by Edmund Burke
Here is a poor, miserable instrument, confessing himself to be such, ruined by Mr. Hastings’s public agents, Mr. Middleton and Mr. Johnson; ruined by his private agents, Major Davy and Major Palmer; ruined equally by them all; and at last declaring in a tone of despair, “If you have a mind really to keep Major Davy and Major Palmer here, why, I must consent to it. Do what you please with me, I am your creature; for God’s sake, let me have a little rest.”
Your Lordships shall next hear what account Hyder Beg Khân, the Vizier’s prime-minister, gives of the situation in which he and his master were placed.
Extract of a Letter from Hyder Beg Khân, received 21st April, 1785.
“I hope that such orders and commands as relate to the friendship between his Highness and the Company’s governments and to your will may be sent through Major Palmer, in your own private letters, or in your letters to the Major, who is appointed from you at the presence of his Highness, that, in obedience to your orders, he may properly explain your commands, and, whatever affair may be settled, he may first secretly inform you of it, and afterwards his Highness may, conformably thereto, write an answer, and I also may represent it. By this system, your pleasure will always be fully made known to his Highness; and his Highness and we will execute whatever may be your orders, without deviating a hair’s-breadth: and let not the representations of interested persons be approved of, because his Highness makes no opposition to your will; and I, your servant, am ready in obedience and service, and I make no excuses.”
Now, my Lords, was there ever such a discovery made of the arcana of any public theatre? You see here, behind the ostensible scenery, all the crooked working of the machinery developed and laid open to the world. You now see by what secret movement the master of the mechanism has conducted the great Indian opera, — an opera of fraud, deceptions, and harlequin tricks. You have it all laid open before you. The ostensible scene is drawn aside; it has vanished from your sight. All the strutting signors, and all the soft signoras are gone; and instead of a brilliant spectacle of descending chariots, gods, goddesses, sun, moon, and stars, you have nothing to gaze on but sticks, wire, ropes, and machinery. You find the appearance all false and fraudulent; and you see the whole trick at once. All this, my Lords, we owe to Major Scott’s trunk, which, by admitting us behind the scene, has enabled us to discover the real state of Mr. Hastings’s government in India. And can your Lordships believe that all this mechanism of fraud, prevarication, and falsehood could have been intended for any purpose but to forward that robbery, corruption, and peculation by which Mr. Hastings has destroyed one of the finest countries upon earth? Is it necessary, after this, for me to tell you that you are not to believe one word of the correspondence stated by him to have been received from India? This discovery goes to the whole matter of the whole government of the country. You have seen what that government was, and by-and-by you shall see the effects of it.
Your Lordships have now seen this trunk of Mr. Scott’s producing the effects of Aladdin’s lamp, — of which your Lordships may read in books much more worthy of credit than Mr. Hastings’s correspondence. I have given all the credit of this precious discovery to Mr. Scott’s trunk; but, my Lords, I find that I have to ask pardon for a mistake in supposing the letter of Hyder Beg Khân to be a part of Mr. Hastings’s correspondence. It comes from another quarter, not much less singular, and equally authentic and unimpeachable. But though it is not from the trunk, it smells of the trunk, it smells of the leather. I was as proud of my imaginary discovery as Sancho Panza was that one of his ancestors had discovered a taste of iron in some wine, and another a taste of leather in the same wine, and that afterwards there was found in the cask a little key tied to a thong of leather, which had given to the wine a taste of both. Now, whether this letter tasted of the leather of the trunk or of the iron of Mr. Macpherson, I confess I was a little out in my suggestion and my taste. The letter in question was written by Hyder Beg Khân, after Mr. Hastings’s departure, to Mr. Macpherson, when he succeeded to the government. That gentleman thus got possession of a key to the trunk; and it appears to have been his intentions to follow the steps of his predecessor, to act exactly in the same manner, and in the same manner to make the Nabob the instrument of his own ruin. This letter was written by the Nabob’s minister to Sir John Macpherson, newly inaugurated into his government, and who might be supposed not to be acquainted with all the best of Mr. Hastings’s secrets, nor to have had all the trunk correspondence put into his hands. However, here is a trunk extraordinary, and its contents are much in the manner of the other. The Nabob’s minister acquaints him with the whole secret of the system. It is plain that the Nabob considered it as a system not to be altered: that there was to be nothing true, nothing aboveboard, nothing open in the government of his affairs. When you thus see that there can be little doubt of the true nature of the government, I am sure that hereafter, when we come to consider the effects of that government, it will clear up and bring home to the prisoner at your bar all we shall have to say upon this subject.
Mr. Hastings, having thrown off completely the authority of the Company, as you have seen, — having trampled upon those of their servants who had manifested any symptom of independence, or who considered the orders of the Directors as a rule of their conduct, — having brought every Englishman under his yoke, and made them supple and fit instruments for all his designs, — then gave it to be understood that such alone were fit persons to be employed in important affairs of state. Consider, my Lords, the effect of this upon the whole service. Not one man that appears to pay any regard to the authority of the Directors is to expect that any regard will be paid to himself. So that this man not only rebels himself, in his own person, against the authority of the Company, but he makes all their servants join him in this very rebellion. Think, my Lords, of this state of things, — and I wish it never to pass from your minds that I have called him the captain-general of the whole host of actors in Indian iniquity, under whom that host was arrayed, disciplined, and paid. This language which I used was not, as fools have thought proper to call it, offensive and abusive; it is in a proper criminatory tone, justified by the facts that I have stated to you, and in every step we take it is justified more and more. I take it as a text upon which I mean to preach; I take it as a text which I wish to have in your Lordships’ memory from the beginning to the end of this proceeding. He is not only guilty of iniquity himself, but is at the head of a system of iniquity and rebellion, and will not suffer with impunity any one honest man to exist in India, if he can help it. Every mark of obedience to the legal authority of the Company is by him condemned; and if there is any virtue remaining in India, as I think there is, it is not his fault that it still exists there.
We have shown you the servile obedience of the natives of the country; we have shown you the miserable situation to which a great prince, at least a person who was the other day a great prince, was reduced by Mr. Hastings’s system. We shall next show you that this prince, who, unfortunately for himself, became a dependant on the Company, and thereby subjected to the will of an arbitrary government, is made by him the instrument of his own degradation, the instrument of his (the Governor’s) falsehoods, the instrument of his peculations; and that he had been subjected to all this degradation for the purposes of the most odious tyranny, violence, and corruption.
Mr. Hastings, having assumed the government to himself, soon made Oude a private domain. It had, to be sure, a public name, but it was to all practical intents and purposes his park, or his warren, — a place, as it were, for game, whence he drew out or killed, at an earlier or later season, as he thought fit, anything he liked, and brought it to his table according as it served his purpose. Before I proceed, it will not be improper for me to remind your Lordships of the legitimate ends to which all controlling and superintending power ought to be directed. Whether a man acquires this power by law or by usurpation, there are certain duties attached to his station. Let us now see what these du
ties are.
The first is, to take care of that vital principle of every state, its revenue. The next is, to preserve the magistracy and legal authorities in honor, respect, and force. And the third, to preserve the property, movable and immovable, of all the people committed to his charge.
In regard to his first duty, the protection of the revenue, your Lordships will find, that, from three millions and upwards which I stated to be the revenue of Oude, and which Mr. Hastings, I believe, or anybody for him, has never thought proper to deny, it sunk under his management to about one million four hundred and forty thousand pounds: and even this, Mr. Middleton says, (as you may see in your minutes,) was not completely realized. Thus, my Lords, you see that one half of the whole revenue of the country was lost after it came into Mr. Hastings’s management. Well, but it may perhaps be said this was owing to the Nabob’s own imprudence. No such thing, my Lords; it could not be so; for the whole real administration and government of the country was in the hands of Mr. Hastings’s agents, public or private.
To let you see how provident Mr. Hastings’s management of it was, I shall produce to your Lordships one of the principal manoeuvres that he adopted for the improvement of the revenue, and for the happiness and prosperity of the country, the latter of which will always go along, more or less, with the first.
The Nabob, whose acts your Lordships have now learned to appreciate as no other than the acts of Mr. Hastings, writes to the Council to have a body of British officers, for the purposes of improving the discipline of his troops, collecting his revenues, and repressing disorder and outrage among his subjects. This proposal was ostensibly fair and proper; and if I had been in the Council at that time, and the Nabob had really and bonâ fide made such a request, I should have said he had taken a very reasonable and judicious step, and that the Company ought to aid him in his design.
Among the officers sent to Oude, in consequence of this requisition, was the well-known Colonel Hannay: a man whose name will be bitterly and long remembered in India. This person, we understand, had been recommended to Mr. Hastings by Sir Elijah Impey: and his appointment was the natural consequence of such patronage. I say the natural consequence, because Sir Elijah Impey appears on your minutes to have been Mr. Hastings’s private agent and negotiator in Oude. In that light, and in that light only, I consider Colonel Hannay in this business. We cannot prove that he was not of Mr. Hastings’s own nomination originally and primarily; but whether we take him in this way, or as recommended by Sir Elijah Impey, or anybody else, Mr. Hastings is equally responsible.
Colonel Hannay is sent up by Mr. Hastings, and has the command of a brigade, of two regiments I think, given to him. Thus far all is apparently fair and easily understood. But in this country we find everything in masquerade and disguise. We find this man, instead of being an officer, farmed the revenue of the country, as is proved by Colonel Lumsden and other gentlemen, who were his sub-farmers and his assistants. Here, my Lords, we have a man who appeared to have been sent up the country as a commander of troops, agreeably to the Nabob’s request, and who, upon our inquiry, we discover to have been farmer-general of the country! We discover this with surprise; and I believe, till our inquiries began, it was unknown in Europe. We have, however, proved upon your Lordships’ minutes, by an evidence produced by Mr. Hastings himself, that Colonel Hannay was actually farmer-general of the countries of Baraitch and Goruckpore. We have proved upon your minutes that Colonel Hannay was the only person possessed of power in the country; that there was no magistrate in it, nor any administration of the law whatever. We have proved to your Lordships that in his character of farmer-general he availed himself of the influence derived from commanding a battalion of soldiers. In short, we have proved that the whole power, civil, military, municipal, and financial, resided in him; and we further refer your Lordships to Mr. Lumsden and Mr. Halhed for the authority which he possessed in that country. Your Lordships, I am sure, will supply with your diligence what is defective in my statement; I have therefore taken the liberty of indicating to you where you are to find the evidence to which I refer. You will there, my Lords, find this Colonel Hannay in a false character: he is ostensibly given to the Nabob as a commander of his troops, while in reality he is forced upon that prince as his farmer-general. He is invested with the whole command of the country, while the sovereign is unable to control him, or to prevent his extorting from the people whatever he pleases.
If we are asked what the terms of his farm were, we cannot discover that he farmed the country at any certain sum. We cannot discover that he was subjected to any terms, or confined by any limitations. Armed with arbitrary power, and exercising that power under a false title, his exactions from the poor natives were only limited by his own pleasure. Under these circumstances, we are now to ask what there was to prevent him from robbing and ruining the people, and what security against his robbing the exchequer of the person whose revenue he farmed.
You are told by the witnesses in the clearest manner, (and, after what you have heard of the state of Oude, you cannot doubt the fact,) that nobody, not even the Nabob, dared to complain against him, — that he was considered as a man authorized and supported by the power of the British government; and it is proved in the evidence before you that he vexed and harassed the country to the utmost extent which we have stated in our article of charge, and which you would naturally expect from a man acting under such false names with such real powers. We have proved that from some of the principal zemindars in that country, who held farms let to them for twenty-seven thousand rupees a year, a rent of sixty thousand was demanded, and in some cases enforced, — and that upon the refusal of one of them to comply with this demand, he was driven out of the country.
Your Lordships will find in the evidence before you that the inhabitants of the country were not only harassed in their fortunes, but cruelly treated in their persons. You have it upon Mr. Halhed’s evidence, and it is not attempted, that I know of, to be contradicted, that the people were confined in open cages, exposed to the scorching heat of the sun, for pretended or real arrears of rent: it is indifferent which, because I consider all confinement of the person to support an arbitrary exaction to be an abomination not to be tolerated. They have endeavored, indeed, to weaken this evidence by an attempt to prove that a man day and night in confinement in an open cage suffers no inconvenience. And here I must beg your Lordships to observe the extreme unwillingness that appears in these witnesses. Their testimony is drawn from them drop by drop, their answers to our questions are never more than yes or no; but when they are examined by the counsel on the other side, it flows as freely as if drawn from a perennial spring: and such a spring we have in Indian corruption. We have, however, proved that in these cages the renters were confined till they could be lodged in the dungeons or mud forts. We have proved that some of them were obliged to sell their children, that others fled the country, and that these practices were carried to such an awful extent that Colonel Hannay was under the necessity of issuing orders against the unnatural sale and flight which his rapacity had occasioned.
The prisoner’s counsel have attempted to prove that this had been a common practice in that country. And though possibly some person as wicked as Colonel Hannay might have been there before at some time or other, no man ever sold his children but under the pressure of some cruel exaction. Nature calls out against it. The love that God has implanted in the heart of parents towards their children is the first germ of that second conjunction which He has ordered to subsist between them and the rest of mankind. It is the first formation and first bond of society. It is stronger than all laws; for it is the law of Nature, which is the law of God. Never did a man sell his children who was able to maintain them. It is, therefore, not only a proof of his exactions, but a decisive proof that these exactions were intolerable.
Next to the love of parents for their children, the strongest instinct, both natural and moral, that exists in man, is the love of his country: an ins
tinct, indeed, which extends even to the brute creation. All creatures love their offspring; next to that they love their homes: they have a fondness for the place where they have been bred, for the habitations they have dwelt in, for the stalls in which they have been fed, the pastures they have browsed in, and the wilds in which they have roamed. We all know that the natal soil has a sweetness in it beyond the harmony of verse. This instinct, I say, that binds all creatures to their country, never becomes inert in us, nor ever suffers us to want a memory of it. Those, therefore, who seek to fly their country can only wish to fly from oppression: and what other proof can you want of this oppression, when, as a witness has told you, Colonel Hannay was obliged to put bars and guards to confine the inhabitants within the country?