A court of justice, where a direct assertion is brought forward, and a direct proof applied to it, is an element in which he cannot live for a moment.
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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Hastings wanted to fly from judicial inquiry; he wanted to put Debi Sing anywhere but in a court of justice.
You have now before you the true reason why he did not choose that this affair should come before a court of justice.
Do you believe he could be so cruel to these provinces, so partial to the rest, as to charge them with that load, with 95,000l., knowing the heavy oppression they were sinking under, and leave all the rest untouched?
You have a standard, a measure of extortion, and that is all: ex pede Herculem: guess from thence what was extorted from all Bengal.
No: you know, and must know, that he who extorts from three provinces will extort from twenty, if there are twenty.
Was it right to lay the whole weight of bribery, extortion, and oppression upon those three provinces, and neglect the rest?
He did not do his duty in making this distinction, if he thought that bribery was the best way of supplying the Company's treasury, and that it formed the most useful and effectual resource for them,--which he has declared over and over…
How came he, I say, to be so wicked a servant, that, out of sixty-eight divisions, he chose only three to supply the exigencies of the Company?
What reason can be given for not taking bribes also from Burdwan, from Bissunpore, in short, from all the sixty-eight collections which comprise the revenues of Bengal, and for selecting only three?
The moment any man stops in the midst of an account, he is stopping in the midst of a fraud.
The rapacity of man has here its bounds: here you shall come, and no farther.
The people of the East, it is well known, have their zenanah, the apartment for their wives, as a sanctuary which nobody can enter,--a kind of holy of holies, a consecrated place, safe from the rage of war, safe from the fury of tyranny.
Is there honor and justice in taking from a lady a gratuitous present made to her?
Can your Lordships believe that this can be any other than a systematical, deliberate fraud, grossly conducted?
Hastings had enabled him to commit one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public trust that ever was committed, by ordering that money of the Company's to be considered as his own, and a bond to be taken as a security for it from…
You do not even praise an accountant for being accurate, because you have thousands of them; but you justly blame a public accountant who is guilty of a gross inaccuracy.
We of the House of Commons have been reduced to form the best legitimate conjectures we could upon this business, and those conjectures have led us to further evidence, which will enable us to fix one of the most scandalous and most…
They cannot so pass with your Lordships' sagacity: I will venture to say that no court, even of pie-poudre, could help finding him guilty upon such a matter, if such a court had to inquire into it.
Hastings has invented upon this occasion, and by which he thinks out of the vices of mankind to draw a better revenue than out of any legal source whatever; and therefore he has resolved to become the most corrupt of all Governors-General…
Such is this patriotic scheme of bribery, this public-spirited corruption which Mr.
Hastings's government was to represent this man, who was unfaithful even to fraud, who did not keep the common faith of thieves and robbers, this very man he recommends to the Company as a person who ought to be rewarded, as one of their…
It appears, however, from the transaction, as far as we can make our way through this darkness, that he had actually received 10,000l. of the money, which he did not account for, and that he pretended that there was an arrear of the rest.
I find to be, what indeed I suspected him to be, a person that I have mentioned frequently to your Lordships, and that you will often hear of, commonly called Gunga Govind Sing,--in a short word, the wickedest of the whole race of banians…
Here is a system made for fraud, and producing all the effects of it.
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