The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X | Page 8

not only in that act, but every consequential act, with most grievous and terrible consequences.
My Lords, I will now come to a scene of peculation of another kind: namely, a peculation by the direct sale of offices of justice,--by the direct sale of the successions of families,--by the sale of guardianships and trusts, held most sacred among the people of India: by the sale of them, not, as before, to farmers, not, as you might imagine, to near relations of the families, but a sale of them to the unfaithful servants of those families, their own perfidious servants, who had ruined their estates, who, if any balances had accrued to the government, had been the cause of those debts. Those very servants were put in power over their estates, their persons, and their families, by Mr. Hastings, for a shameful price. It will be proved to your Lordships, in the course of this business, that Mr. Hastings has done this in another sacred trust, the most sacred trust a man can have,--that is, in the case of those vakeels, (as they call them,) agents, or attorneys, who had been sent to assert and support the rights of their miserable masters before the Council-General. It will be proved that these vakeels were by Mr. Hastings, for a price to be paid for it, put in possession of the very power, situation, and estates of those masters who sent them to Calcutta to defend them from wrong and violence. The selling offices of justice, the sale of succession in families, of guardianships and other sacred trusts, the selling masters to their servants, and principals to the attorneys they employed to defend themselves, were all parts of the same system; and these were the horrid ways in which he received bribes beyond any common rate.
When Mr. Hastings was appointed in the year 1773 to be Governor-General of Bengal, together with Mr. Barwell, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis, the Company, knowing the former corrupt state of their service, (but the whole corrupt system of Mr. Hastings at that time not being known or even suspected at home,) did order them, in discharge of the spirit of the act of Parliament, to make an inquiry into all manner of corruptions and malversations in office, without the exception of any persons whatever. Your Lordships are to know that the act did expressly authorize the Court of Directors to frame a body of instructions, and to give orders to their new servants appointed under the act of Parliament, lest it should be supposed that they, by their appointment under the act, could supersede the authority of the Directors. The Directors, sensible of the power left in them over their servants by the act of Parliament, though their nomination was taken from them, did, agreeably to the spirit and power of that act, give this order.
The Council consisted of two parties: Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, who were chosen and kept there upon the idea of their local knowledge; and the other three, who were appointed on account of their great parts and known integrity. And I will venture to say that those three gentlemen did so execute their duty in India, in all the substantial parts of it, that they will serve as a shield to cover the honor of England, whenever this country is upbraided in India.
They found a rumor running through the country of great peculations and oppressions. Soon after, when it was known what their instructions were, and that the Council was ready, as is the first duty of all governors, even when there is no express order, to receive complaints against the oppressions and corruptions of government in any part of it, they found such a body (and that body shall be produced to your Lordships) of corruption and peculation in every walk, in every department, in every situation of life, in the sale of the most sacred trusts, and in the destruction of the most ancient families of the country, as I believe in so short a time never was unveiled since the world began.
Your Lordships would imagine that Mr. Hastings would at least ostensibly have taken some part in endeavoring to bring these corruptions before the public, or that he would at least have acted with some little management in his opposition. But, alas! it was not in his power; there was not one, I think, but I am sure very few, of these general articles of corruption, in which the most eminent figure in the crowd, the principal figure as it were in the piece, was not Mr. Hastings himself. There were a great many others involved; for all departments were corrupted and vitiated. But you could not open a page in which you did not see Mr.