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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have seen him at Patna, at Calcutta, in the country, on the Ganges: now you see him at the waters at Cheltenham; and you will find his letter from that place to comprehend the substance of all his former letters, and to be a digest of all the falsity, fraud, and nonsense contained in the whole of them. Here it is, and your Lordships will suffer it to be read. I must beg your patience; I must acknowledge that it has been the most difficult of all things to explain, but much more difficult to make pleasant and not wearisome, falsity and fraud pursued through all its artifices; and therefore, as it has been the most painful work to us to unravel fraud and prevarication, so there is nothing that more calls for the attention, the patience, the vigilance, and the scrutiny of an exact court of justice. But as you have already had almost the whole of the man, do not think it too much to hear the rest in this letter from Cheltenham. It is dated, Cheltenham, 11th of July, 1785, addressed to William Devaynes, Esquire;[8 - See this letter in the Appendix to the Eighth and Sixteenth Charges, Vol. IX. pp. 319-325, in the present edition.] and it begins thus:—

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

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

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

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

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

Permit me to make a few remarks upon this extraordinary passage. A letter is written to him, containing a repetition of the request which had been made a thousand times before, and with which he had as often promised to comply. And here he says, "It was lost to my recollection." Observe his memory: he can forget the command, but he has an obscure recollection that he thought it a reprehension rather than a demand! Now a reprehension is a stronger mode of demand. When I say to a servant, "Why have you not given me the account which I have so often asked for?" is he to answer, "The reason I have not given it is because I thought you were railing at and abusing me"?

He goes on:—"I will now endeavor to reply to the different questions which have been stated to me, in as explicit a manner as I am able. To such information as I can give the Honorable Court is fully entitled; and where that shall prove defective, I will point out the only means by which it may be rendered more complete."

In order that your Lordships may thoroughly enter into the spirit of this letter, I must request that you will observe how handsomely and kindly these tools of Directors have expressed themselves to him, and that even their baseness and subserviency to him were not able to draw from him anything that could be satisfactory to his enemies: for as to these his friends, he cares but little about satisfying them, though they call upon him in consequence of his own promise; and this he calls a reprehension. They thus express themselves:—"Although it is not our intention to express any doubt of the integrity of the Governor-General,—on the contrary, after having received the presents, we cannot avoid expressing our approbation of his conduct in bringing them to the credit of the Company,—yet we must confess the statement of those transactions appears to us in many points so unintelligible, that we feel ourselves under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily made to us. We therefore desire to be informed of the different periods when each sum was received, and what were the Governor-General's motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council and of the Court of Directors, and what were his reasons for taking bonds for part of these sums and paying other sums into the treasury as deposits upon his own account." Such is their demand, and this is what his memory furnishes as nothing but a reprehension.

He then proceeds:—"First, I believe I can affirm with certainty that the several sums mentioned in the account transmitted with my letter above mentioned were received at or within a very few days of the dates which are affixed to them in the account. But as this contains only the gross sums, and each of these was received in different payments, though at no great distance of time, I cannot therefore assign a great degree of accuracy to the account."—Your Lordships see, that, after all, he declares he cannot make his account accurate. He further adds, "Perhaps the Honorable Court will judge this sufficient"—that is, this explanation, namely, that he can give none—"for any purpose to which their inquiry was directed; but if it should not be so, I will beg leave to refer, for a more minute information, and for the means of making any investigation which they may think it proper to direct, respecting the particulars of this transaction, to Mr. Larkins, your accountant-general, who was privy to every process of it, and possesses, as I believe, the original paper, which contained the only account that I ever kept of it."

Here is a man who of his bribe accounts cannot give an account in the country where they are carried on. When you call upon him in Bengal, he cannot give the account, because he is in Bengal; when he comes to England, he cannot give the account here, because his accounts are left in Bengal. Again, he keeps no accounts himself, but his accounts are in Bengal, in the hands of somebody else: to him he refers, and we shall see what that reference produced.

"In this, each receipt was, as I recollect, specifically inserted, with the name of the person by whom it was made; and I shall write to him to desire that he will furnish you with the paper itself, if it is still in being and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect concerning it."—Here are accounts kept for the Company, and yet he does not know whether they are in existence anywhere.

"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."

You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in the banian language, a painche, in English, a screw. It is a puzzled and studied involution of a period, framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and the detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better exemplified than in this sentence: "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." Observe, that he says, not facts stated, but facts implied in the report. And of what was this to be a report? Of things which the Directors declared they did not understand. And then the inferences which are to follow these implied facts are to follow them—But how? With a strong probability. If you have a mind to study this Oriental figure of rhetoric, the painche, here it is for you in its most complete perfection. No rhetorician ever gave an example of any figure of oratory that can match this.

But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all, which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do you call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could not give you them? I cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you may learn something from them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr. Larkins for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing this with his other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of fraud and concealment to cover his peculation. He tells them,—"I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December [November?], 1780." He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he received it: we have found it out by other collateral means.—"The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them."—Allowable means of receiving bribes! for such I shall prove them to be in the particular instances.—"But neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid that I could thus procure; nor do I know how I could have stated it without appearing to court favor by an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have had an equal claim."

Now we see, that, after hammering his brains for many years, he does find out his motive, which he could not verify at the time,—namely, that, if he let his colleagues know that he was receiving bribes, and gaining the glory of receiving them, they might take it into their heads likewise to have their share in the same glory, as they were joined in the same commission, enjoyed the same powers, and were subject to the same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous in Mr. Hastings, not behaving like a good, fair colleague in office, not to let them know that he was going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive them of their share in the glory of it: but they were grovelling creatures, who thought that keeping clean hands was some virtue.—"Well, but you have applied some of these bribes to your own benefit: why did you give no account of those bribes?" "I did not," he says, "because it might have excited the envy of my colleagues." To be sure, if he was receiving bribes for his own benefit, and they not receiving such bribes, and if they had a liking to that kind of traffic, it is a good ground of envy, that a matter which ought to be in common among them should be confined to Mr. Hastings, and he therefore did well to conceal it; and on the other hand, if we suppose him to have taken them, as he pretends, for the Company's use, in order not to excite a jealousy in his colleagues for being left out of this meritorious service, to which they had an equal claim, he did well to take bonds for what ought to be brought to the Company's account. These are reasons applicable to his colleagues, who sat with him at the same board,—Mr. Macpherson, Mr. Stables, Mr. Wheler, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis: he was afraid of exciting their envy or their jealousy.

You will next see another reason, and an extraordinary one it is, which he gives for concealing these bribes from his inferiors. But I must first tell your Lordships, what, till the proof is brought before you, you will take on credit,—indeed, it is on his credit,—that, when he formed the Committee of Revenue, he bound them by a solemn oath, "not, under any name or pretence whatever, to take from any zemindar, farmer, person concerned in the revenue, or any other, any gift, gratuity, allowance, or reward whatever, or anything beyond their salary"; and this is the oath to which he alludes. Now his reason for concealing his bribes from his inferiors, this Committee, under these false and fraudulent bonds, he states thus:—"I should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them: I was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the money to be brought to my own house, or that of any person known to be in trust for me."

My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that he knew the practice of taking money from these people was a thing dishonorable in itself. "I should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them." He held it particularly dishonorable to receive them; he had bound others by an oath not to receive them: but he received them himself; and why does he conceal it? "Why, because," says he, "if the suspicion came upon me, the dishonor would fall upon my pate." Why did he, by an oath, bind his inferiors not to take these bribes? "Why, because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and because it would be mischievous and ruinous to the Company's affairs to suffer them to take bribes." Why, then, did he take them himself? It was ten times more ruinous, that he, who was at the head of the Company's government, and had bound up others so strictly, should practise the same himself; and "therefore," says he, "I was more than ordinarily cautious." What! to avoid it? "No; to carry it on in so clandestine and private a manner as might secure me from the suspicion of that which I know to be detestable, and bound others up from practising."

We shall prove that the kind of men from whom he interdicted his Committee to receive bribes were the identical men from whom he received them himself. If it was good for him, it was good for them to be permitted these means of extorting; and if it ought at all to be practised, they ought to be admitted to extort for the good of the Company. Rajah Nobkissin was one of the men from whom he interdicted them to receive bribes, and from whom he received a bribe for his own use. But he says he concealed it from them, because he thought great mischief might happen even from their suspicion of it, and lest they should thereby be inclined themselves to practise it, and to break their oaths.

You take it, then, for granted that he really concealed it from them? No such thing. His principal confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr. Croftes, who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue, and whom he had made to swear not to take bribes: he is the confidant, and the very receiver, as we shall prove to your Lordships. What will your Lordships think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood, that he did it to conceal it from these men, when one of them was his principal confidant and agent in the transaction? What will you think of his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it? He ought to have avoided the crime, and the suspicion would take care of itself.

"For these reasons," he says, "I caused it to be transported immediately to the treasury. There I well knew, Sir, it could not be received, without being passed to some credit; and this could only be done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant. Possibly it was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed."

My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false or groundless: it is completely fallacious in every part. The first sum, he says, was entered as a loan, the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because, when you enter moneys of this kind, you must enter them under some name, some head of account; "and I entered them," he says, "under these, because otherwise there was no entering them at all." Is this true? Will he stick to this? I shall desire to know from his learned counsel, some time or other, whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which he brought under a regular official head, namely, durbar charges; and there is no reason why he should not have brought these under the same head. Therefore what he says, that there is no other way of entering them but as loans and deposits, is not true. He next says, that in the second sum there was no reason for concealment, because it was avowed. But that false deposit was as much concealment as the false loan, for he entered that money as his own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any money to the Company's account, he knew how to do it, for he had been accustomed to enter it under a general name, called durbar charges,—a name which, in its extent at least, was very much his own invention, and which, as he gives no account of those charges, is as large and sufficient to cover any fraudulent expenditure in the account as, one would think, any person could wish. You see him, then, first guessing one thing, then another,—first giving this reason, then another; at last, however, he seems to be satisfied that he has hit upon the true reason of his conduct.

Now let us open the next paragraph, and see what it is.—"Although I am firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the Court of Directors. They had answered my purpose of public utility, and I had almost dismissed them from my remembrance."

My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing account which he gives here, that several of these sums he meant to conceal forever, even from the knowledge of the Directors. Look back to his letter of 22d May, 1782, and his letter of the 16th of December, and in them he tells you that he might have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable so to do; that his conscience would have been wounded, if he had done it; and that he was afraid it would be thought that this discovery was brought from him in consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries. Here he says of a discovery which he values himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it should be attributed to arise from motives of fear. Now, at last, he tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time when he had just cause to dread the strict account to which he is called this day, first, that he cannot tell whether any one motive which he assigns, either in this letter or in the former, were his real motive or not; that he does not know whether he has not invented them since, in consequence of a train of meditation upon what he might have done or might have said; and, lastly, he says, contrary to all his former declarations, "that he had never meant nor could give the Directors the least notice of them at all, as they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed them from his remembrance." "I intended," he says, "always to keep them secret, though I have declared to you solemnly, over and over again, that I did not. I do not care how you discovered them; I have forgotten them; I have dismissed them from my remembrance." Is this the way in which money is to be received and accounted for?

He then proceeds thus:—"But when fortune threw a sum of money in my way of a magnitude which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the time I received it made me more circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily and generally: hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession. I promised to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of it; and, in the performance of my promise, I thought it consistent with it to add to the amount all the former appropriations of the same kind: my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution which might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards known, I might be asked what were my motives for withholding a part of these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of Directors and informing them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up every doubt."

I am almost ashamed to remark upon the tergiversations and prevarications perpetually ringing the changes in this declaration. He would not have discovered this hundred thousand pounds, if he could have concealed it: he would have discovered it, lest malicious persons should be telling tales of it. He has a system of concealment: he never discovers anything, but when he thinks it can be forced from him. He says, indeed, "I could conceal these things forever, but my conscience would not give me leave": but it is guilt, and not honesty of conscience, that always prompts him. At one time it is the malice of people and the fear of misrepresentation which induced him to make the disclosure; and he values himself on the precaution which this fear had suggested to him. At another time it is the magnitude of the sum which produced this effect: nothing but the impossibility of concealing it could possibly have made him discover it. This hundred thousand pounds he declares he would have concealed, if he could; and yet he values himself upon the discovery of it. Oh, my Lords, I am afraid that sums of much greater magnitude have not been discovered at all! Your Lordships now see some of the artifices of this letter. You see the variety of styles he adopts, and how he turns himself into every shape and every form. But, after all, do you find any clear discovery? do you find any satisfactory answer to the Directors' letter? does he once tell you from whom he received the money? does he tell you for what he received it, what the circumstances of the persons giving it were, or any explanation whatever of his mode of accounting for it? No: and here, at last, after so many years' litigation, he is called to account for his prevaricating, false accounts in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.

His explanation of his conduct relative to the bonds now only remains for your Lordships' consideration. Before he left Calcutta, in July, 1784 [1781?], he says, when he was going upon a service which he thought a service of danger, he indorsed the false bonds which he had taken from the Company, declaring them to be none of his. You will observe that these bonds had been in his hands from the 9th or 15th of January (I am not quite sure of the exact date) to the day when he went upon this service, some time in the month of July, 1784 [1781?]. This service he had formerly declared he did not apprehend to be a service of danger; but he found it to be so after: it was in anticipation of that danger that he made this attestation and certificate upon the bonds. But who ever saw them? Mr. Larkins saw them, says he: "I gave them Mr. Larkins." We will show you hereafter that Mr. Larkins deserves no credit in this business,—that honor binds him not to discover the secrets of Mr. Hastings. But why did he not deliver them up entirely, when he was going upon that service? for all pretence of concealment in the business was now at an end, as we shall prove. Why did he not cancel these bonds? Why keep them at all? Why not enter truly the state of the account in the Company's records? "But I indorsed them," he says. "Did you deliver them so indorsed into the treasury?" "No, I delivered them indorsed into the hands of my bribe-broker and agent." "But why not destroy them, or give them up to the Company, and say you were paid, which would have been the only truth in this transaction? Why did you not indorse them before? Why not, during the long period of so many years, cancel them?" No, he kept them to the very day when he was going from Calcutta, and had made a declaration that they were not his. Never before, upon any account, had they appeared; and though the Committee of the House of Commons, in the Eleventh Report, had remarked upon all these scandalous proceedings and prevarications, yet he was not stimulated, even then, to give up these bonds. He held them in his hands till the time when he was preparing for his departure from Calcutta, in spite of the Directors, in spite of the Parliament, in spite of the cries of his own conscience, in a matter which was now grown public, and would knock doubly upon his reputation and conduct. He then declares they are not for his own use, but for the Company's service. But were they then cancelled? I do not find a trace of their being cancelled. In this letter of the 17th of January, 1785, he says with regard to these bonds, "The following sums were paid into the treasury, and bonds granted for the same in the name of the Governor-General, in whose possession the bonds remain, with a declaration upon each, indorsed and signed by him, that he has no claim on the Company for the amount either of principal or interest, no part of the latter having been received."

To the account of the 22d of May, of the indorsement, is added the declaration upon oath. But why any man need to declare upon oath that the money which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from another person is not his is the most extraordinary thing in the world. If he had a mind to have it placed to his credit as his own, then an oath would be necessary; but in this case any one would believe him upon his word. He comes, however, and says, "This is indorsed upon oath." Oath! before what magistrate? In whose possession were the bonds? Were they given up? There is no trace of that upon the record, and it stands for him to prove that they were ever given up, and in any hands but Mr. Larkins's and his own. So here are the bonds, begun in obscurity and ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, corruption to corruption, and fraud to fraud. This is all we see of these bonds, till Mr. Larkins, to whom he writes some letter concerning them which does not appear, is called to read a funeral sermon over them.

My Lords, I am come now near the period of this class of Mr. Hastings's bribes. I am a little exhausted. There are many circumstances that might make me wish not to delay this business by taking up another day at your Lordships' bar, in order to go through this long, intricate scene of corruption. But my strength now fails me. I hope within a very short time, to-morrow or the next court-day, to finish it, and to go directly into evidence, as I long much to do, to substantiate the charge; but it was necessary that the evidence should be explained. You have heard as much of the drama as I could go through: bear with my weakness a little: Mr. Larkins's letter will be the epilogue to it. I have already incurred the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by bringing home to him the proof of his crimes, and to display them in all their force and turpitude. It is my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to my heart.

FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789

My Lords,—When I had the honor last to address you from this place, I endeavored to press this position upon your minds, and to fortify it by the example of the proceedings of Mr. Hastings,—that obscurity and inaccuracies in a matter of account constituted a just presumption of fraud. I showed, from his own letters, that his accounts were confused and inaccurate. I am ready, my Lords, to admit that there are situations in which a minister in high office may use concealment: it may be his duty to use concealment from the enemies of his masters; it may be prudent to use concealment from his inferiors in the service. It will always be suspicious to use concealment from his colleagues and coördinates in office; but when, in a money transaction, any man uses concealment with regard to them to whom the money belongs, he is guilty of a fraud. My Lords, I have shown you that Mr. Hastings kept no account, by his own confession, of the moneys that he had privately taken, as he pretends, for the Company's service, and we have but too much reason to presume for his own. We have shown you, my Lords, that he has not only no accounts, but no memory; we have shown that he does not even understand his own motives; that, when called upon to recollect them, he begs to guess at them; and that as his memory is to be supplied by his guess, so he has no confidence in his guesses. He at first finds, after a lapse of about a year and a half, or somewhat less, that he cannot recollect what his motives were to certain actions which upon the very face of them appeared fraudulent. He is called to an account some years after, to explain what they were, and he makes a just reflection upon it,—namely, that, as his memory did not enable him to find out his own motive at the former time, it is not to be expected that it would be clearer a year after. Your Lordships will, however, recollect, that in the Cheltenham letter, which is made of no perishable stuff, he begins again to guess; but after he has guessed and guessed again, and after he has gone through all the motives he can possibly assign for the action, he tells you he does not know whether those were his real motives, or whether he has not invented them since.

In that situation the accounts of the Company were left with regard to very great sums which passed through Mr. Hastings's hands, and for which he, instead of giving his masters credit, took credit to himself, and, being their debtor, as he confesses himself to be at that time, took a security for that debt as if he had been their creditor. This required explanation. Explanation he was called upon for, over and over again; explanation he did not give, and declared he could not give. He was called upon for it when in India: he had not leisure to attend to it there. He was called upon for it when in Europe: he then says he must send for it to India. With much prevarication, and much insolence too, he confesses himself guilty of falsifying the Company's accounts by making himself their creditor when he was their debtor, and giving false accounts of this false transaction. The Court of Directors was slow to believe him guilty; Parliament expressed a strong suspicion of his guilt, and wished for further information. Mr. Hastings about this time began to imagine his conscience to be a faithful and true monitor,—which it were well he had attended to upon many occasions, as it would have saved him his appearance here,—and it told him that he was in great danger from the Parliamentary inquiries that were going on. It was now to be expected that he would have been in haste to fulfil the promise which he had made in the Patna letter of the 20th of January, 1782; and accordingly we find that about this time his first agent, Major Fairfax, was sent over to Europe, which agent entered himself at the India House, and appeared before the Committee of the House of Commons, as an agent expressly sent over to explain whatever might appear doubtful in his conduct. Major Fairfax, notwithstanding the character in which Mr. Hastings employed him, appeared to be but a letter-carrier: he had nothing to say: he gave them no information in the India House at all: to the Committee (I can speak with the clearness of a witness) he gave no satisfaction whatever. However, this agent vanished in a moment, in order to make way for another, more substantial, more efficient agent,—an agent perfectly known in this country,—an agent known by the name given to him by Mr. Hastings, who, like the princes of the East, gives titles: he calls him an incomparable agent; and by that name he is very well known to your Lordships and the world. This agent, Major Scott, who I believe was here prior to the time of Major Fairfax's arrival in the character of an agent, and for the very same purposes, was called before the Committee, and examined, point by point, article by article, upon all that obscure enumeration of bribes which the Court of Directors declare they did not understand; but he declared that he could speak nothing with regard to any of these transactions, and that he had got no instructions to explain any part of them. There was but one circumstance which in the course of his examination we drew from him,—namely, that one of these articles, entered in the account of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing. He produced an extract of a letter relative to it, which your Lordships in the course of this trial may see, and which will lead us into a further and more minute inquiry on that head; but when that committee made their report in 1783, not one single article had been explained to Parliament, not one explained to the Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr. Hastings had never thought proper to communicate to the East India Company, either by himself, nor, as far as we could find out, by his agent; nor was it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn out from him by a long examination in the Committee of the House of Commons. And thus, notwithstanding the letters he had written and the agents he employed, he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to give his employers no satisfaction at all. What is curious in this proceeding is, that Mr. Hastings, all the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the credit of a discovery. Your Lordships have seen what his discovery is; but Mr. Hastings, among his other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an effectual method of concealment through discovery. I will venture to say, that, whatever suspicions there might have been of Mr. Hastings's bribes, there was more effectual concealment in regard to every circumstance respecting them in that discovery than if he had kept a total silence. Other means of discovery might have been found, but this, standing in the way, prevented the employment of those means.

Things continued in this state till the time of the letter from Cheltenham. The Cheltenham letter declared that Mr. Hastings knew nothing of the matter,—that he had brought with him no accounts to England upon the subject; and though it appears by this very letter that he had with him at Cheltenham (if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a great deal of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of the 22d of May with him, yet any account that could elucidate that letter he declared that he had not; but he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India, whom your Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly apprised of all that transaction. Your Lordships will observe that Mr. Hastings has all his faculties, some way or other, in deposit: one person can speak to his motives; another knows his fortune better than himself; to others he commits the sentimental parts of his defence; to Mr. Larkins he commits his memory. We shall see what a trustee of memory Mr. Larkins is, and how far he answers the purpose which might be expected, when appealed to by a man who has no memory himself, or who has left it on the other side of the water, and who leaves it to another to explain for him accounts which he ought to have kept himself, and circumstances which ought to be deposited in his own memory.

This Cheltenham letter, I believe, originally became known, as far as I can recollect, to the House of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Hastings's own agent: I do not like to be positive upon that point, but I think that was the first appearance of it. It appeared likewise in public: for it was thought so extraordinary and laborious a performance, by the writer or his friends, (as indeed it is,) that it might serve to open a new source of eloquence in the kingdom, and consequently was printed, I believe, at the desire of the parties themselves. But however it became known, it raised an extreme curiosity in the public to hear, when Mr. Hastings could say nothing, after so many years, of his own concerns and his own affairs, what satisfaction Mr. Larkins at last would give concerning them. This letter was directed to Mr. Devaynes, Chairman of the Court of Directors. It does not appear that the Court of Directors wrote anything to India in consequence of it, or that they directed this satisfactory account of the business should be given them; but some private communications passed between Mr. Hastings, or his agents, and Mr. Larkins. There was a general expectation upon this occasion, I believe, in the House of Commons and in the nation at large, to know what would become of the portentous inquiry. Mr. Hastings has always contrived to have half the globe between question and answer: when he was in India, the question went to him, and then he adjourned his answer till he came to England; and when he came to England, it was necessary his answer should arrive from India; so that there is no manner of doubt that all time was given for digesting, comparing, collating, and making up a perfect memory upon the occasion.

But, my Lords, Mr. Larkins, who has in custody Mr. Hastings's memory, no small part of his conscience, and all his accounts, did, at last, in compliance with Mr. Hastings's desire, think proper to send an account. Then, at last, we may expect light. Where are we to look for accounts, but from an accountant-general? Where are they to be met with, unless from him? And accordingly, in that night of perplexity into which Mr. Hastings's correspondence had plunged them, men looked up to the dawning of the day which was to follow that star, the little Lucifer, which with his lamp was to dispel the shades of night, and give us some sort of light into this dark, mysterious transaction. At last the little lamp appeared, and was laid on the table of this House of Commons, on the motion of Mr. Hastings's friends: for we did not know of its arrival. It arrives, with all the intelligence, all the memory, accuracy, and clearness which Mr. Larkins can furnish for Mr. Hastings upon a business that before was nothing but mystery and confusion. The account is called,—

"Copy of the particulars of the dates on which the component parts of sundry sums included in the account of sums received on the account of the Honorable Company by the Governor-General, or paid to their Treasury by his order, and applied to their service, were received for Mr. Hastings, and paid to the Sub-Treasurer."

The letter from Mr. Larkins consisted of two parts: first, what was so much wanted, an account; next, what was wanted most of all to such an account as he sent, a comment and explanation. The account consisted of two members: one gave an account of several detached bribes that Mr. Hastings had received within the course of about a year and a half; and the other, of a great bribe which he had received in one gross sum of one hundred thousand pounds from the Nabob of Oude. It appeared to us, upon looking into these accounts, that there was some geography, a little bad chronology, but nothing else in the first: neither the persons who took the money, nor the persons from whom it was taken, nor the ends for which it was given, nor any other circumstances are mentioned.