He would persuade you that their sufferings are much assuaged by their being nothing new,--and that, having no right to property, to liberty, to honor, or to life, they must be more pleased with the little that is left to them than grieved…
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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My Lords, if the prisoner can succeed in persuading us that these people have no laws, no rights, not even the common sentiments and feeling of men, he hopes your interest in them will be considerably lessened.
No, my Lords, the whole composition is his, by writing or adoption; and never, till he found it pressed him in this House, never, till your Lordships began to entertain the same abhorrence of it that we did, did he disclaim it.
It is, therefore, to preserve the integrity and honor of the Commons of Great Britain, that we have brought this man to your Lordships' bar.
Every man in Great Britain will be contaminated and must be corrupted, if you let loose among us whole legions of men, generation after generation, tainted with these abominable vices, and avowing these detestable principles.
Nothing but contamination can be the result, nothing but corruption can exist in this country, unless we expunge this doctrine out of the very hearts and souls of the people.
My Lords, the House of Commons has already well considered what may be our future moral and political condition, when the persons who come from that school of pride, insolence, corruption, and tyranny are more intimately mixed up with us…
We disclaim, we reject all such doctrines with disdain and indignation; and we have brought them up to your Lordships to be tried at your bar.
We deny that the act of Parliament gave him any such power; we deny that the India Company gave him any such power, or that they had ever any such power to give; we even deny that there exists in all the human race a power to make the…
Its inhabitants have no rights, no laws, no liberties; their state is mean and depraved; they may be fined for any purpose of court extravagance or prodigality,--or as Cheyt Sing was fined by him, not only upon every war, but upon every…
All Asia is by him disfranchised at a stroke.
Thus he has at once repealed all preceding acts, he has annulled by prospect every future act you can make; and it is not in the power of the Parliament of Great Britain, without ruining the empire, to hinder his exercising this despotic…
He appeals to the custom and usage of the Mogul empire; and the constitution of that empire is, he says, arbitrary power.
I beseech your Lordships seriously to look upon the whole nature of the principles upon which the prisoner defends himself.
So that rebellion itself is the parent and promoter of despotism.
For I am not again to tell your Lordships, that arbitrary power is treason in the law,--that to mention it with law is to commit a contradiction in terms.
He has brought out these blasphemous doctrines in this great temple of justice, consecrated to law and equity for a long series of ages.
He first asserts, that he was possessed of an arbitrary and despotic power, restrained by no laws but his own will.
If once they are evaded, you can have no rule for your judgment but your caprices and partialities.
We never will nor can we abandon them; and we therefore do not supplicate your Lordships upon this head, but claim and demand of right, that you will judge him upon those principles, and upon no other.
It is upon these rules that he is responsible; and upon these rules, and these rules only, your Lordships are to judge.
Hastings was invested with discretionary power; but we assert that he was bound to use that power according to the established rules of political morality, humanity, and equity.
No, he has not; and yet this prisoner, and these gentlemen, his learned counsel, have dared to reiterate their complaints of us at your Lordships' bar, while we have always been, and still are, ready to prove both the atrocious nature of…
We refer to your determination for the purpose of showing the falsehood of the imputation which the prisoner has cast upon us, of having oppressed him by delay and irrelevant matter.
But, my Lords, they who withhold their defence, who suffer themselves, as they say, to be cruelly criminated by unjust accusation, and yet will not permit the evidence of their guilt or innocence to be produced, are themselves the causes…
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