The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X | Page 4

their governors, whatever application they might pretend to
make of them, to receive, under any other name or pretence, more than
a certain, marked, simple sum of money, and this not without the
consent and permission of the Presidency to which they belong. This is
the substance, the principle, and the spirit of the covenants, and will
show your Lordships how radicated an evil this of bribery and presents

was judged to be.
When these covenants arrived in India, the servants refused at first to
execute them,--and suspended the execution of them, till they had
enriched themselves with presents. Eleven months elapsed, and it was
not till Lord Clive reached the place of his destination that the
covenants were executed: and they were not executed then without
some degree of force. Soon afterwards the treaty was made with the
country powers by which Sujah ul Dowlah was reëstablished in the
province of Oude, and paid a sum of 500,000l. to the Company for it. It
was a public payment, and there was not a suspicion that a single
shilling of private emolument attended it. But whether Mr. Hastings
had the example of others or not, their example could not justify his
briberies. He was sent there to put an end to all those examples. The
Company did expressly vest him with that power. They declared at that
time, that the whole of their service was totally corrupted by bribes and
presents, and by extravagance and luxury, which partly gave rise to
them, and these, in their turn, enabled them to pursue those excesses.
They not only reposed trust in the integrity of Mr. Hastings, but
reposed trust in his remarkable frugality and order in his affairs, which
they considered as things that distinguished his character. But in his
defence we have him quite in another character,--no longer the frugal,
attentive servant, bred to business, bred to book-keeping, as all the
Company's servants are; he now knows nothing of his own affairs,
knows not whether he is rich or poor, knows not what he has in the
world. Nay, people are brought forward to say that they know better
than he does what his affairs are. He is not like a careful man bred in a
counting-house, and by the Directors put into an office of the highest
trust on account of the regularity of his affairs; he is like one buried in
the contemplation of the stars, and knows nothing of the things in this
world. It was, then, on account of an idea of his great integrity that the
Company put him into this situation. Since that he has thought proper
to justify himself, not by clearing himself of receiving bribes, but by
saying that no bad consequences resulted from it, and that, if any such
evil consequences did arise from it, they arose rather from his
inattention to money than from his desire of acquiring it.

I have stated to your Lordships the nature of the covenants which the
East India Company sent out. Afterwards, when they found their
servants had refused to execute these covenants, they not only very
severely reprehended even a moment's delay in their execution, and
threatened the exacting the most strict and rigorous performance of
them, but they sent a commission to enforce the observance of them
more strongly; and that commission had it specially in charge never to
receive presents. They never sent out a person to India without
recognizing the grievance, and without ordering that presents should
not be received, as the main fundamental part of their duty, and upon
which all the rest depended, as it certainly must: for persons at the head
of government should not encourage that by example which they ought
by precept, authority, and force to restrain in all below them. That
commission failing, another commission was preparing to be sent out
with the same instructions, when an act of Parliament took it up; and
that act, which gave Mr. Hastings power, did mould in the very first
stamina of his power this principle, in words the most clear and forcible
that an act of Parliament could possibly devise upon the subject. And
that act was made not only upon a general knowledge of the grievance,
but your Lordships will see in the reports of that time that Parliament
had directly in view before them the whole of that monstrous head of
corruption under the name of presents, and all the monstrous
consequences that followed it.
Now, my Lords, every office of trust, in its very nature, forbids the
receipt of bribes. But Mr. Hastings was forbidden it, first, by his
official situation,--next, by covenant,--and lastly, by act of Parliament:
that is to say, by all the things that bind mankind, or that can bind
them,--first, moral obligation