The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)

Without entering into all the practices by which he has attempted to maim the Company's records, I shall state one more to your Lordships,—that is, his avowed appointment of spies and under-agents, who shall carry on the real state business, while there are public and ostensible agents who are not in the secret. The correspondence of those private agents he holds in his own hands, communicates as he thinks proper, but most commonly withholds. There remains nothing for the Directors but the shell and husk of a dry, formal, official correspondence, which neither means anything nor was intended to mean anything.

These are some of the methods by which he has defeated the purposes of the excellent institution of a recorded administration. But there are cases to be brought before this court in which he has laid the axe at once to the root,—which was, by delegating out of his own hands a great department of the powers of the Company, which he was himself bound to execute, to a board which was not bound to record their deliberations with the same strictness as he himself was bound. He appointed of his own usurped authority a board for the administration of the revenue, the members of which were expressly dispensed from recording their dissents, until they chose it; and in that office, as in a great gulf, a most important part of the Company's transactions has been buried.

Notwithstanding his unwearied pains in the work of spoliation, some precious fragments are left, which we ought infinitely to value,—by which we may learn, and lament, the loss of what he has destroyed. If it were not for those inestimable fragments and wrecks of the recorded government which have been saved from the destruction which Mr. Hastings intended for them all, the most shameful enormities that have ever disgraced a government or harassed a people would only be known in this country by secret whispers and unauthenticated anecdotes; the disgracer's of government, the vexers and afflicters of mankind, instead of being brought before an awful public tribunal, might have been honored with the highest distinctions and rewards their country has to bestow; and sordid bribery, base peculation, iron-handed extortion, fierce, unrelenting tyranny, might themselves have been invested with those sacred robes of justice before which this day they have cause to tremble.

Mr. Hastings, sensible of what he suffers from this register of acts and opinions, has endeavored to discredit and ruin what remains of it. He refuses, in his defence to the House of Commons, in letters to the Court of Directors, in various writings and declarations, he refuses to be tried by his own recorded declarations; he refuses to be bound by his own opinions, delivered under his own hand. He knows that he and the record cannot exist together. He knows that what remains of the written constitution which he has not destroyed is enough to destroy him. He claims a privilege of systematic inconstancy, a privilege of prevarication, a privilege of contradiction,—a privilege of not only changing his conduct, but the principles of his conduct, whenever it suits his occasions. But I hope your Lordships will show the destroyers of that wise constitution, and the destroyers of those records which are to be the securities against malversation in office, the discoverers and avengers of it, that whoever destroys the discoverer establishes the iniquity; that, therefore, your Lordships will bind him to his own declarations, given on record under his own hand; that you will say to this unfaithful servant of the Company, what was said to another unfaithful person upon a far less occasion by a far greater authority, "Out of thy own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant."

Having gone through what I have been instructed might be necessary to state to your Lordships concerning the Company's constitution, (I mean the real inside, and not the shell of its constitution,)—having stated the abuses that existed in it,—having stated how Mr. Hastings endeavored to perpetuate and to increase and to profit of the abuse, and how he has systematically endeavored to destroy, and has in some instances in fact destroyed, many things truly excellent in that constitution,—if I have not wasted your time in explanation of matters that you are already well acquainted with, I shall next beg leave to state to you the abuse in some particulars of the other part of the public authority which the Company acquired over the natives of India, in virtue of the royal charter of the present Mogul emperor, in the year 1766 [1765?].

My Lords, that you may the better judge of the abuse Mr. Hastings has made of the powers vested in him, it will be expedient to consider a little who the people are to whose prejudice he has abused these powers. I shall explain this point with as much brevity as is consistent with the distinctness with which I mean to bring the whole before your Lordships; and I beg to observe to you that this previous discourse, rather explanatory than accusatorial, (if I may use the expression,) is meant rather to elucidate the nature of the matter to come before you in regular charges than as proof of the charges themselves.

I know that a good deal of latitude is allowed to advocates, when opening a cause in a private court, to indulge themselves in their narratives leading to the charges they intend to bring. They are not always called to the strictest account for such prefatory matter, because the court, when it comes to judge, sifts and distinguishes it from the points to be strictly proved, and on whose merits the cause relies. But I wish your Lordships to know, that, with the high opinion I have of your gravity, (and it is impossible for a man to conceive a higher,) and sensible of the weight of those I represent at this place, namely, the Commons of Great Britain, I should be sorry that any one substantial fact, even in this explanatory opening, or even the color of the fact, should be alleged, which, when called upon, I should not be ready to make good to you by proof,—I mean, by proof adapted to its nature: public opinion, by evidence of public opinion; by record, that to which record is applicable; by oral testimony, things to which oral testimony alone can be produced; and, last of all, that which is matter of historic proof, by historic evidence. This I hope to do with the usual allowance to errors and mistakes, which is the claim of human infirmity.

Then, my Lords, two distinct people inhabit India. Two sorts of people inhabit the same country, as totally distinct from each other, in characters, lives, opinions, prejudices, and manners, as the inhabitants of countries most remote from each other. For both of these descriptions Mr. Hastings was bound to provide equally, agreeable to the terms of the charter which the Company received from the lawful governing power of that country: a charter received at its own solicitation; a charter not forced upon us by a superior power, but given at the immediate solicitation of the principal servants belonging to the Company; a charter solemnly accepted by the Company, and by them, I am very sorry to say, little regarded,—or, at least, little regarded by their principal servants.

My Lords, the first description of people who are subjected virtually to the British empire through those mediums which I have described to you are the original inhabitants of Hindostan, who have in all time, and beyond all the eras which we use, (I mean always the two grand eras excepted,) been the aboriginal inhabitants and proprietors of that country,—with manners, religion, customs, and usages appropriated to themselves, and little resembling those of the rest of mankind. This description of men is commonly called Gentoos. The system and principle of that government is locality. Their laws, their manners, their religion are all local.

Their legislator, whoever he was, (for who he was is a matter lost in the mists of a most obscure antiquity,) had it as a great leading principle of his policy to connect the people with their soil. Accordingly, by one of those anomalies which a larger acquaintance with our species daily discovers, and which perhaps an attentive reflection might explain in the nature of man, this aboriginal people of India,—who are the softest in their manners of any of our race, approaching almost to feminine tenderness,—who are formed constitutionally benevolent, and, in many particulars, made to fill a larger circle of benevolence than our morals take in,—who extend their good-will to the whole animal creation,—these people are, of all nations, the most unalliable to any other part of mankind. They cannot, the highest orders of them, at least, cannot, come into contact with any other. That bond which is one of the chief instruments of society, and which, supporting the individual, connects the species, can have no existence with them: I mean the convivial bond. That race can be held to no other by that great link of life. No Hindoo can mix at meals even with those on whom he depends for the meat he eats. This circumstance renders it difficult for us to enter with due sympathy into their concerns, or for them to enter into ours, even when we meet on the same ground. But there are other circumstances which render our intercourse, in our mutual relation, very full of difficulty. The sea is between us. The mass of that element, which, by appearing to disconnect, unites mankind, is to them a forbidden road. It is a great gulf fixed between you and them,—not so much that elementary gulf, but that gulf which manners, opinions, and laws have radicated in the very nature of the people. None of their high castes, without great danger to his situation, religion, rank, and estimation, can ever pass the sea; and this forbids, forever, all direct communication between that country and this. That material and affecting circumstance, my Lords, makes it ten times more necessary, since they cannot come to us, to keep a strict eye upon all persons who go to them. It imposes upon us a stricter duty to guard with a firm and powerful vigilance those whose principles of conscience weaken their principles of self-defence. If we undertake to govern the inhabitants of such a country, we must govern them upon their own principles and maxims, and not upon ours. We must not think to force them into the narrow circle of our ideas; we must extend ours to take in their system of opinions and rites, and the necessities which result from both: all change on their part is absolutely impracticable. We have more versatility of character and manners, and it is we who must conform. We know what the empire of opinion is in human nature. I had almost said that the law of opinion was human nature itself. It is, however, the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind; and more of the happiness and unhappiness of mankind resides in that inward principle than in all external circumstances put together. But if such is the empire of opinion even amongst us, it has a pure, unrestrained, complete, and despotic power amongst them. The variety of balanced opinions in our minds weakens the force of each: for in Europe, sometimes, the laws of religion differ from the laws of the land; sometimes the laws of the land differ from our laws of honor; our laws of honor are full of caprice, differing from those other laws, and sometimes differing from themselves: but there the laws of religion, the laws of the land, and the laws of honor are all united and consolidated in one invariable system, and bind men by eternal and indissoluble bonds to the rules of what, amongst them, is called his caste.

It may be necessary just to state to your Lordships what a caste is. The Gentoo people, from the oldest time, have been distributed into various orders, all of them hereditary: these family orders are called castes; these castes are the fundamental part of the constitution of the Gentoo commonwealth, both in their church and in their state.

Your Lordships are born to hereditary honors in the chief of your houses; the rest mix with the people. With the Gentoos, they who are born noble can never fall into any second rank. They are divided into four orders,—the Brahmins, the Chittery, the Bice, and the Soodur, with many subdivisions in each. An eternal barrier is placed between them. The higher cannot pass into the lower; the lower cannot rise into the higher. They have all their appropriated rank, place, and situation, and their appropriated religion too, which is essentially different in its rites and ceremonies, sometimes in its object, in each of those castes. A man who is born in the highest caste, which at once unites what would be tantamount in this country to the dignity of the peerage and the ennobled sanctity of the episcopal character,—the Brahmin, who sustains these characters, if he loses his caste, does not fall into an inferior order, the Chittery, the Bice, or the Soodur, but he is thrown at once out of all ranks of society. He is precipitated from the proudest elevation of respect and honor to a bottomless abyss of contempt,—from glory to infamy,—from purity to pollution,—from sanctity to profanation. No honest occupation is open to him; his children are no longer his children; their parent loses that name; the conjugal bond is dissolved. Few survive this most terrible of all calamities. To speak to an Indian of his caste is to speak to him of his all.

But the rule of caste has, with them, given one power more to fortune than the manners of any other nation were ever known to do. For it is singular, the caste may be lost, not only by certain voluntary crimes, but by certain involuntary sufferings, disgraces, and pollutions, that are utterly out of their power to prevent. Those who have patiently submitted to imprisonment,—those who have not flinched from the scourge,—those who have been as unmoved as marble under torture,—those who have laughed at the menaces of death itself,—have instantly given way, when it has been attempted to subject them to any of those pollutions by which they lose caste. To this caste they are bound by all laws of all descriptions, human and divine; and inveterate usage has radicated it in them to a depth and with an adhesion with which no other known prejudice has been known to exist. Tyranny is therefore armed against them with a greater variety of weapons than are found in its ordinary stores.

This, amongst a thousand other considerations, speaks to us in very authoritative language with what care and circumspection we ought to handle people so delicate. In the course of this trial your Lordships will see with horror the use which Mr. Hastings made, through several of his wicked and abominable instruments, chosen from the natives themselves, of these superadded means of oppression. I shall prove, in the course of this trial, that he has put his own menial domestic servant,—a wretch totally dependent,—a wretch grossly ignorant,—the common instrument of his bribery and peculation,—he has enthroned him, I say, on the first seat of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which was to decide upon the castes of all those people, including their rank, their family, their honor, and their happiness here, and, in their judgment, their salvation hereafter. Under the awe of this power, no man dared to breathe a murmur against his tyranny. Fortified in this security, he says, "Who complains of me!"—"No, none of us dare complain of you," says the trembling Gentoo. "No! your menial servant has my caste in his power."—I shall not trouble your Lordships with mentioning others; it was enough that Cantoo Baboo, and Ginga Govind Sing, names to which your Lordships are to be familiarized hereafter,—it is enough that those persons had the caste and character of all the people of Bengal in their hands. Through them he has taken effectual security against all complaint. Your Lordships will hence discern how very necessary it is become that some other personage should intervene, should take upon him their representation, and by his freedom and his power should supply the defects arising from their servitude and their impotence. The Commons of Great Britain charge themselves with this character.

My Lords, these Gentoo people are the original people of Hindostan. They are still, beyond comparison, the most numerous. Faults this nation may have; but God forbid we should pass judgment upon people who framed their laws and institutions prior to our insect origin of yesterday! With all the faults of their nature and errors of their institutions, their institutions, which act so powerfully on their natures, have two material characteristics which entitle them to respect: first, great force and stability; and next, excellent moral and civil effects.

Their stability has been proved by their holding on an uniform tenor for a duration commensurate to all the empires with which history has made us acquainted; and they still exist in a green old age, with all the reverence of antiquity, and with all the passion that people have to novelty and change. They have stood firm on their ancient base; they have cast their roots deep in their native soil,—perhaps because they have never spread them anywhere else than in their native soil. Their blood, their opinions, and the soil of their country make one consistent piece, admitting no mixture, no adulteration, no improvement: accordingly, their religion has made no converts, their dominion has made no conquests; but in proportion as their laws and opinions were concentred within themselves, and hindered from spreading abroad, they have doubled their force at home. They have existed in spite of Mahomedan and Portuguese bigotry,—in spite of Tartarian and Arabian tyranny,—in spite of all the fury of successive foreign conquest,—in spite of a more formidable foe, the avarice of the English dominion.

I have spoken now, my Lords, of what their principles are, their laws and religious institutions, in point of force and stability; I have given instances of their force in the very circumstance in which all the institutions of mankind in other respects show their weakness. They have existed, when the country has been otherwise subdued. This alone furnishes full proof that there must be some powerful influence resulting from them beyond all our little fashionable theories upon such subjects.

The second consideration in the Gentoo institutions is their beneficial effects, moral and civil. The policy, civil or religious, or, as theirs is, composed of both, that makes a people happy and a state flourishing, (putting further and higher considerations out of the way, which are not now before us,) must undoubtedly, so far as human considerations prevail, be a policy wisely conceived in any scheme of government. It is confirmed by all observation, that, where the Hindoo religion has been established, that country has been flourishing. We have seen some patterns remaining to this day. The very country which is to be the subject of your Lordships' judicial inquiry is an instance, by an entire change of government, of the different effects resulting from the rapacity of a foreign hand, and the paternal, lenient, protecting arm of a native government, formed on the long connection of prejudice and power. I shall give you its state under the Hindoo government from a book written by a very old servant of the Company, whose authority is of the greater weight, as the very destruction of all this scheme of government is the great object of the author.

The author, Mr. Holwell, divides the country of Bengal into its different provinces. He supposes what they then paid to the supreme government; he supposes what the country is capable of yielding; and his project is, to change entirely the application of the revenues of the country, and to secure the whole into the hands of government. In enumerating these provinces, at last he comes to the province of Burdwan.

"In truth," (says this author,) "it would be almost cruelty to molest this happy people; for in this district are the only vestiges of the beauty, purity, piety, regularity, equity, and strictness of the ancient Hindostan government. Here the property as well as the liberty of the people are inviolate. Here no robberies are heard of, either public or private. The traveller, either with or without merchandise, becomes the immediate care of the government, which allots him guards, without any expense, to conduct him from stage to stage; and these are accountable for the safety and accommodation of his person and effects. At the end of the first stage he is delivered over, with certain benevolent formalities, to the guards of the next, who, after interrogating the traveller as to the usage he had received in his journey, dismiss the first guard with a written certificate of their behavior, and a receipt for the traveller and his effects; which certificate and receipt are returnable to the commanding officer of the first stage, who registers the same, and regularly reports it to the rajah.

"In this form the traveller is passed through the country; and if he only passes, he is not suffered to be at any expense for food, accommodation, or carriage for his merchandise or baggage: but it is otherwise, if he is permitted to make any residence in one place above three days, unless occasioned by sickness, or any unavoidable accident. If anything is lost in this district,—for instance, a bag of money or other valuables,—the person who finds it hangs it upon the next tree, and gives notice to the nearest chowkey, or place of guard, the officer of which orders immediate publication of the same by beat of tomtom, or drum."

These, my Lords, are the effects universally produced by the Hindoo polity throughout that vast region, before it was distorted and put out of frame by the barbarism of foreign conquests. Some choice, reserved spots continued to flourish under it to the year 1756. Some remained till Mr. Hastings obtained the means of utterly defacing them. Such was the prospect of Benares under the happy government of Bulwant Sing. Such was the happy state of the same Benares in the happy days of Cheyt Sing, until, in the year 1781, Mr. Hastings introduced his reform into that country.

Having stated the general outline of the manners of the original people of Hindostan, having stated the general principles of their policy, which either prohibit connection, or oblige us to a connection very different from what we have hitherto used towards them, I shall leave it to your Lordships' judgment whether you will suffer such fair monuments of wisdom and benevolence to be defaced by the rapacity of your governors. I hope I have not gone out of my way to bring before you any circumstance relative to the Gentoo religion and manners, further than as they relate to the spirit of our government over them; for though there never was such food for the curiosity of the human mind as is found in the manners of this people, I pass it totally over.

I wish to divide this preliminary view into six periods; and your Lordships will consider that of the Hindoos, which I have now mentioned, as the first era.

The second era is an era of great misfortune to that country, and to the world in general: I mean, the time of the prophet Mahomed. The enthusiasm which animated his first followers, the despotic power which religion obtained through that enthusiasm, and the advantages derived from both over the enervated great empires, and broken, disunited, lesser governments of the world, extended the influence of that proud and domineering sect from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Loire.

This second period is the era of the Arabs. These people made a great and lasting impression on India. They established, very early, Mahomedan sovereigns in all parts of it, particularly in the kingdom of Bengal, which is the principal object of our present inquiry. They held that kingdom for a long series of years, under a dynasty of thirty-three kings,—having begun their conquest and founded their dominion in Bengal not very long after the time of their prophet.

These people, when they first settled in India, attempted, with the ferocious arm of their prophetic sword, to change the religion and manners of that country; but at length perceiving that their cruelty wearied out itself, and never could touch the constancy of the sufferers, they permitted the native people of the country to remain in quiet, and left the Mahomedan religion to operate upon them as it could, by appealing to the ambition or avarice of the great, or by taking the lower people, who had lost their castes, into this new sect, and thus, from the refuse of the Gentoo, increasing the bounds of the Mahomedan religion. They left many of the ancient rajahs of the country possessed of an inferior sovereignty; and where the strength of the country, or other circumstances, would not permit this subordination, they suffered them to continue in a separate state, approaching to independence, if not wholly independent.

The Mahomedans, during the period of the Arabs, never expelled or destroyed the native Gentoo nobility, zemindars, or landholders of the country. They all, or almost all, remained fixed in their places, properties, and dignities; and the shadows of several of them remain under our jurisdiction.

The next, which is the third era, is an era the more necessary to observe upon, because Mr. Hastings has made many applications to it in his defence before the Commons: namely, the invasion of the Tartars, or the era of Tamerlane. These Tartars did not establish themselves on the ruins of the Hindoos. Their conquests were over the other Mahomedans: for Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, as he invaded other countries, in the character of the great reformer of the Mahomedan religion. He came as a sort of successor to the rights of the Prophet, upon a divine title. He struck at all the Mahomedan princes who reigned at that time. He considered them as apostates, or at least as degenerated from the faith, and as tyrants abusing their power. To facilitate his conquests over these, he was often obliged to come to a sort of a composition with the people of the country he invaded. Tamerlane had neither time nor means nor inclination to dispossess the ancient rajahs of the country.

Your Lordships will observe that I propose nothing more than to give you an idea of the principles of policy which prevailed in these several revolutions, and not an history of the furious military achievements of a barbarous invader. Historians, indeed, are generally very liberal of their information concerning everything but what we ought to be very anxious to know. They tell us that India was conquered by Tamerlane, and conquered in such a year. The year will be found to coincide somewhere, I believe, with the end of the fourteenth century. Thinking the mere fact as of little moment, and its chronology as nothing, but thinking the policy very material, which, indeed, is to be collected only here and there, in various books written with various views, I shall beg leave to lay before you a very remarkable circumstance relative to that policy, and taken from the same book to which I formerly referred, Mr. Holwell's.

"When the Hindoo rajahs, or princes of Hindostan, submitted to Tamerlane, it was on these capital stipulations: that the emperor should marry a daughter of Rajah Cheyt Sing's house; that the head of this house should be in perpetuity governors of the citadel of Agra, and anoint the king at his coronation; and that the emperors should never impose the jessera (or poll-tax) upon the Hindoos."

Here was a conqueror, as he is called, coming in upon terms; mixing his blood with that of the native nobility of the country he conquered, and, in consequence of this mixture, placing them in succession upon the throne of the country he subdued; making one of them even hereditary constable of the capital of his kingdom, and thereby putting his posterity as a pledge into their hands. What is full as remarkable, he freed the Hindoos forever from that tax which the Mahomedans have laid upon every country over which the sword of Mahomet prevailed,—namely, a capitation tax upon all who do not profess the religion of the Mahomedans. But the Hindoos, by express charter, were exempted from that mark of servitude, and thereby declared not to be a conquered people. The native princes, in all their transactions with the Mogul government, carried the evident marks of this free condition in a noble independency of spirit. Within their own districts the authority of many of them seemed entire. We are often led into mistakes concerning the government of Hindostan, by comparing it with those governments where the prince is armed with a full, speculative, entire authority, and where the great people have, with great titles, no privileges at all, or, having privileges, have those privileges only as subjects. But in Hindostan the modes, the degrees, the circumstances of subjection varied infinitely. In some places hardly a trace at all of subjection was to be discerned; in some the rajahs were almost assessors of the throne, as in this case of the Rajah Cheyt Sing. These circumstances mark, that Tamerlane, however he may be indicated by the odious names of Tartar and Conqueror, was no barbarian; that the people who submitted to him did not submit with the abject submission of slaves to the sword of a conqueror, but admitted a great supreme emperor, who was just, prudent, and politic, instead of the ferocious, oppressive, lesser Mahomedan sovereigns, who had before forced their way by the sword into the country.

That country resembled more a republic of princes with a great chief at their head than a territory in absolute, uniform, systematic subjection from one end to the other,—in which light Mr. Hastings and others of late have thought proper to consider it. According to them, if a subordinate prince, like Cheyt Sing, was not ready to pay any exorbitant sum on instant demand, or submit to any extent of fine which should be inflicted upon him by the mere will of the person who called robbery a fine, and who took the measure of that fine without either considering the means of paying or the degree of delinquency that justified it, their properties, liberties, and lives were instantly forfeited. The rajahs of that country were armed; they had fortresses for their security; they had troops. In the receipt of both their own and the imperial revenue, their securities for justice were in their own hands: but the policy of the Mogul princes very rarely led them to push that people to such extremity as it is supposed that on every slight occasion we have a right to push those who are the subjects of our pretended conquest.