These, my Lords, are the effects universally produced by the Hindoo polity throughout that vast region, before it was distorted and put out of frame by the barbarism of foreign conquests.
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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Its foundation is laid in Regicide, in Jacobinism, and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles a body of systematic manners which secures their operation.
What is full as remarkable, he freed the Hindoos forever from that tax which the Mahomedans have laid upon every country over which the sword of Mahomet prevailed,--namely, a capitation tax upon all who do not profess the religion of the…
All the relations of life are at once dissolved.
The native princes, in all their transactions with the Mogul government, carried the evident marks of this free condition in a noble independency of spirit.
Instead of the religion and the law by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are…
You see that it was the monarchy that was precarious, not the rights of the subordinate chiefs.
On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has made many wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrain the right of ownership by the right of vicinage.
Hastings is his having avowedly looked to such a tyrant and such a usurper as his model, and followed that pernicious example with a servile fidelity.
Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.
To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.
So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.
Indeed, something might have been expected of the kind, when a new dominion emanated from a learned and enlightened part of the world in the most enlightened period of its existence.
God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices!
But whatever necessity might hide or excuse or palliate, in the acquisition of power, a wise nation, when it has once made a revolution upon its own principles and for its own ends, rests there.
He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced.
By the vast sums of money acquired by individuals upon this occasion, by the immense sudden prodigies of fortune, it was discovered that a revolution in Bengal was a mine much more easily worked and infinitely more productive than the…
It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.
If ever there was a time when Bengal should have had respite from internal revolutions, it was this.
The tenderness of the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that men are inclined to favor the means of their own safety is so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the…
In this situation it was resolved to make a new and entirely mercenary revolution, and to set up to sale the government, secured to its present possessor by every tie of public faith and every sacred obligation which could bind or…
He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers.
It introduces some of the persons who were most active in the succeeding scenes, and from that time to this has given its tone and character to the British affairs and government.
My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character.
A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.
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