Edmund Burke

This very man they take up again, to place on the throne from which they had about two years before removed him, and for the effecting of which they had committed so many iniquities.

Then, under the name of compensation for sufferings to the people concerned in the trade, and in the name of donation to an army and a navy which had little to do in this affair, they tax him--what sum do you think?

Like all the rest of the great personages whom we have degraded and brutalized by insult and oppression, he betook himself to the usual destructive resources of unprincipled misery,--sensuality, opium, and wine.

Revolutions were no longer necessary; succession supplied their places: and well the object agreed with the policy.

But a more doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the purposes of extortion and peculation.

This miserable succession was sold, and the eldest of the issue of Munny Begum, an harlot, brought in to pollute the harem of the seraglio, of whom you will hear much hereafter, was chosen.

Another son of the same prostitute succeeded to the same unhappy throne, and followed to the same untimely grave.

Every succession was sold; and between venal successions and venal revolutions, in a very few years seven princes and six sales were seen successively in Bengal.

In the year 1775 he was hanged by those incorrupt English judges who were sent to India by Parliament to protect the natives from oppression.

All these varied and successive sales shook the country to pieces.

As if those miserable exhausted provinces were to be cured of inanition by phlebotomy, while Cossim Ali was racking it above, the Company were drawing off all its nutriment below.

Half the northern force of India poured down like a torrent on Bengal, endangered our existence, and exhausted all our resources.

However, he fought his way like a retiring lion, turning his face to his pursuers.

Perhaps in some of his measures he was mistaken, and in some of his acts reprehensible; but justice obliges me to say, that the plan which he formed and the course which he pursued were in general great and well imagined,--that he laid…

For, in the first place, he composed all the neighboring countries torn to pieces by the wars of Cossim Ali, and quieted the apprehensions raised by the opinion of the boundless ambition of England.

He took strong measures to put an end to a great many of the abuses that prevailed in the country subject to the Company.

He put a bound to the aspiring spirit of the Company's servants; he limited its conquests; he prescribed bounds to its ambition.

On this solid plan he fixed every prince that was concerned in the preceding wars, on the one side and on the other, in an happy and easy settlement.

With a generosity that astonished all Asia, he reinstated this expelled enemy of his nation peaceably upon his throne.

And this act of politic generosity did more towards quieting the minds of the people of Asia than all the terror, great as it was, of the English arms.

This is the great act of the constitutional entrance of the Company into the body politic of India.

It gave to the settlement of Bengal a fixed constitutional form, with a legal title, acknowledged and recognized now for the first time by all the natural powers of the country, because it arose from the charter of the undoubted sovereign.

The dewanny, or high-stewardship, gave to the Company the collection and management of the revenue; and in this modest and civil character they appeared, not the oppressors, but the protectors of the people.

The Company exercised their power over the revenue in the first instance through the natives, but the British Resident was in reality the great mover.

If ever this nation stood in a situation of glory throughout Asia, it was in that moment.