by Edmund Burke
Your Lordships may perhaps suppose that the payment of this money was an act of friendship and generosity in the people of the country. No: we have found out, and shall prove, from whom he got it; at least we shall produce such a conjecture upon it as your Lordships will think us bound to do, when we have such an account before us. Here on the face of the account there is no deficiency; but when we look into it, we find skulking in a corner a person called Nundulol, from whom there is received 58,000 rupees. You will find that he, who appears to have paid up this money, and which Mr. Hastings spent as he pleased in his journey to Benares, and who consequently must have had some trust reposed in him, was the wickedest of men, next to those I have mentioned, — always giving the first rank to Gunga Govind Sing, primus inter pares, the second to Debi Sing, the third to Cantoo Baboo: this man is fit to be one next on a par with them. Mr. Larkins, when he comes to explain this article, says, “I believe it is for a part of the Dinagepore peshcush, which would reduce the balance to about 5,000l.”: but he does not pretend to know what it is given for; he gives several guesses at it; “but,” he says, “as I do not know, I shall not pretend to give more than my conjecture upon it.” He is in the right; because we shall prove Nundulol never did have any thing to do with the Dinagepore peshcush. These are very extraordinary proceedings. It is my business simply to state them to your Lordships now; we will give them in afterwards in evidence, and I will leave that evidence to be confirmed and fortified by further observations.
One of the objects of Mr. Larkins’s letter is to illustrate the bonds. He says, “The two first stated sums” (namely, Dinagepore and Patna, in the paper marked No. 1, I suppose, for he seems to explain it to be such) “are sums for a part of which Mr. Hastings took two bonds: viz., No. 1539, dated 1st October, 1780, and No. 1540, dated 2d October, 1780, each for the sum of current rupees 1,16,000, or sicca rupees one lac. The remainder of that amount was carried to the credit of the head, Four per Cent Remittance Loan: Mr. Hastings having taken a bond for it, (No. 89,) which has been since completely liquidated, conformable to the law.” But before I proceed with the bonds, I will beg leave to recall to your Lordships’ recollection that Mr. Larkins states in his letter that these sums were received in November. How does this agree with another state of the transaction given by Mr. Hastings, namely, that the time of his taking the bonds was the 1st and 2d of October? Mr. Larkins, therefore, who has thought proper to say that the money was received in the month of November, has here given as extraordinary an instance either of fraudulent accuracy or shameful official inaccuracy as was ever perhaps discovered. The first sums are asserted to be paid to Mr. Croftes on the 18th and 19th of Asin, 1187. The month of Asin corresponds with the month of September and part of October, and not with November; and it is the more extraordinary that Mr. Larkins should mistake this, because he is in an office which requires monthly payments, and consequently great monthly exactness, and a continual transfer from one month to another: we cannot suppose any accountant in England can be more accurately acquainted with the succession of months than Mr. Larkins must have been with the comparative state of Bengal and English months. How are we to account for this gross inaccuracy? If you have a poet, if you have a politician, if you have a moralist inaccurate, you know that these are cases which, from the narrow bounds of our weak faculties, do not perhaps admit of accuracy. But what is an inaccurate accountant good for? “Silly man, that dost not know thy own silly trade!” was once well said: but the trade here is not silly. You do not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because you have thousands of them; but you justly blame a public accountant who is guilty of a gross inaccuracy. But what end could his being inaccurate answer? Why not name October as well as November? I know no reason for it; but here is certainly a gross mistake: and from the nature of the thing, it is hardly possible to suppose it to be a mere mistake. But take it that it is a mistake, and to have nothing of fraud, but mere carelessness; this, in a man valued by Mr. Hastings for being very punctilious and accurate, is extraordinary.
But to return to the bonds. We find a bond taken in the month of Shawal, 1186, or 1779, but the receipt is said to be in Asin, 1780: that is to say, there was a year and about three months between the collection and the receipt; and during all that period of time an enormous sum of money had lain in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, to be employed when Mr. Hastings should think fit. He employed it, he says, for the Mahratta expedition. Now he began that letter on the 29th of November by telling you that the bribe would not have been taken from Cheyt Sing, if it had not been at the instigation of an exigency which it seems required a supply of money, to be procured lawfully or unlawfully. But in fact there was no exigency for it before the Berar army came upon the borders of the country, — that army which he invited by his careless conduct towards the Rajah of Berar, and whose hostility he was obliged to buy off by a sum of money; and yet this bribe was taken from Cheyt Sing long before he had this occasion for it. The fund lay in Gunga Govind Sing’s hands; and he afterwards applied to that purpose a part of this fund, which he must have taken without any view whatever to the Company’s interest. This pretence of the exigency of the Company’s affairs is the more extraordinary, because the first receipt of these moneys was some time in the year 1779 (I have not got the exact date of the agreement); and it was but a year before that the Company was so far from being in distress, that he declared he should have, at very nearly the period when this bribe became payable, a very large sum (I do not recollect the precise amount) in their treasury. I cannot certainly tell when the cabooleat, or agreement, was made; yet I shall lay open something very extraordinary upon that subject, and will lead you, step by step, to the bloody scenes of Debi Sing. Whilst, therefore, Mr. Hastings was carrying on these transactions, he was carrying them on without any reference to the pretended object to which he afterwards applied them. It was an old, premeditated plan; and the money to be received could not have been designed for an exigency, because it was to be paid by monthly instalments. The case is the same with respect to the other cabooleats: it could not have been any momentary exigence which he had to provide for by these sums of money; they were paid regularly, period by period, as a constant, uniform income, to Mr. Hastings.
You find, then, Mr. Hastings first leaving this sum of money for a year and three months in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; you find, that, when an exigence pressed him by the Mahrattas suddenly invading Bengal, and he was obliged to refer to his bribe-fund, he finds that fund empty, and that, in supplying money for this exigence, he takes a bond for two thirds of his own money and one third of the Company’s. For, as I stated before, Mr. Larkins proves of one of these accounts, that he took, in the month of January, for this bribe-money, which, according to the principles he lays down, was the Company’s money, three bonds as for money advanced from his own cash. Now this sum of three lacs, instead of being all his own, as it should appear to be in the month of January, when he took the bonds, or two thirds his own and one third the Company’s, as he said in his letter of the 29th of November, turns out, by Mr. Larkins’s account, paragraph 9, which I wish to mark to your Lordships, to be two thirds the Company’s money and one third his own; and yet it is all confounded under bonds, as if the money had been his own. What can you say to this heroic sharper disguised under the name of a patriot, when you find him to be nothing but a downright cheat, first taking money under the Company’s name, then taking their securities to him for their own money, and afterwards entering a false account of them, contradicting that by another account? — and God knows whether the third be true or false. These are not things that I am to make out by any conclusion of mine; here they are, made out by himself and Mr. Larkins, and, comparing them with his letter of the 27th, you find a gross fraud covered by a direct falsehood.
We have now done with Mr. Larkins’s account of the bonds, and are come to the other species of Mr. Hastings’s frauds, (for there is a great variety in them,) and first to Cheyt Sing’s
bribe. Mr. Larkins came to the knowledge of the bond-money through Gunga Govind Sing and through Cantoo Baboo. Of this bribe he was not in the secret originally, but was afterwards made a confidant in it; it was carried to him; and the account he gives of it I will state to your Lordships.
“The fourth sum stated in Mr. Hastings’s account was the produce of sundry payments made to me by Sadamund, Cheyt Sing’s buckshee, who either brought or sent the gold mohurs to my house, from whence they were taken by me to Mr. Croftes, either on the same night or early in the morning after: they were made at different times, and I well remember that the same people never came twice. On the 21st June, 1780, Mr. Hastings sent for me, and desired that I would take charge of a present that had been offered to him by Cheyt Sing’s buckshee, under the plea of atoning for the opposition which he had made towards the payment of the extra subsidy for defraying part of the expenses of the war, but really in the hope of its inducing Mr. Hastings to give up that claim; with which view the present had first been offered. Mr. Hastings declared, that, although he would not take this for his own use, he would apply it to that of the Company, in removing Mr. Francis’s objections to the want of a fund for defraying the extra expenses of Colonel Camac’s detachment. On my return to the office, I wrote down the substance of what Mr. Hastings had said to me, and requested Mr. James Miller, my deputy, to seal it up with his own seal, and write upon it, that he had then done so at my request. He was no further informed of my motive for this than merely that it contained the substance of a conversation which had passed between me and another gentleman, which, in case that conversation should hereafter become the subject of inquiry, I wished to be able to adduce the memorandum then made of it, in corroboration of my own testimony; and although that paper has remained unopened to this hour, and notwithstanding that I kept no memorandum whatever of the substance thereof, yet, as I have wrote this representation under the most scrupulous adherence to what I conceived to be truth, should it ever become necessary to refer to this paper, I am confident that it will not be found to differ materially from the substance of this representation.”
I forgot to mention, that, besides these two bonds, which Mr. Hastings declared to be the Company’s, and one bond his own, that he slipped into the place of the bond of his own a much better, namely, a bond of November, which he never mentioned to the Company till the 22d of May; and this bond for current rupees 1,74,000, or sicca rupees 1,50,000, was taken for the payment stated in the paper No. 1 to have been made to Mr. Croftes on the 11th Aghan, 1187, which corresponds to the 23d of November, 1780. This is the Nuddea money, and this is all that you know of it; you know that this money, for which he had taken this other bond from the Company, was not his own neither, but bribes taken from the other provinces.
I am ashamed to be troublesome to your Lordships in this dry affair, but the detection of fraud requires a good deal of patience and assiduity, and we cannot wander into anything that can relieve the mind: if it was in my power to do it, I would do it. I wish, however, to call your Lordships’ attention to this last bribe before I quit these bonds. Such is the confusion, so complicated, so intricate are these bribe accounts, that there is always something left behind, glean never so much from the paragraphs of Mr. Hastings and Mr. Larkins. “I could not bring them to account,” says Mr. Larkins. “They were received before the 1st and 2d of October.” Why does not the running treasury account give an account of them? The Committee of the House of Commons examined whether the running treasury account had any such account of sums deposited. No such thing. They are said by Mr. Hastings to be deposited in June: they were not deposited in October, nor any account of them given till the January following. “These bonds,” says he, “I could not enter as regular money, to be entered on the Company’s account, or in any public way, until I had had an order of the Governor-General and Council.” But why had not you an order of the Governor-General and Council? We are not calling on you, Mr. Larkins, for an account of your conduct: we are calling upon Mr. Hastings for an account of his conduct, and which he refers to you to explain. Why did not Mr. Hastings order you to carry them to the public account? “Because,” says he, “there was no other way.” Every one who knows anything of a treasury or public banking-place knows, that if any person brings money as belonging to the public, that the public accountant is bound, no doubt, to receive it and enter it as such. “But,” says he, “I could not do it until the account could be settled, as between debtor and creditor: I did not do it till I could put on one side durbar charges, secret service, to such an amount, and balance that again with bonds to Mr. Hastings.” That is, he could not make an entry regularly in the Company’s books until Mr. Hastings had enabled him to commit one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public trust that ever was committed, by ordering that money of the Company’s to be considered as his own, and a bond to be taken as a security for it from the Company, as if it was his own.
But to proceed with this deposit. What is the substance of Mr. Larkins’s explanation of it? The substance of this explanation is, that here was a bribe received by Mr. Hastings from Cheyt Sing, guarded with such scrupulous secrecy, that it was not carried to the house of Mr. Croftes, who was to receive it finally, but to the house of Mr. Larkins, as a less suspected place; and that it was conveyed in various sums, no two people ever returning twice with the various payments which made up that sum of 23,000l. or thereabouts. Now do you want an instance of prevarication and trickery in an account? If any person should inquire whether 23,000l. had been paid by Cheyt Sing to Mr. Hastings, there was not any one man living, or any person concerned in the transaction, except Mr.Larkins, who received it, that could give an account of how much he received, or who brought it. As no two people are ever his confidants in the same transaction in Mr. Hastings’s accounts, so here no two people are permitted to have any share whatever in bringing the several fragments that make up this sum. This bribe, you might imagine, would have been entered by Mr. Larkins to some public account, at least to the fraudulent account of Mr. Hastings. No such thing. It was never entered till the November following. It was not entered till Mr. Francis had left Calcutta. All these corrupt transactions were carried on privately by Mr. Hastings alone, without any signification to his colleagues of his carrying on this patriotic traffic, as he called it. Your Lordships will also consider both the person who employs such a fraudulent accountant, and his ideas of his duty in his office. These are matters for your Lordships’ grave determination; but I appeal to you, upon the face of these accounts, whether you ever saw anything so gross, — and whether any man could be daring enough to attempt to impose upon the credulity of the weakest of mankind, much more to impose upon such a court as this, such accounts as these are.
If the Company had a mind to inquire what is become of all the debts due to them, and where is the cabooleat, he refers them to Gunga Govind Sing. “Give us,” say they, “an account of this balance that remains in your hands.” “I know,” says he, “of no balance.” “Why, is there not a cabooleat?” “Where is it? What are the date and circumstances of it? There is no such cabooleat existing.” This is the case even where you have the name of the person through whose hands the money passed. But suppose the inquiry went to the payments of the Patna cabooleat. “Here,” they say, “we find half the money due: out of forty thousand pounds there is only twenty thousand received: give us some account of it.” Who is to give an account of it? Here there is no mention made of the name of the person who had the cabooleat: whom can they call upon? Mr. Hastings does not remember; Mr. Larkins does not tell; they can learn nothing about it. If the Directors had a disposition, and were honest enough to the Proprietors and the nation to inquire into it, there is not a hint given, by either of those persons, who received the Nuddea, who received the Patna, who received the Dinagepore peshcush.
But in what court can a suit be instituted, and against whom, for the recovery of this balance of 40,000l. out of 95,000l.? I wish your Lordships to examine
strictly this account, — to examine strictly every part, both of the account itself, and Mr. Larkins’s explanation: compare them together, and divine, if you can, what remedy the Company could have for their loss. Can your Lordships believe that this can be any other than a systematical, deliberate fraud, grossly conducted? I will not allow Mr. Hastings to be the man he represents himself to be: he was supposed to be a man of parts; I will only suppose him to be a man of mere common sense. Are these the accounts we should expect from such a man? And yet he and Mr. Larkins are to be magnified to heaven for great financiers; and this is to be called book-keeping! This is the Bengal account saved so miraculously on the 22d of May.
Next comes the Persian account. You have heard of a present to which it refers. It has been already stated, but it must be a good deal farther explained. Mr. Larkins states that this account was taken from a paper, of which three lines, and only three lines, were read to him by a Persian moonshee; and it is not pretended that this was the whole of it. The three lines read are as follows.