My Lords, no authority of the East will be a palliation of the breach of laws enacted in the West: and to those laws of the West, and not the vicious customs of the East, we insist upon making Mr.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
gutenberg.org
Bribery and extortion have been covered by the name of presents, and the authority and practice of the East has been adduced as a palliation of the crime.
The opportunity of acquiring immense fortunes was too inviting to be neglected, and the temptation too powerful to be resisted.
I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to read a consultation of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming the state of the Company, in order to show the magnitude of the pecuniary corruptions that…
The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company's affairs in India, from the time of their first…
If we once can admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope…
As to fear, let a Governor-General once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service.
Is it to be believed that men can long be ashamed of that which they see to be the road to honor?
Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long, when it is seen that crimes which naturally bring disgrace are attended with all the outward symbols, characteristics, and rewards of honor and of virtue,--when it is seen that high station, great rank…
Fear and shame, the great guards to virtue next to conscience, are gone.
My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the inferior parts of the service.
These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in eminent station.
But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination are not always the most pernicious in their effects: in these high, eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort of corrective to their virulence.
These artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy, and subvert forever.
Every one of these are overt acts of the general charge of bribery, and they are every one of them, separately taken, substantive crimes.
The next article which we shall bring before you is, that he is not only personally corrupted, but that he has personally corrupted all the other servants of the Company,--those under him, whose corruptions he ought to have controlled, and…
But we come before your Lordships in a different manner and upon different grounds.
His cause, therefore, is gone, when, having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at length appeals to his character.
When we prove to you the things that we shall prove, this will, I hope, give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory proof of the misery to which these people have been reduced.
Oh, my Lords, consider the situation of a people who are forced to mix their praises with their groans, who are forced to sign, with hands which have been in torture, and with the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an attestation in…
My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and unadulterated justice considers with a certain degree of tenderness the person whom it is called to punish, and never oppresses those by the process who ought not to be oppressed but by the…
Our labor, therefore, will be our reward; and we will go on, we will pursue with vigor and diligence, in a manner suitable to the Commons of Great Britain, every mode of corruption, till we have thoroughly eradicated it.
We know, that, by a mysterious dispensation of Providence, injury is quick and rapid, and justice slow; and we may say that those who have not patience and vigor of mind to attend the tardy pace of justice counteract the order of…
I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life.
I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
