Edmund Burke

Days of menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long time made up all the vicissitude of life to these miserable people.

But there are persons whose fortitude could bear their own suffering; there are men who are hardened by their very pains, and the mind, strengthened even by the torments of the body, rises with a strong defiance against its oppressor.

The circumstances were combined by so subtle a cruelty that every stroke which did not excruciate the sense should wound and lacerate the sentiments and affections of nature.

Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were buried together.

These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature.

My Lords, we are not here to commend or blame the institutions and prejudices of a whole race of people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of…

His parents are no longer his parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his, are no longer to regard him as their father.

It is something far worse than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal excommunication.

It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death.

Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned.

I spare you those of a cruel and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief in that province.

In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into content and satisfaction.

But this general insurrection, which at every moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers all the miseries of all the provinces.

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…

Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.

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.

In short, there was nothing wanting to his power but an honest support.

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…

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.

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.