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
We charge, therefore, first, that this act for which he assumes merit
was in itself a breach of faith; next, that the sale of these provinces
was scandalously conducted; and thirdly, that this sale, at one fifth of
the real value, was effected for corrupt purposes. Thus an act of
threefold delinquency is one of the merits stated with great pomp by his
counsel.
Another of his merits is the stoppage of the pension which the Company
was under an obligation to pay to Nudjif Khân: a matter which, even if
admitted to be a merit, is certainly not worth, as a set-off, much
consideration.
But there is another set-off of merit upon which he plumes himself, and
sets an exceedingly high value: the sale of the Rohilla nation to that
worthless tyrant, the Vizier, their cruel and bitter enemy,--the
cruelest tyrant, perhaps, that ever existed, and their most implacable
enemy, if we except Mr. Hastings, who appears to have had a concealed
degree of animosity, public, private, or political, against them. To
this man he sold this whole nation, whose country, cultivated like a
garden, was soon reduced, as Mr. Hastings, from the character of the
Vizier, knew would be the consequence, to a mere desert, for 400,000_l._
He sent a brigade of our troops to assist the Vizier in extirpating
these people, who were the bravest, the most honorable, and generous
nation upon earth. Those who were not left slaughtered to rot upon the
soil of their native country were cruelly expelled from it, and sent to
publish the merciless and scandalous behavior of Great Britain from one
end of India to the other. I believe there is not an honest, ingenuous,
or feeling heart upon the face of the globe, I believe there is no man
possessing the least degree of regard to honor and justice, humanity
and good policy, that did not reprobate this act. The Court of
Directors, when they heard of it, reprobated it in the strongest manner;
the Court of Proprietors reprobated it in the strongest manner; by the
House of Commons, after the most diligent investigation, it was, in a
resolution moved by Mr. Dundas, reprobated in the strongest manner: and
this is the act which Mr. Hastings brings forward before your Lordships
as a merit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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