And in the course of a service of thirty-two years, and ten of these employed in maintaining the powers and discharging the duties of the first office of the British government in India, that honorable court ought to know whether I possess…
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's money, not the Company's; they would find that it is carried to his credit.
My Lords, when this account appears at last, when this money does emerge in the public accounts, whose is it?
Here are indeed new discoveries, but they are like many new-discovered lands, exceedingly inhospitable, very thinly inhabited, and producing nothing to gratify the curiosity of the human mind.
My conscience allows me boldly to claim the merit of zeal and integrity; nor has fortune been unpropitious to their exertions.
In the first place, why did he take bonds at all from the Company for the money that was their own?
Such a system of cogging, such a system of fraud, such a system of prevarication, such a system of falsehood, never was, I believe, before exhibited in the world.
It was, nevertheless, my decided opinion that some aid should be given, not less as a necessary relief than as an indication of confidence, and a return for the many instances of substantial kindness which we had within the course of the…
Hastings contrived by avowing some bribes to cover others, attempted to outface his delinquency, and, if possible, to reconcile a weak breach of the laws with a sort of spirited observance of them, and to become infamous for the good of…
Therefore I dismiss the idea that any man so acting could have had a good intention in his mind: the supposition is too weak, senseless, and absurd.
This is a revenue which is to be torn away by the action of any person,--a revenue which they must return back to the person complaining, as they in justice ought to do: for no nation ever avowed making a revenue out of bribery and…
Hastings refused a public donation to the army; and from that day to this they have never received it.
Hastings refuses that army the price of their blood, money won solely almost by their arms for a prince who had acquired millions by their bravery, fidelity, and sufferings.
If ever there was a circumstance in which any refinement, any favorable construction of the act could be used, it was in favor of a body of men serving in the field, fighting for their country, spilling their blood for it, suffering all…
Because it admits of no reservation, no exception, no refinement whatever, but is clear, positive, decisive.
In short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may be permitted to repeat the words I made use of on a former occasion, extortion is the assessor, in which fraud is the treasurer, confusion the accountant, oblivion the remembrancer.
Hastings uses as an accountant and treasurer of bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to himself, acting in no public manner, and never acting but upon his requisition, concealing all his frauds and artifices to prevent detection…
What sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited by the violation of the…
He is not only a practitioner of bribery, but a professor, a doctor upon the subject.
Hastings has found out that this very coercive clause, which was made in order to enable his superiors to get at him and punish him for bribery, is a license for him to receive bribes.
And therefore this was not a license for bribery, but a prohibitory and penal clause, providing the means of coercion, and making the prohibition stronger.
It was never dreamed that this should justify the taking of bribes, privately and clandestinely, by the Governor, or any other servant of the Company, for the purpose of its future application to the Company's use.
It then imposes the penalties: and your Lordships see that human wisdom cannot pen an act more strongly directed against taking bribes upon any pretence whatever.
My Lords, an act of Parliament passed in the year 1773, the whole drift of which, I may say, was to prevent bribery, peculation, and extortion in the Company's servants; and the act was penned, I think, with as much strictness and rigor as…
The taking such bribes was to become a justifiable act, in consequence of that reservation in the mind of the person who took them; and he was not to be called to account for them in any other way than as he thought fit.
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