The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 11 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 11 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
But, my Lords, the prisoner defends himself by example; and, good God!
what are the examples which he has chosen? Not the local usages and
constitutions of Oude or of any other province; not the general practice
of a respectable emperor, like Akbar, which, if it would not fatigue
your Lordships, I could show to be the very reverse of this man's. No,
my Lords, the prisoner, his learned counsel here, and his unlearned
Cabinet Council, who wrote this defence, have ransacked the tales of
travellers for examples, and have selected materials from that mass of
loose remarks and crude conceptions, to prove that the natives of India
have neither rights, laws, orders, or distinction.
I shall now proceed to show your Lordships that the people of India have
a keen sense and feeling of disgrace and dishonor. In proof of this I
appeal to well-known facts. There have been women tried in India for
offences, and acquitted, who would not survive the disgrace even of
acquittal. There have been Hindoo soldiers, condemned at a
court-martial, who have desired to be blown from the mouth of a cannon,
and have claimed rank and precedence at the last moment of their
existence. And yet these people are said to have no sense of dishonor!
Good God! that we should be under the necessity of proving, in this
place, all these things, and of disproving that all India was given in
slavery to this man!
But, my Lords, they will show you, they say, that Genghis Khan, Kouli
Khan, and Tamerlane destroyed ten thousand times more people in battle
than this man did. Good God! have they run mad? Have they lost their
senses in their guilt? Did they ever expect that we meant to compare
this man to Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, or Kouli Khan?--to compare a clerk
at a bureau, to compare a fraudulent bullock-contractor, (for we could
show that his first elementary malversations were in carrying on
fraudulent bullock-contracts; which contracts were taken from him with
shame and disgrace, and restored with greater shame and disgrace,) to
compare him with the conquerors of the world? We never said he was a
tiger and a lion: no, we have said he was a weasel and a rat. We have
said that he has desolated countries by the same means that plagues of
his description have produced similar desolations. We have said that he,
a fraudulent bullock-contractor, exalted to great and unmerited powers,
can do more mischief than even all the tigers and lions in the world. We
know that a swarm of locusts, although individually despicable, can
render a country more desolate than Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. When God
Almighty chose to humble the pride and presumption of Pharaoh, and to
bring him to shame, He did not effect His purpose with tigers and lions;
but He sent lice, mice, frogs, and everything loathsome and
contemptible, to pollute and destroy the country. Think of this, my
Lords, and of your listening here to these people's long account of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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