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
My Lords, you have seen the audacious insolence, the tyrannical pride,
with which he dares to treat this order. You have seen the recorded
minute which he has dared to send to the Court of Directors; and in
this you see, that, when he cannot directly asperse a man's conduct, and
has nothing to say against it, he maliciously, I should perhaps rather
say enviously, insinuates that he had unjustly made his fortune. "You
are," says he, "to judge from the independence of his manner and style,
whether he could or no have got that without some unjust means." God
forbid I should ever be able to invent anything that can equal the
impudence of what this man dares to write to his superiors, or the
insolent style in which he dares to treat persons who are not his
servants!
Who made the servants of the Company the master of the servants of the
Company? The Court of Directors are their fellow-servants; they are all
the servants of this kingdom. Still the claim of a fellow-servant to
hold an office which the Court of Directors had legally appointed him to
is considered by this audacious tyrant as an insult to him. By this you
may judge how he treats not only the servants of the Company, but the
natives of the country, and by what means he has brought them into that
abject state of servitude in which they are ready to do anything he
wishes and to sign anything he dictates. I must again beg your Lordships
to remark what this man has had the folly and impudence to place upon
the records of the Council of which he was President; and I will venture
to assert that so extraordinary a performance never before appeared on
the records of any court, Eastern or European. Because Mr. Bristow
claims an office which is his right and his freehold as long as the
Company chooses, Mr. Hastings accuses him of being an accomplice with
the Court of Directors in a conspiracy against him; and because, after
long delays, he had presented an humble petition to have the Court of
Directors' orders in his favor carried into execution, he says "he has
erected himself into a tribunal of justice; that he has arraigned the
Council for disobedience of orders, passed judgment upon them, and
condemned or acquitted them as their magistrate and superior."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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