The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
name of them may be, the powers that are granted, the hopes that every
man has of establishing himself at home, I repeat, it is a source of
infinite grievance, of infinite abuse: of which source of corrupt power
we charge Mr. Hastings with having availed himself, in filling up the
void of direct pay by finding out and countenancing every kind of
oblique and unjust emolument; though it must be confessed that he is
far from being solely guilty of this offence.
Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the
youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The
servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress
and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority,
at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in
the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,--they
are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from
perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate
expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, 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 involves.
It is further remarkable, these servants exercise what your Lordships
are now exercising, high judicial powers, and they exercise them without
the smallest study of any law, either general or municipal. It is made a
sort of rule in the service, a rule confirmed even by the attempts that
were made to correct it, (I mean confirmed by Sir Elijah Impey, when,
under the auspices of Mr. Hastings, he undertook to be legislator for
India,) that the judicial character, the last in the order of legal
progress, that to which all professional men look up as the crown of
their labors, that ultimate hope of men grown gray in professional
practice, is among the first experimental situations of a Company's
servant. It is expressly said in that body of regulations to which I
allude, that the office and situation of a judge of the Dewanny Courts
of Adawlut is to be filled by the _junior_ servants of the Company; and
as the judicial emolument is not substantially equal to that of other
situations, the office of a judge is to be taken, as it were, _in
transitu_, as a passage to other offices not of a judicial nature. As
soon, therefore, as a young man has supplied the defects of his
education by the advantage of some experience, he is immediately
translated to a totally different office; and another young man is
substituted, to learn, at the expense of the property of India, to fill
a situation which, when he may be qualified to fill, he is no longer to
hold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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