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
My Lords, weighty indeed would have been the charge brought before your
Lordships by the Commons of Great Britain against the prisoner at your
bar, if they had fixed upon no other crime or misdemeanor than that
which I am now pressing upon you,--his throwing off the allegiance of
the Company, his putting a black master over himself, and his subjecting
the whole of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, the whole of the Company's
servants, the Company's revenues, the Company's farms, to Gunga Govind
Sing. But, my Lords, it is a very curious and remarkable thing, that we
have traced this man as Mr. Hastings's bribe-broker up to the time of
the nomination of this Committee; we have traced him through a regular
series of bribery; he is Mr. Hastings's bribe-broker at Patna; he is Mr.
Hastings's bribe-broker at Nuddea; he is his bribe-broker at Dinagepore;
we find him his bribe-broker in all these places; but from the moment
that this Committee was constituted, it became a gulf in which the
prevention, the detection, and the correction of all kind of abuses
were sunk and lost forever. From the time when this Committee and Gunga
Govind Sing were appointed, you do not find one word more of Mr.
Hastings's bribes. Had he then ceased to receive any? or where are you
to look for them? You are to look for them in that 500,000_l._ excess of
expense in the revenue department, and in the rest of all that corrupt
traffic of Gunga Govind Sing of which we gave you specimens at the time
we proved his known bribes to you. These are nothing but index-hands to
point out to you the immense mass of corruption which had its origin,
and was daily accumulating in these provinces, under the protection of
Mr. Hastings. And can you think, and can we talk of such transactions,
without feeling emotions of indignation and horror not to be described?
Can we contemplate such scenes as these,--can we look upon those
desolated provinces, upon a country so ravaged, a people so
subdued,--Mahometans, Gentoos, our own countrymen, all trampled under
foot by this tyrant,--can we do this; without giving expression to those
feelings which, after animating us in this life, will comfort us when we
die, and will form our best part in another?
My Lords, I am now at the last day of my endeavors to inspire your
Lordships with a just sense of these unexampled atrocities. I have had a
great encyclopedia of crimes to deal with; I will get through them as
soon as I can; and I pray your Lordships to believe, that, if I omit
anything, it is to time I sacrifice it,--that it is to want of strength
I sacrifice it,--that it is to necessity, and not from any despair of
making, from the records and from the evidence, matter so omitted as
black as anything that I have yet brought before you.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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