My Lords, permit me for one moment to drop my representative character here, and to speak to your Lordships only as a man of some experience in the world, and conversant with the affairs of men and with the characters of men.

I do, then, declare my conviction, and wish it may stand recorded to posterity, that there never was a bad man that had ability for good service. It is not in the nature of such men; their minds are so distorted to selfish purposes, to knavish, artificial, and crafty means of accomplishing those selfish ends, that, if put to any good service, they are poor, dull, helpless. Their natural faculties never have that direction; they are paralytic on that side; the muscles, if I may use the expression, that ought to move it, are all dead. They know nothing, but how to pursue selfish ends by wicked and indirect means. No man ever knowingly employed a bad man on account of his abilities, but for evil ends. Mr. Hastings knew this man to be bad; all the world knew him to be bad; and how did he employ him? In such a manner as that he might be controlled by others? A great deal might be said for him, if this had been the case. There might be circumstances in which such a man might be used in a subordinate capacity. But who ever thought of putting such a man virtually in possession of the whole authority both of the Committee and the Council-General, and of the revenues of the whole country?

As soon as we find Gunga Govind Sing here, we find him employed in the way in which he was meant to be employed: that is to say, we find him employed in taking corrupt bribes and corrupt presents for Mr. Hastings. Though the Committee were tools in his hands, he was a tool in the hands of Mr. Hastings; for he had, as we shall prove, constant, uniform, and close communications with Mr. Hastings. And, indeed, we may be saved a good deal of the trouble of proof; for Mr. Hastings himself, by acknowledging him to be his bribe-broker, has pretty well authenticated a secret correspondence between them. For the next great bribe as yet discovered to be taken by Mr. Hastings, about the time of his great operation of 1781, was the bribe of 40,000l., which we charge to have been privately taken from one of two persons, but from which is not yet ascertained, but paid to him through this flagitious black agent of his iniquities, Gunga Govind Sing. The discovery is made by another agent of his, called Mr. Larkins, one of his white bribe-confidants, and by him made Accountant-General to the Supreme Presidency. For this sum, so clandestinely and corruptly taken, he received a bond to himself, on his own account, as for money lent to the Company. For, upon the frequent, pressing, tender solicitations of the Court of Directors, always insinuated to him in a very delicate manner, Mr. Hastings had written to Mr. Larkins to find out, if he could, some of his own bribes; and accordingly Mr. Larkins sent over an account of various bribes,—an account which, even before it comes directly in evidence before you, it will be pleasant to your Lordships to read. In this account, under the head, "Dinagepore, No. 1," I find "Duplicate copy of the particulars of debts, in which the component parts of sundry sums received on the account of the Honorable Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies were received by Mr. Hastings and paid to the Sub-Treasurer." We find here, "Dinagepore peshcush, four lacs of rupees, cabooleat": that is, an agreement to pay four lacs of rupees, of which three were received and one remained in balance at the time this account was made out. All that we can learn from this account, after all our researches, after all the Court of Directors could do to squeeze it out of him, is, that he received from Dinagepore, at twelve monthly payments, a sum of about three lacs of rupees, upon an engagement to pay him four; that is, he received about 30,000l. out of 40,000l. which was to be paid him: and we are told that he received this sum through the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; and that he was exceedingly angry with Gunga Govind Sing for having kept back or defrauded him of the sum of 10,000l. out of the 40,000l. To keep back from him the fourth part of the whole bribe was very reprehensible behavior in Gunga Govind Sing, certainly very unworthy of the great and high trust which Mr. Hastings reposed in his integrity. My Lords, this letter tells us Mr. Hastings was much irritated at Gunga Govind Sing. You will hereafter see how Mr. Hastings behaves to persons against whom he is irritated for their frauds upon him in their joint concerns. In the mean time Gunga Govind Sing rests with you as a person with whom Mr. Hastings is displeased on account of infidelity in the honorable trust of bribe undertaker and manager.

My Lords, you are not very much enlightened, I believe, by seeing these words, Dinagepore peshcush. We find a province, we find a sum of money, we find an agent, and we find a receiver. The province is Dinagepore, the agent is Gunga Govind Sing, the sum agreed on is 40,000l., and the receiver of a part of that is Mr. Hastings. This is all that can be seen. Who it was that gave this sum of money to Mr. Hastings in this manner does no way appear; it is murder by persons unknown: and this is the way in which Mr. Hastings, after all the reiterated solicitations of Parliament, of the Company, and the public, has left the account of this bribe.

Let us, however, now see what was the state of transactions at Dinagepore at that period. For, if Mr. Hastings in the transactions at that period did anything for that country, it must be presumed this money was given for those acts; for Mr. Hastings confesses it was a sum of money corruptly received, but honestly applied. It does not signify much, at first view, from whom he received it; it is enough to fix upon him that he did receive it. But because the consequences of his bribes make the main part of what I intend to bring before your Lordships, I shall beg to state to you, with your indulgence, what I have been able to discover by a very close investigation of the records respecting this business of Dinagepore.

Dinagepore, Rungpore, and Edrackpore make a country, I believe, pretty nearly as large as all the northern counties of England, Yorkshire included. It is no mean country, and it has a prince of great, ancient, illustrious descent at the head of it, called the Rajah of Dinagepore.

I find, that, about the month of July, 1780, the Rajah of Dinagepore, after a long and lingering illness, died, leaving an half-brother and an adopted son. A litigation respecting the succession instantly arose in the family; and this litigation was of course referred to, and was finally to be decided by, the Governor-General in Council,—being the ultimate authority to which the decision of all these questions was to be referred. This cause came before Mr. Hastings, and I find that he decided the question in favor of the adopted son of the Rajah against his half-brother. I find that upon that decision a rent was settled, and a peshcush, or fine, paid. So that all that is in this transaction is fair and above-board: there is a dispute settled; there is a fine paid; there is a rent reserved to the Company; and the whole is a fair settlement. But I find along with it very extraordinary acts; for I find Mr. Hastings taking part in favor of the minor, agreeably to the principles of others, and contrary to his own. I find that he gave the guardianship of this adopted son to the brother of the Ranny, as she is called, or the widow of the deceased Rajah; and though the hearing and settling of this business was actually a part of the duty of his office, yet I find, that, when the steward of the province of Dinagepore was coming down to represent this case to Mr. Hastings, Mr. Hastings, on pretence that it would only tend to increase the family dissensions, so far from hearing fully all the parties in this business, not only sent him back, but ordered him to be actually turned out of his office. If, then, the 40,000l. be the same with the money taken from the Rajah in 1780, to which account it seems to refer, (for it was taken in regular payments, beginning July, 1780, and ending at the same period in 1781,) it was a sum of money corruptly taken by him as a judge in a litigation of inheritance between two great parties. So that he received the sum of 40,000l. for a judgment; which, whether that judgment was right or wrong, true or false, he corruptly received.

This sum was received, as your Lordships will observe, through Gunga Govind Sing. He was the broker of the agreement: he was the person who was to receive it by monthly instalments, and he was to pay it to Mr. Hastings. His son was in the office of Register-General of the whole country, who had in his custody all the papers, documents, and everything which could tend to settle a litigation among the parties. If Mr. Hastings took this bribe from the Rajah of Dinagepore, he took a bribe from an infant of five years old through the hands of the Register. That is, the judge receives a bribe through the hands of the keeper of the genealogies of the family, the records and other documents, which must have had the principal share in settling the question.

This history of this Dinagepore peshcush is the public one received by the Company, and which is entered upon the record,—but not the private, and probably the true history of this corrupt transaction.

Very soon after this decision, very soon after this peshcush was given, we find all the officers of the young Rajah, who was supposed to have given it, turned out of their employment by Gunga Govind Sing,—by the very man who received the peshcush for Mr. Hastings. We find them all turned out of their employments; we find them all accused, without any appearance or trace in the records of any proof of embezzlement, of neglect in the education of the minor Rajah, of the mismanagement of his affairs, or the allotment of an unsuitable allowance. And accordingly, to prevent the relations of his adopted mother, to prevent those who might be supposed to have an immediate interest in the family, from abusing the trust of his education and the trust of the management of his fortune, Gunga Govind Sing, (for I trust your Lordships would not suffer me, if I had a mind, to quote that tool of a thing, the Committee of Revenue, bought at 62,000l. a year,—you would not suffer me to name it, especially when you know all the secret agency of bribes in the hand of Gunga Govind Sing,)—this Gunga Govind Sing produces soon after another character, to whom he consigns the custody of the whole family and the whole province.

I will do Mr. Hastings the justice to say, that, if he had known there was another man more accomplished in all iniquity than Gunga Govind Sing, he would not have given him the first place in his confidence. But there is another next to him in the country, whom you are to hear of by-and-by, called Debi Sing. This person, in the universal opinion of all Bengal, is ranked next to Gunga Govind Sing; and, what is very curious, they have been recorded by Mr. Hastings as rivals in the same virtues.

Arcades ambo, Et cantare pares, et respondere parati.

But Mr. Hastings has the happiest modes in the world: these rivals were reconciled on this occasion, and Gunga Govind Sing appoints Debi Sing, superseding all the other officers for no reason whatever upon record. And because, like champions, they ought to go in pairs, there is an English gentleman, one Mr. Goodlad, whom you will hear of presently, appointed along with him. Absolute strangers to the Rajah's family, the first act they do is to cut off a thousand out of sixteen hundred a month from his allowance. They state (though there was a great number of dependants to maintain) that six hundred would be enough to maintain him. There appears in the account of these proceedings to be such a flutter about the care of the Rajah, and the management of his household: in short, that there never was such a tender guardianship as, always with the knowledge of Mr. Hastings, is exercised over this poor Rajah, who had just given (if he did give) 40,000l. for his own inheritance, if it was his due,—for the inheritance of others, if it was not his due. One would think he was entitled to some mercy; but, probably because the money could not otherwise be supplied, his establishment was cut down by Debi Sing and Mr. Goodlad a thousand a month, which is just twelve thousand a year.

When Mr. Hastings had appointed those persons to the guardianship who had an interest in the management of the Rajah's education and fortune, one should have thought, before they were turned out, he would at least have examined whether such a step was proper or not. No: they were turned out without any such examination; and when I come to inquire into the proceedings of Gunga Govind Sing's Committee, I do not find that the new guardians have brought to account one single shilling they received, appointed as they were by that council newly made to superintend all the affairs of the Rajah. There is not one word to be found of an account: Debi Sing's honor, fidelity, and disinterestedness, and that of Mr. Goodlad, is sufficient; and that is the way in which the management and superintendence of one of the greatest houses in that country is given to the guardianship of strangers. And how is it managed? We find Debi Sing in possession of the Rajah's family, in possession of his affairs, in the management of his whole zemindary; and in the course of the next year he is to give him in farm the whole of the revenues of these three provinces. Now whether the peshcush was received for the nomination of the Rajah as a bribe in judgment, or whether Mr. Hastings got it from Debi Sing as a bribe in office, for appointing him to the guardianship of a family that did not belong to him, and for the dominion of three great and once wealthy provinces,—(which is best or worst I shall not pretend to determine,)—you find the Rajah in his possession; you find his education, his household, in his possession; the public revenues are in his possession; they are given over to him.

If we look at the records, the letting of these provinces appears to have been carried on by the new Committee of Revenue, as the course and order of business required it should. But by the investigation into Mr. Hastings's money transactions, the insufficiency and fallacy of these records is manifest beyond a doubt. From this investigation it is discovered that it was in reality a bargain secretly struck between the Governor-General and Debi Sing, and that the Committee were only employed in the mere official forms. From the time that Mr. Hastings new-modelled the revenue system, nothing is seen in its true shape. We now know, in spite of the fallacy of these records, who the true grantor was: it will not be amiss to go a little further in supplying their defects, and to inquire a little concerning the grantee. This makes it necessary for me to inform your Lordships who Debi Sing is.

[Mr. Burke read the Committee's recommendation of Debi Sing to the Governor-General and Council; but the copy of the paper alluded to is wanting.]

* * * * *

Here is a choice; here is Debi Sing presented for his knowledge in business, his trust and fidelity, and that he is a person against whom no objection can be made. This is presented to Mr. Hastings, by him recorded in the Council Books, and by him transmitted to the Court of Directors. Mr. Hastings has since recorded, that he knew this Debi Sing, (though he here publicly authorizes the nomination of him to all that great body of trusts,)—that he knew him to be a man completely capable of the most atrocious iniquities that were ever charged upon man. Debi Sing is appointed to all those great trusts, through the means of Gunga Govind Sing, from whom he (Mr. Hastings) had received 30,000l. as a part of a bribe.

Now, though it is a large field, though it is a thing that I must confess I feel a reluctance almost in venturing to undertake, exhausted as I am, yet such is the magnitude of the affair, such the evil consequences that followed from a system of bribery, such the horrible consequences of superseding all the persons in office in the country to give it into the hands of Debi Sing, that, though it is the public opinion, and though no man that has ever heard the name of Debi Sing does not know that he was only second to Gunga Govind Sing, yet it is not to my purpose, unless I prove that Mr. Hastings knew his character at the very time he accepts him as a person against whom no exception could be made.

It is necessary to inform your Lordships who this Debi Sing was, to whom these great trusts were committed, and those great provinces given.

It may be thought, and not unnaturally, that, in this sort of corrupt and venal appointment to high trust and office, Mr. Hastings has no other consideration than the money he received. But whoever thinks so will be deceived. Mr. Hastings was very far from indifferent to the character of the persons he dealt with. On the contrary, he made a most careful selection; he had a very scrupulous regard to the aptitude of the men for the purposes for which he employed them, and was much guided by his experience of their conduct in those offices which had been sold to them upon former occasions.

Except Gunga Govind Sing, (whom, as justice required, Mr. Hastings distinguished by the highest marks of his confidence,) there was not a man in Bengal, perhaps not upon earth, a match for this Debi Sing. He was not an unknown subject, not one rashly taken up as an experiment. He was a tried man; and if there had been one more desperately and abandonedly corrupt, more wildly and flagitiously oppressive, to be found unemployed in India, large as his offers were, Mr. Hastings would not have taken this money from Debi Sing.

Debi Sing was one of those who in the early stages of the English power in Bengal attached himself to those natives who then stood high in office. He courted Mahomed Reza Khan, a Mussulman of the highest rank, of the tribe of Koreish, whom I have already mentioned, then at the head of the revenue, and now at the head of the criminal justice of Bengal, with all the supple assiduity of which those who possess no valuable art or useful talent are commonly complete masters. Possessing large funds, acquired by his apprenticeship and novitiate in the lowest frauds, he was enabled to lend to this then powerful man, in the several emergencies of his variable fortune, very large sums of money. This great man had been brought down by Mr. Hastings, under the orders of the Court of Directors, upon a cruel charge, to Calcutta. He was accused of many crimes, and acquitted, 220,000l. in debt: that is to say, as soon as he was a great debtor, he ceased to be a great criminal.

Debi Sing obtained by his services no slight influence over Mahomed Reza Khan, a person of a character very different from his.

From that connection he was appointed to the farm of the revenue, and inclusively of the government of Purneah, a province of very great extent, and then in a state of no inconsiderable opulence. In this office he exerted his talents with so much vigor and industry that in a very short time the province was half depopulated and totally ruined.

The farm, on the expiration of his lease, was taken by a set of adventurers in this kind of traffic from Calcutta. But when the new undertakers came to survey the object of their future operations and future profits, they were so shocked at the hideous and squalid scenes of misery and desolation that glared upon them in every quarter, that they instantly fled out of the country, and thought themselves but too happy to be permitted, on the payment of a penalty of twelve thousand pounds, to be released from their engagements.

To give in a few words as clear an idea as I am able to give of the immense volume which might be composed of the vexations, violence, and rapine of that tyrannical administration, the territorial revenue of Purneah, which had been let to Debi Sing at the rate of 160,000l. sterling a year, was with difficulty leased for a yearly sum under 90,000l., and with all rigor of exaction produced in effect little more than 60,000l., falling greatly below one half of its original estimate: so entirely did the administration of Debi Sing exhaust all the resources of the province; so totally did his baleful influence blast the very hope and spring of all future revenue.

The administration of Debi Sing was too notoriously destructive not to cause a general clamor. It was impossible that it should be passed over without animadversion. Accordingly, in the month of September, 1772, Mr. Hastings, then at the head of the Committee of Circuit, removed him for maladministration; and he has since publicly declared on record that he knew him to be capable of all the most horrid and atrocious crimes that can be imputed to man.

This brand, however, was only a mark for Mr. Hastings to find him out hereafter in the crowd, to identify him for his own, and to call him forth into action, when his virtues should be sufficiently matured for the services in which he afterwards employed him, through his instruments, Mr. Anderson and Gunga Govind Sing. In the mean time he left Debi Sing to the direction of his own good genius.

Debi Sing was stigmatized in the Company's records, his reputation was gone, but his funds were safe. In the arrangement made by Mr. Hastings, in the year 1773, by which Provincial Councils were formed, Debi Sing became deputy-steward, or secretary, (soon in effect and influence principal steward,) to the Provincial Council of Moorshedabad, the seat of the old government, and the first province of the kingdom; and to his charge were committed various extensive and populous provinces, yielding an annual revenue of one hundred and twenty lacs of rupees, or 1,500,000l. This division of Provincial Council included Rungpore, Edrackpore, and others, where he obtained such a knowledge of their resources as subsequently to get possession of them.

Debi Sing found this administration composed mostly of young men, dissipated and fond of pleasure, as is usual at that time of life, but desirous of reconciling those pleasures, which usually consume wealth, with the means of making a great and speedy fortune,—at once eager candidates for opulence, and perfect novices in all the roads that lead to it. Debi Sing commiserated their youth and inexperience, and took upon him to be their guide.

There is a revenue in that country, raised by a tax more productive than laudable. It is an imposition on public prostitutes, a duty upon the societies of dancing-girls,—those seminaries from which Mr. Hastings has selected an administrator of justice and governor of kingdoms. Debi Sing thought it expedient to farm this tax,—not only because he neglected no sort of gain, but because he regarded it as no contemptible means of power and influence. Accordingly, in plain terms, he opened a legal brothel, out of which he carefully reserved (you may be sure) the very flower of his collection for the entertainment of his young superiors: ladies recommended not only by personal merit, but, according to the Eastern custom, by sweet and enticing names which he had given them. For, if they were to be translated, they would sound,—Riches of my Life, Wealth of my Soul, Treasure of Perfection, Diamond of Splendor, Pearl of Price, Ruby of Pure Blood, and other metaphorical descriptions, that, calling up dissonant passions to enhance the value of the general harmony, heightened the attractions of love with the allurements of avarice. A moving seraglio of these ladies always attended his progress, and were always brought to the splendid and multiplied entertainments with which he regaled his Council. In these festivities, whilst his guests were engaged with the seductions of beauty, the intoxications of the most delicious wines of France, and the voluptuous vapor of perfumed India smoke, uniting the vivid satisfactions of Europe with the torpid blandishments of Asia, the great magician himself, chaste in the midst of dissoluteness, sober in the centre of debauch, vigilant in the lap of negligence and oblivion, attended with an eagle's eye the moment for thrusting in business, and at such times was able to carry without difficulty points of shameful enormity, which at other hours he would not so much as have dared to mention to his employers, young men rather careless and inexperienced than intentionally corrupt. Not satisfied with being pander to their pleasures, he anticipated and was purveyor to their wants, and supplied them with a constant command of money; and by these means he reigned with an uncontrolled dominion over the province and over its governors.

For you are to understand that in many things we are very much misinformed with regard to the true seat of power in India. Whilst we were proudly calling India a British government, it was in substance a government of the lowest, basest, and most flagitious of the native rabble, to whom the far greater part of the English who figured in employment and station had from their earliest youth been slaves and instruments. Banians had anticipated the period of their power in premature advances of money, and have ever after obtained the entire dominion over their nominal masters.

By these various ways and means Debi Sing contrived to add job to job, employment to employment, and to hold, besides the farms of two very considerable districts, various trusts in the revenue,—sometimes openly appearing, sometimes hid two or three deep in false names, emerging into light or shrouding himself in darkness, as successful or defeated crimes rendered him bold or cautious. Every one of these trusts was marked with its own fraud; and for one of those frauds, committed by him in another name, by which he became deeply in balance to the revenue, he was publicly whipped by proxy.

All this while Mr. Hastings kept his eye upon him, and attended to his progress. But as he rose in Mr. Hastings's opinion, he fell in that of his immediate employers. By degrees, as reason prevailed, and the fumes of pleasure evaporated, the Provincial Council emerged from their first dependence, and, finding nothing but infamy attending the councils and services of such a man, resolved to dismiss him. In this strait and crisis of his power the artist turned himself into all shapes. He offered great sums individually, he offered them collectively, and at last put a carte blanche on the table,—all to no purpose. "What are you?—stones? Have I not men to deal with? Will flesh and blood refuse me?"

When Debi Sing found that the Council had entirely escaped, and were proof against his offers, he left them with a sullen and menacing silence. He applied where he had good intelligence that these offers would be well received, and that he should at once be revenged of the Council, and obtain all the ends which through them he had sought in vain.

Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a set of innocent officers,—sold his fellow-servants of the Company, entitled by every duty to his protection,—sold English subjects, recommended by every tie of national sympathy,—sold the honor of the British government itself,—without charge, without complaint, without allegation of crime in conduct, or of insufficiency in talents: he sold them to the most known and abandoned character which the rank servitude of that clime produces. For him he entirely broke and quashed the Council of Moorshedabad, which had been the settled government for twelve years, (a long period in the changeful history of India,)—at a time, too, when it had acquired a great degree of consistency, an official experience, a knowledge and habit of business, and was making full amends for early errors.

For now Mr. Hastings, having buried Colonel Monson and General Clavering, and having shaken off Mr. Francis, who retired half dead from office, began at length to respire; he found elbow-room once more to display his genuine nature and disposition, and to make amends in a riot and debauch of peculation for the forced abstinence to which he was reduced during the usurped dominion of honor and integrity.

It was not enough that the English were thus sacrificed to the revenge of Debi Sing. It was necessary to deliver over the natives to his avarice. By the intervention of bribe-brokerage he united the two great rivals in iniquity, who before, from an emulation of crimes, were enemies to each other,—Gunga Govind Sing and Debi Sing. He negotiated the bribe and the farm of the latter through the former; and Debi Sing was invested in farm for two years with the three provinces of Dinagepore, Edrackpore, and Rungpore,—territories making together a tract of land superior in dimensions to the northern counties of England, Yorkshire included.

To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle on the full swing of his genius, he removed all the restraints which had been framed to give an ostensible credit, to give some show of official order, to the plans of revenue administration framed from time to time in Bengal. An officer, called a dewan, had been established in the provinces, expressly as a check on the person who should act as farmer-general. This office he conferred along with that of farmer-general on Debi Sing, in order that Debi might become an effectual check upon Sing; and thus these provinces, without inspection, without control, without law, and without magistrates, were delivered over by Mr. Hastings, bound hand and foot, to the discretion of the man whom he had before recorded as the destroyer of Purneah, and capable of every the most atrocious wickedness that could be imputed to man.

Fatally for the natives of India, every wild project and every corrupt sale of Mr. Hastings, and those whose example he followed, is covered with a pretended increase of revenue to the Company. Mr. Hastings would not pocket his bribe of 40,000l. for himself without letting the Company in as a sharer and accomplice. For the province of Rungpore, the object to which I mean in this instance to confine your attention, 7,000l. a year was added. But lest this avowed increase of rent should seem to lead to oppression, great and religious care was taken in the covenant so stipulated with Debi Sing, that this increase should not arise from any additional assessment whatsoever on the country, but solely from improvements in the cultivation, and the encouragement to be given to the landholder and husbandman. But as Mr. Hastings's bribe, of a far greater sum, was not guarded by any such provision, it was left to the discretion of the donor in what manner he was to indemnify himself for it.

Debi Sing fixed the seat of his authority at Dinagepore, where, as soon as he arrived, he did not lose a moment in doing his duty. If Mr. Hastings can forget his covenant, you may easily believe that Debi Sing had not a more correct memory; and accordingly, as soon as he came into the province, he instantly broke every covenant which he had entered into as a restraint on his avarice, rapacity, and tyranny, which, from the highest of the nobility and gentry to the lowest husbandmen, were afterwards exercised, with a stern and unrelenting impartiality, upon the whole people. For, notwithstanding the province before Debi Sing's lease was, from various causes, in a state of declension, and in balance for the revenue of the preceding year, at his very first entrance into office he forced from the zemindars or landed gentry an enormous increase of their tribute. They refused compliance. On this refusal he threw the whole body of zemindars into prison, and thus in bonds and fetters compelled them to sign their own ruin by an increase of rent which they knew they could never realize. Having thus gotten them under, he added exaction to exaction, so that every day announced some new and varied demand, until, exhausted by these oppressions, they were brought to the extremity to which he meant to drive them, the sale of their lands.

The lands held by the zemindars of that country are of many descriptions. The first and most general are those that pay revenue; the others are of the nature of demesne lands, which are free, and pay no rent to government. The latter are for the immediate support of the zemindars and their families,—as from the former they derive their influence, authority, and the means of upholding their dignity. The lands of the former description were immediately attached, sequestered, and sold for the most trifling consideration. The rent-free lands, the best and richest lands of the whole province, were sold,—sold for—what do your Lordships think? They were sold for less than one year's purchase,—at less than one year's purchase, at the most underrated value; so that the fee-simple of an English acre of rent-free land sold at the rate of seven or eight shillings. Such a sale, on such terms, strongly indicated the purchaser. And how did it turn out in fact? The purchaser was the very agent and instrument of Mr. Hastings, Debi Sing himself. He made the exaction; he forced the sale; he reduced the rate; and he became the purchaser at less than one year's purchase, and paid with the very money which he had extorted from the miserable vendors.

When he had thus sold and separated these lands, he united the whole body of them, amounting to about 7,000l. sterling a year (but, according to the rate of money and living in that country, equivalent to a rental in England of 30,000l. a year); and then having raised in the new letting, as on the sale he had fraudulently reduced those lands, he reserved them as an estate for himself, or to whomsoever resembling himself Mr. Hastings should order them to be disposed.

The lands, thus sold for next to nothing, left of course the late landholder still in debt. The failure of fund, the rigorous exaction of debt, and the multiplication of new arbitrary taxes next carried off the goods.

There is a circumstance attending this business which will call for your Lordships' pity. Most of the landholders or zemindars in that country happened at that time to be women. The sex there is in a state certainly resembling imprisonment, but guarded as a sacred treasure with all possible attention and respect. None of the coarse male hands of the law can reach them; but they have a custom, very cautiously used in all good governments there, of employing female bailiffs or sergeants in the execution of the law, where that sex is concerned. Guards, therefore, surrounded the houses; and then female sergeants and bailiffs entered into the habitations of these female zemindars, and held their goods and persons in execution,—nothing being left but what was daily threatened, their life and honor. The landholders, even women of eminent rank and condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous, without protection and without bread. The monthly instalment of Mr. Hastings's bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the vitals of the people.

The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of violence and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had been before made away with. Even the lands and funds set aside for their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial sufferings of their lives,—even the very feeble consolations of death, were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,—a tyranny more consuming than the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than death itself,—seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.

Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people. Were the lower, the more industrious, spared? Alas! as their situation was far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary. To afford your Lordships some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr. Hastings's hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing. Debi Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country, had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.

"It is notorious," says he, "that poverty generally prevails amongst the husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the country. They are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence. And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the famine. Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a thousand of which would not perhaps produce twenty shillings."

These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was to obtain a gift of 40,000l., over and above a large increase of rent, over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.

Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences. All this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.

Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was not put in practice. On its own day your Lordships will hear, with astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent on which they were piled.

The country being in many parts left wholly waste and in all parts considerably depopulated by the first rigors, the full rate of the district was exacted from the miserable survivors. Their burdens were increased, as their fellow-laborers, to whose joint efforts they were to owe the means of payment, diminished. Driven to make payments beyond all possible calculation, previous to receipts and above their means, in a very short time they fell into the hands of usurers.

The usurers, who under such a government held their own funds by a precarious tenure, and were to lend to those whose substance was still more precarious, to the natural hardness and austerity of that race of men had additional motives to extortion, and made their terms accordingly. And what were the terms these poor people were obliged to consent to, to answer the bribes and peshcush paid to Mr. Hastings?—five, ten, twenty, forty per cent? No! at an interest of six hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day! A tiller of land to pay six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government! What exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted, overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. An universal treasury extent and process of execution followed on the cattle and stock, and was enforced with more or less rigor in every quarter. We have it in evidence, that in those sales five cows were sold for not more than seven or eight shillings. All other things were depreciated in the same proportion. The sale of the instruments of husbandry succeeded to that of the corn and stock. Instances there are, where, all other things failing, the farmers were dragged from the court to their houses, in order to see them first plundered, and then burnt down before their faces. It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it was a savage war made upon the country.

The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies. The families were disposed of. It is a known observation, that those who have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly attached to their children and wives. The most tender of parents sold their children at market. The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their wives. The tyranny of Mr. 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. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury, and malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing their avarice, their vices are no longer human. From cruel men they are transformed into savage beasts, with no other vestiges of reason left but what serves to furnish the inventions and refinements of ferocious subtlety, for purposes of which beasts are incapable and at which fiends would blush.

Debi Sing and his instruments suspected, and in a few cases they suspected justly, that the country people had purloined from their own estates, and had hidden in secret places in the circumjacent deserts, some small reserve of their own grain to maintain themselves during the unproductive months of the year, and to leave some hope for a future season. But the under-tyrants knew that the demands of Mr. Hastings would admit no plea for delay, much less for subtraction of his bribe, and that he would not abate a shilling of it to the wants of the whole human race. These hoards, real or supposed, not being discovered by menaces and imprisonment, they fell upon the last resource, the naked bodies of the people. And here, my Lords, began such a scene of cruelties and tortures as I believe no history has ever presented to the indignation of the world,—such as I am sure, in the most barbarous ages, no politic tyranny, no fanatic persecution, has ever yet exceeded. Mr. Paterson, the commissioner appointed to inquire into the state of the country, makes his own apology and mine for opening this scene of horrors to you in the following words: "That the punishments inflicted upon the ryots, both of Rungpore and Dinagepore, for non-payment, were in many instances of such a nature that I would rather wish to draw a veil over them than shock your feelings by the detail, but that, however disagreeable the task may be to myself, it is absolutely necessary, for the sake of justice, humanity, and the honor of government, that they should be exposed, to be prevented in future."

My Lords, they began by winding cords round the fingers of the unhappy freeholders of those provinces, until they clung to and were almost incorporated with one another; and then they hammered wedges of iron between them, until, regardless of the cries of the sufferers, they had bruised to pieces and forever crippled those poor, honest, innocent, laborious hands, which had never been raised to their mouths but with a penurious and scanty proportion of the fruits of their own soil; but those fruits (denied to the wants of their own children) have for more than fifteen years past furnished the investment for our trade with China, and been sent annually out, and without recompense, to purchase for us that delicate meal with which your Lordships, and all this auditory, and all this country, have begun every day for these fifteen years at their expense. To those beneficent hands that labor for our benefit the return of the British government has been cords and hammers and wedges. But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands will act with resistless power. What is it that they will not pull down, when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors? Then what can withstand such hands? Can the power that crushed and destroyed them? Powerful in prayer, let us at least deprecate and thus endeavor to secure ourselves from the vengeance which these mashed and disabled hands may pull down upon us. My Lords, it is an awful consideration: let us think of it.

But to pursue this melancholy, but necessary detail. I am next to open to your Lordships, what I am hereafter to prove, that the most substantial and leading yeomen, the responsible farmers, the parochial magistrates and chiefs of villages, were tied two and two by the legs together; and their tormentors, throwing them with their heads downwards, over a bar, beat them on the soles of the feet with rattans, until the nails fell from the toes; and then attacking them at their heads, as they hung downward, as before at their feet, they beat them with sticks and other instruments of blind fury, until the blood gushed out at their eyes, mouths, and noses. Not thinking that the ordinary whips and cudgels, even so administered, were sufficient, to others (and often also to the same who had suffered as I have stated) they applied, instead of rattan and bamboo, whips made of the branches of the bale tree,—a tree full of sharp and strong thorns, which tear the skin and lacerate the flesh far worse than ordinary scourges. For others, exploring with a searching and inquisitive malice, stimulated by an insatiate rapacity, all the devious paths of Nature for whatever is most unfriendly to man, they made rods of a plant highly caustic and poisonous, called Bechettea, every wound of which festers and gangrenes, adds double and treble to the present torture, leaves a crust of leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment. They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe and almost intolerable,—they were led out before break of day, and, stiff and sore as they were with the bruises and wounds of the night, were plunged into water; and whilst their jaws clung together with the cold, and their bodies were rendered infinitely more sensible, the blows and stripes were renewed upon their backs; and then, delivering them over to soldiers, they were sent into their farms and villages to discover where a few handfuls of grain might be found concealed, or to extract some loan from the remnants of compassion and courage not subdued in those who had reason to fear that their own turn of torment would be next, that they should succeed them in the same punishment, and that their very humanity, being taken as a proof of their wealth, would subject them (as it did in many cases subject them) to the same inhuman tortures. After this circuit of the day through their plundered and ruined villages, they were remanded at night to the same prison, whipped, as before, at their return to the dungeon, and at morning whipped at their leaving it, and then sent, as before, to purchase, by begging in the day, the reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long time made up all the vicissitude of life to these miserable people.

But there are persons whose fortitude could bear their own suffering; there are men who are hardened by their very pains, and the mind, strengthened even by the torments of the body, rises with a strong defiance against its oppressor. They were assaulted on the side of their sympathy. Children were scourged almost to death in the presence of their parents. This was not enough. The son and father were bound close together, face to face and body to body, and in that situation cruelly lashed together, so that the blow which escaped the father fell upon the son, and the blow which missed the son wound over the back of the parent. The circumstances were combined by so subtle a cruelty that every stroke which did not excruciate the sense should wound and lacerate the sentiments and affections of nature.

On the same principle, and for the same ends, virgins, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses, and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was to be sought against all wrong and all violence, (but where no judge or lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench,) these virgins, vainly invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all the people, publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of cleft bamboos. Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would think it incredible. But it did not end there. Growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire—(I cannot proceed for shame and horror!)—these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason, distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty,—there, where the reverence of nature and the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe their practices.

These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature. But there were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in mere sensitive nature can do.

The women thus treated lost their caste. My Lords, we are not here to commend or blame the institutions and prejudices of a whole race of people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of men, or foreign conquest, have been able to make the smallest impression. The aboriginal Gentoo inhabitants are all dispersed into tribes or castes,—each caste born to an invariable rank, rights, and descriptions of employment, so that one caste cannot by any means pass into another. With the Gentoos, certain impurities or disgraces, though without any guilt of the party, infer loss of caste; and when the highest caste, that of Brahmin, which is not only noble, but sacred, is lost, the person who loses it does not slide down into one lower, but reputable,—he is wholly driven from all honest society. All the relations of life are at once dissolved. His parents are no longer his parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his, are no longer to regard him as their father. It is something far worse than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal excommunication. It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death. Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned. No honest occupation can be followed. He becomes an halicore, if (which is rare) he survives that miserable degradation.

Upon those whom all the shocking catalogue of tortures I have mentioned could not make to flinch one of the modes of losing caste for Brahmins and other principal tribes was practised. It was to harness a bullock at the court-door, and to put the Brahmin on his back, and to lead him through the towns, with drums beating before him. To intimidate others, this bullock, with drums, (the instrument, according to their ideas, of outrage, disgrace, and utter loss of caste,) was led through the country; and as it advanced, the country fled before it. When any Brahmin was seized, he was threatened with this pillory, and for the most part he submitted in a moment to whatever was ordered. What it was may be thence judged. But when no possibility existed of complying with the demand, the people by their cries sometimes prevailed on the tyrants to have it commuted for cruel scourging, which was accepted as mercy. To some Brahmins this mercy was denied, and the act of indelible infamy executed. Of these men one came to the Company's commissioner with the tale, and ended with these melancholy words: "I have suffered this indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me: I call for justice." He called in vain.

Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a relief, into the prison of their native soil. 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; and, what will always happen in popular tumults, the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were massacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops, who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief in that province.

In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was feared it would go to England. The English Chief in the province, Mr. Goodlad, represented it to Mr. Hastings's Revenue Committee to be (what it was) the greatest and most serious disturbance that ever happened in Bengal. But, good easy man, he was utterly unable to guess to what cause it was to be attributed. He thought there was some irregularity in the collection, but on the whole judged that it had little other cause than a general conspiracy of the husbandmen and landholders, who, as Debi Sing's lease was near expiring, had determined not to pay any more revenue.

Mr. Hastings's Committee of Revenue, whilst these wounds were yet bleeding, and whilst a total failure was threatened in the rents of these provinces, thought themselves obliged to make an inquiry with some sort of appearance of seriousness into the causes of it. They looked, therefore, about them carefully, and chose what they judged would be most plausible and least effective. They thought that it was necessary to send a special commissioner into the province, and one, too, whose character would not instantly blast the credit of his mission. They cast their eyes on a Mr. Paterson, a servant of the Company, a man of fair character, and long standing in the service. Mr. Paterson was a person known to be of a very cool temper, placid manners, moderate and middle opinions, unconnected with parties; and from such a character they looked for (what sometimes is to be expected from it) a compromising, balanced, neutralized, equivocal, colorless, confused report, in which the blame was to be impartially divided between the sufferer and the oppressor, and in which, according to the standing manners of Bengal, he would recommend oblivion as the best remedy, and would end by remarking, that retrospect could have no advantage, and could serve only to irritate and keep alive animosities; and by this kind of equitable, candid, and judge-like proceeding, they hoped the whole complaint would calmly fade away, the sufferers remain in the possession of their patience, and the tyrant of his plunder. In confidence of this event from this presumed character, Mr. Hastings's Committee, in appointing Mr. Paterson their commissioner, were not deficient in arming him with powers equal to the object of his commission. He was enabled to call before him all accountants, to compel the production of all accounts, to examine all persons,—not only to inquire and to report, but to decide and to redress.

Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son, as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts. He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper frame of mind for doing his duty.

He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full support in the execution of it,—as he, with every other white man in Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact, that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent, had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.

But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people, concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie, with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable words. "In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and every insult of disgrace,—and this not confined to a few, but extended over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot, when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half of that demand,—when he finds himself so far from being released, that he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail, adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these prejudices under such circumstances."

He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft, fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe, never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of Bengal,—of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports, carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of Governor Hastings's general system of bribery.

But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr. Hastings's system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore, Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.

Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that all officers representing government, and making in that character an authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would impeach or shake the report.

Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings's devising. In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.

This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty, into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril; the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to proceed by strict rules of law.

By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the credit due to the proceedings of government. They changed the natural situation of proofs. They rejected the depositions of Paterson's witnesses, as not on oath, though they had never ordered or authorized them so to be taken.

They went further, and disabled, in a body, all the deponents themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own rebellion. They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead of the culprit. They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) and made him a complainant and a witness against him in the stupidest and most improbable of all accusations,—namely, that Paterson had menaced him with punishment, if he did not, in so many words, slander and calumniate Debi Sing; and then the Committee, seating this wretch as an assessor at their own board, who a few days before would have trembled like a whipped slave at the look of an European, encouraged him to interrogate their own commissioner.

[Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit down. After some time Mr. Burke again addressed the House.]

My Lords, I am sorry to break the attention of your Lordships in such a way. It is a subject that agitates me. It is long, difficult, and arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you any further trouble, I will go through it this day.

I am to tell your Lordships, that the next step they took was, after putting Mr. Paterson as an accuser to make good a charge which he made out but too much to their satisfaction, they changed their battery.

[Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House, on the motion of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, adjourned.]



SPEECH

IN

OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT.

FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788.

My Lords,—In any great undertaking, a failure in the midst of it, even from infirmity, though to be regarded principally as a misfortune, is attended with some slight shadow of disgrace; but your Lordships' humanity, and your love of justice, have remedied everything, and I therefore proceed with confidence this day.

My Lords, I think (to the best of my remembrance) the House adjourned at the period of time in which I was endeavoring to illustrate the mischiefs that happened from Mr. Hastings's throwing off his responsibility, by delegating his power to a nominal Council, and in reality to a black bad man, a native of the country, of the worst character that could be found in it,—and the consequence of it, in preventing the detection and the punishment of the grossest abuses that ever were known to be committed in India, or any other part of the world.

My Lords, I stated to you that Mr. Commissioner Paterson was sent into that country. I stated that he was sent into it with all the authority of government, with power to hear, and not only to hear and to report, but to redress, the grievances which he should find in the country. In short, there was nothing wanting to his power but an honest support. Your Lordships will be convinced that the road to fortune was easy to him. Debi Sing for a favorable report would have given a large sum of money. Your Lordships will be convinced that the Committee would not have received such a report as a proof of bribery. They would rather consider him as a man whose conduct tended to conciliate, and to soften troublesome and difficult matters, and to settle the order of government as soon as possible.

Some of the things contained in his reports I have taken the liberty of laying before your Lordships, but very faintly, very imperfectly, and far short of my materials. I have stated, that the criminal, against whom the commissioner had made his report, instead of being punished by that strong hand of power which Mr. Hastings has thought proper to use upon other occasions, when he has endeavored to make princes, or persons in the rank and with the attributes of sovereign princes, feel whenever they have incurred his private resentments,—that this man was put into every situation of offence or defence which the most litigious and prevaricating laws that ever were invented in the very bosom of arbitrary power could afford him, or by which peculation and power were to be screened from the cries of an oppressed people.

Mr. Paterson, I stated, from being a commissioner directed to report, under the authority of government, to that government, was considered as a voluntary accuser, obliged to make good the articles of his charge. But I believe I stated that he did not long remain in that condition.

I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that this Debi Sing, fortified by this protection, which was extended even to the lowest of his instruments, thought it high time to assume the superiority that belonged to a personage who had the Governor-General for his pensioner. No longer the sneaking tone of apology; no longer the modest allegations that the commissioner was misinformed;—he boldly accuses the representative of English government of forgery in order to destroy him; he criminates and recriminates, and lays about him without mercy.

Things were now in a proper train; the Committee find the cause growing and ripening to their wishes;—answers, replies, objections, and interrogatories,—accounts opposed to accounts,—balances now on the one side, now on the other,—now debtor becomes creditor, and creditor debtor,—until the proceedings were grown to the size of volumes, and the whole well fitted to perplex the most simple facts, and to darken the meridian sunshine of public notoriety. They prepared a report for the Governor-General and Council suitable to the whole tenor of their proceedings. Here the man whom they had employed and betrayed appeared in a new character. Observe their course with him. First he was made a commissioner. Then he was changed from a commissioner to be a voluntary accuser. He now undergoes another metamorphosis: he appears as a culprit before Mr. Hastings, on the accusation of the donor of Mr. Hastings's bribes. He is to answer to the accusations of Debi Sing. He is permitted to find materials for his own defence; and he, an old Company's servant, is to acknowledge it as a favor to be again suffered to go into the province, without authority, without station, without public character, under the discountenance and frowns, and in a manner under prosecution, of the government. As a favor, he is suffered to go again into Rungpore, in hopes of finding among the dejected, harassed, and enslaved race of Hindoos, and in that undone province, men bold enough to stand forward, against all temptations of emolument, and at the risk of their lives, with a firm adherence to their original charge,—and at a time when they saw him an abandoned and persecuted private individual, whom they had just before looked upon as a protecting angel, carrying with him the whole power of a beneficent government, and whom they had applied to, as a magistrate of high and sacred authority, to hear the complaints and to redress the grievances of a whole people.

A new commission of junior servants was at the same time sent out to review and reexamine the cause, to inquire into the inquiry, to examine into the examination, to control the report, to be commissioners upon the commission of Mr. Paterson. Before these commissioners he was made to appear as an accused person, and was put upon his defence, but without the authority and without the favor which ought to go with an accused person for the purpose of enabling him to make out such defence.

These persons went down into that country, and, after spending a long time in mere matters of form, found they could not do without a representative of Debi Sing, and accordingly they ordered Debi Sing to send up his vakeel.

I forgot to state to your Lordships what the condition of Debi Sing was during this proceeding. This man had been ordered to Calcutta on two grounds: one, on the matter of his flagitious misconduct at Rungpore; and the other, for a great failure in the payment of his stipulated revenue. Under this double accusation, he was to be considered, according to the usual mode of proceeding in such cases, as a prisoner; and he was kept, not in the common gaol of Calcutta, not in the prison of the fort, not in that gaol in which Rajah Nundcomar, who had been prime-minister of the empire, was confined, but, according to the mild ways of that country, where they choose to be mild, and the persons are protected by the official influence of power, under a free custody. He was put under a guard of sepoys, but not confined to his house; he was permitted to go abroad, where he was daily in conference with those who were to judge him; and having an address which seldom fails, and a dexterity never wanting to a man possessed of 700,000l., he converted this guard into a retinue of honor: their bayonets were lowered, their muskets laid aside; they attended him with their side-arms, and many with silver verges in their hands, to mark him out rather as a great magistrate attended by a retinue than a prisoner under guard.

When he was ordered to send a vakeel to defend his conduct, he refused to send him. Upon which the commissioners, instead of saying, "If you will not send your agent, we will proceed in our inquiry without him," (and, indeed, it was not made necessary by the commission that he should be there either by vakeel or otherwise,) condescendingly admitted his refusal, and suffered him to come up in person. He accordingly enters the province, attended with his guard, in the manner I have before mentioned, more as a person returning in triumph from a great victory than as a man under the load of all those enormous charges which I have stated. He enters the province in this manner; and Mr. Paterson, who saw himself lately the representative of the India Company, (an old servant of the Company is a great man in that country,) was now left naked, destitute, without any mark of official situation or dignity. He was present, and saw all the marks of imprisonment turned into marks of respect and dignity to this consummate villain whom I have the misfortune of being obliged to introduce to your Lordships' notice. Mr. Paterson, seeing the effect of the proceeding everywhere, seeing the minds of the people broken, subdued, and prostrate under it, and that, so far from having the means of detecting the villanies of this insolent criminal, appearing as a magistrate, he had not the means of defending even his own innocence, because every kind of information fled and was annihilated before him, represented to these young commissioners that this appearance of authority tended to strike terror into the hearts of the natives, and to prevent his receiving justice. The Council of Calcutta took this representation into their deliberate consideration; they found that it was true, that, if he had such an attendance any longer in this situation, (and a large attendance it was, such as the Chancellor of this kingdom or the Speaker of the House of Commons does not appear with,) it would have an evil appearance. On the other hand, say they, "If he should be left under a guard, the people would consider him as under disgrace." They therefore took a middle way, and ordered the guard not to attend him with fixed bayonets, which had the appearance of the custody of a prisoner, but to lower their muskets and unfix their bayonets.

The next step of these commissioners is to exclude Mr. Paterson from all their deliberations; and in order that both parties might be put on an equality, one would naturally conclude that the culprit, Debi Sing, was likewise excluded. Far from it: he sat upon the bench. Need I say any more upon this subject? The protection followed.

In this situation Mr. Paterson wrote one of the most pathetic memorials that ever was penned to the Council of Calcutta, submitting to his hard fate, but standing inflexibly to his virtue that brought it upon him. To do the man justice, he bore the whole of this persecution like an hero. He never tottered in his principles, nor swerved to the right or to the left from the noble cause of justice and humanity in which he had been engaged; and when your Lordships come to see his memorials, you will have reason to observe that his abilities are answerable to the dignity of his cause, and make him worthy of everything that he had the honor to suffer for it.

To cut short the thread of this shocking series of corruption, oppression, fraud, and chicanery, which lasted for upwards of four years: Paterson remains without employment; the inhabitants of great provinces, whose substance and whose blood was sold by Mr. Hastings, remain without redress; and the purchaser, Debi Sing, that corrupt, iniquitous, and bloody tyrant, instead of being proceeded against by the Committee in a civil suit for retribution to the sufferers, is handed over to the false semblance of a trial, on a criminal charge, before a Mahometan judge,—an equal judge, however. The judge was Mahomed Reza Khan, his original patron, and the author of all his fortunes,—a judge who depends on him, as a debtor depends upon his creditor. To that judge is he sent, without a distinct charge, without a prosecutor, and without evidence. The next ships will bring you an account of his honorable acquittal.

I have stated before that I considered Mr. Hastings as responsible for the characters of the people he employed,—doubly responsible, if he knew them to be bad. I therefore charge him with putting in situations in which any evil may be committed persons of known evil characters.

My Lords, I charge him, as chief governor, with destroying the institutions of the country, which were designed to be, and ought to have been, controls upon such a person as Debi Sing.

An officer, called dewan, or steward of the country, had always been placed as a control on the farmer; but that no such control should in fact exist, that he, Debi Sing, should be let loose to rapine, slaughter, and plunder in the country, both offices were conferred on him. Did Mr. Hastings vest these offices in him? No: but if Mr. Hastings had kept firm to the duties which the act of Parliament appointed him to execute, all the revenue appointments must have been made by him; but, instead of making them himself, he appointed Gunga Govind Sing to make them; and for that appointment, and for the whole train of subordinate villany which followed the placing iniquity in the chief seat of government, Mr. Hastings is answerable. He is answerable, I say, first, for destroying his own legal capacity, and, next, for destroying the legal capacity of the Council, not one of whom ever had, or could have, any true knowledge of the state of the country, from the moment he buried it in the gulf of mystery and of darkness, under that collected heap of villany, Gunga Govind Sing. From that moment he destroyed the power of government, and put everything into his hands: for this he is answerable.

The Provincial Councils consisted of many members, who, though they might unite in some small iniquities perhaps, could not possibly have concealed from the public eye the commission of such acts as these. Their very numbers, their natural competitions, the contentions that must have arisen among them, must have put a check, at least, to such a business. And therefore, Mr. Hastings having destroyed every check and control above and below, having delivered the whole into the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, for all the iniquities of Gunga Govind Sing he is responsible.

But he did not know Debi Sing, whom he employed. I read, yesterday, and trust it is fresh in your Lordships' remembrance, that Debi Sing was presented to him by that set of tools, as they call themselves, who acted, as they themselves tell us they must act, entirely and implicitly under Gunga Govind Sing,—that is to say, by Gunga Govind Sing himself, the confidential agent of Mr. Hastings.

Mr. Hastings is further responsible, because he took a bribe of 40,000l. from some person in power in Dinagepore and Rungpore, the countries which were ravaged in this manner, through the hands of Gunga Govind Sing,—through the medium of that very person whom he had appointed to exercise all the authorities of the Supreme Council above and of all subordinate Councils below. Having, therefore, thus appointed a Council of tools in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, at the expense of 62,000l. a year, to supersede all the English provincial authorities,—having appointed them for the purpose of establishing a bribe-factor general, a general receiver and agent of bribes through all that country, Mr. Hastings is responsible for all the consequences of it.

I have thought it necessary, and absolutely necessary it is, to state what the consequence of this clandestine mode of supplying the Company's exigencies was. Your Lordships will see that their exigencies are to be supplied by the ruin of the landed interest of a province, the destruction of the husbandmen, and the ruin of all the people in it. This is the consequence of a general bribe-broker, an agent like Gunga Govind Sing, superseding all the powers and controls of government.

But Mr. Hastings has not only reduced bribery to a system of government practically, but theoretically. For when he despaired any longer of concealing his bribes from the penetrating eye of Parliament, then he took another mode, and declared, as your Lordships will see, that it was the best way of supplying the necessities of the East India Company in the pressing exigencies of their affairs; that thus a relief to the Company's affairs might be yielded, which, in the common, ostensible mode, and under the ordinary forms of government, and publicly, never would be yielded to them. So that bribery with him became a supplement to exaction.

The best way of showing that a theoretical system is bad is to show the practical mischiefs that it produces: because a thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in its practice excellent. Here a thing in theory, stated by Mr. Hastings to be productive of much good, is in reality productive of all those horrible mischiefs I have stated. That Mr. Hastings well knew this appears from an extract of the Bengal Revenue Consultations, 21st January, 1785, a little before he came away.

Mr. Hastings says,—"I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges: he has disproved them. It was the duty of the accuser to prove them. Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily conceive that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr. Goodlad, who had no authority but that of receiving the accounts and rents of the district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the channel of communication between him and the Committee."

We shall now see what things Mr. Hastings did, what course he was in, a little before his departure,—with what propriety and consistency of character he has behaved from the year of the commencement of his corrupt system, in 1773, to the end of it, when he closed it in 1785, when the bribes not only mounted the chariot, but boarded the barge, and, as I shall show, followed him down the Ganges, and even to the sea, and that he never quitted his system of iniquity, but that it survived his political life itself.

One of his last political acts was this.

Your Lordships will remember that Mr. Goodlad was sent up into the country, whose conduct was terrible indeed: for that he could not be in place and authority in that country, and be innocent, while such things were doing, I shall prove. But that is not now my consideration.

The Governor-General's minute, just read, is this. "I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges: he has disproved them. It was the duty of the accuser to prove them" (the accuser, namely, the commissioner). "Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the character," &c., &c., &c.

Now your Lordships perceive he has acquitted Mr. Goodlad. He is clear. Be it that he is fairly and conscientiously acquitted. But what is Mr. Hastings's account of Rajah Debi Sing? He is presented to him in 1781, by Gunga Govind Sing, as a person against whose character there could be no exception, and by him accepted in that light. Upon the occasion I have mentioned, Mr. Hastings's opinion of him is this: "I so well know the character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily conceive that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr. Goodlad, who had no authority but that of receiving the accounts and rents of the district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the channel of communication between him and the Committee."

Thus your Lordships see what Mr. Hastings's opinion of Debi Sing was. We shall prove it at another time, by abundance of clear and demonstrative evidence, that, whether he was bad or no, (but we shall prove that bad he was indeed,) even he could hardly be so bad as he was in the opinion which Mr. Hastings entertained of him; who, notwithstanding, now disowns this mock Committee, instituted by himself, but, in reality, entirely managed by Gunga Govind Sing. This Debi Sing was accepted as an unexceptionable man; and yet Mr. Hastings knows both his power of doing mischief and his artifice in concealing it. If, then, Mr. Goodlad is to be acquitted, does it not show the evil of Mr. Hastings's conduct in destroying those Provincial Councils which, as I have already stated, were obliged to book everything, to minute all the circumstances which came before them, together with all the consultations respecting them? He strikes at the whole system at once, and, instead of it, he leaves an Englishman, under pretence of controlling Gunga Govind Sing's agent, appointed for the very purpose of giving him bribes, in a province where Mr. Hastings says that agent had the power of committing such enormities, and which nobody doubts his disposition to commit,—he leaves him, I say, in such a state of inefficiency, that these iniquities could be concealed (though every one true) from the person appointed there to inspect his conduct! What, then, could be his business there? Was it only to receive such sums of money as Debi Sing might put into his hands, and which might have been easily sent to Calcutta? Was he to be of use as a communication between Debi Sing and the Committee, and in no other way? Here, then, we have that English authority which Mr. Hastings left in the country,—here the native authority which he settled, and the establishment of native iniquity in a regular system under Gunga Govind Sing,—here the destruction of all English inspection. I hope I need say no more to prove to your Lordships that this system, taken nakedly as it thus stands, founded in mystery and obscurity, founded for the very express purpose of conveying bribes, as the best mode of collecting the revenue and supplying the Company's exigencies through Gunga Govind Sing, would be iniquitous upon the face and the statement of it. But when your Lordships consider what horrid effects it produced, you will easily see what the mischief and abomination of Mr. Hastings's destroying these Provincial Councils and protecting these persons must necessarily be. If you had not known in theory, you must have seen it in practice.

But when both practice and theory concur, there can be no doubt that a system of private bribery for a revenue, and of private agency for a constitutional government, must ruin the country where it prevails, must disgrace the country that uses it, and finally end in the destruction of the revenue. For what says Mr. Hastings? "I was to have received 40,000l. in bribes, and 30,000l. was actually applied to the use of the Company." Now I hope I shall demonstrate, if not, it will be by some one abler than me demonstrated, in the course of this business, that there never was a bribe received by Mr. Hastings that was not instantly followed with a deficiency in the revenue,—this is clear, and what we undertake to prove,—and that Debi Sing himself was, at the time Mr. Hastings came away, between twenty and thirty thousand pounds debtor to the Company. So that, in truth, you always find a deficiency of revenue nearly equal, and in some instances I shall show double, to all the bribes Mr. Hastings received: from whence it will be evident that he never could nor did receive them under that absurd and strange idea of a resource to government.

I must re-state to your Lordships, because I wish you never to forget, that this Committee of Revenue was, in their own opinion, and from their own certain knowledge and mere motion, if motion can be attributed originally to instruments, mere tools; that they knew that they were tools in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing. There were two persons principal in it,—Mr. Shore, who was the acting President, and Mr. Anderson, who was President in rank, and President in emolument, but absent for a great part of the time upon a foreign embassy. It is the recorded opinion of the former, (for I must beg leave to read again a part of the paper which has already been read to your Lordships,) that "the Committee, with the best intentions, best abilities, and steadiest application, must, after all, be a tool in the hands of their dewan."

Now do you believe, in the first place, that men will long have abilities, will long have good intentions, and will long, above all, have steady application, when they know they are but tools in the hands of another,—when they know they are tools for his own corrupt purposes?

In the next place, I must beg leave to state to you, that, on the constitution of this Committee, Mr. Hastings made them all take a solemn oath that they would never receive any present whatever. It was not enough to trust to a general covenant; it was not enough to trust to the penal act of 1773: he bound the Committee by a new oath, and forced them to declare that they would not receive any bribes. As soon as he had so secured them against receiving bribes, he was resolved to make them inefficient,—a good way to secure them against bribes, by taking from them the power of bribe-worthy service. This was a good counter-security to their oath. But Mr. Hastings put a dewan there, against whom there was no security; he let loose this dewan to frustrate their intentions, their application, their abilities, and oath: that is, there was a person at that board who was more than the board itself, who might riot in peculation and plunder from one end of the country to the other. He was there to receive bribes for Mr. Hastings; the Committee were to be pure with impotent hands; and then came a person with ample power for Mr. Hastings himself. And lest this person should not have power enough in this Committee, he is made the general bribe-broker to Mr. Hastings. This secret under-current, as your Lordships will see, is to counteract everything, and, as fast as one part is rendered pure, totally to corrupt all the rest.

But, my Lords, this was not the private opinion of Mr. Shore only, a man of great abilities, and intimately acquainted with the revenue, who must know when he was in a situation to do good and when not. The other gentleman whom I have mentioned, Mr. Hastings's confidant in everything but his bribes, and supposed to be in his closest secrets, is Mr. Anderson. I should remark to your Lordships, that Mr. Anderson is a man apparently of weak nerves, of modest and very guarded demeanor, as we have seen him in the House of Commons; it is in that way only I have the honor of knowing him. Mr. Anderson being asked whether he agreed in the opinion and admitted the truth of his friend Mr. Shore's statement relative to the dewan of the Committee, his answer was this: "I do not think that I should have written it quite so strong, but I do in a great measure agree to it: that is, I think there is a great deal of truth in the observation; I think, in particular, that it would require great exertion in the Committee, and great abilities on the part of the President, to restrain effectually the conduct of the dewan; I think it would be difficult for the Committee to interpose a sufficient control to guard against all the abuses of the dewan."