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with authority to bestow his office upon whomsoever he pleased.

"That the said Markham did bestow the said office of administrator of the province of Benares upon a person, named Jagger Deo Sing, who, in order to gratify the arbitrary demands of the said Warren Hastings, was obliged greatly to distress and harass the unfortunate inhabitants of the said province.

"That the said Warren Hastings did, some time in the year 1784, remove the said Jagger Deo Sing from the said office, under pretence of certain irregularities and oppressions, which irregularities and oppressions are solely imputable to him, the said Warren Hastings.

"That the consequence of all these violent changes and arbitrary acts was the total ruin and desolation of the country, and the flight of the inhabitants; the said Warren Hastings having found every place abandoned at his approach, even by the officers of the very government which he established; and seeing nothing but traces of devastation in every village, the province in effect without a government, the administration misconducted, the people oppressed, the trade discouraged, and the revenue in danger of a rapid decline.

"All which destruction, devastation, oppression, and ruin are solely imputable to the above-mentioned, and other arbitrary, illegal, unjust, and tyrannical acts of him, the said Warren Hastings, who, by all and every one of the same, was and is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors."

[Mr. Burke proceeded.]

My lords, you have heard the charge; and you are now going to see the prisoner at your bar, in a new point of view. I will now endeavor to display him in his character of a legislator in a foreign land, not augmenting the territory, honor, and power of Great Britain, and bringing the acquisition under the dominion of law and liberty, but desolating a flourishing country, that to all intents and purposes was our own; a

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country which we had conquered from freedom, from tranquillity, order, and prosperity, and submitted, through him, to arbitrary power, misrule, anarchy, and ruin. We now see the object of his corrupt vengeance utterly destroyed, his family driven from their home, his people butchered, his wife and all the females of his family robbed and dishonored in their persons, and the effects which husband and parents had laid up in store for the subsistence of their families, all the savings of provident economy, distributed amongst a rapacious soldiery. His malice is victorious. He has well avenged, in the destruction of this. unfortunate family, the rajah's intended visit to General Clavering; he has well avenged the suspected discovery of his bribe to Mr. Francis. "Thou hast it now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all."

Let us see, my lords, what use he makes of this power; how he justifies the bounty of fortune bestowing on him this strange and anomalous conquest. Anomalous I call it, my lords, because it was the result of no plan in the cabinet, no operation in the field. No act or direction proceeded from him the responsible chief, except the merciless orders, and the grant to the soldiery. He lay skulking and trembling in the fort of Chunar, while the British soldiery entitled themselves to the plunder which he held out to them. Nevertheless, my lords, he conquers; the country is his own; he treats it as his own. Let us therefore see how this successor of Tamerlane, this emulator of Ghinges Khân, governs a country conquered by the talents and courage of others, without assistance, guide, direction, or counsel, given by himself.

My lords, I will introduce his first act to your lordships' notice, in the words of the charge. "The said Warren Hastings did, some time in the year 1782, enter into a clandestine correspondence with William Markham, Esq., the then resident at Benares, which said Markham had been, by him, the said Warren Hastings, obtruded into the said office, contrary to the positive orders of the court of directors." This unjustifiable obtrusion, this illegal appointment, shows you, at the

very outset, that he defies the laws of his country; most positively and pointedly defies them. In attempting to give a reason for this defiance, he has chosen to tell a branch of the legislature, from which originated the act, which wisely and prudently ordered him to pay implicit obedience to the court of directors, that he removed Mr. Fowke from Benares, contrary to the orders of the court, on political grounds; "because," says he, "I thought it necessary the resident there should be a man of my own nomination and confidence. I avow the principle, and think no government can subsist without it. The punishment of the rajah made no part of my design in Mr. Fowke's removal, or Mr. Markham's appointment, nor was his punishment an object of my contemplation at the time I removed Mr. Fowke to appoint Mr. Markham; an appointment of my own choice, and a signal to notify the restoration of my own authority, as I had before removed Mr. Fowke and appointed Mr. Graham for the same purpose."

Here, my lords, he does not even pretend that he had any view whatever in this appointment of Mr. Markham, but to defy the laws of his country. "I must," says he, "have a man of my own nomination, because it is a signal to notify the restoration of my own authority, as I had before removed Mr. Fowke for the same purpose."

I must beg your lordships to keep in mind, that the greater part of the observations with which I shall trouble you, have a reference to the principles upon which this man acts; and I beseech you to remember always, that you have before you a question and an issue of law. I beseech you to consider what it is that you are disposing of; that you are not merely disposing of this man and his cause; but that you are disposing of the laws of your country.

You, my lords, have made, and we have made, an act of parliament, in which the council at Calcutta is vested with a special power, distinctly limited and defined. He says, my authority is absolute. I defy the orders of the court of directors, because it is necessary for me to show that I can disre

gard them, as a signal of my own authority. He supposes his authority gone, while he obeys the laws; but, says he, the moment I got rid of the bonds and barriers of the laws, (as if there had been some act of violence and usurpation that had deprived him of his rightful powers,) I was restored to my own authority. What is this authority to which he is restored? Not an authority vested in him by the East India Company; not an authority sanctioned by the laws of this kingdom. It is neither of these, but the authority of Warren Hastings; an inherent divine right, I suppose, which he has thought proper to claim as belonging to himself; something independent of the laws; something independent of the court of directors; something independent of his brethren of the council. It is "my own authority."

And what is the signal by which you are to know when this authority is restored? By his obedience to the court of directors; by his attention to the laws of his country; by his regard to the rights of the people? No, my lords, no; the notification of the restoration of this authority is a formal disobedience of the orders of the court of directors. When you find the laws of the land trampled upon, and their appointed authority despised, then you may be sure that the authority of the prisoner is reëstablished.

There is, my lords, always a close connection between vices of every description. The man who is a tyrant, would, under some other circumstances, be a rebel; and he that is a rebel, would become a tyrant. They are things which originally proceed from the same source. They owe their birth to the wild unbridled lewdness of arbitrary power. They arise from a contempt of public order, and of the laws and institutions which curb mankind. They arise from a harsh, cruel, and ferocious disposition, impatient of the rules of law, order, and morality and accordingly, as their relation varies, the man is a tyrant if a superior, a rebel if an inferior. But this man, standing in a middle point, between the two relations, the superior and inferior, declares himself at once both

a rebel and a tyrant. We therefore naturally expect, that, when he has thrown off the laws of his country, he will throw off all other authority. Accordingly, in defiance of that authority to which he owes his situation, he nominates Mr. Markham to the residency at Benares, and therefore every act of Mr. Markham is his. He is responsible ;-doubly responsible to what he would have been, if in the ordinary course of office he had named this agent.

Every governor is responsible for the misdemeanors committed under his legal authority, for which he does not punish the delinquent; but the prisoner is doubly responsible in this case, because he assumed an illegal authority, which can be justified only, if at all, by the good resulting from the assumption.

Having now chosen his principal instrument, and his confidential and sole counsellor, having the country entirely in his hand, and every obstacle that could impede his course swept out of the arena, what does he do under these auspicious circumstances? You would imagine, that, in the first place, he would have sent down to the council at Calcutta a general view of his proceedings, and of their consequences, together with a complete statement of the revenue; that he would have recommended the fittest persons for public trusts, with such other measures as he might judge to be most essential to the interest and honor of his employers. One would have imagined he would have done this, in order that the council and the court of directors might have a clear view of the whole existing system, before he attempted to make a permanent arrangement for the administration of the country. But, on the contrary, the whole of his proceedings is clandestinely conducted; there is not the slightest communication with the council upon the business, till he had determined and settled the whole. Thus the council was placed in a complete dilemma, either to confirm all his wicked and arbitrary acts, for such we have proved them to be, or to derange the whole administration of the country again, and to make another

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