Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing account which he gives here, that several of these sums he meant to conceal forever, even from the knowledge of the Directors. Look back to his letter of 22d May, 1782, and his letter of the 16th of December, and in them he tells you that he might have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable so to do; that his conscience would have been wounded, if he had done it; and that he was afraid it would be thought that this discovery was brought from him in consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries. Here he says of a discovery which he values himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it should be attributed to arise from motives of fear. Now, at last, he tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time when he had just cause to dread the strict account to which he is called this day, first, that he cannot tell whether any one motive which he assigns, either in this letter or in the former, were his real motive or not; that he does not know whether he has not invented them since, in consequence of a train of meditation upon what he might have done or might have said; and, lastly, he says, contrary to all his former declarations, “that he had never meant nor could give the Directors the least notice of them at all, as they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed them from his remembrance.” “I intended,” he says, “always to keep them secret, though I have declared to you solemnly, over and over again, that I did not. I do not care how you discovered them; I have forgotten them; I have dismissed them from my remembrance.” Is this the way in which money is to be received and accounted for?

  He then proceeds thus:— “But when fortune threw a sum of money in my way of a magnitude which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the time I received it made me more circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily and generally: hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession. I promised to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of it; and, in the performance of my promise, I thought it consistent with it to add to the amount all the former appropriations of the same kind: my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution which might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards known, I might be asked what were my motives for withholding a part of these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of Directors and informing them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up every doubt.”

  I am almost ashamed to remark upon the tergiversations and prevarications perpetually ringing the changes in this declaration. He would not have discovered this hundred thousand pounds, if he could have concealed it: he would have discovered it, lest malicious persons should be telling tales of it. He has a system of concealment: he never discovers anything, but when he thinks it can be forced from him. He says, indeed, “I could conceal these things forever, but my conscience would not give me leave”: but it is guilt, and not honesty of conscience, that always prompts him. At one time it is the malice of people and the fear of misrepresentation which induced him to make the disclosure; and he values himself on the precaution which this fear had suggested to him. At another time it is the magnitude of the sum which produced this effect: nothing but the impossibility of concealing it could possibly have made him discover it. This hundred thousand pounds he declares he would have concealed, if he could; and yet he values himself upon the discovery of it. Oh, my Lords, I am afraid that sums of much greater magnitude have not been discovered at all! Your Lordships now see some of the artifices of this letter. You see the variety of styles he adopts, and how he turns himself into every shape and every form. But, after all, do you find any clear discovery? do you find any satisfactory answer to the Directors’ letter? does he once tell you from whom he received the money? does he tell you for what he received it, what the circumstances of the persons giving it were, or any explanation whatever of his mode of accounting for it? No: and here, at last, after so many years’ litigation, he is called to account for his prevaricating, false accounts in Calcutta, and cannot give them to you.

  His explanation of his conduct relative to the bonds now only remains for your Lordships’ consideration. Before he left Calcutta, in July, 1784 [1781?], he says, when he was going upon a service which he thought a service of danger, he indorsed the false bonds which he had taken from the Company, declaring them to be none of his. You will observe that these bonds had been in his hands from the 9th or 15th of January (I am not quite sure of the exact date) to the day when he went upon this service, some time in the month of July, 1784 [1781?]. This service he had formerly declared he did not apprehend to be a service of danger; but he found it to be so after: it was in anticipation of that danger that he made this attestation and certificate upon the bonds. But who ever saw them? Mr. Larkins saw them, says he: “I gave them Mr. Larkins.” We will show you hereafter that Mr. Larkins deserves no credit in this business, — that honor binds him not to discover the secrets of Mr. Hastings. But why did he not deliver them up entirely, when he was going upon that service? for all pretence of concealment in the business was now at an end, as we shall prove. Why did he not cancel these bonds? Why keep them at all? Why not enter truly the state of the account in the Company’s records? “But I indorsed them,” he says. “Did you deliver them so indorsed into the treasury?” “No, I delivered them indorsed into the hands of my bribe-broker and agent.” “But why not destroy them, or give them up to the Company, and say you were paid, which would have been the only truth in this transaction? Why did you not indorse them before? Why not, during the long period of so many years, cancel them?” No, he kept them to the very day when he was going from Calcutta, and had made a declaration that they were not his. Never before, upon any account, had they appeared; and though the Committee of the House of Commons, in the Eleventh Report, had remarked upon all these scandalous proceedings and prevarications, yet he was not stimulated, even then, to give up these bonds. He held them in his hands till the time when he was preparing for his departure from Calcutta, in spite of the Directors, in spite of the Parliament, in spite of the cries of his own conscience, in a matter which was now grown public, and would knock doubly upon his reputation and conduct. He then declares they are not for his own use, but for the Company’s service. But were they then cancelled? I do not find a trace of their being cancelled. In this letter of the 17th of January, 1785, he says with regard to these bonds, “The following sums were paid into the treasury, and bonds granted for the same in the name of the Governor-General, in whose possession the bonds remain, with a declaration upon each, indorsed and signed by him, that he has no claim on the Company for the amount either of principal or interest, no part of the latter having been received.”

  To the account of the 22d of May, of the indorsement, is added the declaration upon oath. But why any man need to declare upon oath that the money which he has fraudulently taken and concealed from another person is not his is the most extraordinary thing in the world. If he had a mind to have it placed to his credit as his own, then an oath would be necessary; but in this case any one would believe him upon his word. He comes, however, and says, “This is indorsed upon oath.” Oath! before what magistrate? In whose possession were the bonds? Were they given up? There is no trace of that upon the record, and it stands for him to prove that they were ever given up, and in any hands but Mr. Larkins’s and his own. So here are the bonds, begun in obscurity and ending in obscurity, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, corruption to corruption, and fraud to fraud. This is all we see of these bonds, till Mr. Larkins, to whom he writes some letter concerning them which does not appear, is called to read a funeral sermon over them.

  My Lords, I am come now near the period of this class of Mr. Hastings’s bribes. I am a little exhausted. There are many circumstances that might make me wish not to delay this busines
s by taking up another day at your Lordships’ bar, in order to go through this long, intricate scene of corruption. But my strength now fails me. I hope within a very short time, to-morrow or the next court-day, to finish it, and to go directly into evidence, as I long much to do, to substantiate the charge; but it was necessary that the evidence should be explained. You have heard as much of the drama as I could go through: bear with my weakness a little: Mr. Larkins’s letter will be the epilogue to it. I have already incurred the censure of the prisoner; I mean to increase it, by bringing home to him the proof of his crimes, and to display them in all their force and turpitude. It is my duty to do it; I feel it an obligation nearest to my heart.

  SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE. FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789.

  My Lords, — When I had the honor last to address you from this place, I endeavored to press this position upon your minds, and to fortify it by the example of the proceedings of Mr. Hastings, — that obscurity and inaccuracies in a matter of account constituted a just presumption of fraud. I showed, from his own letters, that his accounts were confused and inaccurate. I am ready, my Lords, to admit that there are situations in which a minister in high office may use concealment: it may be his duty to use concealment from the enemies of his masters; it may be prudent to use concealment from his inferiors in the service. It will always be suspicious to use concealment from his colleagues and coördinates in office; but when, in a money transaction, any man uses concealment with regard to them to whom the money belongs, he is guilty of a fraud. My Lords, I have shown you that Mr. Hastings kept no account, by his own confession, of the moneys that he had privately taken, as he pretends, for the Company’s service, and we have but too much reason to presume for his own. We have shown you, my Lords, that he has not only no accounts, but no memory; we have shown that he does not even understand his own motives; that, when called upon to recollect them, he begs to guess at them; and that as his memory is to be supplied by his guess, so he has no confidence in his guesses. He at first finds, after a lapse of about a year and a half, or somewhat less, that he cannot recollect what his motives were to certain actions which upon the very face of them appeared fraudulent. He is called to an account some years after, to explain what they were, and he makes a just reflection upon it, — namely, that, as his memory did not enable him to find out his own motive at the former time, it is not to be expected that it would be clearer a year after. Your Lordships will, however, recollect, that in the Cheltenham letter, which is made of no perishable stuff, he begins again to guess; but after he has guessed and guessed again, and after he has gone through all the motives he can possibly assign for the action, he tells you he does not know whether those were his real motives, or whether he has not invented them since.

  In that situation the accounts of the Company were left with regard to very great sums which passed through Mr. Hastings’s hands, and for which he, instead of giving his masters credit, took credit to himself, and, being their debtor, as he confesses himself to be at that time, took a security for that debt as if he had been their creditor. This required explanation. Explanation he was called upon for, over and over again; explanation he did not give, and declared he could not give. He was called upon for it when in India: he had not leisure to attend to it there. He was called upon for it when in Europe: he then says he must send for it to India. With much prevarication, and much insolence too, he confesses himself guilty of falsifying the Company’s accounts by making himself their creditor when he was their debtor, and giving false accounts of this false transaction. The Court of Directors was slow to believe him guilty; Parliament expressed a strong suspicion of his guilt, and wished for further information. Mr. Hastings about this time began to imagine his conscience to be a faithful and true monitor, — which it were well he had attended to upon many occasions, as it would have saved him his appearance here, — and it told him that he was in great danger from the Parliamentary inquiries that were going on. It was now to be expected that he would have been in haste to fulfil the promise which he had made in the Patna letter of the 20th of January, 1782; and accordingly we find that about this time his first agent, Major Fairfax, was sent over to Europe, which agent entered himself at the India House, and appeared before the Committee of the House of Commons, as an agent expressly sent over to explain whatever might appear doubtful in his conduct. Major Fairfax, notwithstanding the character in which Mr. Hastings employed him, appeared to be but a letter-carrier: he had nothing to say: he gave them no information in the India House at all: to the Committee (I can speak with the clearness of a witness) he gave no satisfaction whatever. However, this agent vanished in a moment, in order to make way for another, more substantial, more efficient agent, — an agent perfectly known in this country, — an agent known by the name given to him by Mr. Hastings, who, like the princes of the East, gives titles: he calls him an incomparable agent; and by that name he is very well known to your Lordships and the world. This agent, Major Scott, who I believe was here prior to the time of Major Fairfax’s arrival in the character of an agent, and for the very same purposes, was called before the Committee, and examined, point by point, article by article, upon all that obscure enumeration of bribes which the Court of Directors declare they did not understand; but he declared that he could speak nothing with regard to any of these transactions, and that he had got no instructions to explain any part of them. There was but one circumstance which in the course of his examination we drew from him, — namely, that one of these articles, entered in the account of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing. He produced an extract of a letter relative to it, which your Lordships in the course of this trial may see, and which will lead us into a further and more minute inquiry on that head; but when that committee made their report in 1783, not one single article had been explained to Parliament, not one explained to the Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr. Hastings had never thought proper to communicate to the East India Company, either by himself, nor, as far as we could find out, by his agent; nor was it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn out from him by a long examination in the Committee of the House of Commons. And thus, notwithstanding the letters he had written and the agents he employed, he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to give his employers no satisfaction at all. What is curious in this proceeding is, that Mr. Hastings, all the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the credit of a discovery. Your Lordships have seen what his discovery is; but Mr. Hastings, among his other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an effectual method of concealment through discovery. I will venture to say, that, whatever suspicions there might have been of Mr. Hastings’s bribes, there was more effectual concealment in regard to every circumstance respecting them in that discovery than if he had kept a total silence. Other means of discovery might have been found, but this, standing in the way, prevented the employment of those means.

  Things continued in this state till the time of the letter from Cheltenham. The Cheltenham letter declared that Mr. Hastings knew nothing of the matter, — that he had brought with him no accounts to England upon the subject; and though it appears by this very letter that he had with him at Cheltenham (if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a great deal of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of the 22d of May with him, yet any account that could elucidate that letter he declared that he had not; but he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India, whom your Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly apprised of all that transaction. Your Lordships will observe that Mr. Hastings has all his faculties, some way or other, in deposit: one person can speak to his motives; another knows his fortune better than himself; to others he commits the sentimental parts of his defence; to Mr. Larkins he commits his memory. We shall see what a trustee of memory Mr. Larkins is, and how far he answers the purpose which might be expected, when appealed to by a man who has no memory himself, or who has left it on the other side of the wa
ter, and who leaves it to another to explain for him accounts which he ought to have kept himself, and circumstances which ought to be deposited in his own memory.

  This Cheltenham letter, I believe, originally became known, as far as I can recollect, to the House of Commons, upon a motion of Mr. Hastings’s own agent: I do not like to be positive upon that point, but I think that was the first appearance of it. It appeared likewise in public: for it was thought so extraordinary and laborious a performance, by the writer or his friends, (as indeed it is,) that it might serve to open a new source of eloquence in the kingdom, and consequently was printed, I believe, at the desire of the parties themselves. But however it became known, it raised an extreme curiosity in the public to hear, when Mr. Hastings could say nothing, after so many years, of his own concerns and his own affairs, what satisfaction Mr. Larkins at last would give concerning them. This letter was directed to Mr. Devaynes, Chairman of the Court of Directors. It does not appear that the Court of Directors wrote anything to India in consequence of it, or that they directed this satisfactory account of the business should be given them; but some private communications passed between Mr. Hastings, or his agents, and Mr. Larkins. There was a general expectation upon this occasion, I believe, in the House of Commons and in the nation at large, to know what would become of the portentous inquiry. Mr. Hastings has always contrived to have half the globe between question and answer: when he was in India, the question went to him, and then he adjourned his answer till he came to England; and when he came to England, it was necessary his answer should arrive from India; so that there is no manner of doubt that all time was given for digesting, comparing, collating, and making up a perfect memory upon the occasion.