Part 19

When we first came to a knowledge of this petition, which was not till some time after it was presented, I happened to have conversation with a noble lord,--I know not whether he be in his place in the House or not, but I think I am not irregular in mentioning his name. When I mention Lord Suffolk, I name a peer whom honor, justice, veracity, and every virtue that distinguishes the man and the peer would claim for their own. My Lord Suffolk told me, that, in a conversation with the late Lord Dover, who brought the prisoner's petition into your House, he could not refrain from expressing his astonishment at that part of the petition which related to the expense Mr. Hastings had been at; and particularly as a complaint had been made in the House of the enormous expense of the prosecution, which at that time had only amounted to fourteen thousand pounds, although the expense of the prosecutor is generally greater than that of the defendant, and public proceedings more expensive than private ones. Lord Dover said, that, before he presented the petition, he had felt exactly in the same manner; but that Mr. Hastings assured him that six thousand pounds had been paid to copying clerks in the India House, and that from this circumstance he might judge of the other expenses. Lord Dover was satisfied with this assurance, and presented the petition, which otherwise he should have declined to do, on account of the apparent enormity of the allegation it contained. At the time when Lord Suffolk informed me of these particulars, (with a good deal of surprise and astonishment,) I had not leisure to go down to the India House in order to make inquiries concerning them, but I afterwards asked the Secretary, Mr. Hudson, to whom we had given a handsome reward, what sums he had received from Mr. Hastings for his services upon this occasion, and the answer was, "Not one shilling." Not one shilling had Mr. Hudson received from Mr. Hastings. The clerks of the Company informed us that the Court of Directors had ordered that every paper which Mr. Hastings wanted should be copied for him gratuitously,--and that, if any additional clerks were wanting for the effectual execution of his wishes, the expense would be defrayed by the Directors. Hearing this account, I next inquired what expedition money might have been given to the clerks: for we know something of this kind is usually done. In reply to this question, Mr. Hudson told me that at various times they had received in little driblets to the amount of ninety-five pounds, or thereabouts. In this way the account stood when I made this inquiry, which was at least half a year after the petition had been presented to your Lordships. Thus the whole story of the six thousand pounds was absolutely false. At that time there was not one word of truth in it, whatever be the amount of the sums which he has paid since. Your Lordships will now judge whether you have been abused by false allegations or not,--allegations which could scarcely admit of being true, and which upon the best inquiry I found absolutely false; and I appeal to the testimony of the noble lord, who is now living, for the truth of the account he received from the worthy and respectable peer whose loss the nation has to bewail.

There are many other circumstances of fraud and falsehood attending this petition, (we must call things by their proper names, my Lords,)--there are, I say, many circumstances of fraud and falsehood. We know it to have been impossible, at the time of presenting this petition, that this man should have expended thirty thousand pounds in the preparation of materials for his defence; and your Lordships' justice, together with the credit of the House of Commons, are concerned in the discovery of the truth. There is, indeed, an ambiguous word in the petition. He asserts that he is engaged for the payment of that sum. We asked the clerks of the India House whether he had given them any bond, note, security, or promise of payment: they assured us that he had not: they will be ready to make the same assurance to your Lordships, when you come to inquire into this matter, which before you give judgment we desire and claim that you will do. All is concealment and mystery on the side of the prisoner; all is open and direct with us. We are desirous that everything which is concealed may be brought to light.

In contradiction, then, to this charge of oppression and of an attempt to ruin his fortune, your Lordships will see that at the time when he made this charge he had not been, in fact, nor was for a long time after, one shilling out of pocket. But some other person had become security to his attorney for him. What, then, are we to think of these men of business, of these friends of Mr. Hastings, who, when he is possessed of nothing, are contented to become responsible for thirty thousand pounds, (was it thirty thousand pounds out of the bullock contracts?)--responsible, I say, for this sum, in order to maintain this suit previous to its actual commencement, and who consequently must be so engaged for every article of expense that has followed from that time to this?

Thus much we have thought it necessary to say upon this part of the recriminatory charge of delay. With respect to the delay in general, we are at present under an account to our constituents upon that subject. To them we shall give it. We shall not give any further account of it to your Lordships. The means belong to us as well as to you of removing these charges. Your Lordships may inquire upon oath, as we have done in our committee, into all the circumstances of these allegations. I hope your Lordships will do so, and will give the Commons an opportunity of attending and assisting at this most momentous and important inquiry.

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The next recriminatory charge made upon us by the prisoner is, that, merely to throw an odium upon him, we have brought forward a great deal of irrelevant matter, which could not be proved regularly in the course of examination at your bar, and particularly in the opening speech, which I had the honor of making on the subject.

Your Lordships know very well that we stated in our charge that great abuses had prevailed in India, that the Company had entered into covenants with their servants respecting those abuses, that an act of Parliament was made to prevent their recurrence, and that Mr. Hastings still continued in their practice. Now, my Lords, having stated this, nothing could be more regular, more proper, and more pertinent, than for us to justify both the covenants required by the Company and the act made to prevent the abuses which existed in India. We therefore went through those abuses; we stated them, and were ready to prove every material word and article in them. Whether they were personally relevant or irrelevant to the prisoner we cared nothing. We were to make out from the records of the House (which records I can produce, whenever I am called upon for them) all these articles of abuse and grievance; and we have stated these abuses as the grounds of the Company's provisional covenants with its servants, and of the act of Parliament. We have stated them under two heads, violence and corruption: for these crimes will be found, my Lords, in almost every transaction with the native powers; and the prisoner is directly or indirectly involved in every part of them. If it be still objected, that these crimes are irrelevant to the charge, we answer, that we did not introduce them as matter of charge. We say they were not irrelevant to the proof of the preamble of our charge, which preamble is perfectly relevant in all its parts. That the matters stated in it are perfectly true we vouch the House of Commons, we vouch the very persons themselves who were concerned in the transactions. When Arabic authors are quoted, and Oriental tales told about flashes of lightning and three seals, we quote the very parties themselves giving this account of their own conduct to a committee of the House of Commons.

Your Lordships will remember that a most reverend prelate, who cannot be named without every mark of respect and attention, conveyed a petition to your Lordships from a gentleman concerned in one of those narratives. Upon your Lordships' table that petition still lies. For the production of this narrative we are not answerable to this House; your Lordships could not make us answerable to him; but we are answerable to our own House, we are answerable to our own honor, we are answerable to all the Commons of Great Britain for whatever we have asserted in their name. Accordingly, General Burgoyne, then a member of this Committee of Managers, and myself, went down into the House of Commons; we there restated the whole affair; we desired that an inquiry should be made into it, at the request of the parties concerned. But, my Lords, they have never asked for inquiry from that day to this. Whenever he or they who are criminated (not by us, but in this volume of Reports that is in my hand) desire it, the House will give them all possible satisfaction upon the subject.

A similar complaint was made to the House of Commons by the prisoner, that matters irrelevant to the charge were brought up hither. Was it not open to him, and has he had no friends in the House of Commons, to call upon the House, during the whole period of this proceeding, to examine into the particulars adduced in justification of the preamble of the charge against him, in justification of the covenants of the Company, in justification of the act of Parliament? It was in his power to do it; it is in his power still; and if it be brought before that tribunal, to which I and my fellow Managers are alone accountable, we will lay before that tribunal such matters as will sufficiently justify our mode of proceeding, and the resolution of the House of Commons. I will not, therefore, enter into the particulars (because they cannot be entered into by your Lordships) any further than to say, that, if we had ever been called upon to prove the allegations which we have made, not in the nature of a charge, but as bound in duty to this Court, and in justice to ourselves, we should have been ready to enter into proof. We offered to do so, and we now repeat the offer.

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There was another complaint in the prisoner's petition, which did not apply to the words of the preamble, but to an allegation in the charge concerning abuses in the revenue, and the ill consequences which arose from them. I allude to those shocking transactions, which nobody can mention without horror, in Rampore and Dinagepore, during the government of Mr. Hastings, and which we attempted to bring home to him. What did he do in this case? Did he endeavor to meet these charges fairly, as he might have done? No, my Lords: what he said merely amounted to this:--"Examination into these charges would vindicate my reputation before the world; but I, who am the guardian of my own honor and my own interests, choose to avail myself of the rules and orders of this House, and I will not suffer you to enter upon that examination."

My Lords, we admit, you are the interpreters of your own rules and orders. We likewise admit that our own honor may be affected by the character of the evidence which we produce to you. But, my Lords, they who withhold their defence, who suffer themselves, as they say, to be cruelly criminated by unjust accusation, and yet will not permit the evidence of their guilt or innocence to be produced, are themselves the causes of the irrelevancy of all these matters. It cannot justly be charged on us; for we have never offered any matter here which we did not declare our readiness upon the spot to prove. Your Lordships did not think fit to receive that proof. We do not now censure your Lordships for your determination: that is not the business of this day. We refer to your determination for the purpose of showing the falsehood of the imputation which the prisoner has cast upon us, of having oppressed him by delay and irrelevant matter. We refer to it in order to show that the oppression rests with himself, that it is all his own.

Well, but Mr. Hastings complained also to the House of Commons. Has he pursued the complaint? No, he has not; and yet this prisoner, and these gentlemen, his learned counsel, have dared to reiterate their complaints of us at your Lordships' bar, while we have always been, and still are, ready to prove both the atrocious nature of the facts, and that they are referable to the prisoner at your bar. To this, as I have said before, the prisoner has objected; this we are not permitted to do by your Lordships: and therefore, without presuming to blame your determination, I repeat, that we throw the blame directly upon himself, when he complains that his private character suffers without the means of defence, since he objects to the use of means of defence which are at his disposal.

Having gone through this part of the prisoner's recriminatory charge, I shall close my observations on his demeanor, and defer my remarks on his complaint of our ingratitude until we come to consider his set-off of services.

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The next subject for your Lordships' consideration is the principle of the prisoner's defence. And here we must observe, that, either by confession or conviction, we are possessed of the facts, and perfectly agreed upon the matter at issue between us. In taking a view of the laws by which you are to judge, I shall beg leave to state to you upon what principles of law the House of Commons has criminated him, and upon what principles of law, or pretended law, he justifies himself: for these are the matters at issue between us; the matters of fact, as I have just said, being determined either by confession on his part or by proof on ours.

My Lords, we acknowledge that Mr. Hastings was invested with discretionary power; but we assert that he was bound to use that power according to the established rules of political morality, humanity, and equity. In all questions relating to foreign powers he was bound to act under the Law of Nature and under the Law of Nations, as it is recognized by the wisest authorities in public jurisprudence; in his relation to this country he was bound to act according to the laws and statutes of Great Britain, either in their letter or in their spirit; and we affirm, that in his relation to the people of India he was bound to act according to the largest and most liberal construction of their laws, rights, usages, institutions, and good customs; and we furthermore assert, that he was under an express obligation to yield implicit obedience to the Court of Directors. It is upon these rules and principles the Commons contend that Mr. Hastings ought to have regulated his government; and not only Mr. Hastings, but all other governors. It is upon these rules that he is responsible; and upon these rules, and these rules only, your Lordships are to judge.

My Lords, long before the Committee had resolved upon this impeachment, we had come, as I have told your Lordships, to forty-five resolutions, every one criminatory of this man, every one of them bottomed upon the principles which I have stated. We never will nor can we abandon them; and we therefore do not supplicate your Lordships upon this head, but claim and demand of right, that you will judge him upon those principles, and upon no other. If once they are evaded, you can have no rule for your judgment but your caprices and partialities.

Having thus stated the principles upon which the Commons hold him and all governors responsible, and upon which we have grounded our impeachment, and which must be the grounds of your judgment, (and your Lordships will not suffer any other ground to be mentioned to you,) we will now tell you what are the grounds of his defence.

He first asserts, that he was possessed of an arbitrary and despotic power, restrained by no laws but his own will. He next says, that "the rights of the people he governed in India are nothing, and that the rights of the government are everything." The people, he asserts, have no liberty, no laws, no inheritance, no fixed property, no descendable estate, no subordinations in society, no sense of honor or of shame, and that they are only affected by punishment so far as punishment is a corporal infliction, being totally insensible of any difference between the punishment of man and beast. These are the principles of his Indian government, which Mr. Hastings has avowed in their full extent. Whenever precedents are required, he cites and follows the example of avowed tyrants, of Aliverdy Khan, Cossim Ali Khan, and Sujah Dowlah. With an avowal of these principles he was pleased first to entertain the House of Commons, the active assertors and conservators of the rights, liberties, and laws of his country; and then to insist upon them more largely and in a fuller detail before this awful tribunal, the passive judicial conservator of the same great interests. He has brought out these blasphemous doctrines in this great temple of justice, consecrated to law and equity for a long series of ages. He has brought them forth in Westminster Hall, in presence of all the Judges of the land, who are to execute the law, and of the House of Lords, who are bound as its guardians not to suffer the words "arbitrary power" to be mentioned before them. For I am not again to tell your Lordships, that arbitrary power is treason in the law,--that to mention it with law is to commit a contradiction in terms. They cannot exist in concert; they cannot hold together for a moment.

Let us now hear what the prisoner says. "The sovereignty which they [the subahdars, or viceroys of the Mogul empire] assumed, it fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such power, or powers of that nature, were delegated to me by any provisions of any act of Parliament I confess myself too little of a lawyer to pronounce. I only know that the acceptance of the sovereignty of Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any act of Parliament; and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the Council, the Company is clearly and indisputably seized of that sovereignty. If, therefore, the sovereignty of Benares, as ceded to us by the Vizier, have any rights whatever annexed to it, and be not a mere empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as are held, countenanced, and established by the law, custom, and usage of the Mogul empire, and not by the provisions of any British act of Parliament hitherto enacted. Those rights, and none other, I have been the involuntary instrument of enforcing. And if any future act of Parliament shall positively or by implication tend to annihilate those very rights, or their exertion, as I have exerted them, I much fear that the boasted sovereignty of Benares, which was held up as an acquisition almost obtruded on the Company against my consent and opinion, (for I acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and inconveniences in its future exercise,)--I fear, I say, that this sovereignty will be found a burden instead of a benefit, a heavy clog rather than a precious gem to its present possessors: I mean, unless the whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made an uniform compact body by one grand and systematic arrangement,--such an arrangement as shall do away all the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together in one unnatural and discordant mass. Every part of Hindostan has been constantly exposed to these and similar disadvantages ever since the Mahometan conquests. The Hindoos, who never incorporated with their conquerors, were kept in order only by the strong hand of power. The constant necessity of similar exertions would increase at once their energy and extent. So that rebellion itself is the parent and promoter of despotism. Sovereignty in India implies nothing else. For I know not how we can form an estimate of its powers, but from its visible effects; and those are everywhere the same from Cabool to Assam. The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power. To all this I strongly alluded in the minutes I delivered in Council, when the treaty with the new Vizier was on foot in 1775; and I wished to make Cheyt Sing independent, because in India dependence included a thousand evils, many of which I enumerated at that time, and they are entered in the ninth clause of the first section of this charge. I knew the powers with which an Indian sovereignty is armed, and the dangers to which tributaries are exposed. I knew, that, from the history of Asia, and from the very nature of mankind, the subjects of a despotic empire are always vigilant for the moment to rebel, and the sovereign is ever jealous of rebellious intentions. A zemindar is an Indian subject, and as such exposed to the common lot of his fellows. The mean and depraved state of a mere zemindar is therefore this very dependence above mentioned on a despotic government, this very proneness to shake off his allegiance, and this very exposure to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, which are consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments. Bulwant Sing, if he had been, and Cheyt Sing, as long as he was, a zemindar, stood exactly in this mean and depraved state by the constitution of his country. I did not make it for him, but would have secured him from it. Those who made him a zemindar entailed upon him the consequences of so mean and depraved a tenure. Aliverdy Khan and Cossim Ali fined all their zemindars on the necessities of war, and on every pretence either of court necessity or court extravagance."

I beseech your Lordships seriously to look upon the whole nature of the principles upon which the prisoner defends himself. He appeals to the custom and usage of the Mogul empire; and the constitution of that empire is, he says, arbitrary power. He says, that he does not know whether any act of Parliament bound him not to exercise this arbitrary power, and that, if any such act should in future be made, it would be mischievous and ruinous to our empire in India. Thus he has at once repealed all preceding acts, he has annulled by prospect every future act you can make; and it is not in the power of the Parliament of Great Britain, without ruining the empire, to hinder his exercising this despotic authority. All Asia is by him disfranchised at a stroke. Its inhabitants have no rights, no laws, no liberties; their state is mean and depraved; they may be fined for any purpose of court extravagance or prodigality,--or as Cheyt Sing was fined by him, not only upon every war, but upon every pretence of war.

This is the account he gives of his power, and of the people subject to the British government in India. We deny that the act of Parliament gave him any such power; we deny that the India Company gave him any such power, or that they had ever any such power to give; we even deny that there exists in all the human race a power to make the government of any state dependent upon individual will. We disclaim, we reject all such doctrines with disdain and indignation; and we have brought them up to your Lordships to be tried at your bar.

What must be the condition of the people of India, governed, as they have been, by persons who maintain these principles as maxims of government, and not as occasional deviations caused by the irregular will of man,--principles by which the whole system of society is to be controlled, not by law, reason, or justice, but by the will of one man?

Your Lordships will remark, that not only the whole of the laws, rights, and usages, but the very being of the people, are exposed to ruin: for Mr. Hastings says, that the people may be fined, that they may be exiled, that they may be imprisoned, and that even their lives are dependent upon the mere will of their foreign master; and that he, the Company's Governor, exercised that will under the authority of this country. Remark, my Lords, his application of this doctrine. "I would," he says, "have kept Cheyt Sing from the consequences of this dependence, by making him independent, and not in any manner subjecting him to our government. The moment he came into a state of dependence upon the British government, all these evils attached upon him.--It is," he adds, "disagreeable to me to exert such powers; but I know they must be exerted; and I declare there is no security from this arbitrary power, but by having nothing to do with the British government."

My Lords, the House of Commons has already well considered what may be our future moral and political condition, when the persons who come from that school of pride, insolence, corruption, and tyranny are more intimately mixed up with us of purer morals. Nothing but contamination can be the result, nothing but corruption can exist in this country, unless we expunge this doctrine out of the very hearts and souls of the people. It is not to the gang of plunderers and robbers of which I say this man is at the head, that we are only, or indeed principally, to look. Every man in Great Britain will be contaminated and must be corrupted, if you let loose among us whole legions of men, generation after generation, tainted with these abominable vices, and avowing these detestable principles. It is, therefore, to preserve the integrity and honor of the Commons of Great Britain, that we have brought this man to your Lordships' bar.

When these matters were first explained to your Lordships, and strongly enforced by abilities greater than I can exert, there was something like compunction shown by the prisoner: but he took the most strange mode to cover his guilt. Upon the cross-examination of Major Scott, he discovered all the engines of this Indian corruption. Mr. Hastings got that witness to swear that this defence of his, from which the passages I have read to your Lordships are extracted, was not his, but that it was the work of his whole Council, composed of Mr. Middleton, Mr. Shore, Mr. Halhed, Mr. Baber,--the whole body of his Indian Cabinet Council; that this was their work, and not his; and that he disclaimed it, and therefore that it would be wrong to press it upon him. Good God! my Lords, what shall we say in this stage of the business? The prisoner put in an elaborate defence: he now disclaims that defence. He told us that it was of his own writing, that he had been able to compose it in five days; and he now gets five persons to contradict his own assertions, and to disprove on oath his most solemn declarations.

My Lords, this business appears still more alarming, when we find not only Mr. Hastings, but his whole Council, engaged in it. I pray your Lordships to observe, that Mr. Halhed, a person concerned with Mr. Hastings in compiling a code of Gentoo laws, is now found to be one of the persons to whom this very defence is attributed which contains such detestable and abominable doctrines. But are we to consider the contents of this paper as the defence of the prisoner or not? Will any one say, that, when an answer is sworn to in Chancery, when an answer is given here to an impeachment of the Commons, or when a plea is made to an indictment, that it is drawn by the defendant's counsel, and therefore is not his? Did we not all hear him read this defence in part at our bar?--did we not see him hand it to his secretary to have it read by his son?--did he not then hear it read from end to end?--did not he himself desire it to be printed, (for it was no act of ours,) and did he not superintend and revise the press?--and has any breath but his own breathed upon it? No, my Lords, the whole composition is his, by writing or adoption; and never, till he found it pressed him in this House, never, till your Lordships began to entertain the same abhorrence of it that we did, did he disclaim it.