Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  Your Lordships shall now hear what Hyder Beg Khân says: that Hyder Beg Khân who stands recorded in your minutes as the worst of mankind; who is represented as writing letters without the Nabob’s consent, and in defiance of him; the man of whom Mr. Hastings says, that the Nabob is nothing but a tool in his hands, and that the Nabob is and ever must be a tool of somebody or other. Now, as we have heard the tool speak, let us hear how the workman employed to work with this tool speaks.

  Extract from Hyder Beg Khân’s Letter to the Governor and Council.

  “It is at this time learnt by the Nabob Vizier, and us, his ministers, that the gentlemen of power in England are displeased with Mr. Hastings, on the suspicion that during his administration in this country, from motives of avidity, he committed oppressions contrary to the rules of justice, took the properties of men by deceit and force, injured the ryots and subjects, and rendered the country destitute and ruined. As the true and upright disposition of Mr. Hastings is in every respect free of this suspicion, we therefore with truth and sincerity declare by these lines, written according to fact, that Mr. Hastings, from the first of his appointment to the government of this country until his departure for Europe, during his authority in the management of the affairs of the country, whether in the lifetime of the Nabob Sujah ul Dowlah Bahadur, deceased, or whether during the present reign, did not, in any matters which took place from the great friendship between this government and the Company, act in any wise upon motives of avidity, and, not having, in any respect, other than justice and propriety in intention, did not swerve from their rules. He kept his Excellency the Vizier always pleased and satisfied” (you will remember, my Lords, the last expressions of his pleasure and satisfaction) “by his friendship and attention in every matter. He at all times showed favor and kindness towards us, the ministers of this government; and under his protection having enjoyed perfect happiness and comfort, we are from our hearts satisfied with and grateful for his benevolence and goodness.”

  Here, my Lords, you have the character which Hyder Beg Khân gives of Mr. Hastings, — of the man who he knew had loaded him, as he had done, with every kind of indignity, reproach, and outrage with which a man can be loaded. Your Lordships will see that this testimony repeats, almost word for word, the testimony of the Vizier Nabob, — which shows who the real writer is.

  My Lords, it is said, that there is no word in the Persian language to express gratitude. With these signal instances of gratitude before us, I think we may venture to put one into their dictionary. Mr. Hastings has said he has had the pleasure to find from the people of India that gratitude which he has not met with from his own countrymen, the House of Commons. Certainly, if he has done us services, we have been ungrateful indeed; if he has committed enormous crimes, we are just. Of the miserable, dependent situation to which these people are reduced, that they are not ashamed to come forward and deny everything they have given under their own hand, — all these things show the portentous nature of this government, they show the portentous nature of that phalanx with which the House of Commons is at present at war, the power of that captain-general of every species of Indian iniquity, which, under him, is embodied, arrayed, and paid, from Leadenhall Street to the furthermost part of India.

  We have but one observation more to offer upon this collection of razinamas, upon these miserable testimonials given by these wretched people in contradiction to all their own previous representations, — directly in contradiction to those of Mr. Hastings himself, — directly in contradiction to those of Lord Cornwallis, — directly in contradiction to truth itself. It is this. Here is Mr. Hastings with his agents canvassing the country, with all that minuteness with which a county is canvassed at an election; and yet in this whole book of razinamas not one fact adduced by us is attempted to be disproved, not one fact upon which Mr. Hastings’s defence can be founded is attempted to be proved. There is nothing but bare vile panegyrics, directly belied by the state of facts, directly belied by the persons themselves, directly belied by Mr. Hastings at your bar, and by all the whole course of the correspondence of the country.

  We here leave to your Lordships’ judgment the consideration of the elevated rank of the persons aggrieved and degraded to the lowest state of dependence and actual distress, — the consideration of the condition of the country gentlemen, who were obliged to hide their heads, wherever they could, from the plunderers and robbers established under his authority in every part of the country, and that of the miserable common people, who have been obliged to sell their children through want of food to feed them, — the consideration, I say, of the manner in which this country, in the highest, in the middle, and in the lowest classes of its inhabitants, nay, in physical works of God, was desolated and destroyed by this man.

  Having now done with the province of Oude, we will proceed to the province of Bengal, and consider what was the kind of government which he exercised there, and in what manner it affected the people that were subjected to it.

  Bengal, like every part of India subject to the British empire, contains (as I have already had occasion to mention) three distinct classes of people, forming three distinct social systems. The first is the Mahometans, which, about seven hundred years ago, obtained a footing in that country, and ever since has in a great degree retained its authority there. For the Mahometans had settled there long before the foundation of the Bengal empire, which was overturned by Tamerlane: so that this people, who are represented sometimes loosely as strangers, are people of ancient and considerable settlement in that country; and though, like Mahometan settlers in many other countries, they have fallen into decay, yet, being continually recruited from various parts of Tartary under the Mogul empire, and from various parts of Persia, they continue to be the leading and most powerful people throughout the peninsula; and so we found them there. These people, for the most part, follow no trades or occupation, their religion and laws forbidding them in the strictest manner to take usury or profit arising from money that is in any way lent; they have, therefore, no other means for their support but what arises from their adherence to and connection with the Mogul government and its viceroys. They enjoy under them various offices, civil and military, — various employments in the courts of law, and stations in the army. Accordingly a prodigious number of people, almost all of them persons of the most ancient and respectable families in the country, are dependent upon and cling to the subahdars or viceroys of the several provinces. They, therefore, who oppress, plunder, and destroy the subahdars, oppress, rob, and destroy an immense mass of people. It is true that a supervening government, established upon another, always reduces a certain portion of the dependants upon the latter to want. You must distress, by the very nature of the circumstances of the case, a great number of people; but then it is your business, when, by the superiority which you have acquired, however you may have acquired it, (for I am not now considering whether you have acquired it by fraud or force, or whether by a mixture of both,) when, I say, you have acquired it, it is your business not to oppress those people with new and additional difficulties, but rather to console them in the state to which they are reduced, and to give them all the assistance and protection in your power.

  The next system is composed of the descendants of the people who were found in the country by the Mahometan invaders. The system before mentioned comprehends the official interest, the judicial interest, the court interest, and the military interest. This latter body includes almost the whole landed interest, commercial interest, and moneyed interest of the country. For the Hindoos not being forbidden by their laws or religious tenets, as laid down in the Shaster, many of them became the principal money-lenders and bankers; and thus the Hindoos form the greatest part both of the landed and moneyed interest in that country.

  The third and last system is formed of the English interest; which in reality, whether it appears directly or indirectly, is the governing interest of the whole country, — of its civil and military interest, of it
s landed, moneyed, and revenue interest; and what to us is the greatest concern of all, it is this system which is responsible for the government of that country to the government of Great Britain. It is divided into two parts: one emanating from the Company, and afterwards regulated by act of Parliament; the other a judicial body, sent out by and acting under the authority of the crown itself. The persons composing that interest are those whom we usually call the servants of the Company. They enter into that service, as your Lordships know, at an early period of life, and they are promoted accordingly as their merit or their interest may provide for them. This body of men, with respect to its number, is so small as scarcely to deserve mentioning; but, from certain circumstances, the government of the whole country is fallen into their hands. Amongst these circumstances, the most important and essential are their having the public revenues and the public purse entirely in their own hands, and their having an army maintained by that purse, and disciplined in the European manner.

  Such was the state of that country when Mr. Hastings was appointed Governor in 1772. Your Lordships are now to decide upon the manner in which he has comported himself with regard to all these three interests: first, whether he has made the ancient Mahometan families as easy as he could; secondly, whether he has made the Hindoo inhabitants, the zemindars and their tenants, as secure in their property and as easy in their tenure as he could; and lastly, whether he has made the English interest a blessing to the country, and, whilst it provided moderate, safe, and proper emoluments to the persons that were concerned in it, it kept them from oppression and rapine, and a general waste and ravage of the country: whether, in short, he made all these three interests pursue that one object which all interests and all governments ought to pursue, the advantage and welfare of the people under them.

  My Lords, in support of our charge against the prisoner at your bar, that he acted in a manner directly the reverse of this, we have proved to you that his first acts of oppression were directed against the Mahometan government, — that government which had been before, not only in name, but in effect, to the very time of his appointment, the real government of the country. After the Company had acquired its right over it, some shadow still remained of the ancient government. An allowance was settled for the Nabob of Bengal, to support the dignity of his court, which amounted to between four and five hundred thousand pounds a year. In this was comprehended the support of the whole mass of nobility, — the soldiers, serving or retired, — all the officers of the court, and all the women that were dependent upon them, — the whole of the criminal jurisdiction of the country, and a very considerable part of the civil law and the civil government. These establishments formed the constitutional basis of their political government.

  The Company never had (and it is a thing that we can never too often repeat to your Lordships) — the Company never had of right despotic power in that country, to overturn any of these establishments. The Mogul, who gave them their charters, could not give them such a power, — he did not de facto give them such a power; the government of this country did not by act of Parliament, and the Company did not and could not by their delegation, give him such a power; the act by which he was appointed Governor did not give him such a power. If he exercised it, he usurped it; and therefore, every step we take in the examination of his conduct in Bengal, as in every step we take upon the same subject everywhere else, we look for the justification of his conduct to laws, — the Law of Nations, the laws of this country, and the laws of the country he was sent to govern.

  The government of that country, by the ancient constitution of the Mogul empire, besides the numberless individual checks and counter-checks in the inferior officers [offices?], is divided into the viceroyal part and the subahdarry part. The viceroyal part takes in all criminal justice and political government. Mr. Hastings found the country under a viceroy, governing according to law, acting by proper judges and magistrates under him: he himself not being the judicial, but executive power of the country, — that which sets the other in action, and does not supersede it or supply its place. The other, the subahdarry power, which was by the grant of the dewanny conferred upon the Company, had under its care the revenues, as much of the civil government as is concerned with the revenues, and many other matters growing out of it. These two offices are coördinate and dependent on each other. The Company, after contracting to maintain the army out of it, got the whole revenue into their power. The army being thus within their power, the subahdar by degrees vanished into an empty name.

  When we thus undertook the government of the country, conscious that we had undertaken a task which by any personal exertion of our own we were unable to perform in any proper or rational way, the Company appointed a native of the country, Mahomed Reza Khân, who stands upon the records of the Company, I venture to say, with such a character as no man perhaps ever did stand, to execute the duties of both offices. Upon the expulsion of Cossim Ali Khân, the Nabob of Bengal, all his children were left in a young, feeble, and unprotected state; and in that state of things, Lord Clive, Mr. Sumner, who sits near Mr. Hastings, and the rest of the Council, wisely appointed Mahomed Reza Khân to fulfil the two offices of deputy-viceroy and deputy-dewan, for which he had immense allowances, and great jaghires and revenues, I allow. He was a man of that dignity, rank, and consideration, added to his knowledge of law and experience in business, that Lord Clive and Mr. Sumner, who examined strictly his conduct at that time, did not think that 112,000l. a year, the amount of the emoluments which had been allowed him, was a great deal too much; but at his own desire, and in order that these emoluments might be brought to stated and fixed sums, they reduced it to 90,000l., — an allowance which they thought was not more than sufficient to preserve the state of so great a magistrate, and a man of such rank, exercising such great employments. The whole revenue of the Company depended upon his talents and fidelity; and you will find, that, on the day in which he surrendered the revenues into our hands, the dewanny, under his management, was a million more than it produced on the day Mr. Hastings left it. For the truth of this I refer your Lordships to a letter of the Company sent to the Board of Control. This letter is not in evidence before your Lordships, and what I am stating is merely historical. But I state the facts, and with the power of referring for their proof to documents as authentic as if they were absolutely in evidence before you. Assuming, therefore, that all these facts may be verified by the records of the Company, I have now to state that this man, by some rumors true or false, was supposed to have misconducted himself in a time of great calamity in that country. A great famine had about this time grievously afflicted the whole province of Bengal. — I must remark by the way, that these countries are liable to this calamity; but it is greatly blessed by Nature with resources which afford the means of speedy recovery, if their government does not counteract them. Nature, that inflicts the calamity, soon heals the wound; it is in ordinary seasons the most fertile country, inhabited by the most industrious people, and the most disposed to marriage and settlement, probably, that exists in the whole world; so that population and fertility are soon restored, and the inhabitants quickly resume their former industrious occupations.

  During the agitation excited in the country by the calamity I have just mentioned, Mahomed Reza Khân, through the intrigues of Rajah Nundcomar, one of his political rivals, and of some English faction that supported him, was accused of being one of the causes of the famine. In answer to this charge, he alleged, what was certainly a sufficient justification, that he had acted under the direction of the English board, to which his conduct throughout this business was fully known. The Company, however, sent an order from England to have him tried; but though he frequently supplicated the government at Calcutta that his trial should be proceeded in, in order that he might be either acquitted and discharged or condemned, Mr. Hastings kept him in prison two years, under pretence (as he wrote word to the Directors) that Mahomed Reza Khân himself was not very desirous to hasten th
e matter. In the mean time the Court of Directors, having removed him from his great offices, authorized and commanded Mr. Hastings (and here we come within the sphere of your minutes) to appoint a successor to Mahomed Reza Khân, fit to fulfil the duties of his station. Now I shall first show your Lordships what sort of person the Court of Directors described to him as most fit to fill the office of Mahomed Reza Khân, what sort of person he did appoint, and then we will trace out to you the consequences of that appointment.

  Letter from the Court of Directors to the President and Council at Fort William, dated 28th August, 1771.

  “Though we have not a doubt but that, by the exertion of your abilities, and the care and assiduity of our servants in the superintendency of the revenues, the collections will be conducted with more advantage to the Company and ease to the natives than by means of a naib dewan, we are fully sensible of the expediency of supporting some ostensible minister in the Company’s interest at the Nabob’s court, to transact the political affairs of the sircar, and interpose between the Company and the subjects of any European power, in all cases wherein they may thwart our interest or encroach on our authority; and as Mahomed Reza Khân can no longer be considered by us as one to whom such a power can be safely committed, we trust to your local knowledge the selection of some person well qualified for the affairs of government, and of whose attachment to the Company you shall be well assured: such person you will recommend to the Nabob to succeed Mahomed Reza as minister of the government, and guardian of the Nabob’s minority; and we persuade ourselves that the Nabob will pay such regard to your recommendation as to invest him with the necessary power and authority.