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
Things were now in a proper train; the Committee find the cause growing
and ripening to their wishes;--answers, replies, objections, and
interrogatories,--accounts opposed to accounts,--balances now on the one
side, now on the other,--now debtor becomes creditor, and creditor
debtor,--until the proceedings were grown to the size of volumes, and
the whole well fitted to perplex the most simple facts, and to darken
the meridian sunshine of public notoriety. They prepared a report for
the Governor-General and Council suitable to the whole tenor of their
proceedings. Here the man whom they had employed and betrayed appeared
in a new character. Observe their course with him. First he was made a
commissioner. Then he was changed from a commissioner to be a voluntary
accuser. He now undergoes another metamorphosis: he appears as a culprit
before Mr. Hastings, on the accusation of the donor of Mr. Hastings's
bribes. He is to answer to the accusations of Debi Sing. He is permitted
to find materials for his own defence; and he, an old Company's servant,
is to acknowledge it as a favor to be again suffered to go into the
province, without authority, without station, without public character,
under the discountenance and frowns, and in a manner under prosecution,
of the government. As a favor, he is suffered to go again into Rungpore,
in hopes of finding among the dejected, harassed, and enslaved race of
Hindoos, and in that undone province, men bold enough to stand forward,
against all temptations of emolument, and at the risk of their lives,
with a firm adherence to their original charge,--and at a time when they
saw _him_ an abandoned and persecuted private individual, whom they had
just before looked upon as a protecting angel, carrying with him the
whole power of a beneficent government, and whom they had applied to, as
a magistrate of high and sacred authority, to hear the complaints and to
redress the grievances of a whole people.
A new commission of junior servants was at the same time sent out to
review and reexamine the cause, to inquire into the inquiry, to examine
into the examination, to control the report, to be commissioners upon
the commission of Mr. Paterson. Before these commissioners he was made
to appear as an accused person, and was put upon his defence, but
without the authority and without the favor which ought to go with an
accused person for the purpose of enabling him to make out such defence.
These persons went down into that country, and, after spending a long
time in mere matters of form, found they could not do without a
representative of Debi Sing, and accordingly they ordered Debi Sing to
send up his _vakeel_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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