The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 12 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 12 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
"It is his by inheritance: the adawlut and the foujdarry having
been repeatedly declared by the Company and by this government to
appertain to the nizamut. The adawlut, namely, the distribution of
civil justice, and the foujdarry, namely, the executive criminal
justice of that country, that is to say, the whole sovereign
government of the courts of justice, have been declared by the
Company to appertain to the nizamut."
I beg of your Lordships to recollect, when you take into your
consideration the charges of the House of Commons, that the person they
accuse, and persons suborned by him, have never scrupled to be guilty,
without sense of shame, of the most notorious falsehoods, the most
glaring inconsistencies, and even of perjury itself; and that it is thus
they make the power of the Company dead or alive, as best suits their
own wicked, clandestine, and fraudulent purposes, and the great end of
all their actions and all their politics plunder and peculation.
I must here refer your Lordships to a minute of Mr. Francis's, which I
recommend to your reading at large, and to your very serious
recollection, in page 1086; because it contains a complete history of
Mr. Hastings's conduct, and of its effects upon this occasion.
And now to proceed.--The Nabob, in a subsequent application to the
Company's government at Calcutta, desires that Munny Begum may be
allowed to take on herself the whole administration of the affairs of
the nizamut, (not the superiority in the administration of the affairs
of the seraglio only, though this would have been a tyrannical
usurpation of the power belonging to the legitimate mother of the
Nabob,) without the interference of any person whatever; and he adds,
that by this the Governor will give him complete satisfaction. In all
fraudulent correspondence you are sure to find the true secret of it at
last. It has been said by somebody, that the true sense of a letter is
to be learnt from its postscript. But this matter is so clumsily
managed, that, in contempt of all decency, the first thing the Nabob
does is to desire he may be put into the hands of Munny Begum, and that
without the interference of anybody whatever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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