Edmund Burke

Now will your Lordships be so good as to let it rest in your memory what sort of an exchequer this is, even with regard to its receipts?

Hastings's mode of accounts, of its vouchers, checks, and counter-checks, your Lordships will have observed that the mode itself is past describing, and that the checks and counter-checks, instead of being put upon one another to prevent…

Hastings himself, who did not seem to stimulate his accountants to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity, was negligent.

If, I say, we have saved these valuable fragments by suspecting his integrity, your Lordships will see suspicion is of some use: and I hope the world will learn that punishment will be of use, too, in preventing such transactions.

There was confidence to be reposed in each of them, and not one of these men appears to be in the confidence of another.

Here is a principle of treacherous fidelity, of perfidious honor, of the faith of conspirators against their masters, the faith of robbers against the public, held up against the duty of an officer in a public situation.

Let us see what becomes of us, when the principle of honor is so debauched and perverted.

We hope and trust, that, after all his concealments, and though he appear resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication, all his artifices will not be able to secure him from the siege which the diligence of the House of Commons has…

Larkins, upon the mere face of the account, sadly disappoints us; and I will venture to say that in matters of account Bengal book-keeping is as remote from good book-keeping as the Bengal painches are remote from all the rules of good…

With much prevarication, and much insolence too, he confesses himself guilty of falsifying the Company's accounts by making himself their creditor when he was their debtor, and giving false accounts of this false transaction.

Hastings kept no account, by his own confession, of the moneys that he had privately taken, as he pretends, for the Company's service, and we have but too much reason to presume for his own.

It will always be suspicious to use concealment from his colleagues and coördinates in office; but when, in a money transaction, any man uses concealment with regard to them to whom the money belongs, he is guilty of a fraud.

I am ready, my Lords, to admit that there are situations in which a minister in high office may use concealment: it may be his duty to use concealment from the enemies of his masters; it may be prudent to use concealment from his inferiors…

It is my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to my heart.

I have already incurred the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by bringing home to him the proof of his crimes, and to display them in all their force and turpitude.

So here are the bonds, begun in obscurity and ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, corruption to corruption, and fraud to fraud.

But why any man need to declare upon oath that the money which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from another person is not his is the most extraordinary thing in the world.

No: and here, at last, after so many years' litigation, he is called to account for his prevaricating, false accounts in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.

My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false or groundless: it is completely fallacious in every part.

He ought to have avoided the crime, and the suspicion would take care of itself.

Why, because it was base and dishonorable so to do; and because it would be mischievous and ruinous to the Company's affairs to suffer them to take bribes." Why, then, did he take them himself?

My Lords, here he comes before you, avowing that he knew the practice of taking money from these people was a thing dishonorable in itself.

Never did inventive folly, working upon conscious guilt, and throwing each other totally in confusion, ever produce such a false, fraudulent, prevaricating letter as this, which is now to be given to you.

Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit, but the Company's treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.

No man, who had any share in the management of the Company's revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both.