We know them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your hands.
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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I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors.
I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored.
I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
His cause, therefore, is gone, when, having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at length appeals to his character.
But we come before your Lordships in a different manner and upon different grounds.
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…
Every one of these are overt acts of the general charge of bribery, and they are every one of them, separately taken, substantive crimes.
These artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy, and subvert forever.
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 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.
My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the inferior parts of the service.
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…
Is it to be believed that men can long be ashamed of that which they see to be the road to honor?
As to fear, let a Governor-General once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service.
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…
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…
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…
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