Edmund Burke

“ Can he open any inquiry? He cannot: he that opens a channel of inquiry under these circumstances opens a high-road to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent it? None: for he can make no laws to restrain that practice without the breach of his own laws immediately in his own conduct. If we once can admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope left in the supreme justice of the country. ”

“ But if, by conniving at these frauds, you once teach the people of England a concealing, narrow, suspicious, guarded conduct,—if you teach them qualities directly the contrary to those by which they have hitherto been distinguished,—if you make them a nation of concealers, a nation of dissemblers, a nation of liars, a nation of forgers,—my Lords, if you, in one word, turn them into a people of banians, the character of England, that character which, more than our arms, and more than our commerce, has made us a great nation, the character of England will be gone and lost. ”

“ Hastings say before this august assembly, "I may be accused in a court of justice,—I am upon my defence,—let all charges remain against me,—I will not give you an account"? Is it fit that a governor should sit with recorded bribery upon him at the head of a public board and the government of a great kingdom, when it is in his power by inquiry to do it away? No: the chastity of character of a man in that situation ought to be as dear to him as his innocence. ”

“ He never robs from the loose superfluity of standing greatness; he devours the fallen, the indigent, the necessitous. His extortion is not like the generous rapacity of the princely eagle, who snatches away the living, struggling prey; he is a vulture, who feeds upon the prostrate, the dying, and the dead. As his cruelty is more shocking than his corruption, so his hypocrisy has something more frightful than his cruelty ”

“ Is it a lesson to be taught to the inferior servants of the Company, that, provided they can escape out of a court of justice by the back-doors and sally-ports of the law, by artifice of pleading, by those strict and rigorous rules of evidence which have been established for the protection of innocence, but which by them might be turned to the protection and support of guilt, that such an escape is enough for them? that an Old Bailey acquittal is enough to establish a fitness for trust? ”

“ Hastings uses as an accountant and treasurer of bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to himself, acting in no public manner, and never acting but upon his requisition, concealing all his frauds and artifices to prevent detection and discovery. In short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may be permitted to repeat the words I made use of on a former occasion, extortion is the assessor, in which fraud is the treasurer, confusion the accountant, oblivion the remembrancer. ”

“ There are crimes, undoubtedly, of great magnitude, naturally fitted to create horror, and that loudly call for punishment, that have yet no idea of turpitude annexed to them; but unclean hands, bribery, venality, and peculation are offences of turpitude, such as, in a governor, at once debase the person and degrade the government itself, making it not only horrible, but vile and contemptible in the eyes of all mankind. ”

“ Hastings is thrown by the perplexity of detected guilt; you see, my Lords, that, instead of defending himself, he rails at his accuser in the most indecent language, calling him a wretch whom they all knew to be the basest of mankind,—that he rails at the Council, by attributing their conduct to the worst of motives,—that he rails at everybody, and declares the accusation to be a libel: in short, you see plainly that the man's head is turned. ”

“ My Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here,—those who have their own honor, the honor of their ancestors and of their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves by various merits,—by great military services which have extended the fame of this country from the rising to the setting sun. ”

“ I proposed first of all to show your Lordships that they have their root in that which is the origin of all evil, avarice and rapacity,—to show how that led to prodigality of the public money,—and how prodigality of the public money, by wasting the treasures of the East India Company, furnished an excuse to the Governor-General to break its faith, to violate all its most solemn engagements, and to fall with a hand of stern, ferocious, and unrelenting rapacity upon all the allies and dependencies of the Company. ”

“ It is no wonder that he has taken to himself an extraordinary degree of merit. For surely such an invention of finance, I believe, never was heard of,—an exchequer wherein extortion was the assessor, fraud the cashier, confusion the accountant, concealment the reporter, and oblivion the remembrancer: in short, such as I believe no man, but one driven by guilt into frenzy, could ever have dreamed of. ”

“ Not suffered to quit the district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an universal insurrection ”

“ As for good acts candor, charity, justice oblige me not to assign evil motives, unless they serve some scandalous purpose or terminate in some manifest evil end, so justice, reason, and common sense compel me to suppose that wicked acts have been done upon motives correspondent to their nature: otherwise I reverse all the principles of judgment which can guide the human mind, and accept even the symptoms, the marks and criteria of guilt, as presumptions of innocence. One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good. ”

“ Not only the worst men will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions. Their protection is sure. The authority that is to restrain, to control, to punish them is previously engaged; he has his retaining fee for the support of their crimes. Mr. Hastings never dared, because he could not, arrest oppression in its course, without drying up the source of his own corrupt emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the fact, to punish extortion in others, because he could not, without risking the discovery of bribery in himself. ”

“ But in his defence we have him quite in another character,—no longer the frugal, attentive servant, bred to business, bred to book-keeping, as all the Company's servants are; he now knows nothing of his own affairs, knows not whether he is rich or poor, knows not what he has in the world. Nay, people are brought forward to say that they know better than he does what his affairs are. He is not like a careful man bred in a counting-house, and by the Directors put into an office of the highest trust on account of the regularity of his affairs ”

“ Hastings extinguished every sentiment of father, son, brother, and husband!
I come now to the last stage of their miseries. Everything visible and vendible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor. ”

“ My Lords, pecuniary corruption forms not only, as your Lordships will observe in the charges before you, an article of charge by itself, but likewise so intermixes with the whole, that it is necessary to give, in the best manner I am able, a history of that corrupt system which brought on all the subsequent acts of corruption. I will venture to say there is no one act, in which tyranny, malice, cruelty, and oppression can be charged, that does not at the same time carry evident marks of pecuniary corruption. ”

“ And never did a man submit to infamy for anything but its true reward, money. Money he received; the infamy he received along with it: he was glad to take his wife with all her goods; he took her with her full portion, with every species of infamy that belonged to her; and your Lordships cannot resist the opinion that he would not have suffered himself to be disgraced with the Court of Directors, disgraced with his colleagues, disgraced with the world, disgraced upon an eternal record, unless he was absolutely guilty of the fact that was charged upon him. ”

“ Hastings himself is of opinion that the cries of oppression, though extorted from a whole people by the iron hand of severity,—that these cries of a whole people, attended even with authentic documents sufficient to satisfy the mind of any man, may be totally insufficient to convict the oppressor in a court; and yet to that court, whose competence he denies, to that very court, he appeals, in that he puts his trust, and upon that ground he refuses to perform the just promise he had given of any explanation to those who had employed him. ”

“ When a man is known to be free from all imputation of taking money, and it becomes an established part of his character, the errors or even crimes of his administration ought to be, and are in general, traced to other sources. You know it is a maxim. But once convict a man of bribery in any instance, and once by direct evidence, and you are furnished with a rule of irresistible presumption that every other irregular act by which unlawful gain may arise is done upon the same corrupt motive. ”

“ I do believe that since the beginning of the world there never was an accusation which was more deserving of inquiry, because there never was an accusation which put a false accuser in a worse situation, and that put an honest defendant in a better; for there was every means of collation, every means of comparison, every means of cross-examining, every means of control. There was every way of sifting evidence, in which evidence could be sifted. ”