The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12). Edmund Burke

had the confidence in him that they had in the meanest of his predecessors."

      If you sanction this practice, if, after all you have exacted from the people by your taxes and public imposts, you are to let loose your servants upon them, to extort by bribery and peculation what they can from them, for the purpose of applying it to the public service only whenever they please, this shocking consequence will follow from it. If your Governor is discovered in taking a bribe, he will say, "What is that to you? mind your business; I intend it for the public service." The man who dares to accuse him loses the favor of the Governor-General and the India Company. They will say, "The Governor has been doing a meritorious action, extorting bribes for our benefit, and you have the impudence to think of prosecuting him." So that the moment the bribe is detected, it is instantly turned into a merit: and we shall prove that this is the case with Mr. Hastings, whenever a bribe has been discovered.

      I am now to inform your Lordships, that, when he made these great discoveries to the Court of Directors, he never tells them who gave him the money, upon what occasion he received it, by what hands, or to what purposes he applied it.

      When he can himself give no account of his motives, and even declares that he cannot assign any cause, I am authorized and required to find motives for him,—corrupt motives for a corrupt act. There is no one capital act of his administration that did not strongly imply corruption. When a man is known to be free from all imputation of taking money, and it becomes an established part of his character, the errors or even crimes of his administration ought to be, and are in general, traced to other sources. You know it is a maxim. But once convict a man of bribery in any instance, and once by direct evidence, and you are furnished with a rule of irresistible presumption that every other irregular act by which unlawful gain may arise is done upon the same corrupt motive. Semel malus præsumitur semper malus. As for good acts candor, charity, justice oblige me not to assign evil motives, unless they serve some scandalous purpose or terminate in some manifest evil end, so justice, reason, and common sense compel me to suppose that wicked acts have been done upon motives correspondent to their nature: otherwise I reverse all the principles of judgment which can guide the human mind, and accept even the symptoms, the marks and criteria of guilt, as presumptions of innocence. One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

      His conduct upon these occasions may be thought irrational. But, thank God, guilt was never a rational thing: it distorts all the faculties of the mind; it perverts them; it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason; it puts him into confusion. He has recourse to such miserable and absurd expedients for covering his guilt as all those who are used to sit in the seat of judgment know have been the cause of detection of half the villanies in the world. To argue that these could not be his reasons, because they were not wise, sound, and substantial, would be to suppose, what is not true, that bad men were always discreet and able. But I can very well from the circumstances discover motives which may affect a giddy, superficial, shattered, guilty, anxious, restless mind, full of the weak resources of fraud, craft, and intrigue, that might induce him to make these discoveries, and to make them in the manner he has done. Not rational, and well-fitted for their purposes, I am very ready to admit. For God forbid that guilt should ever leave a man the free, undisturbed use of his faculties! For as guilt never rose from a true use of our rational faculties, so it is very frequently subversive of them. God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices! No: it takes the lead, and is never found where justice does not accompany it; and if ever it is attempted to bring it into the service of the vices, it immediately subverts their cause. It tends to their discovery, and, I hope and trust, finally to their utter ruin and destruction.

      In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and contradictory. Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts utterly irreconcilable with each other. He is asked, "How came you to take bonds for this money, if it was not your own? How came you to vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company's records, and to state yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their debtor?" His answer was, "I really cannot tell; I have forgot my reasons; the distance of time is so great," (namely, a time of about two years, or not so long,) "I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps I had this motive, perhaps I had another," (but what is the most curious,) "perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect." You shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions. "For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of these sums and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,—namely, that I either chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. It will not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, follow them."

      My Lords, you see, as to any direct explanation, that he fairly gives it up: he has used artifice and stratagem, which he knows will not do; and at last attempts to cover the treachery of his conduct by the treachery of his memory. Frequent applications were made to Mr. Hastings upon this article from the Company,—gentle hints, gemitus columbæ,—rather, little amorous complaints that he was not more open and communicative; but all these gentle insinuations were never able to draw from him any further account till he came to England. When he came here, he left not only his memory, but all his notes and references, behind in India. When in India the Company could get no account of them, because he himself was not in England; and when he was in England, they could get no account, because his papers were in India. He then sends over to Mr. Larkins to give that account of his affairs which he was not able to give himself. Observe, here is a man taking money privately, corruptly, and which was to be sanctified by the future application of it, taking false securities to cover it, and who, when called upon to tell whom he got the money from, for what ends, and on what occasion, neither will tell in India nor can tell in England, but sends for such an account as he has thought proper to furnish.

      I am now to bring before you an account of what I think much the most serious part of the effects of his system of bribery, corruption, and peculation. My Lords, I am to state to you the astonishing and almost incredible means he made use of to lay all the country under contribution, to bring the whole into such dejection as should put his bribes out of the way of discovery. Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.

      I have already shown, amongst the mass of his corruptions, that he let the whole of the lands to farm to the banians; next, that he sold the whole Mahomedan government of that country to a woman. This was bold enough, one should think; but without entering into the circumstances of the revenue change in 1772, I am to tell your Lordships that he had appointed six Provincial Councils, each consisting of many members, who had the ordinary administration of civil justice in that country, and the whole business of the collection of the revenues.

      These Provincial Councils accounted to the Governor-General and Council, who in the revenue department had the whole management, control, and regulation of the revenue. Mr. Hastings did in several papers to the Court of Directors declare, that the establishment of these Provincial Councils, which at first he stated only as experimental, had proved useful in the experiment,—and on that use, and upon that experiment, he had sent even the plan of an act of Parliament, to have it confirmed with the last and most sacred authority of this country. The Court of Directors desired, that, if he thought any other method more proper, he would send it to them for their approbation.

      Thus the whole face of the British government, the whole of its order and constitution, remained from 1772 to 1781. He had got rid, some time before this period, by death, of General Clavering,