Edmund Burke on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, 15-19 February 1788

My LORDS,

THE gentlemen who have it in command to support the impeachment against Mr. Hastings, late Governor-General of Bengal, have directed me to open a general view of the grounds upon which the Commons have proceeded in their charge against him; to open a general view of the extent, the magnitude, the nature, the tendency, and effect of the crimes with which they have charged him; and they have also directed me to give such an explanation, as, with their aid, I may be enabled to give, of such circumstances, preceding or concomitant with the crimes with which they charge him, as may tend to explain whatever may be found obscure in the charges as they stand. And they have further commanded me, and enabled me, I hope and trust, to give to your lordships such an explanation of anything in the laws, customs, opinions and manners, of the people concerned, and who are the objects of the crimes with which they charge him, as may tend to remove all doubt and ambiguity from the minds of your lordships upon these subjects. The several articles as they appear before you, will be opened by the other gentlemen with more distinctness, and without doubt with infinitely more particularity, when they come to apply the evidence that they adduce to each charge. This is the plan, my lords, that we mean to pursue on the great charge which is now before your lordships.

My lords, I confess that in this business I come before your lordships with a considerable degree of animation, because I think it is a most auspicious circumstance in a prosecution like this, in which the honour of this kingdom and that of many nations is involved, that from the commencement of our preliminary process to the hour of this solemn trial, not the smallest difference of opinion has arisen between the two houses. My lords, there were persons who, looking rather upon what was to be found in the journals of parliament than what was to be expected from the public justice of parliament, had formed hopes consolatory to them and unfavourable to us. There were persons who entertained hopes that the corruptions of India should have escaped amongst the dissensions of parliament: but they are disappointed. They will be disappointed in all the rest of their expectations which they had formed upon everything except the merits of the cause. The Commons will not have the melancholy and unsocial glory of having acted a right part in an imperfect work. What the greatest inquest of the nation has begun, its highest tribunal will accomplish. Justice will be done to India. It is true your lordships will have your full share in this great and glorious work; but we shall always consider that any honour that is divided with your lordships will be more than doubled to ourselves.

My lords, I must confess that, amongst all these encouraging prospects, the Commons do not approach your lordships' bar without some considerable degree of anxiety. I hope and trust that the magnitude of the interests which we have in hand will reconcile some degree of solicitude for the event with the undoubting confidence with which we repose ourselves upon your lordships' justice. For we are so made, my lords, that it is not only the greatness of the danger but the value of the stake that excites our concern in every undertaking; and I do assure your lordships--for I am authorized to say it--that no standard is sufficient to estimate the value which the Commons set upon the fate of the case which they now bring before you. For, my lords, it cannot be conceived--God forbid that it should be conceived--that the business of this day is the business of this man. The question is, not solely whether the prisoner at the bar be found innocent or be found guilty, but whether millions of mankind shall be miserable or happy. You do not decide the case only; you fix a rule. For your lordships will undoubtedly see, in the course of this cause, that there is not only a long, connected, systematic, course of misdemeanours, but an equally connected system of maxims and principles invented to justify them, upon which your lordships must judge. It is according to the judgement that you shall pronounce upon the past transactions of India, connected with those principles, that the whole rule, tenure, tendency and character, of our future government in India is to be finally decided. My lords, it will take its course and work its whole impression from the business of this hour. My lords, it is not only the interest of a great empire which is concerned, which is now a most considerable part of the British Empire, but, my lords, the credit and honour of the British nation will themselves be decided by this decision. My lords, they will stand or fall thereby. We are to decide by the case of this gentlemen whether the crimes of individuals are to be turned into public guilt and national ignominy, or whether this nation will convert these offences, which have thrown a transient shade on its glory, into a judgement that will reflect a permanent lustre on the honour, justice and humanity, of this kingdom. . . .

My lords, in the next place I observe, with respect to the crime which we chose, we chose one which we contemplated in its nature, with all its circumstances, with all its extenuations, and with all its aggravations; and, on that review, we are bold to say that the crimes with which we charge the prisoner at the bar are substantial crimes; that they are no errors or mistakes, such as wise and good men might possibly fall into. They are crimes, my lords--truly, and properly, and emphatically, crimes. The Commons are too liberal not to allow for the difficulties of a great and arduous public situation. They know too well that domineering necessities will frequently occur in all great affairs. They know that the exigencies of a great occasion, in its precipitate career, do not give time to have recourse to fixed principles, but that they oblige men frequently to decide in a manner that calmer reason would certainly have rejected. We know that, as we are to be served by men, the persons who serve us must be tried as men, and that there is a very large allowance indeed due to human infirmity and human error. This, my lords, we knew and had weighed before we came to your lordships' bar. But the crimes which we charge in these articles are not the lapses and defects and errors of common human nature and frailty, such as we know and feel, and can allow for. They are crimes which have their rise in the wicked dispositions of men; they are crimes that have their rise in avarice, rapacity, pride, cruelty, ferocity, malignity of temper, haughtiness, insolence; in short, my lords, in everything that manifests a heart blackened to the very blackest--a heart dyed deep in blackness--a heart corrupted, vitiated and gangrened, to the very core. If we do not plant the crimes that we charge [him with in] those vices which the breast of man is made to abhor and its laws to protect against, we desire no longer to be heard on this occasion. Let every- thing be pleaded that can be pleaded on the score of error and infirmity; we give up the whole. We stand on crimes that were crimes of deliberation. We charge him with nothing that he did not commit upon deliberation, that he did not commit against remonstrance. We charge him with nothing that he did not commit against command. We charge him with nothing that he did not commit contrary to the advice, contrary to the admonition and reprimand, of those who were authorized by the laws to reprove and reprimand him. They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice which you are assembled here to assert; which forms are made to support and not to supersede in any instance whatever. They were, not in formal and technical language, but in real and absolute effect, high crimes and misdemeanours. So far as to the crimes. Now as to the criminal. We have not chosen to bring before you a poor, puny, trembling delinquent, misled perhaps by the example of those who ought to have kept him in awe, and afterwards oppressed by their power, in order to make his punishment the means of screening the greater offences of those that were above him. We have not brought before your lordships one of those poor, obscure offenders, in an inferior situation, who, when his insignificance and weakness are weighed against the power of the prosecution, gives even to public justice something of the appearance of oppression. No, my lords; we have brought before your lordships the first man in rank, authority and station. We have brought before you the head, the chief, the captain-general in iniquity--one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all, the tyranny, in India are embodied, disciplined and arrayed. This is the person, my lords, that we bring before you. Then, if we have brought before you such a person, if you strike at him, you will not have need of a great many more examples; you strike at the whole corps if you strike at the head. . . .

I am now, my lords, to proceed to open the charge. I hope and trust that your lordships will be so good as to suppose that the business which falls to my share, which is rather explanation of the circumstances than enforcement of the crimes is not a thing that occurs every day in the ordinary round of municipal affairs; that it has relation to many things, that it touches many points in many places, which are wholly removed from the ordinary beaten orbit of our English business. In other affairs every allusion immediately meets its point of reference; nothing can be started that does not immediately waken your attention to something of your own laws which you meet with every day in the ordinary transactions of life: but here you are caught as it were into another world; here you are to have the way pioneered before you. Your lordships will see the absolute necessity there is of having an explanation of every part of it. As it is new, the business must be explained; as it is intricate as well as new, that explanation can be but comparatively short: and therefore, knowing you to be possessed, along with all other judicial virtues, of the first and foundation of them all, judicial patience, I hope and trust that your lordships will not grudge a few hours to the explanation of that which has cost the Commons fourteen years' assiduous application to acquire--that your lordships will not disdain a few hours to what has cost the people of India upwards of thirty years of their innate, inveterate, hereditary patience to endure.
My lords, the powers which Mr. Hastings is charged with having abused are the powers delegated to him by the East India Company. The East India Company itself acts under two sorts of powers, derived from two sources. The first source of its power is under a charter which the Crown was authorized by act of parliament to grant. The next is from several grants and charters indeed, as well as that great fundamental charter which it derived from the Emperor of the Moguls, the person with whose dominions they are chiefly conversant; particularly the great charter by which they acquired the high stewardship of the kingdoms of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, in 1765. Under those two charters they act. As to the first, it is from that charter that they derive the capacity by which they can be considered as a public body at all, or capable of any public function; it is from thence they acquire the capacity to take any other charter, to acquire any other offices, or to hold any other possessions. This being the root and origin of their power, it makes them responsible to the party from whom that power is derived. As they have emanated from the supreme power of this kingdom, they them- selves are responsible-their body as a corporate body, themselves as individuals-and the whole body and train of their servants are responsible, to the high justice of this kingdom. In delegating great power to the India Company, this kingdom has not released its sovereignty. On the contrary, its responsibility is increased by the greatness and sacredness of the power given. For this power they are and must be responsible; and I hope this day your lordships will show that this nation never did give a power without imposing a proportionable degree of responsibility.

As to the other power, which they derived from the Mogul empire by various charters from that crown, and particularly by the charter of 1765, by which they obtained the office of lord high steward, as I said, or diwan, of the kingdoms of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, by that charter they bound themselves, and bound exclusively all their servants, to perform all the duties belonging to that new office. And by the ties belonging to that new relation they were bound to observe the laws, rights, usages and customs, of the natives, and to pursue their benefit in all things; which was the nature, institution, and purpose, of the office which they received. If the power of the sovereign from whom they derived these powers should be by any misfortune in human affairs annihilated or suspended, the duty of the people below, which they acquired under his charter, is not suspended, is not annihilated, but remains in all its force ; and, for the responsibility, they are thrown back upon that country from whence their original power, and along with it their responsibility, both emanated in one and the same act. For when the Company acquired that office in India, an English corporation became an integral part of the Mogul empire. When Great Britain assented to that grant virtually, and afterwards took advantage of it, Great Britain made a virtual act of union with that country, by which they bound themselves as securities for their subjects, to preserve the people in all rights, laws and liberties, which their natural original sovereign was bound to enforce, if he had been in a condition to enforce it. So that the two duties flowing from two different sources are now united in one, and come to have justice called for them at the bar of this House, before the supreme royal justice of this kingdom, from whence originally their powers were derived.

It may be a little necessary, when we are stating the powers they have derived from their charter, and which we state Mr. Hastings to have abused, to state, in as short and as comprehensive words as I can (f or the matter is large indeed) what the constitution of the Company is, and particularly what its constitution is in reference to its Indian service; where the great theatre of the abuse was situated, and where those abuses were committed.
Your lordships will recollect that the East India Company--and therefore I shall spare you a long history of that, hoping and trusting that your lordships will think it is not to inform you, but to revive circumstances in your memory, that I enter into this detail--the East India Company had its origin about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, a period when all sorts of companies, inventions, and monopolies, were in fashion. And at that time the Company was sent out with large, extensive powers for increasing the commerce and the honour of this country: for to increase its commerce without increasing its honour and reputation would have been thought at that time, and will be thought now, a bad bargain for the country. But their powers were under that charter confined merely to commercial affairs. By degrees, as the theatre of the operation was distant, as its intercourse was with many great, some barbarous, and all of them armed nations, where not only the sovereign but the subjects were also armed in all places, it was found necessary to enlarge their powers. The first power they obtained was a power of naval discipline in their ships--a power which has been since dropped. The next was a power of law martial. The next was a power of civil, and to a degree of criminal, jurisdiction within their own factory, within their own settlements, over their own people and their own servants. The next was--and there was a stretch indeed--the power of peace and war; those great, high prerogatives of sovereignty which never were known before to be parted with to any subjects. But those high sovereign powers were given to the East India Company. So that when it had acquired them all, which it did about the end of the reign of Charles the Second, the East India Company did not seem to be merely a company formed for the extension of the British commerce, but in reality a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East. In that light the Company began undoubtedly to be considered, and ought to be considered, as a subordinate sovereign power; that is, sovereign with regard to the objects which it touched, subordinate with regard to the power from whence this great trust was derived.

When the East India Company once appeared in that light, things happened to it totally different from what has happened in all other ordinary affairs, and from what has happened in all the remote mysteries of politicians, or been dreamed of in the world. For, in all other countries, a political body that acts as a commonwealth is first settled, and trade follows as a necessary consequence of the protection obtained by political power. But here the affair was reversed: the constitution of the Company began in commerce and ended in empire; and where powers of peace and war are given, it wants but time and circumstance to make this supersede every other, and the affairs of commerce fall into their proper rank and situation. And accordingly it did happen that, the possession and power of assertion of these great authorities coinciding with the improved state of Europe, with the improved state of arts and the improved state of laws, and (what is much more material) the improved state of military discipline; that coinciding with the general fall of Asia, with the relaxation and dissolution of its government, with the fall of its warlike spirit, and the total disuse almost of all parts of military discipline; those coinciding, the India Company became what it is, a great empire carrying on subordinately under the public authority a great commerce; it became that thing which was supposed by the Roman law so unsuitable-the same power was a trader, the same power was a lord.

In this situation, the India Company, however, still preserved traces of its original mercantile character, and the whole exterior order of its service is still carried on upon a mercantile plan and mercantile principles: in fact, it is a state in the disguise of a merchant, a great public office in the disguise of a counting-house. Accordingly the whole order and series, as I observed, is commercial: while the principal, inward, real part of the Company is entirely political. Accordingly the Company's service--of which the order and discipline is necessary to be explained to your lordships, that you may see in what manner the abuses have affected it--is commercial.
In the first place, all the persons who go abroad in the Company's service enter as clerks in the counting-house, and are called by a name to correspond to it--writers. In that condition they are obliged to serve five years. The next step is that of a factor, in which they are obliged to serve three years. The next step they take is that of a junior merchant, in which they are obliged to serve three years more. Then they become a senior merchant, which is the highest stage of advance in the Company's service, as a rank by which they had pretensions, before the year 1774, to the Council to the succession of the Presidency, and whatever other honours the Company has to bestow. Therefore the Company followed this idea in the particulars of their service; having originally established factories in certain places, which factories by degrees grew to the name of Presidencies and Councils, in proportion as the power and influence of the Company increased, and as the political began to dominate over the mercantile. And so it continued till the year 1773, when the legislature broke in, for proper reasons urging them to it, upon that order of the service, and appointed to the superior part persons who were not entitled to it-however some might have been--by the course and order of service, such as Mr. Hastings was. But, whatever title they had from thence, their legal title was derived from an express act of parliament, nominating them to that Presidency. In all other respects, the whole course of the service denominated by act of parliament does remain upon that footing--that is, a commercial footing.

Your lordships see here a regular system, a regular order, a regular course of gradation, which requires eleven years before persons can arrive at the highest trusts and situations in the Company's service. You will therefore be utterly astonished when you know that, after so long a service and so long a probation was required, things very different have happened, and that in a much shorter time persons have been seen returning to this kingdom with great and affluent fortunes. It will be necessary for you to consider, and it will be a great part of your inquiry, when we come before you to substantiate evidence against Mr. Hastings, to know how that order came to be broken down completely, so that scarce a trace of it for any good purpose remains. For, though I will not deny that any order in a state may be superseded by the Presidency, when any great parts and talents upon superior exigencies are called forth, yet I must say the order of that service was formed upon wise principles. It gave the persons who were put in that course of probation an opportunity, if circumstances enabled them, of acquiring experience; it gave those who watched them a constant inspection upon them in all their progress; it gave them the necessity of acquiring a character in proportion to their standing, that all they had gained by years should not be lost by misconduct. It was a great, substantial regulation fit to be observed; but scarcely a trace of it remains to be discovered. For Mr. Hastings first broke through that service by making offices which had no reference to gradation, but which were superior in profit to those which the highest gradation might have acquired. He established whole systems of offices, and especially the systems of offices established in 1781, which being new none of the rules of gradation applied to them, and he filled them in such a manner as suited best his own views and purposes; so that in effect the whole of that order, whatever merit was in it, was by him broken down and subverted. The consequence was that persons in the most immature stages of life have been put to conduct affairs which required the greatest maturity of judgement and the greatest possible temper and moderation; and effects consequent have followed upon it. So far with respect to that order of the Company's service.

My lords, I must remark, before I go farther, that there is something peculiar in the service of the East India Company, and different from that of any other nation that has ever transferred its power from one country to another. The East India Company in India is not the British nation. When the Tartars entered into China and into Hindustan--when all the Goths and Vandals entered into Europe--when the Normans came into England--they came as a nation. The Company in India does not exist as a nation. Nobody can go there that does not go in its service. Therefore the English nation in India is nothing but a seminary for the succession of officers. They are a nation of place-men. They are a republic, a commonwealth, without a people. They are a state made up wholly of magistrates. The consequence of which is, that there is no people to control, to watch, to balance against the power of office. The power of office, so far as the English nation is concerned, is the sole power in the country. There is no corrective upon it whatever. The consequence of which is, that, being a kingdom of magistrates, the esprit de corps is strong in it--the spirit of the body by which they consider themselves as having a common interest, and a common interest, separated both from the country that sent them out and from the country in which they are, and where there is no control by persons who understand their language, who understand their manners, or can apply their conduct to the laws of the country. Such control does not exist in India. Therefore confederacy is easy, and has been general among them; and therefore your lordships, are not to expect that that should happen in such a body which never happened in the world in any body or corporation, namely, that they should ever be a proper check and control upon themselves: it is not in the nature of things. There is a monopoly with an esprit de corps at home, called the India Company, and there is an esprit de corps abroad; and both those systems are united into one body, animated with the same spirit, that is, with the corporate spirit, which never was a spirit which corrected itself in any time or circumstance in the world, and which is such a thing as has not happened to the Moors, to the Portuguese, to the Romans--to go to any old or new examples. It has not happened in any one time or circumstance in the world, except in this. And out of that has issued a series of abuses, at the head of which Mr. Hastings has put himself, against the authority of the East India Company at home and every authority in this country.

My lords, the next circumstance is--and which is curious too--that the emoluments of office do not in any degree correspond with the trust. For, under the name of junior merchant, and senior merchant, and writer, and those other little names of a counting-house, you have great magistrates; you have the administrators of revenues truly royal; you have judges civil, and in a great degree criminal, who pass judgements upon the greatest properties of the country. You have all these under these names; and the emoluments that belong to them are so weak, so inadequate to the dignity of the character, that it is impossible--I may say of that service that it is absolutely impossible--for the subordinate parts of it, to exist, to hope to exist, as Englishmen who look at their home as their ultimate resource--to exist in a state of incorruption. In that service the rule that prevails in many other countries is reversed. In other countries, often the greatest situations are attended with but little emoluments; because glory, fame, reputation, the love, the tears of joy, the honest applause of their country, pay those great and weighty labours which in great situations are sometimes required from the commonwealth; but all other countries pay in money what cannot be paid in fame and reputation. But it is the reverse with the India Company. All the subordinate parts of the gradation are officers, who, notwithstanding the weight and importance of the offices and dignities entrusted to them, are miserably provided for; and the heads, the chiefs, have great emoluments, securing them against every mode of temptation. And this is the thing Mr. Hastings has abused. He was at the head of the service. He has corrupted his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has used oppression and tyranny in the place of legal government; and, instead of endeavouring to find honest, honourable, and adequate rewards for the persons who served the public, he has left them to prey upon it without the smallest degree of control. He has neither supplied nor taken care to supply, with that unbounded licence which he used over the public revenues, an honest scale of emoluments, suited to the vastness of the power given to the Company's service. He has not employed the public revenue f or that purpose; but has left them at large to prey upon the country, and find themselves emoluments as they could. These are the defects of that service. There is no honest emolument, in much the greater part of it, correspondent to the nature and answerable to the expectations of the people who serve. There is an unbounded licence in almost all other respects; and, as one of the honestest and ablest servants of the Company said to me, it resembled the service of the Mahrattas--little pay, but unbounded licence to plunder. This is the pay of the Company's service; a service opened to all dishonest emolument, shut up to all things that are honest and fair. I do not say that the salaries would not sound well here; but when you consider the nature of the trusts, the dignity of the situation whatever the name of it is, the powers that are granted, and the hopes that every man has of establishing himself at home, it is a source of infinite grievance, of infinite abuse; and we charge Mr. Hastings, instead of stopping up, instead of endeavouring to regulate, instead of endeavouring to correct, so grievous and enormous an error, with having increased every part of it.

My lords, the next circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. They have almost universally been sent out at that period of life, to begin their progress and career in active life and in the use of power, which in all other places has been employed in the course of a rigid education. They have been sent there in fact--to put it in a few words--with a perilous independence, with too inordinate expectations, and with boundless power. They are schoolboys without tutors; they are minors without guardians. The world is let loose upon them with all its temptations; and they are let loose upon the world, with all the powers that despotism can give. This is the situation of the Company's servants.

There is one thing that is remarkable. They are to exercise what your lordships are now exercising--high judicial powers--without the smallest study of any law, either general or municipal. It is made a rule in the service, a rule confirmed even by the attempts that were made to regulate it--I mean confirmed by Sir Elijah Impey, when he undertook to be legislator for India-that the judicial character, which is the last in study and the last in professional experience, that to which all professional men ultimately look up, is the first experimental situation of a Company's servant; and it is expressly said that the office and situation of a judge are to be filled by the junior servants of the Company. And, as the emolument is not equal to that of other situations, the judicial service is to be taken as in transitu--as a passage to other things; and, as soon as a man has supplied the defects of his education by the advantage of experience, he is immediately translated to another situation, and another young man is sent there to learn, at the expense of the properties of India, to fill a situation which he is not to fill.

So with regard to the other situations. They are the situations of great statesmen, which undoubtedly, according to the practice of the world, require rather a large converse with men, to fill properly, and much intercourse in life, than the study of books-though that has its eminent service. We know too that, in the habits of civilized life, in cultivated society, there is imbibed by men a good deal of the solid practice of government, of the true maxims of state, and everything that enables a man to serve his country. But these men are sent over to exercise functions at which a statesman here would tremble, without any study, without any of that sort of experience which forms men gradually and insensibly to great affairs. These men are sent over to India without maturity, without experience, without knowledge or habits in cultivated life, to perform such functions as I will venture to say the greatest statesmen are hardly equal to.

Mr. Hastings has himself, in his defence before the House of Commons, and in the defences he has made before your lordships, lamented his own situation in this particular. It was much to be lamented indeed. How far it will form a justification for his conduct, when we come to examine that conduct, will be seen; how far it will furnish either extenuation or palliation will likewise be seen. But so is the fact, and so we must lament it, that the servants of the Company are sent out young, are sent out with incompetent emoluments, are sent out to a body that forms them into an esprit de corps; sent out in that situation without any control upon them, without that which is the best thing in education, discipline, restraint, order and subordination, which are education, and all the rest of it are but subordinate to this great point.

My lords, by means of this bad system of things it has so happened, and does happen, that the very laws we have made, the covenants the Company has got its servants to enter into, and the orders that have been given, have proved as things have turned out most noxious and mischievous to the country, instead of beneficial. For the servants of the Company are obliged, when they enter into the service, to enter into it not only with the general duty which attaches upon all servants, but they enter into a specific covenant with their masters, to perform all the duties described in that covenant, under heavy penalties. They are bound by them; and at every step of their progress, from writer to factor, from factor to junior merchant, and from junior merchant to senior merchant, they are bound to renew these covenants by something--I speak without offence--which may be said to resemble confirmation in the church. They are obliged to renew their obligation. This covenant would have been wise and proper if it had been enforced. The orders of the Company have forbidden them to take any unlawful emoluments. The act of parliament has fulminated against them. What is the consequence? The consequence is that, there being clear, positive laws, clear, positive covenants, and positive engagements having no exception of circumstances in them or difference quoad maius et minus, but every one who offends against the law being liable to the law, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful emolument--and all have taken many pennies of unlawful emolument--dare not complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel oppression; and he who has taken a penny to do a good act is obliged to be silent when he sees whole nations desolated about him. The great criminal has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the small offence and crush the person entirely who has committed it. In consequence of which, Mr. Hastings has not only obtained a vast power by this grand defect in the Company's service, but by distributing liberally the emoluments of the Company, and by making it impossible for any man to rise but through his favour, he has such a hold of corruption that he has linked it, got it bound above, below, and on all sides about him, by one common participation and connivance. And accordingly he has had no complaint from the service against him. He states it as one of his merits that there has been no such complaint. No such complaint can exist. The esprit de corps forbids it, in which an informer is the most odious and detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been hunted down, as a common enemy of the common profit. He cannot do it; because as nobody is free from small offences, the great offender can always crush the small one. And accordingly, what is singular, if you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine, from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's service was made out of the very filth and dregs of mankind, the most degenerate public body that ever existed in the world; but, if you can examine his conduct towards them, you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary perfection. He was fourteen years at the head of that service, and there is not one single instance in which he endeavoured to detect corruption, in which he ever attempted to punish it; but the whole service with that whole mass of enormity slept, as it were, at once under his terror and his protection-his protection if they did not dare to move against him, his terror from his power to pluck out individuals and make a public example of them whenever he pleased.

And therefore the first thing to be observed is, that it is a service of confederacy, a service of connivance, a service of various systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head, protector, and conniver. Not only as protector and conniver, but we shall prove to your lordships that, when the Company were driven by shame--not by inclination, but by shame--to order several prosecutions against the delinquents, Mr. Hastings, not satisfied with the general connivance, directly contrary to the duty of his office, and directly contrary to the express and positive law of the Court of Directors, which law parliament had bound upon him as his duty--not satisfied with that connivance, before he went away passed a general pardon, which he was not authorized to give, and at once ordered the whole body of the prosecutions of the Company to be discharged. Then, having had fourteen years' connivance, and then a general release of all charges and actions of the Company being given by usurpation, fraud, and madness in him, he now puts himself at the head, and expects the support of that body which he fully discharged from all prosecutions. You will find in the course of this business that, whenever, by means that have been fortunately used but unfortunately stopped, these charges have been brought against him of any bribery, corruption or malversation, his point has been never to answer one word to that bribery, corruption, malversation, but to inquire of the whole service whether there was any one man in it that would give him an ill word. He is just in that situation in which he may well call witnesses to his character; but he will find himself utterly incapable of justifying his conduct. So far with regard to that part of the service.
My lords, there is another part of the service which I really omitted, but whether I should put it first or last I must confess I am at some loss to decide; because, though it appears to be the lowest part of the service, it is by far the most considerable and the most efficient; without a full consideration and explanation of which, no part hardly of the conduct of Mr. Hastings, and of many others that may be in his situation, can be well understood. I have given you an account of writers, factors, merchants, who exercise the offices of judges, chancellors, ministers of state, and chancellors of the exchequer, and managers of great revenues. I have given you some description of them. But there is another description of men, whether in the Company's service or not, that is of more importance than them all; that is, a description of character you have often read of, but which has not been sufficiently explained--I mean the character of a banya. When the Company's service was nothing but mercantile, and they were utterly unacquainted with the country, they used the intervention of certain factors among the natives, who were called banyas. We called them so. They were of the tribe or caste of the vaisyas or merchants, the Indians being distributed into tribes; and the English employed them as their factors in their dealing in the country; and the name still continues when the functions of the banyas have become totally different. A banya has other names too. He is called diwan or steward: and indeed that is a term with more propriety applied to him in several of the functions which he occupies. He is by his office the steward of the household of every European gentleman, and has the care, management, and ordering, of his servants. He is a domestic servant. He is generally chosen out of that class of natives who, by being habituated to misery and subjection, can submit to any orders, and are fit for any of the basest services. Having been themselves subject to oppression, they are fitted perfectly--for that is the true education--to oppress others. They serve an apprenticeship of servitude to qualify them for the trade of tyranny. They are persons without whom a European can do nothing. They know, they themselves being trained in that way, all the ways, all the little frauds, all the defensive armour, all the artifices and contrivances, by which abject slavery secures itself against the violence of power. They know all the lurking-holes, all the winding recesses, of the unfortunate; and they hunt out distress and misery even to their last retreats. They know the way they have suffered themselves, and far from being taught by these sufferings to abstain, they have only learned the way of afflicting others. Without them, Europeans, with all their pompous names, with all their consideration, are nothing. The moment a Company's servant comes there--and they have the best intelligence of what is done at home--that class of people immediately make application to the gentleman who comes to India. They take possession of him, as if he were their inheritance. They have knowledge of the country; they have money; and they have the arts of making money. The gentleman who comes from home has none of them; he has nothing but simplicity; he has nothing but a desire of wealth, great indigence, and a disposition to relieve himself. These banyas have all; they have money, and a knowledge of the country; and they know the means of acquiring wealth. Accordingly they take possession of him; and it is much to be lamented that they do continue a tyranny not only over the people but over the master, who does nothing but give them the ticket of his name. So that the man is connected and supported by a European who is well supported at home, and from that moment forward it is not the Englishman, but it is the black banya, that is the master. He keeps the Englishman alive. We know how young men are sent out of this country. We know how happy we are soon to know that they are no longer a burden to their friends and parents, but are in a situation of thriving. The banya knows it too. He supplies him with money. But the chief way in which he is paid is the use of his master's name and power; and thus he goes into the country with a commission in his hand which nothing can resist. This banya thus empowered has not only the people under his subjection, but his master also. The way he has him under his subjection is this--he has that dreadful power over him which every creditor has over his debtor. The master is no longer a master; he is the tool in the hands of this man. Actions the most abhorrent to his nature he must see done before his face--and thousands and thousands worse are done in his absence--and he dare not complain of them. The banya extorts, robs, murders, and gives him what proportion of [the spoil] he pleases. If he should murmur at him, the very power that was sent over to protect, the people of India from these very abuses--the best things being perverted when put into situations not fit for them--the very laws of England, which make the recovery of debts more easy, give ten thousand times more power to the banya over his master; and the court [of justice] becomes a collateral security for that abominable tyranny, executed over Europeans as well as natives. So that, while we are here boasting of British power, we are, in more than half the service, nothing but the inferior tools and miserable instruments of the tyranny which the lower part of the natives exercise, to the disgrace of the British power and to the ruin of all that is respectable among their own country-men. They have subverted the first houses; totally ruined and undone the country; cheated and defrauded the revenue; and kept people in India under a miserable state of beggary; until something or other has relieved them from this servitude. Which is the true reason that the Company's servants in India, in order to free themselves from this horrid and atrocious servitude, are obliged to become the tools of men in power to get some office that may enable them to make money to pay their debts, or to be the tools of Mr. Hastings. It is true that these people were originally the lowest castes in the country; but, after seeing the profit which these men make, and that there is neither power, profession, nor occupation to be had that a reputable person could have, men born to better things, men of higher castes, have thrown themselves into that disgraceful servitude, have become menial servants to Englishmen, that they might rise by their degradation. But they have prostituted their integrity; they have equally lost their character; and there is no difference between the best and the worst ....

Now your lordships see the whole of the revolutions. I have stated them, I trust, with perspicuity; stated the grounds and principles upon which they were made; stated the abuses that grew upon them, and that every revolution produced its abuse. You saw the native government vanish away by degrees, until it is reduced to a situation fit for nothing but to become a private perquisite, as it has been, to Mr. Hastings, to be granted to whom he pleased. The English government succeeded. Mr. Hastings was appointed to it by an act of parliament, having been appointed to the Presidency before, to reform abuses. And in those two periods of his Presidency and his appointment by act of parliament were those crimes committed of which he now stands accused. All this history is merely by way of illustration. His crimination begins with his nomination to the Presidency, and his subsequent nomination by parliament.

The troubled period between the year 1756 and the settlement made in the year 1774 being passed, Mr. Hastings having the government in his hands, we are to consider how he comported himself in it. My lords, the first thing in considering the character of any Governor is to have some test by which it may be tried. And we conceive here that when a British Governor is sent abroad, he is sent to pursue the good of the people as much as possible in the spirit of the laws of this country, which intend in all respects their conservation, their happiness, and their prosperity. These are the principles upon which Mr. Hastings was bound to govern, and upon which he is to account for his conduct here.

The rule upon which you are to try him is this--what should a British Governor in such a situation do, or forbear to do? If he has done and if he has forborne in the manner in which a British Governor ought to do and to forbear, he has done his duty, and he is honourably acquitted. He resorts to other principles and to other maxims; but this country will force him to be tried by its laws. The law of this country recognizes that well-known crime called misconduct in office. It is a head of the law of England; and, so far as inferior courts are competent to try it, it may be tried there. Here your lordships are competent to everything; and as you are competent in the power you are competent in the knowledge of the offence. And here I am bound to state to your lordships, by the directions of those whose directions I am bound to follow, the principles upon which Mr. Hastings declares he has conducted his government; which principles he declares, first in several letters written to the East India Company, next in a paper of defence delivered to the House of Commons explicitly, and more explicitly in his defence before your lordships.

I am directed first to clear the way of all those grounds and principles upon which he frames his defence; for, if those grounds are good and valid, they carry off a great deal at least, if not entirely, the foundation of our charge. My lords, we contend that Mr. Hastings, as a British Governor, ought to govern upon British principles, not by British forms. God forbid! for if ever there was a case in which the letter kills and the spirit gives life, it would be an attempt to introduce British forms and the substance of despotic principles together into any country. No! We call for that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice, that spirit of safety, that spirit of protection, that spirit of lenity, which ought to characterize every British subject in power; and upon these, and these principles only, he wilt be tried.

But he has told your lordships in his defence, that actions in Asia do not bear the same moral qualities as the same actions would bear in Europe. My lords, we positively deny that principle. I am authorized and called upon to deny it. And having stated at large what he means by saying that the same actions have not the same qualities in Asia and in Europe, we are to let your lordships know that these gentlemen have formed a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men in public and in private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the great governor of the universe, or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude, parallels not of life but of latitudes; as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial line, all the virtues die, as they say some animals die when they cross the line; as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and commence a new order and system of things.

This geographical morality we do protest against. Mr. Hastings shall not screen himself under it. And I hope and trust not a great many words will be necessary to satisfy your lordships--but we think it necessary, in justification of ourselves, to declare--that the laws of morality are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which would pass for an action of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression, in England that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and oppression, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over. This I contend for, not in the forms of it, but I contend for it in the substance.
Mr. Hastings comes before your lordships not as a British Governor answering to a British tribunal, but as a subahdar, as a Pacha of three tails. He says: 'I had an arbitrary power to exercise; I exercised it. Slaves I found the people; slaves they are. They are so by their constitution; and if they are, I did not make it for them. I was unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I did exercise it. It was disagreeable to me, but I did exercise it, and no other power can be exercised in that country.' This, if it be true, is a plea in bar. But I trust and hope your lordships will not judge by laws and institutions which you do not know, against those laws and institutions which you do know, and under whose power and authority Mr. Hastings went out to India. Can your lordships patiently hear what we have heard with indignation enough, and what, if there were nothing else, would call these principles as well as the actions, which are justified upon such principles, to your lordships' bar; that it may be known whether the Peers of England do not sympathize with the Commons in their detestation of such doctrine? Think of an English Governor tried before you as a British subject, and yet declaring that he governed upon the principles of arbitrary power! This plea is, that he did govern there upon arbitrary and despotic, and, as he supposes, Oriental principles. And as this plea is boldly avowed and maintained, and as, no doubt, all his conduct was perfectly correspondent to these principles, these principles and that conduct must be tried together.

If your lordships will permit, me, I will state one of the many places in which he has avowed these principles as the basis and foundation of all his conduct:

'The sovereignty which they assumed, it fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such power or powers of that nature were delegated to me by any provisions of any Act of Parliament, I confess myself too little of a lawyer to pronounce. I only know that the acceptance of the sovereignty of Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any Act of Parliament; and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the council, the Company is clearly and indisputably seised of that sovereignty.'

So that this gentleman, because he is not a lawyer, nor clothed with those robes which distinguish and well distinguish the learning of this country, is not to know anything of his duty; and whether he was bound by any, or what act of parliament, is a thing he is not lawyer enough to know. Now, if your lordships will suffer the laws to be broken by those that are not of the long robe, I am afraid those of the long robe will have none to punish but those of their own profession. Mr. Hastings, therefore, goes to a law which he knows better, that is, the law of arbitrary power and force, if it deserves to be called by any such name. 'If, therefore says he,-

'the sovereignty of Benares, as ceded to us by the Vizier, have any rights whatever annexed to it, and be not a mere empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as are held, countenanced, and established, by the law, custom, and usage, of the Mogul empire, and not by the provisions of any British Act of Parliament hitherto enacted. Those rights, and none other, I have been the involuntary instrument of enforcing. And if any future Act of Parliament shall positively, or by implication, tend to annihilate those very rights or their exertion, as I have exerted them, I much fear that the boasted sovereignty of Benares, which was held up as an acquisition almost obtruded upon the Company against my consent and opinion-for I acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and inconveniences in its future exercise-I fear, I say, that this sovereignty will be found a burden instead of a benefit, a heavy clog rather than a precious gem to its present possessors; I mean, unless the whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made a uniform compact body by one grand and systematic arrangement, such an arrangement, as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences, both to the governors and the governed, arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases, of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity and instability, of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass.

Every part of Hindustan has been constantly exposed to these and similar disadvantages ever since the Mohammedan conquests. The Hindus, who never incorporated with their conquerors, were kept in order only by the strong hand of power. The constant necessity of similar exertions would increase at once their energy and extent; so that rebellion itself is the parent and promoter of despotism. Sovereignty in India implies nothing else; for I know not how we can form an estimate of its powers but from its visible effects, and those are everywhere the same from Kabool to Assam. The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power. To all this I strongly alluded in the minutes I delivered in Council, when the treaty with the new Vizier was on foot in 1775; and I wished to make Cheit Sing independent, because in India dependence included a thousand evils, many of which I enumerated at that time, and they are entered in the ninth clause of the first section of this charge. I knew the powers with which an Indian sovereignty is armed, and the dangers to which tributaries are exposed. I knew that, from the history of Asia, and from the very nature of mankind, the subjects of a despotic empire are always vigilant for the moment to rebel, and the sovereign is ever jealous I of rebellious intentions. A zemindar is an Indian subject, and, as such, exposed to the common lot of his fellows. "The mean and depraved state of a mere zemindar" is therefore this very dependence above mentioned on a despotic government, this very proneness to shake off his allegiance, and this very exposure to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, which are consequent on the political state of Hindustanic governments. Bulwant Sing, if he had been, and Cheit Sing, as long as he was, a zemindar, stood exactly in this "mean and depraved state" by the constitution of his country. I did not make it for him, but would have secured him from it. Those who made him a zembidar entailed upon him the consequences of so mean and depraved a tenure. Aliverdi Khan and Cossim Ali fined all their zemindars, on the necessities of war and on every pretence, either of court necessity or court extravagance.'

My lords, you have now heard the principles upon which Mr. Hastings governs the part of Asia subjected to the British empire. You have heard his opinion of 'the mean and depraved state' of those who are subject to it. You have heard his lecture upon arbitrary power, which he states to be the constitution of Asia. You hear the application that he makes of it; and you hear the practices which he employs to justify it, and who the persons were the authority of whose examples he professes to follow. Do your lordships really think that the nation would bear, that any human creature would bear, to hear an English governor defend himself upon such principles? For, if he can defend himself upon such principles, no man has any security for anything but by being totally independent of the British Government. Here he has declared his opinion that he is a despotic prince, that he is to use arbitrary power; and of course all his acts are covered with that shield. 'I know,' says he, 'the constitution of Asia only from its practices.' Will your lordships ever bear the corrupt practices of mankind made the principles of government? It will be your pride and glory to teach men that they are to confirm their practices to principles, and not to draw their principles from the corrupt practices of any man whatever. Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a man would dare to mention the practices of all the villains, all the mad usurpers, all the thieves and robbers, in Asia, that he should gather them all up, and form the whole mass of abuses into one code and call it the duty of a British governor? I believe that till this time so audacious a thing was never attempted by mankind.

He to have arbitrary power! My lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him; the King has no arbitrary power to give him; your lordships have not; nor the Commons; nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is the thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give away. No man can govern himself by b is own will, much less can he be governed by the will of others. We are all born in subjection, all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, pre-existent law, prior to all our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to our very being itself, by which we are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir. This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have ; it does not arise from our vain institutions. Every good gift is of God, all power is of God; and He who has given the power, and from whom it alone originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. Therefore, will it be imagined, if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine wisdom and justice? No, my lords. It is not to be had by conquest; for by conquest, which is a more immediate designation of the hand of God, the conqueror only succeeds to all the painful duties and subordination to the power of God which belonged to the sovereign that held the country before. He cannot have it by succession; for no man can succeed to fraud, rapine, and violence, neither by compact, covenant, or submission, nor by any other means, can arbitrary power be conveyed to any man. Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal, and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world. Nothing but absolute impotence can justify men in not resisting it to the best of their power. Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and, I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains if we Will, but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it is an enemy to God ....

Therefore I charge Mr. Hastings-and we shall charge him afterwards, when we come to bring the evidence more directly and fully home-with having destroyed, for private purposes, the whole system of government by the six provincial councils which he had no right to destroy.
I charge him with having delegated away from himself that power which the act of parliament had directed him to preserve inalienably in himself.

I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere instruments and tools, at the enormous expense of  62,000 per annum.

I charge him with having appointed a person their diwan, to whom these Englishmen were to be subservient tools, whose name was--to his own knowledge, by the general voice of the Company, by the recorded official transactions, by everything that can make a man known--abhorred and detested, stamped with infamy; and I charge him with the whole power which he had thus separated from the Council General and from the provincial councils.

I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.

I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which fidelity, even in iniquity, requires at the hands of the worst of men.

I charge him with having robbed those people of whom he took the bribes.

I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.

I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, taken the lands of orphans and given them to wicked persons under him.

I charge him with having removed the natural guardians of a minor Raja, and given his zemindary to that wicked person, Deby Sing.

I charge him--his wickedness being known to himself and all the world--with having committed to Deby Sing the management of three great provinces; and with having thereby wasted the country, destroyed the landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burnt their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that country.

In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villany upon Warren Hastings in this last moment of my application to you.

My lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my lords? You have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces and of wasted kingdoms.

Do you want a criminal, my lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one? No, my lords, you must not look to punish any delinquent in India more. Warren Hastings has not left substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.

My lords, is it a prosecutor that you want? You have before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my lords, that the sun, in his beneficient progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and barriers of nature, united by the bond of a social and moral community;--all the Commons of England resenting as their own the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of India.

Do we want a tribunal? My lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. My lords, here we see virtually, in the mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the Crown, under whose authority you sit and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority, what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent powers and protecting justice of his Majesty. We have here the heir apparent to the Crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England wish an heir apparent of the Crown to be. We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the Crown and the subject, offering a pledge in that situation for the support of the rights of the Crown and the liberties of the people, both which extremities they touch. My lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here; those who have their own honour, the honour of their ancestors and of their posterity, to guard; and who will justify, as they have always justified, that provision in the constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office. My lords, we have here a new nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves by various merits, by great military services, which have extended the fame of this country from the rising to the setting sun. We have those who, by various civil merits and various civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which they well deserve, and in which they will justify the favour of their sovereign and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and make them rejoice to see those virtuous characters, that were the other day upon a level with them, now exalted above them in rank, but feeling with them in sympathy what they felt in common before. We have persons exalted from the practice of the law, from the place in which they administered high though subordinate justice, to a seat here, to enlighten with their knowledge and to strengthen with their votes those principles which have distinguished the courts in which they have presided.

My lords, you have before you the lights of our religion-you have the bishops of England. My lords, you have that true image of the primitive church in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from the superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will bring upon the best institutions. You have the representatives of that religion which says that 'God is love', that the very vital spirit of its institution is charity; a religion which so much hates oppression, that, when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, he did not appear in a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with the lowest of the people; and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government, since the person, who was the master of nature chose to appear himself in a subordinate situation. These are the considerations which influence them, which animate them and will animate them against all oppression; knowing that he who is called first among them, and first among us all, both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it, made himself 'the servant of all'.

My lords, these are the securities that we have in all the constituent parts of the body of this house. We know them, we reckon, we rest, upon them; and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into their hands. Therefore it is with confidence that, ordered by the Commons, I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and, misdemeanours.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties, he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.

From: A. Berriedale Keith, ed. Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy, 1750-1921. Vol. I. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1922, 114-155.