Hastings took this bribe from the Rajah of Dinagepore, he took a bribe from an infant of five years old through the hands of the Register.
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.
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Hastings the justice to say, that, if he had known there was another man more accomplished in all iniquity than Gunga Govind Sing, he would not have given him the first place in his confidence.
Hastings's money transactions, the insufficiency and fallacy of these records is manifest beyond a doubt.
Hastings's bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the vitals of the people.
Alas! as their situation was far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary.
Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a thousand of which would not perhaps produce twenty shillings.
All this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more than the whole of their substance…
No! at an interest of six hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day!
A tiller of land to pay six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government!
What exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of wretchedness and misery?
Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted, overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the…
The crop was then gone, but the debt remained.
It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it was a savage war made upon the country.
The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies.
It is a known observation, that those who have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly attached to their children and wives.
The most tender of parents sold their children at market.
The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their wives.
Hastings extinguished every sentiment of father, son, brother, and husband!
Everything visible and vendible was seized and sold.
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of…
Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury, and malice, implacable because…
From cruel men they are transformed into savage beasts, with no other vestiges of reason left but what serves to furnish the inventions and refinements of ferocious subtlety, for purposes of which beasts are incapable and at which fiends…
And here, my Lords, began such a scene of cruelties and tortures as I believe no history has ever presented to the indignation of the world,--such as I am sure, in the most barbarous ages, no politic tyranny, no fanatic persecution, has…
But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands will act with resistless power.
What is it that they will not pull down, when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors?
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