The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery, the presumptions that
arise from his own bribes, his attention to secure others from the
punishment of theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his
discharging it,--when we see all this, can we avoid judging and forming
our opinions upon two grand points: first, that no man would proceed in
that universal patronage of guilt, unless he was guilty himself; next,
that, by a universal connivance for fourteen years, he is himself the
cause and mainspring of all the evils, calamities, extortion, and
bribery, that have prevailed and ravaged that country for so long a
time? There is, indeed, no doubt either of his guilt, or of the
consequences of it, by which he has extinguished the last expiring hope
and glimpse that remained of procuring a remedy for India of the evils
that exist in it.
I would mention, that, as a sort of postscript, when he could no longer
put the government into the hands of that infamous woman, Munny Begum,
he sent an amorous, sentimental letter to the Company, describing her
miserable situation, and advising the Company to give her a pension of
seventy-two thousand rupees a year, to maintain her. He describes her
situation in such a moving way as must melt every heart. He supposes her
to be reduced to want by the cruel orders of the Company, who retain
from her money which they were never obliged to give her. This
representation, which he makes with as much fairness as he represents
himself to be in a state of the most miserable poverty and distress, he
alone made to the Company, because his colleagues would not countenance
him in it; and we find, upon looking over Lord Cornwallis's last
examination into the whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman
was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty thousand pounds. Mr.
Hastings, however, could not avoid making this representation; because
he knew, that, if he quitted the country without securing that woman, by
giving her a hope that she could procure by his credit here that money
which by his authority he had before procured for her, she might then
make a discovery of all the corruption that had been carried on between
them; and therefore he squanders away the treasures of the Company, in
order to secure himself from any such detection, and to procure for
himself _razinamas_ and all those fine things. He knew that Munny Begum,
that the whole seraglio, that all the country, whom he had put under the
dominion of Sir John D'Oyly, that all those people might have made a
discovery of all his corrupt proceedings; he therefore gets the Nabob to
appoint Sir John D'Oyly his agent here, with a view of stopping his
mouth, and by the hope of another 160,000_l._ a year to prevent his
giving an account of the dilapidation and robbery that was made of the
160,000_l._ which had been left him.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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