equal struggle, are pushed back upon them- While discovery of the misgovernment of othselves, and, by a reversal of their whole func-ers led to his own power, it was wise to inquire; tions, fester to gangrene-to death; and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench and poison, an offense, a horror, a lesson to the world. Mr. Dundas' the subject is In my opinion, we ought not to wait for the fruitless instruction of calamity to inquire into the abuses which bring upon us ruin in the worst of its forms, in the loss of our fame and virtue. But the right honorable gentleman pretense that [Mr. Dundas] says, in answer to all too delicate to the powerful arguments of my honorbe taken up able friend [Mr. Fox], “that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this transaction." But it is exposed. It is perfectly known in every member, in every particle, and in every way, except that which may lead to a remedy. He knows that the papers of correspondence are printed, and that they are in every hand. He and delicacy are a rare and singular coalition. He thinks that to divulge our Indian politics may be highly dangerous. He! the mover! the chairman! the reporter of the Committee of Secrecy! he that brought forth in the utmost detail, in several vast, printed folios, the most recondite parts of the politics, the military, the revenues of the British empire in India! With six great chopping bastards [Reports of the Committee of Secrecy], each as lusty as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the sight of his new bridegroom, assumes a virgin delicacy; or, to use a more fit, as well as a more poetic comparison, the person so squeamish, so timid, so trembling, lest the winds of heaven should visit too roughly, is expanded to | broad sunshine, exposed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud with all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of her deli cate amours: Triginta capitum fœtus enixa jacebit, 49 Mr. Burke here accommodates to his purpose a passage of Virgil's Eneid, book iii., p. 391, in which the prophet Helenus gives a sign to neas indica tive of the spot where he should build a city, and cease from his labors. Cum tibi solicito secretò ad fluminis undam, Littoreis ingens inventa sub ilicibus sus Trigenta capitum fælus enixa jacebit, Alba, solo recubans, albi circum ubera nati; Is locus urbis erit, requies ea certa laborum. Dryden has rendered the lines somewhat loosely, in the following manner: When in the shady shelter of a wood, And near the margin of a gentle flood, Thou shalt behold a sow upon the ground, With thirty sucking young encompass'd round, The dam and offspring white as fallen snow, These on thy city shall their name bestow, And there shall end thy labor and thy woe. No one will dispute the ingenuity of Mr. Burke in turning these lines to his purpose; but it will be a wonder to most men, that he, who wrote the de } it was safe to publish; there was then no delicacy; there was then no danger. But when his object is obtained, and in his imitation he has outdone the crimes that he had reprobated in volumes of reports, and in sheets of bills of pains and penalties, then concealment becomes pru. dence, and it concerns the safety of the state that we should not know, in a mode of parliamentary cognizance, what all the world knows but too well; that is, in what manner he chooses to dispose of the public revenues to the CREATURES of his politics. Peroration: The concerns of India, however perplexed or reer cease to in pulsive, can nev volve the honor and safety of the The debate has been long, and as much so on my part, at least, as on the part of those who have spoken before me. But long as it is, the more material half of the subject has hardly been touched on; that is, the corrupt and destructive system to which this debt empire. has been rendered subservient, and which seems to be pursued with at least as much vigor and regularity as ever. If I considered your ease or my own, rather than the weight and importance of this question, I ought to make some apology to you, perhaps some apology to myself, for having detained your attention so long. I know on what ground I tread. This subject, at one time taken up with so much fervor and zeal, is no longer a favorite in this House. The House itself has undergone a great and signal revolution. To some the subject is strange and uncouth; to several harsh and distasteful; to the relics of the last Parliament it is a matter of fear and apprehension. It is natural for those who have seen their friends sink in the tornado which raged during the late shift of the monsoon, and have hardly escaped on the planks of the general wreck, it is but too natural for them, as soon as they make the rocks and quicksands of their former disasters, to put about their new-built barks, and, as much as possible, to keep aloof from this perilous lee-shore. But let us do what we please to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation. Our attempts to banish this importunate duty will only make it return upon us again and again, and every time in a shape more unpleasant than the former. A government has been fabricated for that great province; the right honorable gentleman says, that therefore you ought not to examine into its conduct. Heavens! what an argument is this! We are not to examine into the conduct of the direction, because it is an old government; we are not to examine into this Board of Control, because it is a new one; then we are only to examine into the conduct of those who have no conduct to account for. Unfortunately, the basis of this new government has been laid on old, condemned delinquents, and its superstructure is raised out of scription of the Queen of France, could ever have soiled his pages with such a passage as the one above. prosecutors turned into protectors. The event has been such as might be expected. But if it had been otherwise constituted; had it been constituted even as I wished, and as the mover of this question had planned, the better part of the proposed establishment was in the publicity of its proceedings; in its perpetual responsibility to Parliament. Without this check, what is our government at home; even awed, as every European government is, by an audience formed of the other states of Europe, by the applause or condemnation of the discerning and critical company before which it acts? But if the scene on the other side of the globe, which tempts, invites, almost compels to tyranny and rapine, be not inspected with the eye of a severe and unremitting vigilance, shame and destruction must ensue, For one, the worst event of this day, though it may deject, shall not break or subdue me. The call upon us is authoritative. Let who will shrink back, I shall be found at my post. Baffled, discountenanced, subdued, discredited, as the cause of justice and humanity is, it will be only the dearer to me. Whoever, therefore, shall at any time bring before you any thing toward the relief of our distressed fellowcitizens in India, and toward a subversion of the present most corrupt and oppressive system for its government, in me shall find a weak, I am afraid, but a steady, earnest, and faithful assistant. ough inquiry. A Board of Commissioners was appointed to examine into these new claims. After an investigation of many years, only £1,346,796 were allowed as good, thus showing that less than one part in twenty of all these claims could be regarded as true and lawful debts. It is the opinion of well-informed men that the claims of Benfield and his associates, if fairly investigated, would have been reduced in very near the same proportion. But has Mr. Burke made out his case as to the motives of Mr. Pitt? Has he proved that these claims were allowed without inquiry, as a "recompense" to Benfield and the other creditors for their parliamentary influence? This question will be differently answered by different persons, according to their estimate of Mr. Pitt's character. Mill, in his British India, speaking of Mr. Burke's charge, says, "In support of it, he adduces as great a body of proof as it is almost ever possible to bring to a fact of such a description." He goes on to examine Mr. Dundas' defense, that the Nabob and others were allowed "to object" to these claims, and adds, "That this was a blind is abundantly clear, though it is possible that it stood as much between his own eyes and the light, as he was desirous of putting it between the light and eyes of other people." There was also another "blind," mentioned by Wraxall, viz., that these claims had, to some extent, changed hands, and The motion for inquiry was voted down. Mr. that the innocent would suffer with the guilty, Pitt was now at the height of his popularity, and if any of them were disallowed. It is easy to had an overwhelming majority at his command, see how strongly Mr. Pitt was tempted, at this ready to sustain him in all his measures. The critical moment of his life, to attach undue imconsequences were very serious to the finances portance to such considerations. It was imposof the country. Many years were necessarily sible to go back and lay bare all the frauds and occupied in paying so large a debt. In 1814 crimes of the English residents in India. To Mr. Hume publicly stated that, according to the prevent them hereafter was the great object. best information he could obtain, the amount paid Once firmly seated in power, he was resolved (interest included) was nearly five millions of to do it; and when he was brought off in tripounds; nor was this all. Mr. Hume adds, umph at the polls through the agency (to a con"the knowledge of the fact that Mr. Dundas siderable extent) of men like Benfield, in conhad in that manner admitted, without any kind nection with the immense East India interest of inquiry, the whole claims of the Consolidated throughout the country, it was natural for him Debt of 1777, served as a strong inducement to to feel that he must not be too scrupulous in reothers to get from the Nabob obligations or bonds spect to the past, but must rather aim in future of any description, in hopes that some future good- at the prevention of all such evils. It is thus natured president of the Board of Control would that the errors of political men spring from mindo the same for them. We accordingly find that gled motives; and while we can not doubt that an enormous debt of near thirty millions sterling Mr. Pitt was more or less influenced in this was very soon formed after that act of Mr. Dun- case, as in that of Mr. Hastings' impeachment, das, and urgent applications were soon again by his "avarice of power," we should be slow made to have the claims paid in the same man- to admit that his conduct implies that dereliction ner." It now became necessary to make a thor- of principle imputed to him by Mr. Burke. EXTRACT S. PERORATION OF THE OPENING SPEECH AT THE TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS. In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villainy upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you. My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords? You have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted kingdoms. Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish any other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance enough in India to nourish such another delinquent. My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, that the sun, in his beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and barriers of nature, united by the bond of a social and moral community-all the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered to all the people of India. Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the Crown, under whose authority you sit, and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority, what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent powers and protecting justice of his Majesty. We have here the heir-apparent to the Crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England wish an heir-apparent of the Crown to be. We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the Sovereign and the subject-offering a pledge, in that situation, for the support of the rights of the Crown and the liberties of the people, both which extremities they touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here; those who have their own honor, the honor of their ancestors, and of their posterity, to guard, and who will justify, as they have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new nobility, who have risen, and exalted themselves, by various merits, by great military services, which have extended the fame of this country from the rising to the setting sun. We have those, who, by various civil merits and various civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which they well deserve, and in which they will justify the favor of their Sovereign and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and make them rejoice to see those virtuous characters, that were the other day upon a level with them, now exalted above them in rank, but feeling with them in sympathy what they felt in common with them before. We have persons exalted from the practice of the law, from the place in which they administered high, though subordinate justice, to a seat here, to enlighten with their knowledge, and to strengthen with their votes, those principles which have distinguished the courts in which they have presided. My Lords, you have here, also, the lights of our religion; you have the bishops of England. My Lords, you have that true image of the primitive Church in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from the superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will bring upon the best institutions. You have the representatives of that religion which says that their God is love, that the very vital spirit of their institution is charity-a religion which so much hates oppression, that when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, he did not appear in a form of greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government, since the person, who was the Master of Nature, chose to appear himself in a subordinate situation. These are the considerations which influence them, which animate them, and will animate them, against all oppression; knowing that He who is called first among them, and first among us all, both of the flock that is fed and of those who feed it, made himself "the servant of all." My Lords, these are the securities which we have in all the constituent parts of the body of this House. We know them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your hands. Therefore, it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons, I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors. I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonored. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose property he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate. I impeach him in the name, and by virtue, of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated. I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. You began ill, because you began by despising every thing that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour, and you would have risen with the example to The extracts which follow under this head are taken from Mr. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, and his Letters on the Regicide Peace. you, beyond any thing recorded in the history of the world; but you have shown that difficulty is good for man. By following those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most unequivocal bless France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites or other of religion. All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices, and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of equality in France. whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, Compute your gains; see what is got by as a nation of low-born, servile wretches, until those extravagant and presumptuous speculathe emancipating year of 1789. In order to tions which have taught your leaders to despise furnish, at the expense of your honor, an excuse all their predecessors, and all their contemporato your apologists here for several enormities of ries, and even to despise themselves, until the yours, you would not have been content to be rep-moment in which they became truly despicable. resented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed, and were illings! France has bought poverty by crime! fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have you thought, what I, for one, always thought you, a generous and gallant nation, long misled, to your disadvantage, by your high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honor, and loyalty; that events had been unfavorable to you, but that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition; that, in your most devoted submission, you were actuated by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshiped, in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood that, in the delusion of this amiable error, you had gone farther than your wise ancestors; that you were resolved to resume your ancient privileges, while you preserved the spirit of your ancient and your recent loyalty and honor; or, if diffident of yourselves, and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated Constitution of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbors in this land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe, meliorated and adapted to its present state-by following wise examples you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but as, when well disciplined, it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive, but a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a free Constitution, a potent monarchy, a disciplined army, a reformed and venerated clergy, a mitigated, but spirited nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory laid open to France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust, and taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns will consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confidence in their people, as subverters of their thrones; as traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy good nature, under specious pretenses, to admit combinations of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power. This alone (if there were nothing else) is an irreparable calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your Parliament of Paris told your king that, in calling the states together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of their zeal in providing for the support of the throne. It is right that these men should hide their heads. It is right that they should bear their part in the ruin which their counsel has brought on their Sovereign and their country. Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy; to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salatary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary tyrant. Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities. Seizure of the King and Queen of France. History will record, that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the King and Queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public faith, to indulge nature in a This was unnatural. The rest is in order. few hours of respite and troubled melancholy They have found their punishment in their suc- repose. From this sleep the Queen was first cess. Laws overturned; tribunals subverted; startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, industry without vigor; commerce expiring; who cried out to her to save herself by flight— the revenue unpaid, yet the people impover- that this was the last proof of fidelity he could ished; a church pillaged, and a state not re-give-that they were upon him, and he was lieved; civil and military anarchy made the dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band of constitution of the kingdom; every thing human cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, blood, rushed into the chamber of the Queen, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, and pierced, with a hundred strokes of bayonets to crown all, the paper securities of new, preca- and poniards, the bed from whence this perserious, tottering power, the discredited paper se- cuted woman had but just time to fly almost nacurities of impoverished fraud, and beggared ked, and, through ways unknown to the murderrapine, held out as a currency for the support ers, had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized King and husband not secure of his own life for species that represent the lasting conventional a moment. credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted. Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war; they are the sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace. They are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, because unresisted and irresistible authority. The persons who have thus squandered away the precious treasure of their crimes, the persons who have made this prodigal and wild waste of public evils (the last stake reserved for the ultimate ransom of the state), have met in their progress with little, or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a war. Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and laid every thing level at their feet. Not one drop of their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have ruined. They have made no sacrifice to their projects of greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, while they were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and distress, thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty has not even been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their sense of perfect safety in authorizing treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings, throughout their harassed land; but the cause of all was plain from the beginning. This King, to say no more of him, and this Queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great and generous people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases. Thence they were conducted into the capital of their kingdom. Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted, promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the gentlemen of birth and family who composed the King's body-guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execution of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; while the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amid the horrid yells, and thrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were, under a guard composed of those very soldiers who had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a Bastile for kings. |