Part 23

"If I appear in any unfavorable light by these transactions, I resign the common and legal security of those who commit crimes or errors. I am ready to answer every particular question that may be put against myself, upon honor or upon oath.

"The sources from which these reliefs to the public service have come would never have yielded them to the Company publicly; and the exigencies of your service (exigencies created by the exposition of your affairs, and faction in your councils) required those supplies.

"I could have concealed them, had I had a wrong motive, from yours and the public eye forever; and I know that the difficulties to which a spirit of injustice may subject me for my candor and avowal are greater than any possible inconvenience that could have attended the concealment, except the dissatisfaction of my own mind. These difficulties are but a few of those which I have suffered in your service. The applause of my own breast is my surest reward, and was the support of my mind in meeting them. Your applause, and that of my country, are my next wish in life."

Your Lordships will observe at the end of this letter, that this man declares his first applause to be from his own breast, and that he next wishes to have the applause of his employers. But reversing this, and taking their applause first, let us see on what does he ground his hope of their applause? Was it on his former conduct? No: for he says that conduct had repeatedly met with their disapprobation. Was it upon the confidence which he knew they had in him? No: for he says they gave more of their confidence to the meanest of his predecessors. Observe, my Lords, the style of insolence he constantly uses with regard to all mankind. Lord Clive was his predecessor, Governor Cartier was his predecessor, Governor Verelst was his predecessor: every man of them as good as himself: and yet he says the Directors had given "more of their confidence to the meanest of his predecessors." But what was to entitle him to their applause? A clear and full explanation of the bribes he had taken. Bribes was to be the foundation of their confidence in him, and the clear explanation of them was to entitle him to their applause! Strange grounds to build confidence upon!--the rotten ground of corruption, accompanied with the infamy of its avowal! Strange ground to expect applause!--a discovery which was no discovery at all! Your Lordships have heard this discovery, which I have not taken upon me to state, but have read his own letter on the occasion. Has there, at this moment, any light broken in upon you concerning this matter?

But what does he say to the Directors? He says, "Upon the whole of these transactions, which to you, who are accustomed to view business in an official and regular light, may appear unprecedented, if not improper, I have but a few short remarks to suggest to your consideration." He looks upon them and treats them as a set of low mechanical men, a set of low-born book-keepers, as base souls, who in an account call for explanation and precision. If there is no precision in accounts, there is nothing of worth in them. You see he himself is an eccentric accountant, a Pindaric book-keeper, an arithmetician in the clouds. "I know," he says, "what the Directors desire: but they are mean people; they are not of elevated sentiments; they are modest; they avoid ostentation in taking of bribes: I therefore am playing cups and balls with them, letting them see a little glimpse of the bribes, then carrying them fairly away." Upon this he founds the applause of his own breast.

Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.

That private ipse plaudo he may have in this business, which is a business of money; but the applause of no other human creature will he have for giving such an account as he admits this to be,--irregular, uncertain, problematical, and of which no one can make either head or tail. He despises us also, who are representatives of the people, and have amongst us all the regular officers of finance, for expecting anything like a regular account from him. He is hurt at it; he considers it as a cruel treatment of him; he says, "Have I deserved this treatment?" Observe, my Lords, he had met with no treatment, if treatment it may be called, from us, of the kind of which he complains. The Court of Directors had, however, in a way shameful, abject, low, and pusillanimous, begged of him, as if they were his dependants, and not his masters, to give them some light into the account; they desire a receiver of money to tell from whom he received it, and how he applied it. He answers, They may be hanged for a parcel of mean, contemptible book-keepers, and that he will give them no account at all. He says, "If you sue me"--There is the point: he always takes security in a court of law. He considers his being called upon by these people, to whom he ought as a faithful servant to give an account, and to do which he was bound by an act of Parliament specially intrusting him with the administration of the revenues, as a gross affront. He adds, that he is ready to resign his defence, and to answer upon honor or upon oath. Answering upon honor is a strange way they have got in India, as your Lordships may see in the course of this inquiry. But he forgets, that, being the Company's servant, the Company may bring a bill in Chancery against him, and force him upon oath to give an account. He has not, however, given them light enough or afforded them sufficient ground for a fishing bill in Chancery. Yet he says, "If you call upon me in a Chancery way, or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms, and give you some account." In consequence of this the Company did demand from him an account, regularly, and as fully and formally as if they had demanded it in a court of justice. He positively refused to give them any account whatever; and they have never, to this very day in which we speak, had any account that is at all clear or satisfactory. Your Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of fraud, falsification, iniquity, and prevarication, that, in defiance of his promise, which promise they quote upon him over and over again, he has never given them any account of this matter.

He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming) that by calling him to account they may provoke him--to what? "To appropriate," he says, "to my own use the sums which I have already passed to your credit, by the unworthy and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which you have passed upon me for the first communication of this kind." They passed no reflections: they said they would neither praise nor blame him, but pressed him for an account of a matter which they could not understand: and I believe your Lordships understand it no more than they, for it is not in the compass of human understanding to conceive or comprehend it. Instead of an account of it, he dares to threaten them: "I may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be an honest man,--to falsify your account a second time, and to reclaim those sums which I have passed to your credit,--to alter the account again, by the assistance of Mr. Larkins." What a dreadful declaration is this of his dominion over the public accounts, and of his power of altering them! a declaration, that, having first falsified those accounts in order to deceive them, and afterwards having told them of this falsification in order to gain credit with them, if they provoke him, he shall take back the money he had carried to their account, and make them his debtors for it! He fairly avows the dominion he has over the Company's accounts; and therefore, when he shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able to rebut that evidence, and say, "The Company's accounts are corrupted by you, through your agent, Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them, because you not only told the Company you could do so, but we can prove that you have actually done it." What a strange medley of evasion, pretended discovery, real concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears in every part of this letter!

But admitting this letter to have been written upon the 22d of May, and kept back to the 16th of December, you would imagine that during all that interval of time he would have prepared himself to give some light, some illustration of these dark and mysterious transactions, which carried fraud upon the very face of them. Did he do so? Not at all. Upon the 16th of December, instead of giving them some such clear accounts as might have been expected, he falls into a violent passion for their expecting them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he tells them they knew who had profited by these transactions: thus, in order to strike terror into their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had practised or protected. What weight this may have had with them I know not; but your Lordships will expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after giving four accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three must necessarily be false,--after having thrown the Company's accounts into confusion, and being unable to tell, as he says himself, why he did so,--will at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints that he ought to do it.--You have heard nothing yet but the consequences of their refusing to give him the present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had taken from the Nabob. They did right to refuse it to him; they did wrong to take it to themselves.

We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges, in September, 1784,--that Ganges whose purifying water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings's hands a little clean of bribery, and would have rolled down its golden sands like another Pactolus. Here we find him discovering another of his bribes. This was a bribe taken upon totally a different principle, according to his own avowal: it is a bribe not pretended to be received for the use of the Company,--a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself. He tells them that he had taken between thirty and forty thousand pounds. This bribe, which, like the former, he had taken without right, he tells them that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he insists upon their sanction for so doing. He says, he had in vain, upon a former occasion, appealed to their honor, liberality, and generosity,--that he now appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing this bribe--which he had taken without telling them from whom, where, or on what account--to his own use.

Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which he wrote from Patna, on the 20th of January, 1782, he there states that he was in tolerable good circumstances, and that this had arisen from his having continued long in their service. Now, he has continued two years longer in their service, and he is reduced to beggary! "This," he says, "is a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit, and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want, and to sink in obscurity."

So far back as in 1773 he thought that he could save an exceeding good fortune out of his place. In 1782 he says, with gratitude, that he has made a decent private competency; but in two years after he sunk to the extremity of private want. And how does he seek to relieve that want? By taking a bribe: bribes are no longer taken by him for the Company's service, but for his own. He takes the bribe with an express intention of keeping it for his own use, and he calls upon the Company for their sanction. If the money was taken without right, no claim of his could justify its being appropriated to himself: nor could the Company so appropriate it; for no man has a right to be generous out of another's goods. When he calls upon their justice and generosity, they might answer, "If you have a just demand upon our treasury, state it, and we will pay it; if it is a demand upon our generosity, state your merits, and we will consider them." "But I have paid myself by a bribe; I have taken another man's money; and I call upon your justice--to do what? to restore it to its owner? no--to allow me to keep it myself." Think, my Lords, in what a situation the Company stands! "I have done a great deal for you; this is the jackal's portion; you have been the lion; I have been endeavoring to prog for you; I am your bribe-pander, your factor of corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn and ignominy, to insults even from you. I have been preying and plundering for you; I have gone through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness, wading through every species of dirt and corruption, for your advantage. I am now sinking into the extremity of private want; do give me this--what? money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me this bribe; vote me--what? money of your own? that would be generous: money you owe me? that would be just: no, money which I have extorted from another man; and I call upon your justice to give it me." This is his idea of justice. He says, "I am compelled to depart from that liberal plan which I originally adopted, and to claim from your justice (for you have forbid me to appeal to your generosity) the discharge of a debt which I can with the most scrupulous integrity aver to be justly due, and which I cannot sustain." Now, if any of the Company's servants may say, "I have been extravagant, profuse,--it was all meant for your good,--let me prey upon the country at my pleasure,--license my bribes, frauds, and peculations, and then you do me justice,"--what country are we in, where these ideas are ideas of generosity and justice?

It might naturally be expected that in this letter he would have given some account of the person from whom he had taken this bribe. But here, as in the other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the Ganges, like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw in Mr. Middleton; they recollect nothing, they know nothing. He has not stated, from that day to this, from whom he took that money. But we have made the discovery. And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to the present age and posterity, will be their use, that, if we pursue them with the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon us demands, and if your Lordships do firmly administer justice upon this man's frauds, you will at once put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever. Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry, it is the diligence of the House of Commons, which he has the audacity to call malice, that has discovered and brought to light the frauds which we shall be able to prove against him.

I will now read to your Lordships an extract from that stuff, called a defence, which he has either written himself or somebody else has written for him, and which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases, when, under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment, he discovered at length from whom he got this last bribe.

"The last part of the charge states, that, in my letter to the Court of Directors of the 21st February, 1784, I have confessed to have received another sum of money, the amount of which is not declared, but which, from the application of it, could not be less than thirty-four thousand pounds sterling, &c. In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the Company not having at that time sufficient cash in their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed three lacs of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta, whom I desired to call upon me with a bond properly filled up. He did so; but at the time I was going to execute it he entreated I would rather accept the money than execute the bond. I neither accepted the offer nor refused it; and my determination upon it remained suspended between the alternative of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid, and of taking it, and applying it, as I had done other sums, to the Company's use. And there the matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow, when I determined to accept the money for the Company's use; and these were my motives. Having made disbursements from my own cash for services, which, though required to enable me to execute the duties of my station, I had hitherto omitted to enter into my public accounts, I resolved to reimburse myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the Company's affairs, by charging these disbursements in my durbar accounts of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received, which was this of Nobkissin's. If my claim on the Company were not founded in justice, and bona fide due, my acceptance of three lacs of rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that sum from me. No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts."

We do not suspect him of presenting false accounts: we can prove, we are now radically proving, that he presents false accounts. We suspect no man who does not give ground for suspicion; we accuse no man who has not given ground for accusation; and we do not attempt to bring before a court of justice any charges which we shall not be able decisively to prove. This will put an end to all idle prattle of malice, of groundless suspicions of guilt, and of ill-founded charges. We come here to bring the matter to the test, and here it shall be brought to the test, between the Commons of Great Britain and this East India delinquent. In his letter of the 21st of February, 1784, he says he has never benefited himself by contingent accounts; and as an excuse for taking this bribe from Nobkissin, which he did not discover at the time, but many years afterwards, at the bar of the House of Commons, he declares that he wanted to apply it to the contingent account for his expenses, that is, for what he pretended to have laid out for the Company, during a great number of years. He proceeds:--

"If it should be objected, that the allowance of these demands would furnish a precedent for others of the like kind, I have to remark, that in their whole amount they are but the aggregate of a contingent account of twelve years; and if it were to become the practice of those who have passed their prime of life in your service, and filled, as I have filled it, the first office of your dominion, to glean from their past accounts all the articles of expense which their inaccuracy or indifference hath overlooked, your interests would suffer infinitely less by the precedent than by a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want and to sink in obscurity."

Here is the man that has told us at the bar of the House of Commons that he never made up any contingent accounts; and yet, as a set-off against this bribe, which he received for himself, and never intended to apply to the current use of the Company, he feigns and invents a claim upon them, namely, that he had, without any authority of the Company, squandered away in stationery and budgeros, and other idle services, a sum amounting to 34,000l. But was it for the Company's service? Is this language to be listened to? "Everything I thought fit to expend I have expended for the Company's service. I intended, indeed, at that time, to have been generous. I intended out of my own pocket to have paid for a translation of the code of Gentoo laws. I was then in the prime of my life, flowing in money, and had great expectations: I am now old; I cannot afford to be generous: I will look back into all my former accounts, pen, ink, wax, everything that I generously or prodigally spent as my own humor might suggest; and though, at the same time, I know you have given me a noble allowance, I now make a charge upon you for this sum of money, and intend to take a bribe in discharge of it." Now suppose Lord Cornwallis, who sits in the seat, and I hope will long, and honorably and worthily, fill the seat, which that gentleman possessed,--suppose Lord Cornwallis, after never having complained of the insufficiency of his salary, and after having but two years ago said he had saved a sufficient competency out of it, should now tell you that 30,00l. a year was not enough for him, and that he was sinking into want and distress, and should justify upon that alleged want taking a bribe, and then make out a bill of contingent expenses to cover it, would your Lordships bear this?

Mr. Hastings has told you that he wanted to borrow money for his own use, and that he applied to Rajah Nobkissin, who generously pressed it upon him as a gift. Rajah Nobkissin is a banian: you will be astonished to hear of generosity in a banian; there never was a banian and generosity united together: but Nobkissin loses his banian qualities at once, the moment the light of Mr. Hastings's face beams upon him. "Here," says Mr. Hastings, "I have prepared bonds for you." "Astonishing! how can you think of the meanness of bonds? You call upon me to lend you 34,000l., and propose bonds? No, you shall have it: you are the Governor-General, who have a large and ample salary; but I know you are a generous man, and I emulate your generosity: I give you all this money." Nobkissin was quite shocked at Mr. Hastings's offering him a bond. My Lords, a Gentoo banian is a person a little lower, a little more penurious, a little more exacting, a little more cunning, a little more money-making, than a Jew. There is not a Jew in the meanest corner of Duke's Place in London that is so crafty, so much a usurer, so skilful how to turn money to profit, and so resolved not to give any money but for profit, as a Gentoo broker of the class I have mentioned. But this man, however, at once grows generous, and will not suffer a bond to be given to him; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, is thrown into very great distress. You see sentiment always prevailing in Mr. Hastings. The sentimental dialogue which must have passed between him and a Gentoo broker would have charmed every one that has a taste for pathos and sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the money as a gift. He really does not know what to do: whether to insist upon giving a bond or not,--whether he shall take the money for his own use, or whether he shall take it for the Company's use. But it may be said of man as it is said of woman: the woman who deliberates is lost: the man that deliberates about receiving bribes is gone. The moment he deliberates, that moment his reason, the fortress, is lost, the walls shake, down it comes,--and at the same moment enters Nobkissin into the citadel of his honor and integrity, with colors flying, with drums beating, and Mr. Hastings's garrison goes out, very handsomely indeed, with the honors of war, all for the benefit of the Company. Mr. Hastings consents to take the money from Nobkissin; Nobkissin gives the money, and is perfectly satisfied.

Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it to the Company's service. How? To pay his own contingent bills. "Everything that I do," says he, "and all the money I squander, is all for the Company's benefit. As to particulars of accounts, never look into them; they are given you upon honor. Let me take this bribe: it costs you nothing to be just or generous. I take the bribe: you sanctify it." But in every transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have got a name, there we have got a crime. Nobkissin gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately afterwards enters upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable districts in Bengal. We know very well, and shall prove to your Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had been taken from them. These bribes are taken under a pretence of the Company's service, but sooner or later they fall upon the Company's treasury. And we shall prove that Nobkissin, within a year from the time when he gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Company, as their steward, to the amount of a sum the very interest of which, according to the rate of interest in that country, amounted to more than this bribe, taken, as was pretended, for the Company's service. Such are the consequences of a banian's generosity, and of Mr. Hastings's gratitude, so far as the interest of the country is concerned; and this is a good way to pay Mr. Hastings's contingent accounts. But this is not all: a most detestable villain is sent up into the country to take the management of it, and the fortunes of all the great families in it are given entirely into his power. This is the way by which the Company are to keep their own servants from falling into "the extremity of private want." And the Company itself, in this pretended saving to their treasury by the taking of bribes, lose more than the amount of the bribes received. Wherever a bribe is given on one hand, there is a balance accruing on the other. No man, who had any share in the management of the Company's revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both. In short, Mr. Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit, but the Company's treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.

And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic in bribes brought to light by the Court of Directors? No: we got it in the House of Commons. These bribes appear to have been taken at various times and upon various occasions; and it was not till his return from Patna, in February, 1782, that the first communication of any of them was made to the Court of Directors. Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of Directors wrote back to him, requiring some further explanation upon the subject. No explanation was given, but a communication of other bribes was made in his letter, said to be written in May of the same year, but not dispatched to Europe till the December following. This produced another requisition from the Directors for explanation. And here your Lordships are to observe that this correspondence is never in the way of letters written and answers given; but he and the Directors are perpetually playing at hide-and-seek with each other, and writing to each other at random: Mr. Hastings making a communication one day, the Directors requiring an explanation the next; Mr. Hastings giving an account of another bribe on the third day, without giving any explanation of the former. Still, however, the Directors are pursuing their chase. But it was not till they learned that the committees of the House of Commons (for committees of the House of Commons had then some weight) were frowning upon them for this collusion with Mr. Hastings, that at last some honest men in the Direction were permitted to have some ascendency, and that a proper letter was prepared, which I shall show your Lordships, demanding from Mr. Hastings an exact account of all the bribes that he had received, and painting to him, in colors as strong at least as those I use, his bribery, his frauds, and peculations,--and what does them great honor for that moment, they particularly direct that the money which was taken from the Nabob of Oude should be carried to his account. These paragraphs were prepared by the Committee of Correspondence, and, as I understand, approved by the Court of Directors, but never were sent out to India. However, something was sent, but miserably weak and lame of its kind; and Mr. Hastings never answered it, or gave them any explanation whatever. He now, being prepared for his departure from Calcutta, and having finished all his other business, went up to Oude upon a chase in which just now we cannot follow him. He returned in great disgust to Calcutta, and soon after set sail for England, without ever giving the Directors one word of the explanation which he had so often promised, and they had repeatedly asked.

We have now got Mr. Hastings in England, where you will suppose some satisfactory account of all these matters would be obtained from him. One would suppose, that, on his arrival in London, he would have been a little quickened by a menace, as he expresses it, which had been thrown out against him in the House of Commons, that an inquiry would be made into his conduct; and the Directors, apprehensive of the same thing, thought it good gently to insinuate to him by a letter, written by whom and how we do not know, that he ought to give some explanation of these accounts. This produced a letter which I believe in the business of the whole world cannot be paralleled: not even himself could be his parallel in this. Never did inventive folly, working upon conscious guilt, and throwing each other totally in confusion, ever produce such a false, fraudulent, prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given to you.

You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the country, on the Ganges: now you see him at the waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his letter from that place to comprehend the substance of all his former letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity, fraud, and nonsense contained in the whole of them. Here it is, and your Lordships will suffer it to be read. I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that it has been the most difficult of all things to explain, but much more difficult to make pleasant and not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued through all its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication, so there is nothing that more calls for the attention, the patience, the vigilance, and the scrutiny of an exact court of justice. But as you have already had almost the whole of the man, do not think it too much to hear the rest in this letter from Cheltenham. It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of July, 1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire; and it begins thus:--

"Sir,--The Honorable Court of Directors, in their general letter to Bengal by the 'Surprise,' dated the 16th of March, 1784, were pleased to express their desire that I should inform them of the periods when each sum of the presents mentioned in my address of the 22d May, 1782, was received,--what were my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors,--and what were my reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums, and for paying other sums into the treasury as deposits, on my own account."

I wish your Lordships to pause a moment. Here is a letter written in July, 1785. You see that from the 29th of December [November?], 1780, till that time, during which interval, though convinced in his own conscience and though he had declared his own opinion of the necessity of giving a full explanation of these money transactions, he had been imposing upon the Directors false and prevaricating accounts of them, they were never able to obtain a full disclosure from him.

He goes on:--"I have been kindly apprised that the information required as above is yet expected from me. I hope that the circumstances of my past situation, when considered, will plead my excuse for having thus long withheld it. The fact is, that I was not at the Presidency when the 'Surprise' arrived; and when I returned to it, my time and attention were so entirely engrossed, to the day of my final departure from it, by a variety of other more important occupations, of which, Sir, I may safely appeal to your testimony, grounded on the large portion contributed by myself of the volumes which compose our Consultations of that period,"--

These Consultations, my Lords, to which he appeals, form matter of one of the charges that the Commons have brought against Mr. Hastings,--namely, a fraudulent attempt to ruin certain persons employed in subordinate situations under him, for the purpose, by intruding himself into their place, of secretly carrying on his own transactions. These volumes of Consultations were written to justify that act.

He next says,--"The submission which my respect would have enjoined me to pay to the command imposed on me was lost to my recollection, perhaps from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it had left on my mind, that it was rather intended as a reprehension for something which had given offence in my report of the original transaction than an expression of any want of a further elucidation of it."