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• History of British India.
• Book VI.
• Chap. I.
• Chap. II.
• Chap III.
• Chap IV.
• Chap V.
• Chap VI.

CHAP. I.

BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.Upon the departure of Mr. Hastings from Bengal, Mr. Macpherson succeeded, as senior in council, to the power and dignity of Chief Governor of the British establishments in India. Certain peculiarities marked the history of this gentleman in the service of the Company. He sailed to Madras in 1766, purser of an India ship; and having obtained the means of an introduction to the Nabob of Arcot, insinuated himself quickly into his inmost confidence. As the Nabob, since the first moment of his deliverance from the terror of the French, had been in a state of perpetual struggle with the servants of the Company for a larger share of power, Mr. Macpherson appears to have flattered him with the hopes of advantage from an application to the British minister; and to have prevailed upon the Nabob to make use of himself as the organ of the attempt. The project was, to persuade the minister, that the Nabob was suffering under a load of oppression by the Company’s servants. Mr. Macpherson arrived in England, in execution of this commission, towards the end of the year 1768. Upon his return to Madras he was, during the administration of Governor Dupré, admitted into the civil service of the Company, and employed by that Governor in the most confidential transactions; particularly, in writing his dispatches, to which the superior skill of Mr. Macpherson in the art of composition afforded a recommendation. In the year 1776, Lord Pigot was Governor of Madras, Mr. Macpherson had ascended to the rank of a factor in the Company’s service; when a paper, purporting to be a memorial to the Nabob of Arcot, was presented to the Council by their President. It had noBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. signature; but it recapitulated various services, which the writer had rendered to the Nabob in England; and the concurrence of circumstances rendered it but little possible that he should be any other person than Mr. Macpherson. Mr. Macpherson was called before the Board; and asked whether, or not, he acknowledged the production. Mr. Macpherson replied, “That he could not give a precise answer; that it was not written in his hand, nor signed by him; and that if referred to transactions before he was in the Company’s service.” Lord Pigot regarded this answer as not only evasive, but a satisfactory proof that Mr. Macpherson was the author; and as the transactions appeared to him to be those of a man unfit for the service of the Company, he therefore moved that he should be dismissed. The following is a passage of the memorial; “The object of this commission was to procure relief, from the oppressions under which the Nabob was labouring: To procure this wished-for relief, the means to be employed were, if possible, to raise in the breast of the Prime Minister a favourable respect for the Nabob; then to lay before him the distress of the Prince; likewise to show the advantage which would arise to the state, from granting him the proper protection.” In describing his first interview with the Minister, the Duke of Grafton, the memorialist said, “I expatiated upon the superior merits of the Nabob; showed that he was the person to whom Britain owed the rise of her power in India; that his attachment and unsullied honour to the English were unparalleled. I then dwelt upon his personal merits, as a statesman and a gentleman; and showed, that though he had assurances of protection, under the sovereign BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.hand, he was treated with indignity, and even tyranny.” “Having represented,” continues the author, “the Nabob’s distress, and the oppressions under which he laboured, in the most cautious manner to his Grace, I availed myself of the disputes which subsisted, or were rather commencing, between his Grace, as First Lord of the Treasury, and the India Directors, to enforce the propriety of supporting the Nabob.” Another of the topics which he says he always laboured was, “that the firm support of his Highness was the best restraint which government had upon the usurpations of the servants of a certain Company.” The memorialist also desires the Nabob to recollect, whether he was not the inventor of the plea, by which the Nabob claimed to be a party to the treaty of Paris; that is, to rank himself with the princes of Europe, as a member of their general system; and to make the King of France an arbiter between him and the English. Beside the general project of relieving the Nabob from oppression, that is, from the necessity of paying his debts, and of yielding any thing from the revenues of the country toward its defence, the memorialist claims the merit of having exerted himself in favour of two other favourite designs of the Nabob; that of usurping the seat of the Subah of Deccan, and that of disinheriting his elder, in favour of his second, son. Beside the arguments which the memorialist employed upon the minister, and the publications by which he boasts of having influenced the public mind, he recurred to other instruments of persuasion. He offered presents to the minister, but they were rejected; and then to the minister’s secretary, but they were rejected again. His next offer, but under the necessary portion of disguise, was that of a present to the nation; a sum of seventy lacs, or even more, to be given to theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. minister, on loan for the public service, at an interest of two per cent.

As the memorialist in these transactions appeared distinctly to have lent or sold himself to the Nabob, to act in hostility to the Company, it was decided in the Council, by a majority of nine to two, that Mr. Macpherson should be dismissed from the service. Four of the members, not satisfied with a silent acquiescence in the reasons of the President, add, that “a man of the intriguing disposition which that paper shows Mr. Macpherson to be, is, we think, very unfit to be employed as a servant of the Company; more especially as we believe Mr. Macpherson has been concerned in the intrigues, which the greater part of the Board must be sensible have lately been carried on at the Nabob’s Durbar, to the detriment of the Company’s service, and which may have impeded the execution of their late orders.”

As the Board regarded the evidence against Mr. Macpherson as conclusive, they held it unnecessary to call upon him for a defence. To the Directors, the offence when it came before them, must have appeared of a very trivial nature. About the restoration of Mr. Macpherson they seem not to have hesitated. Their only anxiety was to restore him, without submission to the condition (the votes of three-fourths of the Directors and three-fourths of the Proprietors) prescribed by the act. The opinion obtained from the Company’s council was, that though his dismission, pronounced without receiving his defence, was informal, he could not, without submission to the clause of the act, be restored. The counsel added, “And it is worth considering, if Mr. Macpherson should be restored, whether he is a proper person to be continued in the Company’s service: BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.He has, in my opinion, too much connexion with the Nabob of Arcot; and when the Company’s interest and Nabob’s are opposite, (as they will often happen,) they will greatly disturb a man of honour and integrity.” As this opinion appears not to have accorded with the wishes of the leading portion of the Directors, they made an experiment whether a more favourable opinion could not be obtained from another quarter. They consulted the Solicitor-General, Wedderburne, who had sufficient power over technical language to satisfy them completely. He pronounced the dismission of Mr. Macpherson not a dismission; and by consequence, the clause of the act, which regarded dismission, had in this case no application. Mr. Macpherson was immediately restored. In announcing, however, this decree to the Governor and Council of Madras, the letter of the Court of Directors has the following words; “But, as his behaviour was disrespectful to your Board, and, in other particulars, very reprehensible, we direct that you give him a severe reprimand, and acquaint him that a like conduct will meet with a severer punishment.” From the humiliation, however, of such a reprimand, and such a menace, the Court of Directors, who prescribed them, afforded him effectual protection. Though restored to his rank and emoluments in the service, he was allowed to remain in England, till January, 1781, when he was chosen to fill the high office, vacant by the resignation of Mr. Barwell, in the Supreme Council of Bengal. This appointment excited the attention of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, who took it under examination, and deemed it of sufficient importance to make it the subject of their third report. The conduct of Mr. Macpherson, who undertook the office of a secret enemy of the Company, and became the willing and mercenary instrument of designs levelled against hisBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. country; the conduct of the Court of Directors in shielding such a man from the punishment awarded for his offence, nay distinguishing him, as if he had been a model of excellence, by a most unusual reward; lifting him up from a low rank in the service, and placing him all at once in nearly the highest and most important office which they had to bestow, the Select Committee condemned in language of the greatest severity. The design of the Nabob to exempt himself from all dependance upon the Company, the Committee represented as early formed, systematically pursued, and pregnant with danger. He endeavoured to negotiate a treaty of neutrality with the French, which would have secured that nation at Pondicherry. He carried on, to the perpetual disturbance of the Company’s government, a perpetual system of intrigue, in pursuance of his plan. Of Mr. Macpherson’s construction of the article in the treaty of Paris respecting the guarantee of his independence by France, he was eager to take advantage, and to interpose that nation between himself and the English. “By means of such flattering delusions,” say the Committee, “the ambition of the Nabob Mahomed Ali had been, before this invention, as well as ever since, stimulated to desperate designs and enterprises; which have disturbed the peace of India, shaken the lawful government of the Company at Madras, wasted his own revenues, and at length brought the power of Great Britain in that part of the world to the verge of ruin.”

A copy of this report was sent out by the Directors to Bengal, where Mr. Macpherson was then performing so important a part in the government of India. It was a call upon him for a defence of his own conduct and of theirs. The apology was written, under date the 30th of March, 1783. It consisted BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.of the following particulars; First, an assertion, that the transactions in which he had been engaged for the Nabob of Arcot, were made fully known to the Company’s Governor of Madras, at the time when he entered into the Company’s service, and that he had never presented any memorial of those transactions to the Nabob, but what had that Governor’s approbation; Secondly, of a display of the meritorious proceedings of the Supreme Government in Bengal, from the time when he became a member of it.1

Upon the first part of this apology, it is obvious to remark, that it consisted entirely of his own affirmation of what passed between himself and a man that was dead. Besides, if it was true, it only proved that a certain governor sanctioned a certain conduct; not that such conduct was innocent. The secret concurrence of a governor, if in any thing wrong, was a collusion between two individuals, not the sanction of government. Upon the second part, an observation equally conclusive was, that the plea was foreign to the charge; for surely the acts of the Supreme Council, whether excellent or the reverse, during the time in which Mr. Macpherson had possessed a seat at the Board, were no proof that nearly twenty years before he had not committed an act, which ought to have excluded him from the service.

As Mr. Hastings remained in India, till the passing of Mr. Pitt’s bill left no longer any doubt of his recall, Mr. Macpherson had time to rise to seniority in the Council; and by virtue of his station, occupied, when left vacant, the Governor-General’s chair.

The state of the revenues; the affairs of Oude; and the proceedings of Scindia, the great Mahratta chief, occupied first the attention of the new administration.BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.

The state, in which Mr. Macpherson received the government, he represents as far from happy and prosperous. In a statement, bearing date the 4th of March, 1785, “The public distress,” he says, “was never so pressing as in this moment. The season of the heavy collections is over; the demands of Madras and Bombay are most pressing; and our arrears to the army are upwards of fifty lacs.”2 To the Court of Directors, when rendering an account of his government, upon the intimation of his recall, he represents himself, as having been called upon “to act as their Governor-General, at a season of peculiar difficulty, when the close of a ruinous war, and the relaxed habits of their service, had left all their armies in arrear, and their presidencies in disorder.”2 The loose language, in which the Indian Governors indulge, makes it impossible to know very exactly what Mr. Macpherson indicated, by the term “relaxed habits” of the service; undoubtedly, however, he meant bad government; since he described them as among the causes of some of the worst effects,—armies all in arrear—and presidencies all in disorder.

The Governor-General and Council stood pledged BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.to Mr. Hastings for the maintenance of his new system for the management of Oude. To reduce, however, the drain upon the Nabob’s treasury, produced by allowances and gratuities to the Company’s servants, a rule was introduced, that every thing of this nature should appear upon the face of his accounts, should be recorded by the Council, and transmitted for the inspection of the Court of Directors. A body of troops had been assigned by the Nabob to Mr. Hastings, as a body guard, during his residence in Oude; and to these troops had been appointed British officers at the Nabob’s expense. This too was a burthen upon the Nabob which the Governor-General deemed it improper any longer to impose. The expense, however, of Major Palmer, the private agent of Mr. Hastings, left at the seat of the Nabob when the ostensible resident was withdrawn, he was induced “from motives (he says) of delicacy, to the late Governor-General, and his arrangements in the upper provinces,” not immediately to remove; though the expence was enormous,1 and the agent employed for no other function than to transmit to the Presidency the letters of the Vizir and present those addressed to him by the Governor-General. The Futty-gur detachment, from the changes which had taken place on the frontiers of Oude, it was also, for the present, deemed unsafe to withdraw. But the Governor-General declared his resolution of confining the military burthen imposed upon the Vizir to the smallest amount, consistent with the security of his dominions; and for this he conceived that one complete brigade, in constant readiness, and punctually paid, would suffice.2

The proceedings of Scindia were already an objectBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. of great jealousy, if not of dread. In 1781, Mr. Hastings, apparently engrossed by one object, the accomplishment of peace with Scindia, and through him with the government at Poonah, overlooked or misunderstood the dangers which were involved in the aggrandisement of the Mahratta chief, and expressly instructed the English ambassador to throw no obstacles in the way of the designs which he entertained against the remaining territories of the Mogul. Toward the end of the year 1782, died Nujeef Khan whose talents had, even in its present decline, given a portion of stability to the imperial throne. The remaining chiefs by whom it was surrounded immediately broke into general discord. In the petty, but virulent warfare, in which they engaged, the unhappy Emperor was banded from one to another, according as each, attaining a precarious ascendancy, became master of his person; and he was equally enslaved, and oppressed by them all. About six months after the death of Nujeef Khan, Mr. Hastings, though he had directed Colonel Muir, not to insert any thing in the treaty with Scindia “which might expressly mark our knowledge of his views, or concurrence in them,” namely, his views on the territory of Shah Aulum; and though he had on that occasion declared, that “our connexion with the Mogul had long been suspended, and he wished never to see it renewed, as it had proved a fatal drain to the wealth of Bengal, and the treasury of the Company, “sent certain agents, among whom were Major Browne, and Major Davy, to the court of the Emperor at Delhi: and, by means of them, entered into negotiations, if not engagements, of which the nature has never been satisfactorily explained. It appears, that an offer was made, on conditions which were accepted, to BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.provide for the expense of any troops which the king might require; and Major Browne, in his dispatch to Mr. Hastings laid before the, Board declared, that “The business of assisting the Shah can and must go on, if we wish to be secure in India, or regarded as a nation of faith and honour.”1 The proposition, however, which was made by the Governor-General, to grant assistance to the Mogul, was disrelished by the other members of the Board; and the scheme was defeated. At what mark it was aimed, we no where distinctly perceive.2 “I avow,” says Mr. Hastings, “that I would have afforded effectual assistance to the Mogul, that is, to the King Shah Aulum, if powers had been granted to me; but my Council differed in opinion with me, and nothing was done.” This is all the information which, in his answer to the charge on this subject, Mr. Hastings condescends to yield. When urging upon the Directors his wishes for sending troops to the assistance of the Mogul, he had indeed held a language, contradictory both to his former and his subsequent declarations. If the King’s authority, he said, “is suffered to receive its final extinction, it is impossible to foresee what power may arise out of its ruins, or what events may be linked in the same chain of revolution with it. But your interests may suffer by it: your reputation certainly will—as his right to our assistance has been constantly acknowledged—and, by a train of consequences to which our government has not intentionally given birth, but most especially by the movements, which its influence, by too near an approach, has excited, it has unfortunately become the efficient instrument of a great portion of theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. King’s present distresses and dangers.” Mr. Burke, however, affirms, with a strength which the circumstances will not warrant, that the pretended design of Mr. Hastings to free the Emperor from thraldom under the Delhi chiefs, was not his real design, because not consistent with some of his declaration, and some of his acts. While Mr. Hastings was at Lucknow, in 1784, the eldest son, and heir apparent of the Emperor, repaired to Oude, to solicit the protection of the Governor-General and Nabob. He was received with marks of distinction, which had no tendency to extinguish hope, and was described by Mr. Hastings as a person of considerable qualifications, well versed in affairs. His solicitations for aid to deliver his father from oppression, and re-establish in some degree the fortunes of his house, Mr. Hastings informed him, were opposed, by the present temper of the English nation, as well as by that of his colleagues in the government; and he advised an intermediate application to Scindia, as the most powerful Mahratta Prince, the ally of the English nation, and a man who, unless early prevented, was likely to take an opposite part. To Scindia, Mr. Hastings, as he informed the Court of Directors, had himself written, on the very first advice he received of the flight of the Mogul Prince, not only to apprize him of that event, but to solicit his advice. Scindia immediately sent to Lucknow his familiar and confidential ministers, with whom Mr. Hastings held several secret conferences, without the presence even of a secretary. He reported no more than the result of these conferences; namely,” that the inclinations of the Mahratta chief were not very dissimilar from his own; and he added, that neither in this, nor in any other instance, would he BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.suffer himself to be drawn into measures which should tend to weaken the connexion between the English government and Scindia; “nor, in this, even to oppose his inclinations.” What his inclinations were, at the time of the negotiation with Colonel Muir, the reader will remember: What were the recent declarations of Mr. Hastings, respecting the obligations both of justice and of policy, to support the Emperor, has been immediately stated: What were the inclinations of Scindia at the present moment, M{. Hastings is far from disclosing: The actions of Scindia made them soon distinctly appear.1 The Emperor, from the impulse of a feeble mind, which deems any evil less than that under which it is immediately suffering, listened to the insidious overtures of Scindia, who offered him deliverance from the undutiful; servants that enthralled him. Partly by intrigue, and partly by force, Scindia got possession easily of the imperial person, and with the imperialBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. person, of all the pretensions, and all the territories, which belonged to the imperial throne. Nor wes it long before he manifested the value of that friendship of his to the English, which Mr. Hastings claimed so much of merit for maintaining. Mr. Hastings had not yet left Calcutta, when a body of the Seiks, invaded Rohilcund; and it was on strong grounds believed, that they received encouragement from Scindia to the attempt. That ambitious chief proceeded in his plans with so much expedition, that before the end of March he was master of Agra; and the fort of Ally Ghur, which could not long the defended, remained, in that part of India, the only place of strength, beyond the confines of the Vizir, which was not in his power. He afforded protection to Cheyte Sing, and gave him a command in his army. He had already treated the vizir with so little delicacy, that nothing but the prospect of effectual resistance, as Major Palmer and Mr. Anderson united in representing, could b expected to restrain him within the bounds of justice.1 What was more, he compelled the Emperor to declare him Vicegerent to the Mogul empire, an authority which superseded that of the Vizir; and consolidated in the hands of the Mahrattas all the legal sovereignty of India. These advantages he failed not to direct immediately against the Company themselves; and incited the Mogul to make a demand of the tribute due to him from the English. On the charge, however, of having connived with the designs of Scindia, Mr. Hastings has the following words, “I declare, that I entered into no negotiations with Madajee Scindia for delivering the Mogul into the hands of the Mahrattas; but I must have BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.been a madman indeed, if I had involved the Company in a war with the Mahrattas, because the Mogul, as his last resource, had thrown himself under the protection of Madajee Scindia.”1 The question is, whether he did not more surly prepare a war with the Mahrattas, by allowing Scindia to feed his presumption and his power, with all the resources and pretensions of the imperial throne.

The power of Scindia over the Mogul family was not complete, so long as the eldest son of the Emperor remained out of his hands. Towards the end of March a negotiation was opened with him by Scindia, of which the object was his return to Delhi. The conditions offered were extremely favourable. “This convinced me,” said Major Palmer, “they were insidious; and I earnestly recommended that the Prince should not trust to promises; as, without security for their performance, he would expose his dignity, his succession, and even his life, to the greatest hazard.” Major Palmer continues, “I consider the interests of the Company, and the Vizir, as deeply involved in the fate of the Prince. Whilst he continues under the protection of the Vizir and the Company, the usurpation of the Mahrattas must be incomplete; but, if he should fall under their power, it will be perpetuated, and the consequences of their being permanently established ion the authority of the empire, would be truly alarming to the peace of the Vizir’s and the Company’s dominions.” The Major added, “It will not only be impracticable to withdraw the Futty Ghur detachment, in the event of Scindia’s obtaining a firm footing in the Dooab, which is his aim, and which he has nearly accomplished;—but it will also be necessary for the Vizir to maintain a respectable body of cavalry to act with the Company’s infantryBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. for the protection of his dominions. And his Excellency is so seriously alarmed at the growing power of the Mahrattas in his neighbourhood, that I am convinced he will readily adopt any practicable plan for securing himself against the consequences of it.”1

The Board of Control, at the head of which was placed Mr. Henry Dundas, had not been long in the exercise of its functions, when it manifested pretty clearly the ends which it was calculated to promote.

So strong a conviction was impressed upon Englishmen, in general, of the evil resulting from the magnitude of the debts due to British subject by the Nabob of Carnatic; of the fraudulent methods by which they had been contracted; and of the mischievous purposes which the Nabob pursued, by acknowledging debts, where nothing had been received, and nothing but a dangerous co-operation was expected in return; that, in every one of the schemes which the late reformers had proposed for the government of India, a provision had been included, for an adjustment of those enormous and suspicious contracts. In Mr. Dundas’s bill it was proposed, that the Governor-General and Council “should take into consideration the present state of the affairs of the Nabob of Arcot, and inquire not and ascertain, the origin, nature, and amount of his just debts,” and take the most speedy and effectual measures for discharging them. A provision to the same effect, and couched very nearly in the self-same words, was contained in Mr. Fox’s bill; and to prevent the recurrence of a like evil in future, it was declared “unlawful for any servant, civil or military, of the Company, to be engaged in the borrowing or lending BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.of any money, or in any money transaction whatsoever, with any protected or other native prince.” The clause in Mr. Pitt’s act was the following words: “Whereas very large sums of money are claimed to be due to British subjects by the Nabob of Arcot,…be it enacted, That the Court of Directors shall, as soon as may be, take into consideration, the origin and justice of the said demands,—and that they shall give such orders to their Presidencies and servants abroad for completing the investigation thereof, as the nature of the case shall require; and for establishing, in concert with the Nabob, such fund, for the discharge of those debts which shall appear to be justly due, as shall appear consistent with the rights of the Company, the security of the creditors, and the honour and dignity of the said Nabob.”

The Directors, from the words of this enactment, concluded, as any body would conclude, that this inquiry, respecting these alleged debts, was a trust, expressly and exclusively devolved upon them; and that an inquiry into “the origin and justice of the said demands” implied (what was absolutely necessary to the end which seemed to he proposed, the separation of the false from the true) that scrutiny should be made into each particular case. They proceeded to the fulfilment of he obligations, which this enactment seemed to lay upon them; drew up a set of instructions for their Presidencies and servants abroad; and transmitted them for approbation to the Board of Control.

They were not a little surprised to find the Board of Control take the whole business out of their hands. The Board of Control thought proper to divide the debts of the Nabob into three classes; 1. A class consolidated, as it was called, in the year 1767, constituting what it called the loan of 1767; 2. A classBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. contracted for paying the arrears of certain cavalry discharged in 1777, which it called the cavalry loan; 3. Another class, which it called the consolidated debt of 1777. And it ordered, that all these three classes should be discharged, without any inquiry.

As it was only by degrees that funds for that discharge could arise; the following order was prescribed: That the debt consolidated in 1767 be made up1 to the end of the year 1784 with the current interest at ten per cent.; the cavalry loan made up to the same period with the current interest at twelve per cent.; the debt consolidated in 1777 made up to the same period with the current interest at twelve per cent. to November 1781, and from thence with the current interest at six per cent.: That the annual twelve lacs should be applied; 1. To the growing interest on the cavalry loan at twelve per cent.; 2. To the growing interest on the debt of 1777 at six per cent.; 3. Of the remainder, one half to the payment of the growing interest, and liquidation of the principal of the loan of 1767, the other half to liquidation of the debt which the Nabob, beside his debt to individuals, owed to the Company: That when the loan of 1767 should thus be discharged, the twelve lacs should be applied; 1. To the growing interest of the loan of 1777; 2. Of the remainder, one half to pay the interest and liquidate the principal of the cavalry loan, the other half to the liquidation of the debt to the Company: That when the cavalry loan should thus be discharged, the twelve lacs should be applied, in the proportion of five lacs to the interest and principal of the loan of 1777, seven lacs to the BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.debt due to the Company: And lastly, when the debt to the Company should thus be discharged, that the whole of the twelve lacs should go to the extinction of the debt of 1777.

The Directors remonstrated, but very humbly. “My Lords and Gentlemen, It is with extreme concern that we express a difference of opinion with your Right Honourable Board, in this early exercise of your controling power; but, in so novel an institution, it can scarce be thought extraordinary, if the exact boundaries of our respective functions and duties should not at once, on either side, be precisely and familiarly understood, and therefore confide in your justice and candour for believing that we have no wish to evade or frustrate the salutary purpose of your institution, as we on our part are thoroughly satisfied that you have no wish to encroach on the legal powers of the East India Company: we shall proceed to state our objections to such of the amendments as appear to us to be either insufficient, inexpedient, or unwarranted.” And under the head of, private debts of the Nabob of Arcot, “you are pleased,” they say, “to substantiate at once the justice of all those demands which the act requires us to investigate.” After “submitting,” which is all that they presume to do, “to the consideration” of the Board, whether “the express direction of the act, to examine the nature and origin of the debts,” had thus been “complied with;” and likewise “submitting,” whether inquiry could have done any harm; they add, “But to your appropriation of the fund, our duty requires that we should state our strongest dissent. Our right to be paid the arrears of those expences by which, almost to our own rain, we have preserved the country, land all the property connected with it, from falling a prey to a foreign conqueror, surely stands paramount to all claims, for former debts, upon theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. revenues of a country so preserved, even if the legislature had not expressly limited the assistance to be given to private creditors to be such as should be consistent with our rights. The Nabob had, long before passing the act, by treaty with our Bengal government, agreed to pay us seven lacs of pagodas, as part of the twelve lacs, in liquidation of those arrears; of which seven lacs, the arrangement you have been pleased to lay down would take away from us more than the half and give it to private creditors, of whose demands there are only about a sixth part which do not stand in a predicament that you declare would not entitle them to any aid or protection from us in the recovery thereof, were it not upon grounds of expediency. Until our debt shall be discharged, we can by no means consent to give up any part of the seven lacks to the private creditors.”1

The correspondence upon this subject between the Court of Directors and the Board of Control passed during the months of October and November in the year 1784. The Board of Control persisted in the plan which it had originally adopted. And on the 28th of February, 1785, it was moved by Mr. Fox, in the House of Commons, that the directions which had in consequence been transmitted to India, should be laid before the House. A vehement debate ensued, in which Mr. Burke delivered that celebrated speech, which he afterwards published, under the title of “Mr. Burke’s Speech on the Motion made for Papers relative to the Directions for charging the Nabob of Arcot’s Private Debts to Europeans on the Revenues of the Carnatic.” Mr. Dundas defended the Board BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.of Control: By showing that, whatever might be the natural and obvious meaning of the words of the legislature commanding inquiry, and committing that inquiry to the Court of Directors; it was yet very possible for the strong party to do what it pleased: By asserting that the Directors had sufficient materials in the Indian House, for deciding upon all three classes of debts; though the opinion of whe Directors themselves was precisely the reverse: By observing, that, if any improper claim under any of the three classes was preferred, it was open to the Nabob, to the Company and to the other creditors, to object . The only object, which, as far as can be gathered from the report of his speech, he held for the as about to be gained, by superseding that inquiry, which all men, but himself and his majority in parliament, would have concluded to be the command of the legislature, was that this measure would not leave “the Nabob an opportunity to plead in excuse for not keeping his payments to the Company, that he was harassed by the application of his private creditors.”1

Mr. Burke took a very extensive view of theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. Indian policy of the ministers. The most curious and important part of his speech; and that is important indeed; is the part, where he undertakes to show what was the real motive, for superseding that inquiry which was called for by the legislature, and for deciding at once, and in the lump, upon a large amount of suspicious and more than suspicious demands. The motive, which he affirms, and in support of which he adduces as great a body of proof as it is almost ever possible to bring, to a fact of such a descriptions, (facts of that descriptions, though of the highest order of importance, are too apt to exhibit few of those marks which are commonly relied upon as matter of evidence), was no other than that baneful source of all our misgovernment, and almost all our misery, Parliamentary Influence. It was to hold the corrupt benefit of a large parliamentary interest, created by the creditors and creatures, fraudulent and not fraudulent, of the Nabob of Arcot, that, according to Mr. Burke, the ministry of 1784 decided, they should all, whether fraudulent or not fraudulent, receive their demands. “Paul Benfield is the grand parliamentary reformer. What region in the empire, what city, what borough, what county, what tribunal in this kingdom, is not full of his labours. In order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor rotten constitution of his native country. For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this house, to furnish it, not with the faded tapestry figures of antiquated merit, such as decorate, and may reproach, some other houses, but with real solid, living patterns of true modern virtue. Paul Benfield made (reckoning himself) no fewer than BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.eight members in the last parliament. What copious streams of pure blood must he not have transfused into the veins of the present!“

But the occasions of Mr. Benfield had called him to India. “It was therefore,” continues Mr. Burke, “not possible for the minister to consult personally with this great man. What then was he to do? Through a sagacity that never failed him in these pursuits, he found out in Mr. Benfields representative his exact resemblance. A specific attraction, by which he gravitates towards all such characters, so brought our minister into a close connexion with Mr. Benfield’s agent and attorney; that is, with the grand contractor (whom I name to honour) Mr. Richard Atkinson; a name that will be well remembered as long as the records of this house, as long as the records of the British treasury, as long as the monumental debt of England, shall endure! This gentleman, Sir, acts as attorney for Mr. Paul Benfield. Every one who hears me is well acquainted with the sacred friendship and the mutual attachment that subsist t between him and the present minister. As many members as chose to attend in the first session of this parliament can best tell their own feelings at the scenes which were then acted.” After representing this Atkinson, as the man whose will directed in framing the articles of Mr. Pitt’s East India Bill, Mr. Burke proceeds: “But it was necessary to a authenticate the coalition between the men of Intrigue in India, and the minister of Intrigue in England, by a studied display of the power of this their connecting link. Every trust, every honour, every distinction was to be heaped upon him. He was at once made a Director of the India Company; made an Alderman of London; and to be made, if ministry could prevail (and I am sorry to say how near, how very near they wear to prevailing)representative of the capital of this kingdom.BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. But to secure his services against all risk, he was brought in for a ministerial borough. On his part he was not wanting in zeal for the common cause. His advertisements show his motives, and the merits upon which he stood. For your minister, this worn-out veteran submitted to enter into the dusty field of the London contest; and you all remember that in the same virtuous cause, he submitted to keep a sort of public office, or counting-house, where the whole business of the last general election was managed. it was openly managed, by the direct agent and attorney of Benfield. It was managed upon Indian principles, an for an Indian interest. This was the golden cup of abomination; this the chalice of the fornications of rapine, usury, and oppression, which was held out by the people so many of the nobles of this land, had drained to the very dregs. Do you think that no reckoning was to follow this lewd debauch? that no payment was to be demanded for this riot of public drunkenness, and national prostitution? Here! you have it, here before you. The principal of the grand election manager must be indemnified. Accordingly the claims of Benfield and his crew must be put above all inquiry.”

This is a picture! it concerns my countrymen to contemplate well the features of it. I care not to what degree it may please any one to say that it is what degree it may please any one to say that it is not a likeness of the groups that sat for it. To me it is alone of importance to know, that if it presents not and individual, it present, and with consummate fidelity, a familylikeness; that it represents the tribe; that such scenes, and such exactly, were sure to be acted, by the union between Indian influence and parliamentary influence; that such was sure to be the game, which would be played into one another’s BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.hands, by Indian corruption, and parliamentary corruption, the moment a proper channel of communication was opened between them.

The points, to which Mr. Burke adverts in the next place, are of amore tangible nature. “Benfield,” he says, “for several years appeared as the chief proprietor, as well as the chief agent, director, and controller of this system of debt. My best information goes to fix his share at 400,000l. By the scheme of the present ministry for adding interest to the principal, that smallest of the sums ever mentioned for Mr. Benfield will form a capital of 592,000l., at six percent. interest. Benfield has thus received, by the ministerial grant before you, an annuity of 35,520l., a year, charged on the public revenues.”1

After several other remarks on the proceedings of Benefield, he thus sums up; “I have laid before you, Mr. Speaker, I think with sufficient clearness, the connexion of ministers with Mr. Atkinson at the general election; I have laid open to you the connexion of Atkinson with Benefield; I have shown Benefield’s employment of his wealth in creating a parliamentary interest to procure a ministerial protection; I have set before your eyes his large concern in the debt, his practices to hide that concern from the publicBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. eye; and the liberal protection which he has received from the minister. If this chain of circumstances do not lead you necessarily to conclude that the minister has paid to the avarice of Benfield the services done by Benefield’s connexion to his ambition, I do not know any thing short of the confession of the party that can persuade you of his guilt. Clandestine and collusive practice can only be traced by combination and comparison of circumstances. To reject such combination and comparison is to reject the only means of detecting fraud; it is indeed to give it a patent, and free license, to cheat with impunity. I confine myself to the connexion of ministers mediately or immediately with only two persons concerned in this debt. How many others, who support their power and greatness within and without doors, are concerned originally, or by transfers of these debts, must be left to general opinion. I refer to the Reports of the Select Committee for the proceedings of some of the agents in these affairs, and their attempts, at least, to furnish ministers with the means of buying general courts, and even whole parliaments, in the gross.” 1

In what proportion these ancient debts were false, and either collusive or forged, we have, as far as they were exempted from inquiry, no direct means of knowing. If a rule may be taken from those of a more modern date, when suspicion was more awake, and after all the checks of Mr. Dunds and his successors had been applied, it will be concluded that few were otherwise. The commissioners, who were appointed in the year 1805, to decide upon the claims of the private creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, had, BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.in the month of November, 1814, performed adjudication on claims to the amount of 20,390,570l. of which only 1,346,796l. were allowed as good, 19,043,774l. were rejected as bad; in other words, one part in twenty was all that could be regarded as true and lawful debt.1

Mr. Dundas assumed that he had done enough, when he allowed the Nabob, the Company, and other creditors to object. That this was a blind, is abundantly clear; though it is possible, that it stood as much between his own eyes and the light, as he was desirous of putting it between the light, as he was desirous of putting it between the light and eyes of other people. Where was the use of a power given to the Nabob to object? The Nabob was one of the fraudulent parties. Or to the creditors to object? of whom the greater number had an interest in conniving at others, in order that others might connive at them. Or to the company to object? The Company was not there to object: And the servants of the Company were the creditors themselves.

It was not thus decided, by the parties on whom theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. power of decision depended, when the commissioners for adjudication on the debts of the Nabob were appointed in 1805. It was not accounted wisdom, then, to approve of all in the lump, and only allow the power of objection. It was thought necessary to inquire; and to perform adjudication, after inquiry, upon each particular case. The consequence is, as above disclosed, that one part in twenty, in a mass of claims exceeding twenty millions sterling, is all that is honest and true.

In this imputed collusion between the ministry and the creditors of the Nabob, it was not insinuated that the ministers had taken money for the favour which they had shown. Upon this Mr. Burke makes a remark, which is of the very highest importance. “I know that the ministers,” says he, “will think it little less than acquittal, that hey are not charged with partisans. If I am to speak my private sentiments, I think, that in a thousand cases for one, it would be far less mischievous to the public (and full as little dishonourable to themselves), to be polluted with direct bribery, than thus to become a standing auxiliary to the oppression, usury, and peculation of multitudes, in order to obtain a corrupt support to their power. It is by bribing; not so often by being bribed; that wicked politicians bring ruin on mankind. Avarice is a rival to the pursuits of many; it finds a multitude of checks and many opposers in every walk of life. But the objects of ambition are for the few: And every person who aims at indirect profit; and therefore wants other protection than innocence and law; instead of its rival becomes its instrument: BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.There is a natural allegiance and fealty due to this domineering paramount evil from all the vassal vices; which acknowledge its superiority, and readily militate under its banners: and it is under that discipline alone, that avarice is able to spread to any considerable extent, or to render itself a general public mischief. It is therefore, no apology for ministers, that they have not been bought by the East India delinquents; that they have only formed an alliance with them, for screening each other from justice, according to the exigence of their several necessities. That they have done so is evident: And the junction of the power of office in England, with the abuse of authority in the East, has not only prevented even the appearance of redress to the grievances of India, but I wish it may not be found to have dulled, if not extinguished, the honour, the candour, the generosity, the good nature, which used formerly to characterize the people of England.”

In October, 1784, the Directors appointed Mr. Holland, an old servant, on the Madras establishment, to succeed eventually to the government of Fort St. George, upon the resignation, death or removal of Lord Macartney. The Board of Control disapprove the choice; not as wrong in itself, but “open to plausible misrepresentation.” The Directors not only persist in their appointment, but proceed so far as to say, that the Board are interfering in matters “to which their control professedly does not extend.” The conduct of the Board of Control is characteristic. “If the reasons,” say they, “which we have adduced, do not satisfy the Court of Directors, we have certainly no right to control their opinion.” Mr. Holland, however, is informed, that the moment he arrives in India, he will be re-called. This terminates the dispute; and Sir Archibald Campbell,BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. a friend of Mr. Dundas, is nominated in his stead.

According to the very force of the term, the operation of control is subsequent, not precedent. Before you can control, there must be something to be controlled. Something to be controlled must be something either done or proposed. The subsequent part of transaction by no means satisfied the new organ of government for the East Indies, the Board of Control. Without and interval of reserve, the Board took upon itself to originate almost every measure of importance.

Intimately connected with its proceedings relative to the debts of the Nabob of Carnatic, was the resolution, formed by the Board of Control with respect to the revenues. The assignment had been adopted by the government of Madras, and approved by the Court of directors, upon the maturest experience; as the only means pf obtaining either the large balances which were due to the Company, or of preventing that dissipation of the revenue, and impoverishment of the country, by misrule, which rendered its resources unavailable to its defence, involved the Company in pecuniary distress, and exposed them continually to dangers of the greatest magnitude.

The same parties, however, whose interests were concerned in the affair of the debts, had an interest, no less decisive, in the restoration to the Nabob of the collection and disbursement of the revenues; from which so many showers of emolument fell upon those who had the vices requisite for standing under them. The same influence which was effectual for the payment of the debts was effectual also for the restoration of the revenues. The Board of control decreed that the revenues should be restored; for the BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.purpose, the Board declared, of giving to all the powers of India, a strong proof of the national faith.

The order for the restitution of the assignment, and the notification of the appointment of a successor, were received by Lord Macartney at the same time. The appointment of a successor he had solicited. The overthrow of his favourite measure, from a full knowledge of the interests which were united, and at work, he was led to expect. “Well apprised,” he said, “of the Nabob’s extensive influence; and of the ability, industry, and vigilance of his agents; and observing a concurrence of many other circumstances, I was not without apprehensions, that, before the government of Madras could have timely notice of the train, the assignment might be blown up at home; the sudden shock of which, I knew, must almost instantly overthrow the company in the Carnatic. I, therefore, employed myself most assiduously, in making preparations, to mitigate the mischief; and by degrees collected and stored up all the money that it was possible to reserve with safety from other services and demands; so that when the explosion burst upon us, I had provided an unexpected mass, of little less than thirteen lacs of rupees, to resist its first violence.”1

In conformity with his declared determination, not to be accessary to a measure which he regarded asBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. teeming with mischief, or a witness to the triumph of those whose cupidity he had restrained,1 Lord Macartney chose not to hold any longer the reins of government. But one attempt he thought proper to make; which was, to return to England by way of Bengal; and endeavour to convey to the Supreme Board so correct a notion of the evils to which the recent instructions from home were likely to give birth, as might induce them to delay the execution of those orders, or at least exert themselves to prevent as far as possible their pernicious effects. In less than a week, after receiving the dispatches from England, he embarked, and arrived about the middle of June at Calcutta. The Governor-General and Council were too conscious of their own precarious and dependent situation, to risk the appearance of disobedience to an order, regarding what they might suppose a favourite scheme of the Board of control. Lord Macartney, therefore, was disappointed in his expectation, of obtaining through them, a delay of the embarrassments which the surrender of the revenues would produce. He had indulged, however, another hope. If the resources of the Carnatic were snatched from the necessities of the Madras government, he believed that the want might be supplied, BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.by the surplus revenues of Bengal. “I had long before,” he says, in a letter to the Secret Committee of Directors, “been so much enlivened (and your honourable house was no doubt enlivened also) by the happy prospects held out in the late Governor-General’s letter to you of the 16th of December, 1783, published in several newspapers both foreign and domestic, that I flattered myself with hopes of finding from a loss of the assignment, or from other misfortunes; but in the range of my inquiries, no distinct traces were to be discovered of these prognosticated funds. I had it seems formed a visionary estimate; the reality disappeared like a phantom on the approach of experiment, and I looked here for it in vain. the government declared themselves strangers to Mr.Hastings’s letter, and indicated not a few symptoms of their own necessities.”1

They, accordingly, assured Lord Macartney, “that the exhausted state of the finances of the Bengal government would not admit of any extraordinary and continued aid to Fort St. George;”2 expressing at the same time their desire to contribute what assistance was in their power to relieve the distress. which the loss of the revenues, they acknowledged, must produce.3

A dangerous illness prolonged the stay of Lord Macartney at Calcutta, and previous to his departure, he received a dispatch from the Court of directors, in which was announced to him his appointment to be Governor-General of Bengal. After his removalBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. from the government, after the subversion of his favourite plans at Madras; an appointment, almost immediate, and without solicitation, to the highest station in the government of India, is not the clearest proof of systematic plans, and correspondent execution. The motives, at the same time, appear to have been more than usually honourable and pure. Though Lord Macartney, from the praises which Mr. Fox and his party had bestowed upon him in Parliament, might have been suspected of views in conformity with theirs; though he had no connexion with the existing administration which could render it personally desirable to promote him; though the Board of control had even entered upon the examination of the differences between him an Mr. Hastings, with minds unfavourably disposed, the examination of the differences between him and Mr. Hastings, with minds unfavourable disposed, the examination impressed the mind of Mr. Dundas with so strong an idea of the merit of that Lord’s administration, that he induced Mr. Pitt to concur with him in recommending Lord Macartney to the Court of Directors, that is, in appointing him Governor-General of Bengal.

The gratification offered to those powerful passions, the objects of which are wealth and power, had not so great an ascendancy over the mind of Lord Macartney, as to render him insensible to other considerations. His health required a season of repose, and the salutary influence of his native climate. The state of the government in India was such as to demand reforms; reforms, without which the administration could not indeed be successful; but which he as not sure of obtaining power to effect. The members of the Bengal administration had been leagued with Mr. Hastings in opposing and undervaluing his government at Madras; and peculiar objections applied BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785.to any thought of co-operation with the person who was left by Mr. Hastings at its head. He resolved, therefore, to decline the appointment; at least for a season, till visit to England should enable him to determine, by conference with ministers and directors, the arrangements which he might have it in his power to effect.

He arrived in England on the 9th of January, 1786, and on the 13th had a conference with the chairman, and deputy chairman, of the Court of Directors. The regulations on which he insisted, as of peculiar necessity for the more successful government of India, were two. The entire dependance of the military upon the civil power the represented, as not only recommended by the most obvious dictates of reasons, but conformable to be practice of the English government in all its other dependencies, and even to that of the East India Company, previous to the instructions of 1774; instructions which were framed on the spur of the occasion, and created two independent powers in the same administration. Secondly, a too rigid adherence to the rule of seniority infilling the more important departments of the State, or even to that of confiding the choice to the Company’s servants, was attended, the affirmed, with the greatest inconveniences; deprived the governments of the inestimable use of talents; lessened the motives to meritorious exertion among the servants and fostered a spirit, most injurious to the government, of independence and disobedience as towards its head. With proper regulation sin these particulars; a power of deciding against the opinion of the Council; and such changes among the higher servants, as sere required by the particular circumstances of the present case, he conceived that he might, but without them, he could not, accept of the government of India, with hopes of usefulness toBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1785. his country, or honour to himself.

A minute of this conversation was transmitted by the Chairs to the Board of Control; and on the 20th of February, Lord Macartney met Mr. Dundas, and Mr. Pitt. Even since his arrival, Mr. Pitt, in answer to an attack by Mr. Fox, upon the inconsistency of appointing that nobleman to the chief station in the Indian government almost at the very moment when his principal measure had been reversed, had been called forth to pronounce a warm panegyric upon Lord Macartney; and to declare that, with the exception of that one arrangement, his conduct in his government had merited all the praise which language could bestow and pointed him out as a most eligible choice for the still more important trust of Governor-General of Bengal. to the new regulations or reforms, proposed by Lord Macartney, Mr. Pitt gave a sort of general approbation; but with considerable latitude, in regard to the mode and time of alteration. Lord Macartney remarked, that what he had observed in England had rather increased, that diminished, the estimate which he had formed of the support which would be necessary to counteract the opposition, which, both at home and abroad, he was sure to experience; and he pointed in direct terms to what he saw of the enmity of Me. Hastings, the influence which he retained among both those who were, and those who had been the servants of the Company, as well s the influence which arose from those persons who were high in the administration. His opinion was, that some distinguished mark of favour, which would impose in some degree upon minds that were adversely disposed, and proclaim to all, the power with which he might expect to be BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.supported, was necessary to encounter the difficulties with which he would have to contend. He alluded to a British peerage, to which, even on other grounds, he conceived that he was not without a claim.

No further communication was vouchsafed to Lord Macartney; and in three days after this conversation he learned, that Lord Cornwallis was appointed Governor-General of Bengal. The appointment of the administration, among others the Chancellor Thurlow, whose impetuosity gave weight to his opinions; it was also odious to all those among the East India Directors and Proprietors, who were the partisans either of Hastings or Macpherson. “When, therefore,” says a letter of Lord Melville, “against such an accumulation of discontent and opposition, Mr. Pitt was induced by me to concur in the return of Lord Macartney to India, as Governor-General, it was not unnatural that both of us should have felt in our hands, than make it the subject of a since qua non preliminary. And I think if Lord Macartney had known us as we did.” These were the private grounds; As public ones, the same letter states, that the precedent was disapproved of indicating to the world that a premium was necessary to induce persons of consideration in England to accept the office of Governor-General in India, at the very moment when the resolution was taken of not confining the high situations in India to the servants of the Company.1

We have now arrived at the period of another parliamentary proceeding, which excited attention by its pomp, and by the influence upon the public mind of those whose interest it affected, much more thanBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. by any material change which it either produced, or was calculated to produce, upon the state of affaires in India. IN a history of those affaires, a very contracted summary of the voluminous records which are left of it, is all for which a place can be usefully found.

The parties into which parliament was now divided; the ministerial, headed by Mr. Pitt; and that of the opposition, by Mr. Fox; had, both, at a preceding period, found it their interest to arraign the government in India. The interest of the party in opposition remained, in this respect, the same as before. That of the ministry was altogether changed. It appeared to those whose interest it still was to arraign the government in India, that the most convenient form the attack could assume was that of an accusation of Mr. Hastings. The ministry had many reasons to dislike the scrutiny into which such a measure would lead. But they were too far committed, by the violent censure which they had for merely pronounced, to render it expedient for them to oppose it. Their policy was, to gain credit by an appearance of consent, and to secure their own objects, as far as it might be done, under specious pretences, during the course of the proceedings.

The vehement struggles of the parliamentary parties had prevented them, during the year 1784, from following up by any correspondent measure the violent censures which had fallen upon the administration of India. The preceding threats of Mr. Burke received a more determinate character, when he gave notice, on the 20th of June, 1785, “That if no other gentleman would undertake the business, he would at a future day, make a motion respecting the conduct of a gentleman just returned from India.” On the BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.first day of the following session, he was called upon by Major Scott, who had acted in the avowed capacity of the agent of Mr. Hastings, to produce his charges, and commit the subject to investigation. On the 18th of February, 1786, he have commencement to the undertaking, by a motion for a variety f papers; and a debate of great length ensued, more remarkable for the criminations, with which the leaders of the two parties appeared desirous of aspersing one another, than for any light which threw upon the subjects in dispute.

Mr. Burke began his speech, by requiring that the Journals of the House should be opened, and that the 44th and 45th of that series of resolutions, which Mr. Dundas had moved, and the House adopted on the 29th of May, 1782, should be read: “1. That,—for the purpose of conveying entire conviction to the minds of the native princes, that to commence hostilties, without just provocation, against them, and to pursue schemes of conquest and extent of dominion, are measures repugnant to the wish, the honour, and the policy of this nation—the parliament of Great Britain should give some signal mark of its displeasure against those, (in whatever degree entrusted with the charge of the East India Company’s affairs,) who shall appear wilfully to gave adopted, or countenanced, a system tending to inspire a reasonable distrust of the moderation, justice and good faith of the British nation:—2. That Warren Hastings, Esq. Governor-General of Bengal, and William Hornby, Esq. President of the Council at Bombay, having in sundry instances acted in a manner repugnant to the honour and policy of this nation, and thereby brought great calamities on India, and enormous expenses on the East India Company, it is the duty of the Directors of the said Company, to pursue all legal and effectual means for the removal of the said Governor-General and PresidentBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. from their respective offices, and to recall them to Great Britain.” After Mr. Burke had remarked that the present task would better have become the author of these resolutions than himself, he vented his sarcasms on a zeal against Indian delinquency, which was put on, or put off, according as convenience suggested; exhibited a short history of the notice which parliament had taken of Indian affairs; and, in the next place, adduced the considerations which, at the present moment, appeared to call upon the House to Institute penal proceedings. It then remained for him, to present a view of the different courses, which, in such a case, it was competent for that assembly to pursue. In the first place, the House might effect a prosecution by the Attorney-General. But to this mode he had three very strong objections. First, the person who held that office appeared to be unfriendly to the prosecution; whatever depended upon his exertions was, therefore, and object of despair. Secondly, Mr. Burke regarded a jury as little qualified to decide upon matters of the description of those which would form the subject of the present judicial inquiry. Thirdly, he looked upon the Court of King’s Bench as a tribunal radically unfit to be trusted in questions of that large and elevated nature. The inveterate habit of looking, as in that court, at minute affairs, and that only in their most contracted relations, produced a narrowness on mind, which was almost invariably, at fault, when the extended relations of things or subjects of a comprehensive nature, were the objects to be investigated and judged.1 A bill of pains and penalties was a mode of penal inquiry which did not, BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.in his opinion, afford sufficient security for justice and fair dealing towards the party accused. The last mode of proceeding, to which the House might have recourse, was that of impeachment; and that was the mode, the adoption of which he intended to recommend. He should, however, propose a slight departure from the usual order of the steps. Instead or urging the House to vote immediately a bill of impeachment, to which succeeded a Committee by whom the articles were framed, he should move for papers, in the first instance; and then draw up the articles, with all the advantage in favor of justice, which deliberation and knowledge, in place of precipitation and ignorance, were calculated to yield. He concluded by a motion for one of the sets of papers which it was his object to obtain.

Mr. Dundas thought that the allusions to himself demanded a reply. He observed, that, at one time during the speech, he began to regard himself, not Mr. Hastings, as the criminal whom the Right Honourable Gentlemen meant to impeach : that he was obliged, however, to those who had any charge to prefer against him, when they appeared without disguise: that he wished to meet his accusers face to face: that he had never professed any intention to prosecute the late Governor-General of India: that the extermination of the Rohillas, the aggression upon the Mahrattas, and the misapplication of the revenue, were the points on which his condemnation rested: that he did move the resolutions which had been read; and entertained now the same sentiments which he then expressed: that the resolutions he had moved, went only to the point of recall: that though in several particulars he deemed the conduct of Mr. Hastings highly culpable; yet, as often as he examined it, which he had done very minutely, the possibility of annexing to it a criminal intention eluded his grasp;BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. that the Directors were often the cause of those proceedings to which the appearance of criminality was attached; that after India was glutted with their patronage, no fewer than thirty-six writers had been sent out, to load with expense the civil establishment, in one year; that year of purity, when the situation of the present accusers sufficiently indicated the shop, from which the commodity was supplied: that subsequently to the period at which he had moved the resolutions in question, Mr. Hastings had rendered important services; and merited the vote of thanks with which his employers had thought fit to reward him. Mr. Dundas concluded, by saying, that he had no objection to the motion, and that, but for the insinuations against himself, he should not have thought it necessary to speak.

The defence, however, of Mr. Dundas, is not less inconsistent than his conduct. His profession of a belief, that he himself was to be the object of the prosecution, was an affectation of wit, which proved not, thought Mr. Hastings were polluted, that Mr. Dundas was pure; or that in the accusation of the former it was not highly proper, even requisite, to hold up to view what was suspicious in the conduct of the latter. Whether he ever had the intention to prosecute Mr. Hastings, was known only to himself. But that he had pronounced accusations against Mr. Hastings, which were either unjust, or demanded a prosecution, all the world could judge. When he said that the resolutions which he had moved, and which had immediately been read, implied nothing more than recall, it proved only one of two things; either that he regarded public delinquency, in a very favourable light; or that this was one of those bold assertions, in the face of evidence, which men of certain BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.character are always ready to make. If Warren Hastings had really, as was affirmed by Mr. Dundas, and voted at his suggestion by the House of Commons, “in sundry instances tarnished the honour, and violated the policy of his country, brought great calamities on India, and enormous expenses to the East India Company,” had he merited nothing but recall? Lord Macartney was recalled; Sir John Macpherson was recalled; many others were recalled; against whom no delinquency was alleged. Recall was not considered as a punishment. And was nothing else due to such offences as those which Mr. Dundas laid to the charge of Mr. Hastings? But either the words of Mr. Dundas’s resolutions were very ill adapted to express his meaning, or they did imply much more than recall. Of the two resolutions which Mr. Burke had required to be read, the last recommended the measure of recall to the Court of Directors, whose prerogative it was; the first recommended something else, some signal mark of the displeasure of the parliament of Great Britain. What might this be? Surely not recall; which was not within the province of parliament. Surely not a mere advice to the Directors to recall, which seems to fall wonder fully short of a signal mark of its displeasure. But Mr. Dundas still retained the very sentiments respecting the conduct of Mr. Hastings which he had entertained when he described it as requiring “some signal mark of the displeasure of the British parliament;” yet, as often as often as he examined that conduct, the possibility of annexing to it a criminal intention eluded his grasp; nay, he regarded Mr. Hastings, as the proper object of the Company’s thanks; that is to say, in the opinion of Mr. Dundas, Mr. Hastings was at one and the same moment, the proper object of “some signal mark of the displeasure of the British parliament,” and of a vote of thanks at the East IndiaBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. House. The Court of Directors were the cause of Directors were the cause of the bad actions of Mr. Hastings. Why then did Mr. Dundas pronounce those violent censures of Mr. Hastings? And why did he profess that he now entertained the same sentiments which he then declared? He thought him culpable, forsooth, but not criminal; though he had described him as having “ violated the honour and policy of his country, brought great calamities upon India, and enormous expense on his employers;” so tenderly did Mr. Dundas think it proper to deal with public offences, which he himself described as of the deepest die! But he could not affix criminal intention to the misconduct of Mr. Hastings. It required much less ingenuity than that of Mr. Dundas, to make it appear that there is no such thing as criminal intention in the world. The man who works all day to earn a crown, and the man who robs him of it, as he goes home at night, act, each of them, with the very same intention; that of obtaining a certain portion of money. Mr. Dundas might have known, that criminal intention is by no means necessary to constitute the highest possible degree of public delinquency. Where is the criminal intention of the sentinel who falls asleep at his post? Where was the criminal intention of Admiral Bing, who suffered a capital punishment? The assassin of Henry the Fourth of France was doubtless actuated by the purest and most heroic intentions. yet who doubts that he was the proper object of penal exaction? Such are the inconsistencies of a speech, which yet appears to have passed as sterling, in the assembly to which it was addressed; and such is a sample of the speeches which have had so much influence in the government of this nation!

The year in which Mr. Fox had been minister was BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.accused of overloading the patronage of India; and Mr. Dundas hazarded a curious proposition, to which his experience yielded weight, that the circumstance of who was minister always indicated the shop, as he called it, from which Indian patronage was retailed. This called up Mr. Fox, who began by declaring that he spoke on account solely of the charge which had been levelled against himself. Surmise might be answered, he thought, by assertion; and, therefore, he solemnly declared, that he had never been the cause of sending out except one single writer to India, and that during the administration of Lord Shelburne. The consistency, however, of the Honorable Gentleman suggested strongly a few remarks, notwithstanding his boasted readiness to face his opponents. The power of facing, God knew, was not to be numbered among his wants; even when driven, as on the present occasion, to the miserable necessity of applauding, in the latter part of his speech, what he condemned in the former. His opinion of Mr. Hastings remained the same as when he arraigned him: Yet he thought him a fit object of thanks. He condemned the Rohilla war; the treaty of Poorunder; and the expense of his administration. Gracious heaven! Was that all? Was the shameful plunder of the Mogul Emperor, the shameful plunder of the Rajah of Benares, the shameful plunder of the Princesses of Oude, worthy of no moral abhorrence, of no legal visitation? Was the tender language now held by the Honourable Gentleman, respecting the author of those disgraceful transactions, in conformity either with the facts, or his former declarations?

Mr. Pitt rose in great warmth; to express, he said, some part of the indignation, with which his breast was filled, and which he trusted, no man of generous and honourable feelings could avoid sharing with him. Who had accused his Honourable Friend of guilt, inBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. now applauding the man whom he had formerly condemned? Who, but he, who, in the face of Europe, had united councils with the man whom for a series of years he had loaded with the most extravagant epithets of reproach, and threatened with the severest punishment! The height of the colouring, which that individual had bestowed upon the supposed inconsistency of his friend, might have led persons unacquainted with his character, to suppose that he possessed a heart really capable of feeling abhorrence at the meanness and baseness of those who shifted their sentiments with their interests. As to the charge of inconsistency against his Honourable Friend, was it not very possible for the conduct of any man to merit, at one time, condemnation, at another, applause? Yet it was true, that the practice of the accuser had instructed the world in the merit of looking to persons, not to principles! He then proceeded to extenuate the criminality of the Rohilla war. And concluded, by ascribing the highest praise to that portion of the administration of Hastings which had succeeded the date of the resolutions of Mr. Dundas.

On this speech, what first suggests itself is, that a great proportion of it is employed, not in proving that Mr. Dundas had not, but in proving that Mr. Fox had, been corruptly inconsistent. In what respect, however, did it clear the character of Mr. Dundas, to implicate that of the man who accused him? How great soever the baseness of Mr. Fox, that of Mr. Dundas might equal, and even surpass it. True, indeed, the conduct of a man, at one time bad, might, at another time, be the reverse. But would that be a good law which should exempt crimes from punishment, provided the perpetrators happened afterwards to perform acts of a useful description? A man might thus BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.get securely rich by theft and robbery, on the condition of making a beneficent use of the fruits of his crimes. “The former portion of the administration of Mr. Hastings was criminal; the latter, meritorious.” It suited the minister’s present purpose to say so. But they who study the history, will probably find, that of the praise which is due to the administration of Mr. Hastings, a greater portion belongs to the part which Mr. Pitt condemns, than to that which he applauds: To such a degree was either his judgment incorrect, or his language deceitful!

The production of the papers was not opposed, till a motion was made for those relating to the business of Oude during the latter years of Mr. Hastings’s administration. To this Mr. Pitt objected. He said, it would introduce new matter; and make the ground of the accusation wider than necessary: He wished to confine the judicial inquiry to the period embraced in the reports of the Committees of 1781. Mr. Dundas stood up for the same doctrine. If the object, however, was, to do justice between Mr. Hastings and the nation, it will be difficult to imagine a reason, why one, rather than another part of his administration should escape inquiry. Even the friends, however, of Mr. Hastings, urged the necessity of obtaining the Oude papers; and, therefore, they were granted.

A motion was made for papers relative to the Mahratta peace. It was opposed, as leading to the discovery of secrets. On ground like this, it was replied, the minister could never want a screen to any possible delinquency. A motion for the papers relative to the negotiations which Mr. Hastings had carried on at Delhi in the last months of his administration, was also made, and urged with great importunity. It was opposed on the same grounds,BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. and both were rejected.

During the debates on these motions, objections had begun to be started, on the mode of procedure which Mr. Burke had embraced. To call for papers relative to misconduct, and from the information which these might afford, to shape the charges by the guilt, was not, it was contended, a course which parliament ought to allow. The charges ought to be exhibited first; and no evidentiary matter ought to be granted, but such alone as could be shown to bear upon the charge. These objections, however, produced not any decisive result, till the 3d of April, when Mr. Burke proposed to call to the bar some of the gentlemen who had been ordered, as witnesses, to attend. On this occasion, the crown lawyers opposed in phalanx. Their speeches were long, but their arguments only two. Not to produce the charges in the first instance, and proof, strictly confined to those charges, was unfair, they alleged, to the party accused. To produce the charges first, and no proof but what strictly applied to the charges, was the mode of proceeding in the Courts of Law. Mr. Burke, and they who supported him, maintained, that this was an attempt to infringe the order of procedure already adopted by the House; which had granted evidence in pursuance of its own plan; had formed itself into a Committee for the express purpose of receiving evidence; and had summoned witnesses to be at that moment in attendance. They affirmed, that the mode of proceeding, by collecting evidence in the first instance, and thence educing the charges, was favorable to precision and accuracy; that the opposition, which it experienced, savored of a design to restrict evidence; and that the grand muster of the crown lawyers for such a purpose was loaded with suspicion. The House, however, BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.agreed with the lawyers; which is as much as to say, that such was the plan of the minister; and the accuser was obliged to invert the order of his steps. Some elucidation of the incident is strongly required.

To collect some knowledge of the facts of the supposed delinquency; to explore the sources of evidence; to seek to throw light upon the subject of accusation; to trace the media of proof from one link to another, often the only way in which it can be traced; and, when the subject is thus in some degree understood, to put the matter of delinquency into those propositions which are the best adapted to present it truly and effectually to the test of proof, is not, say the lawyers, the way to justice. Before you are allowed to collect one particle of knowledge respecting the facts of the delinquency; before you are allowed to explore a single source of evidence, or do any one thing which can throw light upon the subject, you must put the matter of delinquency, which you are allowed, as far as the lawyers can prevent you, to know nothing about, into propositions for the reception of proof. And having thus made up the subject, which you know nothing about, into a set of propositions, such as ignorance has enabled you to make them, you are to be restrained from adducing one particle of evidence to any thing but your first propositions, how much soever you may find, as light breaks in upon you, that there is of the matter of delinquency, which your propositions, made by compulsion under ignorance, do not embrace. And this is the method, found out and prescribed by the lawyers, for elucidating the field of delinquency, and ensuring the detection of crime!

To whom is the most complete and efficient production of evidence unfavorable? To the guilty individual. To whom is it favourable? To all who areBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. innocent, and to the community at large. Evidence, said the lawyers, shall not be produced, till after your charges, because it may be unfavorable to Mr. Hastings.

If they meant that partial evidence might operate unequitably on the public mind; the answer is immediate: Why allow it to be partial? Mr. Hastings knew the field of evidence far better than his accusers, and might call for what he required.

The lawyers were very merciful. It was a cruel thing to an innocent man, to have evidence of guilt exhibited against him; and every man should be presumed innocent, till proved guilty. From these premises there is only one legitimate inference; and that is, that evidence of guilt should never be exhibited against any man.

The rule of the lawyers for the making of propositions is truly their own. It is, to make them out of nothing. All other men, on all occasions, tell us to get knowledge first; and then to make propositions. Out of total ignorance how can any thing the result of knowledge be made?—No, say the lawyers; make your propositions, while in absolute ignorance; and, by help of that absolute ignorance, show, that even the evidence which you call for is evidence to the point. It is sufficiently clear, that when the man who endeavours to throw light upon delinquency is thus compelled to grope his way in the dark, a thousand chances are provided for delinquency to escape.

When a rule is established by lawyers, and furiously upheld; a rule pregnant with absurdity, and contrary to the ends of justice, but eminently conducive to the profit and power of lawyers, to what sort of motives does common sense guide us in BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.ascribing the evil? Delinquency produces law suits; law suits produce lawyers’ fees and lawyers’ power; whatever can multiply the law suits which arise out of delinquency, multiplies the occasions on which lawyers’ power and profit are gained. That a rule to draw up the accusatory propositions before inquiry, that is, without knowledge, and to adduce evidence to nothing but those propositions which ignorance drew, is a contrivance, skilfully adapted, to multiply the law suits to which delinquency gives birth, is too obvious to be capable of being denied.

And what is the species of production, which their rule of acting in the dark enables the lawyers themselves, in the guise of the writing of accusation or bill of indictment, to supply? A thing so strange, so extravagant, so barbarous, that it more resembles the freak of a mischievous imagination, playing a malignant frolic, than the sober contrivance of reason, even in its least instructed condition.

Not proceeding by knowledge, but conjecture, as often as the intention is really to include, not to avoid including, the offence, they are obliged to ascribe to the supposed delinquent, not one crime, but all manner of crimes, which bear any sort of resemblance to that of which they suppose him to have been really guilty; in order, that, in a multitude of guesses, they may have some chance to be right in one.

And this course they pretend to take, out of tenderness to the party accused. To save him from the pain of having evidence adduced to the one crime of which he is guilty, they solemnly charge him with the guilt of a great variety of crimes. Where innocence really exists, the production of evidence is evidence to innocence, and is the greatest favour which innocence, under suspicion, can receive.

The absurdities, with which, under this irrational mode of procedure, a bill of indictment is frequentlyBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. stuffed, far exceed the limits of ordinary belief. Not only are the grossest known falsehoods regularly and invariably asserted, and found by juries upon their oaths; but things contradictory of one another, and absolutely impossible in nature. Thus, when it is not known in which of two ways a man has been murdered, he is positively affirmed to have been murdered twice; first to have been murdered in one way; and after being murdered in that way, to be murdered again in another.

The truth, in the mean time is, that a system of preliminary operations, having it for their object to trace out and secure evidence for the purpose of the ultimate examination and decision, so far from being adverse to the ends of justice, would form a constituent part of every rational course of judicial procedure. By means of these preparatory operations, the judge would be enabled to come to the examination of the case, with all the circumstances before him on which his decision ought to be grounded, or which the nature of the case allowed to be produced. Without these preparatory operations, the judge is always liable to come to the examination with only a small part of the circumstances before him, and very seldom indeed can have the advantage of the whole. The very nature of crime, which as much as possible seeks concealment, implies, that the evidence of it must be traced. Some things are only indications of other indications. The last may alone be decisive evidence of guilt; but evidence, which would have remained undiscovered, had the inquirer not been allowed to trace it, by previously exploring the first. One man may be supposed to know something of the crime. When examined, he is found to know nothing of it himself, but points out another man, from BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.whom decisive evidence is obtained. If a preliminary procedure for the purpose of tracing evidence is allowed, the persons and things whose evidence is immediate to the fact in question, are produced to the judge; and the truth is ascertained. If the preliminary procedure is forbidden, the persons and things, whose evidence would go immediately to the facts in question, are often not produced to the judge; and in this and a thousand other ways, the means of ascertaining the truth, that is of satisfying justice, are disappointed of their end.

It thus appears, that a confederacy of crown lawyers and ministers, with a House of Commons at their beck, succeeded in depriving the prosecution of Mr. Hastings of an important and essential instrument of justice, of which not that cause only, but every cause ought to have the advantage; and that they succeeded on two untenable grounds; first, because the search for evidence was unfavourable to Mr. Hastings, which was as much as to say, that Mr. Hastings was guilty, not innocent; next, because it was contrary to the practice of the courts of law; as if the vices of the courts of law ought not only to be inviolate on their own ground, but never put to shame and disgrace by the contrast of virtues in any other place!1

Mr. Burke being thus compelled to produce the particulars of his accusation, before he was allowed by aid of evidence to acquaint himself with the matter of it, exhibited nine of his articles of charge on the fourth of April, and twelve more in the course of the following week. I conceive that in this place nothing more is required than to give indication of the principal topics. These were, the Rohilla war; the transactions respecting Benares and its Rajah; theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. measure by which Corah and Allahabad, and the tribute due for the province of Bengal, were taken from the Mogul; the transactions in Oude respecting the Begums, the English residents, and other affairs; those regarding the Mahratta war, and the peace by which it was concluded; the measures of internal administration, including the arrangements for the collection of the revenues and the administration of justice, the death of Nuncomar, and treatment of Mahomed Reza Khan; disobedience of the commands, and contempt for the authority, of the Directors; extravagant expense, for the purpose of creating dependants and enriching favourites; and the receipt of presents or bribes. An additional article was afterwards presented, on the 6th of May, which related to the treatment bestowed upon Fyzoolla Khan. I shall not account it necessary to follow the debates, to which the motions upon these several charges gave birth, in the House of Commons; both because they diffused little information on the subject, and because the facts have already been stated with such lights as, it is hoped, may suffice to form a proper judgment upon each.

Not only, on several preliminary questions, did the ministers zealously concur with the advocates of Mr. Hastings; but even when the great question of the Rohilla war, and the ruin of a whole people, came under discussion, Mr. Hastings had the decisive advantage of their support. Mr. Dundas himself, who had so recently enumerated the Rohilla war among the criminal transactions which called forth his condemnation, rose up in its defence;1 and the House BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.voted, by a majority of 119 to 67, that no impeachable matter was contained in the charge.

It was not without reason, that the friends of Mr. Hastings now triumphed in the prospect of victory. Every point had been carried in his favour: The minister had steadily and uniformly lent him the weight of his irresistible power: And the most formidable article in the bill of accusation, had been rejected as void of criminating force.

The motion on the charge respecting the extermination of the Rohillas was made on the first of June. That on the charge respecting the Rajah of Benares was made on the 13th of the same month. On that day, however, the sentiments of Mr. Pitt appeared to have undergone a revolution. The exceptions, indeed, which he took to the conduct of Mr. Hastings, were not very weighty. In his demands upon the Rajah, and the exercise of the arbitrary discretion entrusted to him, Mr. Hastings had exceeded the exigency. Upon this ground, after having joined in a sentence of impunity on the treatment of the Rohillas, the minister declared, that “upon the whole, the conduct of Mr. Hastings, in the transactions now before the House, had been so cruel, unjust, and oppressive, that it was impossible he, as a man of honour or honesty, or having any regard to faith or conscience, could any longer resist; and therefore he had fully satisfiedBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. his conscience, that Warren Hastings, in the case in question, had been guilty of such enormities and misdemeanours, as constituted a crime sufficient to call upon the justice of the House to impeach him.”

Some article of secret history is necessary to account for this sudden phenomenon.1 With the conduct of the minister, that too of the House of Commons underwent immediate revolution; the same majority, almost exactly, which had voted that there was not matter of impeachment in the ruin brought upon the Rohillas, voted that there was matter of impeachment in the ruin brought upon the Rajah Cheyte Sing. The friends of Mr. Hastings vented expressions of the highest indignation; and charged the minister with treachery; as if he had been previously pledged for their support.2

No further progress was made in the prosecution of Mr. Hastings during that session of the parliament. But the act of Mr. Pitt for the better government of India was already found in need of tinkering. Mr. Francis, early in the session, had moved for leave to bring in a bill for amending the existing law agreeably to the ideas which he had often expressed. BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.Upon this, however, the previous question was moved, and carried without a division.

In the course of the year 1786, no fewer than three bills for amending the late act, with regard to the government of India, were introduced by the ministers, and passed. The first29. had for its principal object to free the Governor-General from a dependance upon the majority of his council, by enabling him to act in opposition to their conclusions, after their opinions together with the reasons upon which they were founded had been heard and recorded. This idea had been first brought forward by Lord North, in the propositions which he offered as the foundation of a bill, immediately before the dissolution of his ministry. It appears to have been first suggested by Mr. Dundas; and the regulation was insisted upon by Lord Macartney, as indispensable to the existence of a good government in India. It was violently, indeed, opposed by Mr. Francis, Mr. Burke, and the party who were led by them, in their ideas on Indian subjects. The institution, however, bears upon it considerable marks of wisdom. The Council were converted into a party of assessors to the Governor-General, aiding him by their advice, and checking him by their presence. Individual responsibility and unity of purpose were thus united with multiplicity of ideas, and with the influence, not only of eyes, to which every secret was exposed, but of recorded reasons, in defiance of which, as often as the assessors were honest and wise, every pernicious measure would have to be taken, and by which it would be seen that it might afterwards be tried.

The same bill introduced another innovation, which was, to enable the offices of Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief, to be united in the same person. It was undoubtedly of great importance to render theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. military strictly dependant upon the civil power, and to preclude the unavoidable evils of two conflicting authorities. But very great inconveniences attended the measure of uniting in the same person the superintendance of the civil and military departments. In the first place, it raised to the greatest possible degree of concentrated strength the temptations to what the parliament and ministry pretended they had the greatest aversion; the multiplication of wars, and pursuit of conquest. In the next place, the sort of talents, habits, and character, best adapted for the office of civil governor, were not the sort of talents, habits, and character, best adapted for the military functions: nor were those which were best adapted for the military functions, best adapted for the calm and laborious details of the civil administration. And, to omit all other evils, the whole time and talents of the ablest man were not more than sufficient for the duties of either office. For the same man, therefore, it was impossible, not to neglect the one set of duties, in the same degree in which he paid attention to the other.

This bill was arraigned by those who generally opposed the minister, and on the 22d of March, when, in the language of parliament, it was committed, in other words, considered by the House, when the House calls itself a committee, Mr. Burke poured fourth against it one of his most eloquent harangues. It established a despotical power, he said, in India. This, it was pretended, was for giving energy and dispatch to the government. But the pretext was false. He desired to know, where that arbitrary government existed, of which dignity, energy, and dispatch, were the characteristics. To what had democracy, in all ages and countries, owed most of its BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786.triumphs, but to the openness, the publicity, and strength of its operation.”1

Mr. Dundas called upon his opponents to inform him, whether it was not possible for despotism to exist in the hands of many, as well as in the hands of one; and he observed, that if the power of the Governor-General would be increased, so would also his responsibility. The answer was just and victorious. It is a mere vulgar error, that despotism ceases to be despotism, by merely being shared. It is an error, too, of pernicious operation on the British constitution. Where men see that the powers of government are shared, they conclude that they are also limited, and already under sufficient restraint. Mr. Dundas affirmed, and affirmed truly, that the government of India was no more a despotism, when the despotism was lodged in the single hand of the Governor-General, than when shared between the Governor and the Council. What he affirmed of increasing the force, by increasing the concentration, of responsibility, is likewise so true, that a responsibility, shared, is seldom any responsibility at all. So little was there, in Burke’s oratory, of wisdom, if he knew no better, of simplicity and honesty, if he did.

The second of the East India acts of this year2 was an artifice. It repealed that part Mr. Pitt’s original act which made necessary the approbation of the King for the choice of a Governor-General. It reserved to the King the power of recall, in whichBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1786. the former was completely included.

The third of the acts of the same year1 had but one object of any importance; and that was, to repeal the part of Mr. Pitt’s original bill, which almost alone appears to have had any tendency to improve the government to which it referred: I mean the disclosure of the amount of the property which each individual, engaged in the government of India, realized in that country. This was too searching a test: And answered the purposes neither of ministers in England, nor of the Company’s servants in India.2

Nor was this all. There was also, during the course of this year, a fourth bill, granting relief to the East India Company; that sort of relief, for which they had so often occasion to apply, relief in the way of money. A petition from the Company was presented; and the subject was discussed in the House of Commons, on the 9th, and 26th of June. The BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787.act1 enabled them to raise money by the sale of a part, to wit, 1,207,559l. 15s. of the 4,200,000l., which they had lent to the public; and also, by adding 800,000l. in the way of subscription to their capital stock.

On the first day of the following session, which was the 23d of January, 1787, Mr. Burke announced, that he should proceed with the prosecution of Mr. Hastings, on the first day of the succeeding month. The business, during this session, was carried through its first and most interesting stage. The House of Commons reviewed the several articles of charge; impeached Mr. Hastings at the bar of the House of Peers; and delivered him to that judicatory for trial. Of the proceedings at this stage it is necessary for me to advert to only the more remarkable points.

On the 7th of February, the charge relating to the resumption of the jaghires or lands of the Princesses of Oude, the seizure of their treasure, and the connected offences, was exhibited by Mr. Sheridan in a speech which powerfully operated upon the sympathy of the hearers, and was celebrated as one of the highest efforts of English eloquence. On this subject Mr. Pitt took a distinction between the landed estates, and the treasures. For depriving the Begums of their estates, he could conceive that reasons might exist; although peculiar delicacy and forbearance were due on the part of the English, who were actually the guarantees to the Princesses for the secure possession of those estates. But the confiscation of their treasures, he thought an enormity, altogether indefensible and atrocious; and the guilt of that act was increased by stifling the order of the Court of Directors, which commanded the proceedings against the Princesses to be revised. The plunderBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787. of the chief of Furruckabad, a dependant, also, of the Nabob, whom the English were bound to protect, formed a part of the transactions to which the Governor-General became a party by the treaty of Chunar. It was made a separate article of charge. And, in the matter of that as well as the preceding article, it was voted by large majorities, that high crimes and misdemeanours were involved. Mr. Pitt observed, that the conduct of the Governor-General, in receiving a present of enormous value from the Nabob, at the time when he let him loose to prey upon so many victims, was not justified by the pretence of receiving it for the public service, in which no exigence existed to demand recurrence to such a resource: “it could be accounted for by nothing but corruption.”

In the course of these proceedings, Mr. Burke thought it necessary to call the attention of the House to the difficulties under which the prosecution laboured in regard to evidence. The late Governor-General, as often as he thought proper, had withheld, mutilated or garbled the correspondence which he was bound to transmit to the East India House. Nor was this all. Those whose duty it was to bring evidence of the charges were often ignorant of the titles of the papers for which it was necessary to call; and papers, however closely connected with the subject, were withheld, if not technically included under the title which was given. He himself, for example, had moved for the Furruckabad papers, and what he received under that title, he concluded, were the whole; but a motion had been afterwards made, by another member, for the Persian correspondence, which brought forth documents of the greatest importance. BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787.To another circumstance it befitted the House to advert. The attorney of the East India Company, in vindication of whose wrongs the prosecution was carried on, was (it was pretty remarkable) the attorney, likewise, of Mr. Hastings; and while the House were groping in the dark, and liable to miss what was of most importance, Mr. Hastings and his attorney, to whom the documents in the India House were known, might, on each occasion, by a fortunate document, defeat the imperfect evidence before the House, and laugh at the prosecution.

On the charge, that expence had been incurred by Mr. Hastings for making dependants and creating a corrupt influence, brought forward on the 15th of March, Mr. Pitt selected three particulars, as those alone which appeared to him, in respect to magnitude, and evidence of criminality, to demand the penal proceedings of parliament. These were, the contract for bullocks in 1779; the opium contract in 1780;1 and the extraordinary emoluments bestowed on Sir Eyre Coote. In the first there were not only, he said, reprehensible circumstances, but strong marks of corruption: while the latter transaction involved in it almost every species of criminality; a violation of the faith of the Company, a wanton abuse of power against a helpless ally, a misapplication of the publicBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787. property, and disobedience to his superiors, by a disgraceful and wicked evasion.

On the 2d of April, when the report of the Committee on he articles of charge was brought up, it was proposed by Mr. Pitt, that, instead of voting whether the House should proceed to impeachment, a preliminary step should be interposed, and that a committee should be formed to draw up articles of impeachment. His reason was, that on several of the particulars, contained in the articles of charge, he could not vote for the penal proceeding proposed, while he thought that on account of others it was clearly required. A committee might draw up articles of impeachment, which would remove his objections, without frustrating the object which all parties professed to have in view. After some little opposition, this suggestion was adopted. Among the names presented for the Committee was that of Mr. Francis. Objection to him was taken, on the score of a supposed enmity to the party accused; and he was rejected by a majority of 96 to 44.

On the 25th of the month, the articles of impeachment were brought up from the Committee by Mr. Burke. They were taken into consideration on the 9th of May. The formerly celebrated, then Alderman, Wilkes, was a warm friend of Mr. Hastings; and strenuously maintained that the prosecution was unjust. He said, what was the most remarkable thing in the debate, that it was the craving and avaricious policy of this country, which had, for the purpose of getting money to satisfy this inordinate appetite, betrayed Mr. Hastings into those of his measures for which a defence was the most difficult to be found. The remark had its foundation in truth; and it goes pretty far in extenuation of some of Mr. Hastings’s BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787.most exceptionable acts. The famous Alderman added, that a zeal for justice, which never recognizes any object that takes any thing from ourselves, is a manifest pretence. If Mr. Hastings had committed so much injustice, how disgraceful was it to be told, that not a single voice had yet been heard to cry for restitution and compensation to those who had suffered by his acts? The stain to which the reformed patriot thus pointed the finger of scorn, is an instance of that perversion of the moral sentiments to which nations by their selfishness are so commonly driven, and which it is therefore so useful to hold up to perpetual view. Among individuals, a man so corrupt could scarcely be formed as to cry out with vehemence against the cruelty of a plunder, perpetrated for his benefit, without a thought of restoring what by injustice he had obtained. There was in this debate another circumstance worthy of notice; that Mr. Pitt pronounced the strongest condemnation of those who endeavoured to set in balance the services of Mr. Hastings against the crimes, as if the merit of the one extinguished the demerit of the other. This was an attempt, he said, to compromise the justice of the country. Yet at a date no further distant than the preceding session, Mr. Pitt had joined with Mr. Dundas, when that practical statesman urged the merit of the latter part of Mr. Hastings’s administrations, as reason to justify himself for not following up by prosecution the condemnations which he had formerly pronounced.

The articles of impeachment, which were now brought up from the Committee, received the approbation of the House; a vote for impeaching Mr. Hastings was passed; the impeachment was carried by Mr. Burke to the bar of the Lords; Mr. Hastings was brought to that bar; admitted to bail; and allowed one month, and till the second day ofBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787. the following session of parliament, to prepare for his defence.

On the 24th of April, 1787, Sir Gilbert Elliot, whose intention had been delayed by other business which was before the House, gave notice of a day on which he intended to bring forward the subject of the impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey, but on account of the approaching termination of that session was induced to postpone it till the next.

On the 12th of December, after an introductory speech, Sir Gilbert exhibited his articles of charge. They related to five supposed offences, regarding, 1. The catastrophe of the Rajah Nuncomar; 2. The Patna cause; 3. The Cossijurah cause; 4. The office of Sudder Duannee Adaulut; 5. The affidavits at Lucknow. They were referred to a Committee of the whole house, and on the 4th of February, 1788, Sir Elijah Impey was heard in his defence. What he advanced was confined to the subject of the first charge, his concern in the death of Nuncomar. Further discussions took place, on the same subject, on the 7th and 8th. On the 11th and 26th of February, and on the 16th of April, witnesses were examined at the bar, and more or less of discussion accompanied. On the 28th of April, on the 7th and 9th of May, Sir Gilbert Elliot summed up and enforced the evidence on the first of the charges, and on the last of these days moved, “That the Committee, having considered the first article, and examined evidence thereupon, is of opinion, that there is ground of impeachment of high crimes and misdemeanours against Sir Elijah Impey, upon the matter of the said article.” After a debate of considerable length, the motion was negatived, by a majority of seventy-three to fifty-five. An attempt was made to BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787.proceed with the remaining articles on the 27th of May; but the business was closed, by a motion to postpone it for three months. In this affair, the lawyers, as was to be expected, supported the judge. The minister, Mr. Pitt, distinguished himself by the warmth with which he took up the defence of Sir Elijah from the beginning of the investigation, and by the asperity with which he now began to treat Mr. Francis.1

The operation of Mr. Pitt’s new law produced occasion for another legislative interference. In passing that law, two objects were very naturally pursued. To avoid the imputation of what was represented as the heinous guilt of Mr. Fox’s bill, it was necessary, that the principal part of the power should appear to remain in the hands of the Directors. For ministerial advantage, it was necessary, that it should in reality be all taken away.

Minds drenched with terror are easily deceived. Mr. Fox’s bill threatened the Directors with evils which to them, at any rate, were not imaginary. And with much art, and singular success, other men were generally made to believe, that it was fraught with mischief to the nation.

Mr. Pitt’s bill professed to differ from that of his rival, chiefly in this very point, that while the one destroyed the power of the Directors, the other left it almost entire. The double purpose of the minister was obtained, by leaving them the forms, while the substance was taken away. In the temper into which the mind of the nation had been artfully brought, the deception was easily passed. And vague and ambiguous language was the instrument. The terms, in which the functions of the Board of Control were described, implied, in their most obvious import, noBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787. great deduction from the former power of the Directors. They were susceptible of an interpretation which took away the whole.

In all arrangements between parties of which the one is to any considerable degree stronger than the other, all ambiguities in the terms are sooner or later forced into that interpretation which is most favourable to the strongest party, and least favourable to the weakest. The short-sighted Directors understood not this law of human nature; possibly saw not, in the terms of the statute, any meaning beyond what they desired to see; that which the authors of the terms appeared, at the time, to have as ardently at heart as themselves.

The Directors had not enjoyed their imaginary dignities long, when the Board of Control began operations which surprised them; and a struggle which they were little able to maintain, immediately ensued. The reader is already acquainted with the disputes which arose on the payment of the debts of the Nabob of Arcot; and on the appointment of a successor to Lord Macartney, as Governor of Fort St. George.

Lieutenant-Colonel Ross had been guilty of what the Directors considered an outrageous contempt of their authority. In July, 1785, they dictated a severe reprimand. The Board of Control altered the dispatch, by striking out the censure. The dignity of the Directors was now touched in a most sensible part. “The present occasion,” they said, “appeared to them so momentous, and a submission on their part so destructive of all order and subordination in India, that they must take the liberty of informing the Right Honourable Board that no dispatch can be sent to India which does not contain the final decision BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1787.of the Directors on Lieutenant-Colonel Ross.” The Board of Control, it is probable, deemed the occasion rather too delicate for the scandal of a struggle. It could well afford a compromise: and crowned its compliance, in this instance, with the following comprehensive declaration: “We trust, however, that by this acquiescence, it will not be understood that we mean to recognize any power in you to transmit to India either censure or approbation of the conduct of any servant, civil, or military, exclusive of the control of this Board:” that is to say, they were not to retain the slightest authority, in any other capacity than that of the blind and passive instruments of the superior power.

These cases are a few, out of a number, detached for the purpose of giving greater precision to the idea of the struggle which for a time the Court of Directors were incited to maintain with the Board of Control. At last an occasion arrived which carried affairs to a crisis. In 1787, the democratical party in Holland rose to the determination of throwing off the yoke of the aristocratical party. As usual, the English government interfered, and by the strong force of natural tendency, in favour of the aristocratical side. The French government, with equal zeal, espoused the cause of the opposite party; and a war was threatened between England and France. The Directors took the alarm; petitioned for an augmentation of military force; and four royal regiments, destined for that service, were immediately raised. Happily the peace with France was not interrupted. The Directors were of opinion that, now, the regiments were not required. The Board of Control, however, adhered to its original design. The expense of conveying the troops, and the expense of maintaining them in India, would be very great: The finances of the Company were in their usual state of extremeBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788. pressure and embarrassment: This addition to their burthens the Directors regarded as altogether gratuitous; and tending to nothing but the gradual transfer of all military authority in India from the Company to the minister: Their ground appeared to be strong: By an act which passed in 1781, they were exempted from the payment of any troops which were not sent to India upon their requisition: They resolved to make a stand, refusing to charge the Company with the expense of the ministerial regiments. The Board of Control maintained that, by the act of 1784, it received the power, upon the refusal of the Company to concur in any measure which it deemed expedient for the government of India, to order the expense of the measure to be defrayed out of the territorial revenues. The Directors, looking to the more obvious, and, at the time of its passing, the avowed meaning of the act, which professed to confirm, not to annihilate the “chartered rights of the Company,” denied the construction which was now imposed upon the words. They took the opinion of several eminent lawyers, who, looking at the same points with themselves, rather than the unlimited extent to which the terms of the act were capable of stretching, declared that the pretensions of the ministers were not authorized by law.

The question of the full, or limited, transfer of the government of India, was to be determined. The minister, therefore, resolved to carry it before a tribunal on whose decision he could depend. On the 25th of February, 1788, he moved the House of Commons for leave to bring in a bill. When the meaning of an act is doubtful, or imperfect, the usual remedy is a bill to explain and amend. Beside the confession of error which that remedy appears to BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788.imply, a confession not grateful to ministerial sensibility, something is understood to be altered by that proceeding in the matter of the law. Now, the extraordinary powers, to which the claim was at this time advanced, might, it was probable, be more easily allowed, if they were believed to be old powers, already granted, than new powers, on which deliberation, for the first time, was yet to be made. For this, or for some other reason, the ministers did not bring in a bill to explain and amend their former act, but a bill to declare its meaning. The business of a legislature is to make laws. To declare the meaning of the laws, is the business of a judicatory. What, in this case, the ministers therefore called upon the parliament to perform, was not an act of legislation, but an act of judicature. They called upon it successfully, of course, to supersede the courts of justice, and to usurp the decision of a question of law; to confound, in short, the two powers, of judicature and legislation.

In the speech, in which Mr. Pitt moved for leave to bring in the bill by means of which this act of judicature was to be performed, it was, he declared, incomprehensible to him, that respectable men of the law should have questioned that interpretation of the statute of 1784 for which he contended. “In his mind nothing could be more clear, than that there was no one step that could have been taken previous to passing the act of 1784 by the Court of Directors, touching the military and political concerns of India, and also the collection, management, and application of the revenues of the territorial possessions, that the Commissioners of the Board of Control had not now a right to take by virtue of the powers and authority vested in them by the act of 1784.”

If every power which had belonged to the Directors, might be exerted by the Board of Control, againstBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788. the consent of the Directors; but the Directors could not exercise the smallest political power, against the consent of the Board of Control, it is evident that all political power was taken away from the Directors. The present declaration of Mr. Pitt, with regard to the interpretation of his act, was, therefore, directly contradictory to his declarations in 1784, when he professed to leave the power of the Directors regulated, rather than impaired.

Mr. Dundas, the President of the Board of Control, spoke a language still more precise. “It was the meaning, he affirmed, of the act of 1784, that the Board of Control, if it chose, might apply the whole revenue of India to the purposes of its defence, without leaving to the Company a single rupee.”

The use to which the minister was, in this manner, about to convert the parliament, the opponents of the bill described as full of alarm. To convert the makers of law into the interpreters of law, was, itself, a circumstance in the highest degree suspicious; involved in it the destruction of all certainty of law, and by necessary consequence of all legal government. To convert into a judicature the British parliament, in which influence made the will of the minister the governing spring, was merely to erect an all-powerful tribunal, by which every iniquitous purpose of the minister might receive its fulfilment. The serpentine path, which the minister had thus opened, was admirably calculated for the introduction of every fraudulent measure, and the accomplishment of every detestable design. He finds an object with a fair complexion; lulls suspicion asleep by liberal professions; frames a law in terms so indefinite as to be capable of stretching to the point in view; watches his opportunity; and, when that arrives, calls upon BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788.an obedient parliament, to give his interpretation to their words. By this management, may be gained, with little noise or observation, such acquisitions of power, as, if openly and directly pursued, would at least produce a clamour and alarm.

When, however, the opponents of the bill contended that the act did not warrant the interpretation which the legislature was now called upon to affix; they assumed a weaker ground. They showed, indeed, that the act of 1784 was so contrived as to afford strong appearances of the restricted meaning from which the minister wished to be relieved; such appearances as produced general deception at the time;1 but it was impossible to show, that the terms of the act were not so indefinite, as to be capable of an interpretation which involved every power of the Indian government.

It was indeed true, that when a law admits of two interpretations, it is the maxim of Courts of Law, to adopt that interpretation which is most in favour of the party against whom the law is supposed to operate. In parliament, the certain maxim is, to adopt that interpretation which is most favourable to the minister.

The memory of the minister was well refreshed with descriptions of the dreadful effects which he said would flow from the powers transferred to the minister by the bill of Mr. Fox. As the same or still greater powers were transferred to the minister by his own, so they were held in a way more alarming and dangerous. Under the proposed act of Mr. Fox, theyBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788. would have been avowedly held. Under the act of Mr. Pitt, they were held in secret, and by fraud. Beside the difference, between powers exercised avowedly, and powers exercised under a cover and by fraud, there was one other difference between the bill of Mr. Fox and that of Mr. Pitt. The bill of Mr. Fox transferred the power of the Company to commissioners appointed by parliament. The bill of Mr. Pitt transferred them to commissioners appointed by the King. For Mr. Pitt to say that commissioners chosen by the parliament were not better than commissioners chosen by the King, was to say that parliament was so completely an instrument of bad government, that it was worse calculated to produce good results than the mere arbitrary will of a King. All those who asserted that the bill of Mr. Pitt was preferable to that of Mr. Fox, are convicted of holding, however they may disavow, that remarkable opinion.

The declaratory bill itself professed to leave the commercial powers of the Company entire. Here, too, profession was at variance with fact. The commercial funds of the Company were blended with the political. The power of appropriating the one, was the power of appropriating the whole. The military and political stores were purchased in England with the produce of the commercial sales. The Presidencies abroad had the power of drawing upon the domestic treasury to a vast amount. The bill, therefore, went to the confiscation of the whole of the Company’s property. It was a bill for taking the trading capital of a Company of merchants, and placing it at the disposal of the ministers of the crown.

Beside these objections to the general powers assumed by the bill, the particular measure in contemplation BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788.was severely arraigned. To send out to India troops, called the King’s when troops raised by the Company in India could be so much more cheaply maintained, was an act on which the mischievousness of all unnecessary expense stamped the marks of the greatest criminality. That criminality obtained a character of still deeper atrocity, when the end was considered, for which it was incurred. It was the increase of crown patronage, by the increase of that army which belonged to the crown. And what was the use of that patronage? To increase that dependance upon the crown which unites the members of the House of Commons, in a tacit confederacy for their own benefit, against all political improvement.

Another objection to the troops was drawn from what was called the doctrine of the constitution: that no troops should belong to the King, for which parliament did not annually vote the money.

Some of the Directors professed, that though the powers, darkly conveyed by the act of 1784, were not altogether concealed from them at the time; they had given their consent to the bill from the confidence they had in the good intentions of the ministry; whom they never believed to be capable of aiming at such extravagant powers as those which they now assumed.

This body of arguments was encountered by the minister, first, with the position that no interpretation of a law was to be admitted, which defeated its end. But what was the end of this law of his, was a question, from the solution of which he pretty completely abstained. If it was the good government of India; he did not attempt the difficult task of proving that to this end the powers for which he contended were in any degree conducive. If it was the increase of ministerial influence; of their conducivenessBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788. to this end, no proof was required.

To the charge that he had introduced his act, under professions of not adding to the influence of the Crown, nor materially diminishing the powers of the Company; professions which his present proceedings completely belied; he made answer by asserting, broadly and confidently, that it was the grand intention of the act of 1784 to transfer the government of India from the Court of Directors to the Board of Control; and that he had never held a language which admitted a different construction.

Mr. Dundas denied, what was asserted on the part of the Company, that for some time after the passing of the act, the Board of Control had admitted its want of title to the powers which now it assumed. The Company offered to produce proof of their assertion at the bar of the House. The ministers introduced a motion, and obtained a vote that they should not be allowed. No further proof of the Company’s assertion, according to the rules of practical logic, could be rationally required.

To show that the Board of Control had exercised the powers which it was thus proved that they had disclaimed, Mr. Dundas was precipitated into the production of facts, which were better evidence of other points than that to which he applied them. He made the following statement: That, in 1785, the resources of the Company were so completely exhausted, as to be hardly equal to payment of the arrears which were due to the army: That the troops were so exasperated by the length of those arrears, as to be ripe for mutiny: And that the Board of Control sent orders to apply the Company’s money to the satisfaction of the troops, postponing payments of every other description. In this appropriation, BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788.however, was it not true, that the Directors, though reluctantly, did at last acquiesce?

Mr. Dundas further contended, that without the powers in question, namely, the whole powers of government, the Board of Control would be a nugatory institution.

If the whole powers of government, however, were necessary for the Board of Control, what use was there for another governing body, without power? This was to have two governing bodies; the one real, the other only in show. Of this species of duplication the effect is, to lessen the chances for good government, increase the chances for bad; to weaken all the motives for application, honesty, and zeal in the body vested with power; and to furnish it with an ample screen, behind which its love of ease, power, lucre, vengeance, may be gratified more safely at the expense of its trust.

To crown the ministerial argument, Mr. Dundas advanced, that the powers which were lodged with the Board of Control, how great soever they might be, were lodged without danger, because the Board was responsible to parliament. To all those who regard the parliament as substantially governed by ministerial influence, responsibility to parliament means responsibility to the minister. The responsibility of the Board of Control to parliament, meant, according to this view of the matter, the responsibility of the ministry to itself. And all those, among whom the authors of the present bill and their followers were to be ranked as the most forward and loud, who denounced parliament as so corrupt, that it would have been sure to employ, according to the most wicked purposes of the minister, the powers transferred to it by the bill of Mr. Fox, must have regarded as solemn mockery, the talk, whether from their own lips, or those of other people, about theBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788. responsibility of ministers to parliament.

Meeting the objections to the sending of King’s troops, Mr. Pitt confessed his opinion, that the army in India ought all to be on one establishment; and should all belong to the King; nor did he scruple to declare, that it was in preparation for this reform that the troops were now about to be conveyed.

With regard to the doctrine, called constitutional, about the necessity of an annual vote of parliament for the maintenance of all troops kept on foot by the King, he remarked, that the bill of rights, and the mutiny act, the only positive laws upon the subject, were so vague and indefinite (which is very true) as to be almost nugatory; that one of the advantages attending the introduction of the present question would be, to excite attention and apply reform to that important but defective part of the constitutional law; and that he was ready to receive from any quarter the suggestion of checks upon any abuse to which the army, or the patronage of India, might appear to be exposed.

If any persons imagined, that this language, about the reform of the constitutional law, would lead to any measures for that desirable end; they were egregiously deceived. Besides, was it any reason, because the law which pretended to guard the people from the abuse of a military power was inadequate to its ends, that therefore a military force should now be created, more independant of parliament than any which, under that law, had as yet been allowed to exist? That any danger, however, peculiar to itself, arose from this army, it was, unless for the purpose of the moment, weak to pretend.

Notwithstanding the immense influence of the minister, so much suspicion was excited by the contrast BOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788.between his former professions, and the unlimited power at which he now appeared to be grasping, that the bill was carried through the first stages of its progress, by very small majorities. With a view to mitigate this alarm, Mr. Pitt proposed that certain clauses should be added; the first, to limit the number of troops, beyond which the orders of the Board of Control should not be obligatory on the East India Company; the second, to prevent the Board from increasing the salary attached to any office under the Company, except with the concurrence of Directors and Parliament; the third, to prevent the Board, except with the same concurrence, from ordering any gratuity for services performed; the fourth, to oblige the Directors annually to lay before parliament the account of the Company’s receipts and disbursements.

The annexation of these clauses opened a new source of argument against the bill. A declaratory bill, with enacting clauses, involved, it was said, an absurdity which resembled a contradiction in terms. It declared that an act had a certain meaning; but a meaning limited by enactments yet remaining to be made. It declared that a law without limiting clauses, and a law with them, was one and the same thing. By the bill before them, if passed, the House would declare that certain powers had been vested in the Board of Control, and yet not vested, without certain conditions, which had not had existence. Besides, if such conditions were now seen to be necessary to prevent the powers claimed under the act from producing the worst of consequences, what was to be thought of the legislature for granting such dangerous powers? It was asked, whether this was not so disgraceful to the wisdom of parliament, if it saw not the danger; so disgraceful to its virtue, if it saw it without providing the remedy, as to afford a proof, that no suchBOOK VI. Chap. 1. 1788. powers in 1784 were meant by the legislature to be conveyed?

A protest in the upper house, signed Portland, Carlisle, Devonshire, Portchester, Derby, Sandwich, Cholmondely, Powis, Cardiff, Craven, Bedford, Loughborough, Fitzwilliam, Scarborough, Buckinghamshire,—fifteen lords—exhibits, on the subject of the patronage, the following words: “The patronage of the Company—and this seems to be the most serious terror to the people of England—the Commissioners of Control enjoy in the worst mode, without that responsibility which is the natural security against malversation and abuse. They cannot immediately appoint; but they have that weight of recommendation and influence, which must ever inseparably attend on substantial power, and which, in the present case, has not any where been attempted to be denied.—Nor is this disposal of patronage without responsibility the only evil that characterizes the system. All the high powers and prerogatives with which the commissioners are vested, they may exercise invisibly—and thus, for a period at least, invade, perhaps, in a great measure finally baffle, all political responsibility; for they have a power of administering to their clerks and other officers an oath of secresy framed for the occasion by themselves; and they possess in the India House the suspicious instrument of a Secret Committee, bound to them by an oath.”

[1]For these facts, see the Third Report of the Select Committee formed in 1781; and Mr. Macpherson’s Letter to the Court of Directors, dated Calcutta, 30th of March, 1783, printed by order of the House of Commons, among the papers laid before them in 1787.

[2]Letter to Major Palmer, printed among extracts from papers in No. 2, vol. vii. presented to the House of Commons on the 13th of March, 1786.

[2]Copy of a letter to the Court of Directors, dated 10th August, 1786, printed by order of the House of Commons.—The Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1810, in their Third Report, p. 370, say, “The effects of the war which ended in the year 1783 were particularly prejudicial to the financial system of India. The revenues had been absorbed, the pay and allowances of both the civil and military branches of the service were greatly in arrear; the credit of the Company was extremely depressed: and, added to all, the whole system had fallen into such irregularity and confusion, that the real state of affairs could not be ascertained till the conclusion of the year 1785–6.” Such is the state, in which India was left, by the administration of Mr. Hastings.

[1]In all 112,950l. of which 22,800l. was in salary to Major Palmer alone. The expense of the residency, under Mr. Bristow, which Mr. Hastings had represented as frightfully enormous, amounted to 64,202l. See Burke’s Charges, No. 16, sect. 89.

[2]See the letter to Major Palmer, quoted in the preceding page.

[1]Letter from Major Brown to Mr. Hastings, dated at Delhi, 30th December, 1783.

[2]The papers on this subject were refused by ministry, or rather by the House of Commons, under the guidance of the minister. See the Debates in Parliament, under date March 7th and 18th, 1786.

[1]The insinuations of Mr. Burke that the negotiation of the Governor-General with the Mogul covered an insidious design to betray him into the hands of Scindia, receives its greatest confirmation from what Mr. Pitt was brought to say in the House of Commons, on the 18th of March, 1786, in the debate on the production of Delhi papers. “If he were inclined to lay open secrets which the interests of the country required should be concealed, he!could easily prove, he said, “that the junction of the Mogul with the Mabratta powers was of the highest advantage to the Company,” Tow other objects, which were always found an efficient source of terror, a terror is always, in such hands, a most convenient instrument of persuasion, were, on this occasion, brought forward by the minister. These were, Tippoo Saib, and the French. These two, he said, were, at that time, plotting against the Company; and Tippoo was making efforts, by holding out dazzling projects to the Mogul, to realize the great advantage of the imperial authority and name. “In order to counteract this,” said Mr. Pitt, “it became necessary for the servants of the Company to exert them-selves to the utmost to ingratiate themselves with the Court of Delhi, and by that means secure to their employers that great body of strength and influence which would naturally result from the countenance of the Shah.” Ibid. It was “a body of strength and influence” on which Mr. Hastings, set a high value, in his instructions for the negotiation with Scindia!

[1]Extracts from Papers in No. 2, vol. vii. ut supra.

[1]Mr. Hastings’s Answer to the Nineteenth, Eighteenth, and Seventeenth articles of Charge.

[1]Letter from the agent in Outde, dated Lucknow, 1st April, 1785; Extracts from Papers, ut supra.

[1]“Made up,” means augmented by the addition interest due.

[1]Beside the Parliamentary Papers, these documents are found in the Appendix to Burke’s speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s Debts.

[1]How wretched his foresight, if he really was sincere in this opinion, and how little he was capable of calculating the effects of his own measures, soon appeared by the event. “The actual loss,” says Mr. Hume, “by this proceeding of the Board of Control is not limited to the large sum which has been paid: for the knowledge of the fact, that Mr. Dundas had in that manner admitted, without any kind of inquiry, the whole claims of the consolidated debt of 1777, served as a strong inducement to others, to get from the Nabob obligations or bonds of any description, in hopes that some future good-natured President of the board of Control would do the same for them. We accordingly find that an enormous debt of near thirty millions sterling was very soon formed after that act of Mr. Dundas, and urgent applications were soon again made to have the claims paid in the same manner.” Speech of Joseph Hume, Esq. at a general Court of Proprietors at the East India House, on the 9th of June, 1814, p. 23.

[1]Mr. Hume applied to the Directors in 1814, for information relative to the money which had been paid by the Company, under this decision of the Board of Control; also for a copy of the instructions which the Directors proposed to send out to the Presidency for separating the true from the fraudulent debts, and which instructions the Board of Control superseded. In both instances the application was unsuccessful; and Mr. Hume, from the best information be could obtain, places the amount at nearly 5,000,000l. “These claims,” he says, “for what was called the consolidated debt of 1777, ’of which the Directors had never heard until 1776, and had never been able to obtain any satisfactory information,’ amounted, with high interest made up to the end of 1784, to the sum of 54,98,500 pagodas, or 2,199,400l.: And, agreeably to the orders of the Board of Control sent out at that and subsequent periods, the total had been paid in 1804, with nearly twenty years’ interest amounting in the whole to near five millions sterling.” Speech, at supra, p. 22.

[1]Second Report of Select Committee, 1781.

[1]See Tenth Report of Commissioners, the last which has yet come to my hand, p. 469. Mr. Hume says, “The claims which formed the consolidated debt of 1777, amounting to 2,199,400l. were considered equally objectionable in 1774, as these new claims in 1806; and if Mr. Dundas had permitted a proper inquiry to be instituted in 1785, as the act of 24 Geo. III. duected, there is every reason to conclude that a much larger proportion of the old than the new debt would have been rejected….We are fully warranted in drawing the above conclusion, as the court of Directors, and all the Governors in India, had invariably declared these clams of 1777 to be shameful, and such as could not bear the light. And, in 1781, the claimants had so had an opinion of their right to the whole, that they made a voluntary offer to the government in Bengal to take off one fourth from the amount of their claims, and to agree to any kind of settlement, without interest, if the Company would but sanction their title to the remainder. There is also very little doubt, I think, but that the debt of 1767, and also the cavalry debt, if properly examined, would have turned out very objectionable. And it was the duty of Mr. Dundas to have ordered the necessary inquiry into the justice of the whole, agreeably to Mr. Pitt’s bill, which made no distinction in the debts of 1767 and 1777.” Speech, at supra, p. 24, 25.

[1]Letter from Lord Macartney to the Committee of Secrecy of the Court of Directors, dated Calcutta, 27th July, 1785. How much Lord Macartney and his Council agreed with Mr. Burke, respecting the springs which in all these transaction moved the machinery, still further appears from the following words: “The Ameer al Omrah and Mr. Benfield were well known to each other: Mutual esteem did not appear to attract them to each other; but as soon as the objects of their antipathies were the same, they united at once. In this partnership, Mr. Benfield has brought his knowledge of ministers, his interest in parliament, to the former experience of his successful intrigues upon the spot.” Copy of Letter from the government of Fort St. George to the of Bengal, dated 28th May, 1783.

[1]“I considered the assignment as the rock of your strength in the Carnatic, and therefore had guarded it with vigilance against the assaults of the durbar and the menaces of Bengal. It had contributed largely to your support through the war, and might have secured the stability of your commerce and dominion on the coast. DIIS ALITER VISUM EST! I had long since expressed my hope of not being made a witness or an accessary to a premature surrender of it; and indeed no man could be less properly qualified on such an occasion than myself, being personally disagreeable to the Durbar, and from my knowledge of their duplicity, disaffection, and politics, totally unqualified for any negotiation that required the slightest degree of confidence to be reposed in them.” Letter to the Secret Committee, 27th July, 1785.

[1]Letter to the Secret Committee, 27th July, 1785.

[2]Barrow’s Life of Lord Macartney, i. 282.

[3]The conduct of Lord Macartney in this business is displayed in a series of official documents, entitled “Papers relating to the affairs of the Carnatic,” vol. ii. printed by order of the House of Commons in 1803.

[1]Letter of Lord Melville, in Barrow’s Macartney, i,330.

[1]“The magnitude of the trial would overwhelm,” he said, “the varying multitude of lesser causes, of meum and tuum, assault and battery, conversion and trover, trespass and burglary,” &c.

[1]For a profound elucidation of what he calls Investigatorial Procedure, see Mr. Bentham’s treatise, entitled Scotch Reform.

[1]The following are the words of the eight of the resolutions, which he moved in 1781, “That too strong a confirmation cannot be given to the sentiments and resolutions of the Court of Directors and the Court of Proprietors, in condemnation of the Rohillawar:—That the conduct of the President and Select Committee of Bengal appears, in almost every stage of it, to have been biased by an interested partiality to the Vizir, to transgress their own, as well as the Company’s positive and repeated regulations and orders:—That the extermination of the Rohills was not necessary, for the recovery of forty lacs of rupees:—And that, if it was expedient to make their country a barrier against the Mahrattas, there is reason to believe, that this might have been effected by as easy, and by a less iniquitous, interference of the government of Bengal; which would, at the same time, have preserved the dominion to the rightful owners, and exhibited an attentive example of justice, as well as policy, to all India.”

[1]The cause is variously conjectured; some turn in the cabinet; or in the sentiments of the King, whose zeal for Mr. Hastings was the object of common fame; an increasing dread of unpopularity, from the progress of indignation in the public mind.

[2]The contemporary historian says, “The conduct of the minister on this occasion drew upon him much indecent calumny from the friends of Mr. Hastings. They did not hesitate to accuse him, out of doors, both publicly and privately, of treachery. They declared it was in the full confidence of his protection and support, that they had urged on Mr. Burke to bring forward his charges: And, that the gentleman accused had been persuaded to come to their bar, with an hasty and premature defence. And they did not scruple to attribute this conduct in the minister to motives of the basest jealousy.” Annual Register for the year 1786, ch. vii.

[29.]26 Geo. III. c. 16.

[1]Cobbetts Parl. Hist. xxv. 1276. In the same speech Mr. Burke said, “What he, from the experience derived from many years’ attention, would recommend as a means of recovering India, and reforming all its abuses, was a combination of these three things—a government by law—trial by jury—and publicity in every executive and judicial concern.” Ibid. Of these three grand instruments of good government, what he meant is not very clear as to any but the last; of which the importance is, undoubtedly, great beyond expression.

[2]26 Geo. III. c. 25.

[1]26 Geo. III. c. 57.

[2]The following is a curious testimony to the importance of the clause which was now repealed. Major Scott, the famous agent of Mr. Hastings, in the debate of the 7th of February, 1788, on the impeachment of Sir E. Impey, counteracting the panegyrics which had been pronounced on Mr. Francis, said, “Before I join in applauding the integrity of the Hon. Gent., I require it to be proved by the only possible way in which his integrity can possibly be proved. Let him come fairly, boldly, and honestly forward, as Lord Macartney has done; let him state that he left England in debt, that he was six years in India, that his expenses at home and abroad were so much, and his fortune barely the difference between the amount of his expences and the amount of his salary. When the Hon. Gent. shall have done this, I will join the committee of impeachment with cheerfulness, in pronouncing Mr. Francis to be one of the honestest men that ever came from Bengal. But until he shall submit to this only true test of his integrity, I shall pay no attention to the animated panegyrics of his friends.” Cobbett’s Parl. Hist. xxvi. 1425. I wish I could have availed myself of this testimony, without repeating the surmise of a man who would not have confined himself to surmise against Mr. Francis, had he had any thing stronger to produce.

[1]26 Geo. III. c. 62.

[1]There were several pecuniary transactions with individuals, such as a contract for supplying the army with bullocks, a contract for feeding elephants, an agency for the supply of corn, a contract for the Company’s opium, which were laid hold of by the accusers of Mr. Hastings, as either not having been performed agreeably to the rules and orders of the service, or in some way implying corruption on the part of the Governor-General, and thence included among the subjects of criminal charge. As the indications of criminality in these transactions appeared to me to fall short of proof; and as they were matters of that degree of detail, to which the limits of history do not allow it to descend, no account of them is included in the narrative of Mr. Hastings’s Indian Administration.

[1]See Parliamentary Hist, ad dies.

[1]Mr. Baring said, that “when the bill of 1784 was in agitation, it had not been intimated to the Directors, that the bill gave any such power to the Commissioners of Control, as was now contended for: If they had so understood it, they would not have given their support to a bill, that tended to annihilate the Company, and deprive them of all their rights and powers.” Parl. Hist. xxvii. 67.