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

Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son, as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts. He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper frame of mind for doing his duty.

He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full support in the execution of it,—as he, with every other white man in Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact, that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent, had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.

But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people, concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie, with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable words. "In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and every insult of disgrace,—and this not confined to a few, but extended over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot, when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half of that demand,—when he finds himself so far from being released, that he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail, adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these prejudices under such circumstances."

He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft, fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe, never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of Bengal,—of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports, carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of Governor Hastings's general system of bribery.

But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr. Hastings's system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore, Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.

Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that all officers representing government, and making in that character an authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would impeach or shake the report.

Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings's devising. In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.

This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty, into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril; the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to proceed by strict rules of law.

By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the credit due to the proceedings of government. They changed the natural situation of proofs. They rejected the depositions of Paterson's witnesses, as not on oath, though they had never ordered or authorized them so to be taken.

They went further, and disabled, in a body, all the deponents themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own rebellion. They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead of the culprit. They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) and made him a complainant and a witness against him in the stupidest and most improbable of all accusations,—namely, that Paterson had menaced him with punishment, if he did not, in so many words, slander and calumniate Debi Sing; and then the Committee, seating this wretch as an assessor at their own board, who a few days before would have trembled like a whipped slave at the look of an European, encouraged him to interrogate their own commissioner.

[Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit down. After some time Mr. Burke again addressed the House.]

My Lords, I am sorry to break the attention of your Lordships in such a way. It is a subject that agitates me. It is long, difficult, and arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you any further trouble, I will go through it this day.

I am to tell your Lordships, that the next step they took was, after putting Mr. Paterson as an accuser to make good a charge which he made out but too much to their satisfaction, they changed their battery.

[Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House, on the motion of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, adjourned.]

FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788

My Lords,—In any great undertaking, a failure in the midst of it, even from infirmity, though to be regarded principally as a misfortune, is attended with some slight shadow of disgrace; but your Lordships' humanity, and your love of justice, have remedied everything, and I therefore proceed with confidence this day.

My Lords, I think (to the best of my remembrance) the House adjourned at the period of time in which I was endeavoring to illustrate the mischiefs that happened from Mr. Hastings's throwing off his responsibility, by delegating his power to a nominal Council, and in reality to a black bad man, a native of the country, of the worst character that could be found in it,—and the consequence of it, in preventing the detection and the punishment of the grossest abuses that ever were known to be committed in India, or any other part of the world.

My Lords, I stated to you that Mr. Commissioner Paterson was sent into that country. I stated that he was sent into it with all the authority of government, with power to hear, and not only to hear and to report, but to redress, the grievances which he should find in the country. In short, there was nothing wanting to his power but an honest support. Your Lordships will be convinced that the road to fortune was easy to him. Debi Sing for a favorable report would have given a large sum of money. Your Lordships will be convinced that the Committee would not have received such a report as a proof of bribery. They would rather consider him as a man whose conduct tended to conciliate, and to soften troublesome and difficult matters, and to settle the order of government as soon as possible.

Some of the things contained in his reports I have taken the liberty of laying before your Lordships, but very faintly, very imperfectly, and far short of my materials. I have stated, that the criminal, against whom the commissioner had made his report, instead of being punished by that strong hand of power which Mr. Hastings has thought proper to use upon other occasions, when he has endeavored to make princes, or persons in the rank and with the attributes of sovereign princes, feel whenever they have incurred his private resentments,—that this man was put into every situation of offence or defence which the most litigious and prevaricating laws that ever were invented in the very bosom of arbitrary power could afford him, or by which peculation and power were to be screened from the cries of an oppressed people.

Mr. Paterson, I stated, from being a commissioner directed to report, under the authority of government, to that government, was considered as a voluntary accuser, obliged to make good the articles of his charge. But I believe I stated that he did not long remain in that condition.

I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that this Debi Sing, fortified by this protection, which was extended even to the lowest of his instruments, thought it high time to assume the superiority that belonged to a personage who had the Governor-General for his pensioner. No longer the sneaking tone of apology; no longer the modest allegations that the commissioner was misinformed;—he boldly accuses the representative of English government of forgery in order to destroy him; he criminates and recriminates, and lays about him without mercy.

Things were now in a proper train; the Committee find the cause growing and ripening to their wishes;—answers, replies, objections, and interrogatories,—accounts opposed to accounts,—balances now on the one side, now on the other,—now debtor becomes creditor, and creditor debtor,—until the proceedings were grown to the size of volumes, and the whole well fitted to perplex the most simple facts, and to darken the meridian sunshine of public notoriety. They prepared a report for the Governor-General and Council suitable to the whole tenor of their proceedings. Here the man whom they had employed and betrayed appeared in a new character. Observe their course with him. First he was made a commissioner. Then he was changed from a commissioner to be a voluntary accuser. He now undergoes another metamorphosis: he appears as a culprit before Mr. Hastings, on the accusation of the donor of Mr. Hastings's bribes. He is to answer to the accusations of Debi Sing. He is permitted to find materials for his own defence; and he, an old Company's servant, is to acknowledge it as a favor to be again suffered to go into the province, without authority, without station, without public character, under the discountenance and frowns, and in a manner under prosecution, of the government. As a favor, he is suffered to go again into Rungpore, in hopes of finding among the dejected, harassed, and enslaved race of Hindoos, and in that undone province, men bold enough to stand forward, against all temptations of emolument, and at the risk of their lives, with a firm adherence to their original charge,—and at a time when they saw him an abandoned and persecuted private individual, whom they had just before looked upon as a protecting angel, carrying with him the whole power of a beneficent government, and whom they had applied to, as a magistrate of high and sacred authority, to hear the complaints and to redress the grievances of a whole people.

A new commission of junior servants was at the same time sent out to review and reëxamine the cause, to inquire into the inquiry, to examine into the examination, to control the report, to be commissioners upon the commission of Mr. Paterson. Before these commissioners he was made to appear as an accused person, and was put upon his defence, but without the authority and without the favor which ought to go with an accused person for the purpose of enabling him to make out such defence.

These persons went down into that country, and, after spending a long time in mere matters of form, found they could not do without a representative of Debi Sing, and accordingly they ordered Debi Sing to send up his vakeel.

I forgot to state to your Lordships what the condition of Debi Sing was during this proceeding. This man had been ordered to Calcutta on two grounds: one, on the matter of his flagitious misconduct at Rungpore; and the other, for a great failure in the payment of his stipulated revenue. Under this double accusation, he was to be considered, according to the usual mode of proceeding in such cases, as a prisoner; and he was kept, not in the common gaol of Calcutta, not in the prison of the fort, not in that gaol in which Rajah Nundcomar, who had been prime-minister of the empire, was confined, but, according to the mild ways of that country, where they choose to be mild, and the persons are protected by the official influence of power, under a free custody. He was put under a guard of sepoys, but not confined to his house; he was permitted to go abroad, where he was daily in conference with those who were to judge him; and having an address which seldom fails, and a dexterity never wanting to a man possessed of 700,000l., he converted this guard into a retinue of honor: their bayonets were lowered, their muskets laid aside; they attended him with their side-arms, and many with silver verges in their hands, to mark him out rather as a great magistrate attended by a retinue than a prisoner under guard.

When he was ordered to send a vakeel to defend his conduct, he refused to send him. Upon which the commissioners, instead of saying, "If you will not send your agent, we will proceed in our inquiry without him," (and, indeed, it was not made necessary by the commission that he should be there either by vakeel or otherwise,) condescendingly admitted his refusal, and suffered him to come up in person. He accordingly enters the province, attended with his guard, in the manner I have before mentioned, more as a person returning in triumph from a great victory than as a man under the load of all those enormous charges which I have stated. He enters the province in this manner; and Mr. Paterson, who saw himself lately the representative of the India Company, (an old servant of the Company is a great man in that country,) was now left naked, destitute, without any mark of official situation or dignity. He was present, and saw all the marks of imprisonment turned into marks of respect and dignity to this consummate villain whom I have the misfortune of being obliged to introduce to your Lordships' notice. Mr. Paterson, seeing the effect of the proceeding everywhere, seeing the minds of the people broken, subdued, and prostrate under it, and that, so far from having the means of detecting the villanies of this insolent criminal, appearing as a magistrate, he had not the means of defending even his own innocence, because every kind of information fled and was annihilated before him, represented to these young commissioners that this appearance of authority tended to strike terror into the hearts of the natives, and to prevent his receiving justice. The Council of Calcutta took this representation into their deliberate consideration; they found that it was true, that, if he had such an attendance any longer in this situation, (and a large attendance it was, such as the Chancellor of this kingdom or the Speaker of the House of Commons does not appear with,) it would have an evil appearance. On the other hand, say they, "If he should be left under a guard, the people would consider him as under disgrace." They therefore took a middle way, and ordered the guard not to attend him with fixed bayonets, which had the appearance of the custody of a prisoner, but to lower their muskets and unfix their bayonets.

The next step of these commissioners is to exclude Mr. Paterson from all their deliberations; and in order that both parties might be put on an equality, one would naturally conclude that the culprit, Debi Sing, was likewise excluded. Far from it: he sat upon the bench. Need I say any more upon this subject? The protection followed.

In this situation Mr. Paterson wrote one of the most pathetic memorials that ever was penned to the Council of Calcutta, submitting to his hard fate, but standing inflexibly to his virtue that brought it upon him. To do the man justice, he bore the whole of this persecution like an hero. He never tottered in his principles, nor swerved to the right or to the left from the noble cause of justice and humanity in which he had been engaged; and when your Lordships come to see his memorials, you will have reason to observe that his abilities are answerable to the dignity of his cause, and make him worthy of everything that he had the honor to suffer for it.

To cut short the thread of this shocking series of corruption, oppression, fraud, and chicanery, which lasted for upwards of four years: Paterson remains without employment; the inhabitants of great provinces, whose substance and whose blood was sold by Mr. Hastings, remain without redress; and the purchaser, Debi Sing, that corrupt, iniquitous, and bloody tyrant, instead of being proceeded against by the Committee in a civil suit for retribution to the sufferers, is handed over to the false semblance of a trial, on a criminal charge, before a Mahometan judge,—an equal judge, however. The judge was Mahomed Reza Khân, his original patron, and the author of all his fortunes,—a judge who depends on him, as a debtor depends upon his creditor. To that judge is he sent, without a distinct charge, without a prosecutor, and without evidence. The next ships will bring you an account of his honorable acquittal.

I have stated before that I considered Mr. Hastings as responsible for the characters of the people he employed,—doubly responsible, if he knew them to be bad. I therefore charge him with putting in situations in which any evil may be committed persons of known evil characters.

My Lords, I charge him, as chief governor, with destroying the institutions of the country, which were designed to be, and ought to have been, controls upon such a person as Debi Sing.

An officer, called dewan, or steward of the country, had always been placed as a control on the farmer; but that no such control should in fact exist, that he, Debi Sing, should be let loose to rapine, slaughter, and plunder in the country, both offices were conferred on him. Did Mr. Hastings vest these offices in him? No: but if Mr. Hastings had kept firm to the duties which the act of Parliament appointed him to execute, all the revenue appointments must have been made by him; but, instead of making them himself, he appointed Gunga Govind Sing to make them; and for that appointment, and for the whole train of subordinate villany which followed the placing iniquity in the chief seat of government, Mr. Hastings is answerable. He is answerable, I say, first, for destroying his own legal capacity, and, next, for destroying the legal capacity of the Council, not one of whom ever had, or could have, any true knowledge of the state of the country, from the moment he buried it in the gulf of mystery and of darkness, under that collected heap of villany, Gunga Govind Sing. From that moment he destroyed the power of government, and put everything into his hands: for this he is answerable.

The Provincial Councils consisted of many members, who, though they might unite in some small iniquities perhaps, could not possibly have concealed from the public eye the commission of such acts as these. Their very numbers, their natural competitions, the contentions that must have arisen among them, must have put a check, at least, to such a business. And therefore, Mr. Hastings having destroyed every check and control above and below, having delivered the whole into the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, for all the iniquities of Gunga Govind Sing he is responsible.

But he did not know Debi Sing, whom he employed. I read, yesterday, and trust it is fresh in your Lordships' remembrance, that Debi Sing was presented to him by that set of tools, as they call themselves, who acted, as they themselves tell us they must act, entirely and implicitly under Gunga Govind Sing,—that is to say, by Gunga Govind Sing himself, the confidential agent of Mr. Hastings.

Mr. Hastings is further responsible, because he took a bribe of 40,000l. from some person in power in Dinagepore and Rungpore, the countries which were ravaged in this manner, through the hands of Gunga Govind Sing,—through the medium of that very person whom he had appointed to exercise all the authorities of the Supreme Council above and of all subordinate Councils below. Having, therefore, thus appointed a Council of tools in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing, at the expense of 62,000l. a year, to supersede all the English provincial authorities,—having appointed them for the purpose of establishing a bribe-factor general, a general receiver and agent of bribes through all that country, Mr. Hastings is responsible for all the consequences of it.

I have thought it necessary, and absolutely necessary it is, to state what the consequence of this clandestine mode of supplying the Company's exigencies was. Your Lordships will see that their exigencies are to be supplied by the ruin of the landed interest of a province, the destruction of the husbandmen, and the ruin of all the people in it. This is the consequence of a general bribe-broker, an agent like Gunga Govind Sing, superseding all the powers and controls of government.

But Mr. Hastings has not only reduced bribery to a system of government practically, but theoretically. For when he despaired any longer of concealing his bribes from the penetrating eye of Parliament, then he took another mode, and declared, as your Lordships will see, that it was the best way of supplying the necessities of the East India Company in the pressing exigencies of their affairs; that thus a relief to the Company's affairs might be yielded, which, in the common, ostensible mode, and under the ordinary forms of government, and publicly, never would be yielded to them. So that bribery with him became a supplement to exaction.

The best way of showing that a theoretical system is bad is to show the practical mischiefs that it produces: because a thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in its practice excellent. Here a thing in theory, stated by Mr. Hastings to be productive of much good, is in reality productive of all those horrible mischiefs I have stated. That Mr. Hastings well knew this appears from an extract of the Bengal Revenue Consultations, 21st January, 1785, a little before he came away.

Mr. Hastings says,—"I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges: he has disproved them. It was the duty of the accuser to prove them. Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily conceive that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr. Goodlad, who had no authority but that of receiving the accounts and rents of the district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the channel of communication between him and the Committee."

We shall now see what things Mr. Hastings did, what course he was in, a little before his departure,—with what propriety and consistency of character he has behaved from the year of the commencement of his corrupt system, in 1773, to the end of it, when he closed it in 1785, when the bribes not only mounted the chariot, but boarded the barge, and, as I shall show, followed him down the Ganges, and even to the sea, and that he never quitted his system of iniquity, but that it survived his political life itself.

One of his last political acts was this.

Your Lordships will remember that Mr. Goodlad was sent up into the country, whose conduct was terrible indeed: for that he could not be in place and authority in that country, and be innocent, while such things were doing, I shall prove. But that is not now my consideration.

The Governor-General's minute, just read, is this. "I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges: he has disproved them. It was the duty of the accuser to prove them" (the accuser, namely, the commissioner). "Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the character," &c., &c., &c.

Now your Lordships perceive he has acquitted Mr. Goodlad. He is clear. Be it that he is fairly and conscientiously acquitted. But what is Mr. Hastings's account of Rajah Debi Sing? He is presented to him in 1781, by Gunga Govind Sing, as a person against whose character there could be no exception, and by him accepted in that light. Upon the occasion I have mentioned, Mr. Hastings's opinion of him is this: "I so well know the character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily conceive that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr. Goodlad, who had no authority but that of receiving the accounts and rents of the district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the channel of communication between him and the Committee."

Thus your Lordships see what Mr. Hastings's opinion of Debi Sing was. We shall prove it at another time, by abundance of clear and demonstrative evidence, that, whether he was bad or no, (but we shall prove that bad he was indeed,) even he could hardly be so bad as he was in the opinion which Mr. Hastings entertained of him; who, notwithstanding, now disowns this mock Committee, instituted by himself, but, in reality, entirely managed by Gunga Govind Sing. This Debi Sing was accepted as an unexceptionable man; and yet Mr. Hastings knows both his power of doing mischief and his artifice in concealing it. If, then, Mr. Goodlad is to be acquitted, does it not show the evil of Mr. Hastings's conduct in destroying those Provincial Councils which, as I have already stated, were obliged to book everything, to minute all the circumstances which came before them, together with all the consultations respecting them? He strikes at the whole system at once, and, instead of it, he leaves an Englishman, under pretence of controlling Gunga Govind Sing's agent, appointed for the very purpose of giving him bribes, in a province where Mr. Hastings says that agent had the power of committing such enormities, and which nobody doubts his disposition to commit,—he leaves him, I say, in such a state of inefficiency, that these iniquities could be concealed (though every one true) from the person appointed there to inspect his conduct! What, then, could be his business there? Was it only to receive such sums of money as Debi Sing might put into his hands, and which might have been easily sent to Calcutta? Was he to be of use as a communication between Debi Sing and the Committee, and in no other way? Here, then, we have that English authority which Mr. Hastings left in the country,—here the native authority which he settled, and the establishment of native iniquity in a regular system under Gunga Govind Sing,—here the destruction of all English inspection. I hope I need say no more to prove to your Lordships that this system, taken nakedly as it thus stands, founded in mystery and obscurity, founded for the very express purpose of conveying bribes, as the best mode of collecting the revenue and supplying the Company's exigencies through Gunga Govind Sing, would be iniquitous upon the face and the statement of it. But when your Lordships consider what horrid effects it produced, you will easily see what the mischief and abomination of Mr. Hastings's destroying these Provincial Councils and protecting these persons must necessarily be. If you had not known in theory, you must have seen it in practice.