mr. Hastings was extremely dissatisfied with the excuses Gunga Govind Sing assigned for not paying Mr. Croftes the sum stated by the p
aper No. 1 to be in his charge, he never could obtain from him any further payments on this account.” Mr. Hastings is exceedingly dissatisfied with those excuses, and this is the whole account of the transaction. This is the only thing said of Gunga Govind Sing in the account: he neither states how he came to be employed, or for what he was employed. It appears, however, from the transaction, as far as we can make our way through this darkness, that he had actually received 10,000l. of the money, which he did not account for, and that he pretended that there was an arrear of the rest. So here Mr. Hastings’s bribe-agent admits that he had received 10,000l., but he will not account for it; he says there is an arrear of another 10,000l.; and thus it appears that he was enabled to take from somebody at Dinagepore, by a cabooleat, 40,000l., of which Mr. Hastings can get but 20,000l.: there is cent per cent loss upon it. Mr. Hastings was so exceedingly dissatisfied with this conduct of Gunga Govind Sing, that you would imagine a breach would have immediately ensued between them. I shall not anticipate what some of my honorable friends will bring before your Lordships; but I tell you, that, so far from quarrelling with Gunga Govind Sing, or being really angry with him, it is only a little pettish love quarrel with Gunga Govind Sing: amantium iræ amoris integratio est. For Gunga Govind Sing, without having paid him one shilling of this money, attended him to the Ganges; and one of the last acts of Mr. Hastings’s government was to represent this man, who was unfaithful even to fraud, who did not keep the common faith of thieves and robbers, this very man he recommends to the Company as a person who ought to be rewarded, as one of their best and most faithful servants. And how does he recommend him to be rewarded? By giving him the estate of another person, — the way in which Mr. Hastings desires to be always rewarded himself: for, in calling upon the Company’s justice to give him some money for expenses with which he never charged them, he desires them to assign him the money upon some person of the country. So here Mr. Hastings recommends Gunga Govind Sing not only to trust, confidence, and employment, which he does very fully, but to a reward taken out of the substance of other people. This is what Mr. Hastings has done with Gunga Govind Sing; and if such are the effects of his anger, what must be the effect of his pleasure and satisfaction? Now I say that Mr. Hastings, who, in fact, saw this man amongst the very last with whom he had any communication in India, could not have so recommended him after this known fraud, in one business only, of 20,000l., — he could not so have supported him, he could not so have caressed him, he could not so have employed him, he could not have done all this, unless he had paid to Mr. Hastings privately that sum of money which never was brought into any even of these miserable accounts, without some payment or other with which Mr. Hastings was and ought to be satisfied, or unless Gunga Govind Sing had some dishonorable secret to tell of him which he did not dare to provoke him to give a just account of, or, lastly, unless the original agreement was that half or a third of the bribe should go to Gunga Govind Sing.
Such is this patriotic scheme of bribery, this public-spirited corruption which Mr. Hastings has invented upon this occasion, and by which he thinks out of the vices of mankind to draw a better revenue than out of any legal source whatever; and therefore he has resolved to become the most corrupt of all Governors-General, in order to be the most useful servant to the finances of the Company.
So much as to the first article of Dinagepore peshcush. All you have is, that G.G.S is Gunga Govind Sing; that he has cheated the public of half of it; that Mr. Hastings was angry with him, and yet went away from Bengal, rewarding, praising, and caressing him. Are these things to pass as matters of course? They cannot so pass with your Lordships’ sagacity: I will venture to say that no court, even of pie-poudre, could help finding him guilty upon such a matter, if such a court had to inquire into it.
The next article is Patna. Here, too, he was to receive 40,000l.; but from whom this deponent saith not. At this circumstance Mr. Larkins, who is a famous deponent, never hints once. You may look through his whole letter, which is a pretty long one, (and which I will save your Lordships the trouble of hearing read at length now, because you will have it before you when you come to the Patna business,) and you will only find that somebody had engaged to pay him 40,000l., and that but half of this sum was received. You want an explanation of this. You have seen the kind of explanation given in the former case, a conjectural explanation of G.G.S. But when you come to the present case, who the person paying was, why the money was not paid, what the cause of failure was, you are not told: you only learn that there was that sum deficient; and Mr. Larkins, who is our last resort and final hope of elucidation in this transaction, throws not the smallest glimpse of light upon it. We of the House of Commons have been reduced to form the best legitimate conjectures we could upon this business, and those conjectures have led us to further evidence, which will enable us to fix one of the most scandalous and most mischievous bribes, in all the circumstances of it, upon Mr. Hastings, that was ever known. If he extorted 40,000l. under pretence of the Company’s service, here is again another failure of half the money. Oh, my Lords, you will find that even the remaining part was purchased with the loss of one of the best revenues in India, and with the grievous distress of a country that deserved well your protection, instead of being robbed to give 20,000l. to the Company, and another 20,000l. to some robber or other, black or white. When I say, given to some other robber, black or white, I do not suppose that either generosity, friendship, or even communion, can exist in that country between white men and black: no, their colors are not more adverse than their characters and tempers. There is not that idem velle et idem nolle, there are none of those habits of life, nothing, that can bind men together even in the most ordinary society: the mutual means of such an union do not exist between them. It is a money-dealing, and a money-dealing only, which can exist between them; and when you hear that a black man is favored, and that 20,000l. is pretended to be left in his hands, do not believe it: indeed, you cannot believe it; for we will bring evidence to show that there is no friendship between those people, — and that, when black men give money to a white man, it is a bribe, — and that, when money is given to a black man, he is only a sharer with the white man in their infamous profits. We find, however, somebody, anonymous, with 20,000l. left in his hands; and when we come to discover who the man is, and the final balance which appears against him in his account with the Company, we find that for this 20,000l., which was received for the Company, they paid such a compound interest as was never before paid for money advanced: the most violently griping usurer, in dealing with the most extravagant heir, never made such a bargain as Mr. Hastings has made for the Company by this bribe. Therefore it could be nothing but fraud that could have got him to have undertaken such a revenue. This evidently shows the whole to be a pretence to cover fraud, and not a weak attempt to raise a revenue, — and that Mr. Hastings was not that idiot he represents himself to be, a man forgetting all his offices, all his duties, all his own affairs, and all the public affairs. He does not, however, forget how to make a bargain to get money; but when the money is to be recovered for the Company, (as he says,) he forgets to recover it: so that the accuracy with which he begins a bribe, acribus initiis et soporosâ fine, and the carelessness with which he ends it, are things that characterize, not weakness and stupidity, but fraud.
The next article we proceed to is Nuddea. Here we have more light; but does Mr. Larkins anywhere tell you anything about Nuddea? No it appears as if the account had been paid up, and that the cabooleat and the payments answer and tally with each other; yet, when we come to produce the evidence upon these parts, you will see most abundant reason to be assured that there is much more concealed than is given in this account, — that it is an account current, and not an account closed, — and that the agreement was for some other and greater sum than appears. It might be expected that the Company would inquire of Mr. Hastings, and ask, “From whom did he get it? Who has received it? Who is to answer for it?” But he knew that they
were not likely to make any inquiry at all, — they are not that kind of people. You would imagine that a mercantile body would have some of the mercantile excellencies, and even you would allow them perhaps some of the mercantile faults. But they have, like Mr. Hastings, forgotten totally the mercantile character; and, accordingly, neither accuracy nor fidelity of account do they ever require of Mr. Hastings. They have too much confidence in him; and he, accordingly, acts like a man in whom such confidence, without reason, is reposed.