The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)

Another circumstance in that service is deserving of notice. Except in the highest parts of all, the emoluments of office do not in any degree correspond with the trust, nor the nature of the office with its name. In other official systems, the style, in general, is above the function; here it is the reverse. Under the name of junior merchant, senior merchant, writer, and other petty appellations of the counting-house, you have magistrates of high dignity, you have administrators of revenues truly royal, you have judges, civil, and in some respects criminal, who pass judgment upon the greatest properties of a great country. The legal public emoluments that belong to them are very often so inadequate to the real dignity of the character, that it is impossible, almost absolutely impossible, for the subordinate parts of it, which, though subordinate, are stations of power, to exist, as Englishmen, who look at a fortune to be enjoyed at home as their ultimate object, and to exist in a state of perfect incorruption in that service.

In some parts of Europe, it is true that the greatest situations are often attended with but little emolument; yet still they are filled. Why? Because reputation, glory, fame, the esteem, the love, the tears of joy which flow from happy sensibility, the honest applauses of a grateful country, sometimes pay the cares, anxieties, and toils which wait on great situations in the commonwealth; and in these they pay in money what cannot be paid in fame and reputation. It is the reverse in the service of the India Company. Glory is not the lot of subordinated merit,—and all the subordinate parts of the gradation are officers who, in comparison with the offices and duties intrusted to them, are miserably provided for; whereas the chief of each great Presidency has emoluments securing him against every mode of temptation. But if this has not secured the head, we may easily judge how the members are to be coerced. Mr. Hastings, at the head of the service, with high legal emoluments, has fouled his hands and sullied his government with bribes. He has substituted oppression and tyranny in the place of legal government. With all that unbounded, licentious power which he has assumed over the public revenues, instead of endeavoring to find a series of gradual, progressive, honorable, and adequate rewards for the persons who serve the public in the subordinate, but powerful situations, he has left them to prey upon the people without the smallest degree of control. In default of honest emolument, there is the unbounded license of power; and, as one of the honestest and ablest servants of the Company said to me in conversation, the civil service of the Company resembled the military service of the Mahrattas,—little pay, but unbounded license to plunder. I do not say that some of the salaries given in India would not sound well here; but when you consider the nature of the trusts, the dignity of the situation, whatever the name of them may be, the powers that are granted, the hopes that every man has of establishing himself at home, I repeat, it is a source of infinite grievance, of infinite abuse: of which source of corrupt power we charge Mr. Hastings with having availed himself, in filling up the void of direct pay by finding out and countenancing every kind of oblique and unjust emolument; though it must be confessed that he is far from being solely guilty of this offence.

Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority, at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,—they are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers that despotism involves.

It is further remarkable, these servants exercise what your Lordships are now exercising, high judicial powers, and they exercise them without the smallest study of any law, either general or municipal. It is made a sort of rule in the service, a rule confirmed even by the attempts that were made to correct it, (I mean confirmed by Sir Elijah Impey, when, under the auspices of Mr. Hastings, he undertook to be legislator for India,) that the judicial character, the last in the order of legal progress, that to which all professional men look up as the crown of their labors, that ultimate hope of men grown gray in professional practice, is among the first experimental situations of a Company's servant. It is expressly said in that body of regulations to which I allude, that the office and situation of a judge of the Dewanny Courts of Adawlut is to be filled by the junior servants of the Company; and as the judicial emolument is not substantially equal to that of other situations, the office of a judge is to be taken, as it were, in transitu, as a passage to other offices not of a judicial nature. As soon, therefore, as a young man has supplied the defects of his education by the advantage of some experience, he is immediately translated to a totally different office; and another young man is substituted, to learn, at the expense of the property of India, to fill a situation which, when he may be qualified to fill, he is no longer to hold.

It is in a great measure the same with regard to the other situations. They are the situations of great statesmen, which, according to the practice of the world, require, to fill properly, rather a large converse with men and much intercourse in life than deep study of books,—though that, too, has its eminent service. We know that in the habits of civilized life, in cultivated society, there is imbibed by men a good deal of the solid practice of government, of the true maxims of state, and everything that enables a man to serve his country. But these men are sent over to exercise functions at which a statesman here would tremble, without any theoretical study, and without any of that sort of experience which, in mixed societies of business and converse, form men gradually and insensibly to great affairs. Low cunning, intrigue, and stratagem are soon acquired; but manly, durable policy, which never sacrifices the general interest to a partial or momentary advantage, is not so cheaply formed in the human understanding.

Mr. Hastings, in his defence before the House of Commons, and in the defences he has made before your Lordships, has lamented his own situation in this particular. It was much to be lamented, indeed. How far it will furnish justification, extenuation, or palliation of his conduct, when we come to examine that conduct, will be seen.

These circumstances in the system have in a great degree vitiated and perverted what is in reality (and many things are in reality) excellent in it. They have rendered the application of all correctives and remedies to abuse, at best, precarious in their operation. The laws that we have made, the covenants which the Company has obliged its servants to enter into, the occasional orders that have been given, at least ostensibly good, all have proved noxious to the country, instead of beneficial.

To illustrate this point, I beg leave to observe to your Lordships, that the servants of the Company are obliged to enter into that service not only with an impression of the general duty which attaches upon all servants, but are obliged to engage in a specific covenant with their masters to perform all the duties described in that covenant (which are all the duties of their relation) under heavy penalties. They are bound to a repetition of these covenants at every step of their progress, from writer to factor, from factor to junior merchant, and from junior merchant to senior merchant. They ought, according to the rule, to renew these covenants at these times by something (I speak without offence) which may be said to resemble confirmation in the Church. They are obliged to renew their obligation in particular to receive no gifts, gratuities, or presents whatsoever.

This scheme of covenants would have been wise and proper, if it had belonged to a judicious order, and rational, consistent scheme of discipline. The orders of the Company have forbidden their servants to take any extraneous emoluments. The act of Parliament has fulminated against them. Clear, positive laws, and clear, positive private engagements, have no exception of circumstances in them, no difference quoad majus et minus; but every one who offends against the law is liable to the law. The consequence is this: he who has deviated but an inch from the straight line, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful emolument, (and all have taken many pennies of unlawful emolument,) does not dare to complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel oppression in any of his fellow-servants. He who has taken a trifle, perhaps as the reward of a good action, is obliged to be silent, when he sees whole nations desolated around him. The great criminal at the head of the service has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the small offence, and crush the person who has committed it. This is one grand source of Mr. Hastings's power. After he had got the better of the Parliamentary commission, no complaint from any part of the service has appeared against Mr. Hastings. He is bold enough to state it as one presumption of his merit, that there has been no such complaint. No such complaint, indeed, can exist. The spirit of the corps would of itself almost forbid it,—to which spirit an informer is the most odious and detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been hunted down, as a common enemy. But here is a new security. Who can complain, or dares to accuse? The whole service is irregular: nobody is free from small offences; and, as I have said, the great offender can always crush the small one.

If you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine, from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption; but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes, you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary perfection. He was fourteen years at the head of that service; and there is not an instance, no, not one single instance, in which he endeavored to detect corruption, or that he ever, in any one single instance, attempted to punish it; but the whole service, with that whole mass of enormity which he attributes to it, slept, as it were, at once, under his terror and his protection: under his protection, if they did not dare to move against him; under terror, from his power to pluck out individuals and make a public example of them, whenever he thought fit. And therefore that service, under his guidance and influence, was, beyond even what its own nature disposed it to, a service of confederacy, a service of connivance, a service composed of various systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head and the protector. But this general connivance he did not think sufficient to secure to him the general support of the Indian interest. He went further. We shall prove to your Lordships, that, when the Company were driven by shame, not by inclination, to order several prosecutions against delinquents in their service, Mr. Hastings, directly contrary to the duty of his office, directly contrary to the express and positive law of the Court of Directors, which law Parliament had bound upon him as his rule of action, not satisfied with his long tacit connivance, ventured, before he left his government, and among his last acts, to pass a general act of pardon and indemnity, and at once ordered the whole body of the prosecutions directed by his masters, the Company, to be discharged.

Having had fourteen years' lease of connivance to bestow, and giving at the end a general release of all suits and actions, he now puts himself at the head of a vast body enriched by his bounties, connivances, and indemnities, and expects the support of those whom he had thus fully rewarded and discharged from the pursuit of the laws. You will find, in the course of this business, that, when charges have been brought against him of any bribery, corruption, or other malversation, his course has been to answer little or nothing to that specific bribery, corruption, or malversation: his way has been to call on the Court of Directors to inquire of every servant who comes to Europe, and to say whether there was any one man in it that will give him an ill word. He has put himself into a situation in which he may always safely call to his character, and will always find himself utterly incapable of justifying his conduct.

So far I have troubled your Lordships with the system of confederacy and connivance, which, under his auspices, was the vital principle of almost the whole service. There is one member of the service which I have omitted: but whether I ought to have put it first, or, as I do now, last, I must confess I am at some loss; because, though it appears to be the lowest (if any regular) part of the service, it is by far the most considerable and the most efficient, without a full consideration and explanation of which hardly any part of the conduct of Mr. Hastings, and of many others that may be in his situation, can be fully understood.

I have given your Lordships an account of writers, factors, merchants, who exercise the office of judges, lord chancellors, chancellors of the exchequer, ministers of state, and managers of great revenues. But there is another description of men, of more importance than them all, a description you have often heard of, but which has not been sufficiently explained: I mean the banian. When the Company's service was no more than mercantile, and the servants were generally unacquainted with the country, they used the intervention of certain factors among the natives, which were called banians: we called them so, because they were of the tribe or caste of the banians or merchants,—the Indians being generally distributed into trades according to their tribes. The name still continues, when the functions of the banians are totally altered. The banian is known by other appellations. He is called dewan, or steward; and, indeed, this is a term with more propriety applied to him in several of his functions. He is, by his name of office, the steward of the household of the European gentleman: he has the management of his affairs, and the ordering of his servants. He is himself a domestic servant, and generally chosen out of that class of natives who, by being habituated to misery and subjection, can submit to any orders, and are fit for any of the basest services. Trained under oppression, (it is the true education,) they are fit to oppress others. They serve an apprenticeship of servitude to qualify them for the trade of tyranny. They know all the devices, all the little frauds, all the artifices and contrivances, the whole panoply of the defensive armor by which ingenious slavery secures itself against the violence of power. They know all the lurking-holes, all the winding recesses, of the unfortunate; and they hunt out distress and misery even to their last retreats. They have suffered themselves; but, far from being taught by those sufferings to abstain from rigor, they have only learned the methods of afflicting their fellow-slaves. They have the best intelligence of what is done in England. The moment a Company's servant arrives in India, and his English connections are known to be powerful, some of that class of people immediately take possession of him, as if he were their inheritance. They have knowledge of the country and its affairs; they have money; they have the arts of making money. The gentleman who comes from England has none of these; he enters into that world, as he enters into the world at large, naked. His portion is great simplicity, great indigence, and a strong disposition to relieve himself. The banian, once in possession, employs his tyranny, not only over the native people of his country, but often over the master himself, who has little other share in the proceedings of his servant but in giving him the ticket of his name to mark that he is connected with and supported by an European who is himself well connected and supported at home. This is a commission which nothing can resist. From that moment forward it is not the Englishman, it is the black banian, that is the master. The nominal master often lives from his hand. We know how young men are sent out of this country; we know how happy we are to hear soon that they are no longer a burden to their friends and parents. The banian knows it, too. He supplies the young servant with money. He has him under his power: first, from the necessity of employing such a man; and next, (and this is the more important of the two,) he has that dreadful power over his master which every creditor has over his debtor. Actions the most abhorrent to his nature he must see done before his face, and thousands and thousands worse are done in his absence, and he dare not complain. The banian extorts, robs, plunders, and then gives him just what proportion of the spoil he pleases. If the master should murmur, the very power that was sent over to protect the people of India from these very abuses, (the best things being perverted, when applied to unknown objects and put into unsuitable situations,) the very laws of England, by making the recovery of debts more easy, infinitely increase the power of the banian over his master. Thus the Supreme Court of Justice, the destined corrector of all abuses, becomes a collateral security for that abominable tyranny exercised by the moneyed banians over Europeans as well as the natives. So that, while we are here boasting of the British power in the East, we are in perhaps more than half our service nothing but the inferior, miserable instruments of the tyranny which the lowest part of the natives of India exercise, to the disgrace of the British authority, and to the ruin of all that is respectable among their own countrymen. They have subverted the first houses, totally ruined and undone the country, cheated and defrauded the revenue,—the master a silent, sometimes a melancholy spectator, until some office of high emolument has emancipated him. This has often been the true reason that the Company's servants in India, in order to free themselves from this horrid and atrocious servitude, are obliged to become instruments of another tyranny, and must prostitute themselves to men in power, in order to obtain some office that may enable them to escape the servitudes below, and enable them to pay their debts. And thus many have become the instruments of Mr. Hastings.

These banians, or dewans, were originally among the lower castes in the country. But now, it is true, that, after seeing the power and profits of these men,—that there is neither power, profession, nor occupation to be had, which a reputable person can exercise, but through that channel,—men of higher castes, and born to better things, have thrown themselves into that disgraceful servitude, have become menial servants to Englishmen, that they might rise by their degradation. But whoever they are, or of whatever birth, they have equally prostituted their integrity, they have equally lost their character; and, once entered into that course of life, there is no difference between the best castes and the worst. That system Mr. Hastings confirmed, established, increased, and made the instrument of the most austere tyranny, of the basest peculations, and the most scandalous and iniquitous extortions.

In the description I have given of banians a distinction is to be made. Your Lordships must distinguish the banians of the British servants in subordinate situations and the banians who are such to persons in higher authority. In the latter case the banian is in strict subordination, because he may always be ruined by his superior; whereas in the former it is always in his power to ruin his nominal superior. It was not through fear, but voluntarily, and not for the banian's purposes, but his own, Mr. Hastings has brought forward his banian. He seated him in the houses of the principal nobility, and invested him with farms of the revenue; he has given him enormous jobs; he has put him over the heads of a nobility which, for their grandeur, antiquity, and dignity, might almost be matched with your Lordships. He has made him supreme ecclesiastical judge, judge even of the very castes, in the preservation of the separate rules and separate privileges of which that people exists. He who has dominion over the caste has an absolute power over something more than life and fortune.

Such is that first, or last, (I know not which to call it,) order in the Company's service called a banian. The mutseddies, clerks, accountants, of Calcutta, generally fall under this description. Your Lordships will see hereafter the necessity of giving you, in the opening the case, an idea of the situation of a banian. You will see, as no Englishman, properly speaking, acts by himself, that he must be made responsible for that person called his banian,—for the power he either uses under him, or the power he has acquired over him. The banian escapes, in the night of his complexion and situation, the inquiry that a white man cannot stand before in this country. Through the banians, or other black natives, a bad servant of the Company receives his bribes. Through them he decides falsely against the titles of litigants in the court of castes, or in the offices of public registry. Through them Mr. Hastings has exercised oppressions which, I will venture to say, in his own name, in his own character, daring as he is, (and he is the most daring criminal that ever existed,) he never would dare to practise. Many, if not most, of the iniquities of his interior bad administration have been perpetrated through these banians, or other native agents and confidants; and we shall show you that he is not satisfied with one of them, confiding few of his secrets to Europeans, and hardly any of his instruments, either native or European, knowing the secrets of each other. This is the system of banianism, and of concealment, which Mr. Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into that dark and insidious character.

I have explained, or endeavored to explain, to your Lordships these circumstances of the true spirit, genius, and character, more than the ostensible institutions of the Company's service: I now shall beg leave to bring before you one institution, taken from the mercantile constitution of the Company, so excellent, that I will venture to say that human wisdom has never exceeded it. In this excellent institution the counting-house gave lessons to the state. The active, awakened, and enlightened principle of self-interest will provide a better system for the guard of that interest than the cold, drowsy wisdom of those who provide for a good out of themselves ever contrived for the public. The plans sketched by private prudence for private interest, the regulations by mercantile men for their mercantile purposes, when they can be applied to the discipline and order of the state, produce a discipline and order which no state should be ashamed to copy. The Company's mercantile regulations are admirably fitted for the government of a remote, large, disjointed empire. As merchants, having factors abroad in distant parts of the world, they have obliged them to a minuteness and strictness of register, and to a regularity of correspondence, which no state has ever used in the same degree with regard to its public ministers. The Company has made it a fundamental part of their constitution, that almost their whole government shall be a written government. Your Lordships will observe, in the course of the proceeding, the propriety of opening fully to you this circumstance in the government of India,—that is, that the Company's government is a government of writing, a government of record. The strictest court of justice, in its proceeding, is not more, perhaps not so much a court of record as the India Company's executive service is, or ought to be, in all its proceedings.

In the first place, they oblige their servants to keep a journal or diary of all their transactions, public and private: they are bound to do this by an express covenant. They oblige them, as a corrective upon that diary, to keep a letter-book, in which all their letters are to be regularly entered. And they are bound by the same covenant to produce all those books upon requisition, although they should be mixed with affairs concerning their own private negotiations and transactions of commerce, or their closest and most retired concerns in private life. But as the great corrective of all, they have contrived that every proceeding in public council shall be written,—no debates merely verbal. The arguments, first or last, are to be in writing, and recorded. All other bodies, the Houses of Lords, Commons, Privy Council, Cabinet Councils for secret state deliberations, enter only resolves, decisions, and final resolutions of affairs: the argument, the discussion, the dissent, does very rarely, if at all, appear. But the Company has proceeded much further, and done much more wisely, because they proceeded upon mercantile principles; and they have provided, either by orders or course of office, that all shall be written,—the proposition, the argument, the dissent. This is not confined to their great Council; but this order ought to be observed, as I conceive, (and I see considerable traces of it in practice,) in every Provincial Council, whilst the Provincial Councils existed, and even down to the minutest ramification of their service. These books, in a progression from the lowest Councils to the highest Presidency, are ordered to be transmitted, duplicate and triplicate, by every ship that sails to Europe. On this system an able servant of the Company, and high in their service, has recorded his opinion, and strongly expressed his sentiments. Writing to the Court of Directors, he says, "It ought to be remembered, that the basis upon which you rose to power, and have been able to stand the shock of repeated convulsions, has been the accuracy and simplicity of mercantile method, which makes every transaction in your service and every expenditure a matter of record."

My Lords, this method not only must produce to them, if strictly observed, a more accurate idea of the nature of their affairs and the nature of their expenditures, but it must afford them no trivial opportunity and means of knowing the true characters of their servants, their capacities, their ways of thinking, the turn and bias of their minds. If well employed, and but a little improved, the East India Company possessed an advantage unknown before to the chief of a remote government. In the most remote parts of the world, and in the minutest parts of a remote service, everything came before the principal with a domestic accuracy and local familiarity. It was, in the power of a Director, sitting in London, to form an accurate judgment of every incident that happened upon the Ganges and the Gogra.

The use of this recorded system did not consist only in the facility of discovering what the nature of their affairs and the character and capacity of their servants was, but it furnished the means of detecting their misconduct, frequently of proving it too, and of producing the evidence of it judicially under their own hands. For your Lordships must have observed that it is rare indeed, that, in a continued course of evil practices, any uniform method of proceeding will serve the purposes of the delinquent. Innocence is plain, direct, and simple: guilt is a crooked, intricate, inconstant, and various thing. The iniquitous job of to-day may be covered by specious reasons; but when the job of iniquity of to-morrow succeeds, the reasons that have colored the first crime may expose the second malversation. The man of fraud falls into contradiction, prevarication, confusion. This hastens, this facilitates, conviction. Besides, time is not allowed for corrupting the records. They are flown out of their hands, they are in Europe, they are safe in the registers of the Company, perhaps they are under the eye of Parliament, before the writers of them have time to invent an excuse for a direct contrary conduct to that to which their former pretended principles applied. This is a great, a material part of the constitution of the Company. My Lords, I do not think it to be much apologized for, if I repeat, that this is the fundamental regulation of that service, and which, if preserved in the first instance, as it ought to be, in official practice in India, and then used as it ought to be in England, would afford such a mode of governing a great, foreign, dispersed empire, as, I will venture to say, few countries ever possessed, even in governing the most limited and narrow jurisdiction.

It was the great business of Mr. Hastings's policy to subvert this great political edifice. His first mode of subverting it was by commanding the public ministers, paid by the Company, to deliver their correspondence upon the most critical and momentous affairs to him, in order to be suppressed and destroyed at his pleasure. To support him in this plan of spoliation, he has made a mischievous distinction in public business between public and private correspondence. The Company's orders and covenants made none. There are, readily I admit, thousands of occasions in which it is not proper to divulge promiscuously a private correspondence, though on public affairs, to the world; but there is no occasion in which it is not a necessary duty, on requisition, to communicate your correspondence to those who form the paramount government, on whose interests and on whose concerns and under whose authority this correspondence has been carried on. The very same reasons which require secrecy with regard to others demand the freest communication to them. But Mr. Hastings has established principles of confidence and secrecy towards himself which have cut off all confidence between the Directors and their ministers, and effectually kept them at least out of the secret of their own affairs.