The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
Chapter 54 : Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have thought fit to

Your worthy ministers, supporting what they are obliged to condemn, have thought fit to renew the Company's old order against contracting private debts in future. They begin by rewarding the violation of the ancient law; and then they gravely reenact provisions, of which they have given bounties for the breach. This inconsistency has been well exposed.[51]

But what will you say to their having gone the length of giving positive directions for contracting the debt which they positively forbid?

I will explain myself. They order the Nabob, out of the revenues of the Carnatic, to allot four hundred and eighty thousand pounds a year, as a fund for the debts before us. For the punctual payment of this annuity, they order him to give soucar security.[52] When a soucar, that is, a money-dealer, becomes security for any native prince, the course is for the native prince to counter-secure the money-dealer, by making over to him in mortgage a portion of his territory equal to the sum annually to be paid, with an interest of at least twenty-four per cent. The point fit for the House to know is, who are these soucars to whom this security on the revenues in favor of the Nabob's creditors is to be given? The majority of the House, unaccustomed to these transactions, will hear with astonishment that these soucars are no other than the creditors themselves. The minister, not content with authorizing these transactions in a manner and to an extent unhoped for by the rapacious expectations of usury itself, loads the broken back of the Indian revenues, in favor of his worthy friends, the soucars, with an additional twenty-four per cent for being security to themselves for their own claims, for condescending to take the country in mortgage to pay to themselves the fruits of their own extortions.

The interest to be paid for this security, according to the most moderate strain of soucar demand, comes to 118,000_l._ a year, which, added to the 480,000_l._ on which it is to accrue, will make the whole charge amount to 598,000_l._ a year,--as much as even a long peace will enable those revenues to produce. Can any one reflect for a moment on all those claims of debt, which the minister exhausts himself in contrivances to augment with new usuries, without lifting up his hands and eyes in astonishment at the impudence both of the claim and of the adjudication? Services of some kind or other these servants of the Company must have done, so great and eminent that the Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot think that all they have brought home is half enough.

He hallooes after them, "Gentlemen, you have forgot a large packet behind you, in your hurry; you have not sufficiently recovered yourselves; you ought to have, and you shall have, interest upon interest upon a prohibited debt that is made up of interest upon interest. Even this is too little. I have thought of another character for you, by which you may add something to your gains: you shall be security to yourselves; and hence will arise a new usury, which shall efface the memory of all the usuries suggested to you by your own dull inventions."

I have done with the arrangement relative to the Carnatic. After this it is to little purpose to observe on what the ministers have done to Tanjore. Your ministers have not observed even form and ceremony in their outrageous and insulting robbery of that country, whose only crime has been its early and constant adherence to the power of this, and the suffering of an uniform pillage in consequence of it. The debt of the Company from the Rajah of Tanjore is just of the same stuff with that of the Nabob of Arcot.

The subsidy from Tanjore, on the arrear of which this pretended debt (if any there be) has accrued to the Company, is not, like that paid by the Nabob of Arcot, a compensation for vast countries obtained, augmented, and preserved for him; not the price of pillaged treasuries, ransacked houses, and plundered territories: it is a large grant, from a small kingdom not obtained by our arms; robbed, not protected, by our power; a grant for which no equivalent was ever given, or pretended to be given.

The right honorable gentleman, however, bears witness in his reports to the punctuality of the payments of this grant of bounty, or, if you please, of fear. It amounts to one hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling net annual subsidy. He bears witness to a further grant of a town and port, with an annexed district of thirty thousand pound a year, surrendered to the Company since the first donation. He has not borne witness, but the fact is, (he will not deny it,) that in the midst of war, and during the ruin and desolation of a considerable part of his territories, this prince made many very large payments. Notwithstanding these merits and services, the first regulation of ministry is to force from him a territory of an extent which they have not yet thought proper to ascertain,[53] for a military peace establishment the particulars of which they have not yet been pleased to settle.

The next part of their arrangement is with regard to war. As confessedly this prince had no share in stirring up any of the former wars, so all future wars are completely out of his power; for he has no troops whatever, and is under a stipulation not so much as to correspond with any foreign state, except through the Company. Yet, in case the Company's servants should be again involved in war, or should think proper again to provoke any enemy, as in times past they have wantonly provoked all India, he is to be subjected to a new penalty. To what penalty? Why, to no less than the confiscation of all his revenues. But this is to end with the war, and they are to be faithfully returned? Oh, no! nothing like it. The country is to remain under confiscation until all the debt which the Company shall think fit to incur in such war shall be discharged: that is to say, forever. His sole comfort is, to find his old enemy, the Nabob of Arcot, placed in the very same condition.

The revenues of that miserable country were, before the invasion of Hyder, reduced to a _gross_ annual receipt of three hundred and sixty thousand pound.[54] From this receipt the subsidy I have just stated is taken. This again, by payments in advance, by extorting deposits of additional sums to a vast amount for the benefit of their soucars, and by an endless variety of other extortions, public and private, is loaded with a debt, the amount of which I never could ascertain, but which is large undoubtedly, generating an usury the most completely ruinous that probably was ever heard of: _that is, forty-eight per cent, payable monthly, with compound interest_.[55]

Such is the state to which the Company's servants have reduced that country. Now come the reformers, restorers, and comforters of India.

What have they done? In addition to all these tyrannous exactions, with all these ruinous debts in their train, looking to one side of an agreement whilst they wilfully shut their eyes to the other, they withdraw from Tanjore all the benefits of the treaty of 1762, and they subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to _him_, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a s.h.i.+lling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this hara.s.sed nation to be tributary to a person who is himself, by their own arrangement, deprived of the right of war or peace, deprived of the power of the sword, forbid to keep up a single regiment of soldiers, and is therefore wholly disabled from all protection of the country which is the object of the pretended tribute. Tribute hangs on the sword. It is an incident inseparable from real, sovereign power. In the present case, to suppose its existence is as absurd as it is cruel and oppressive. And here, Mr. Speaker, you have a clear exemplification of the use of those false names and false colors which the gentlemen who have lately taken possession of India choose to lay on for the purpose of disguising their plan of oppression. The Nabob of Arcot and Rajah of Tanjore have, in truth and substance, no more than a merely civil authority, held in the most entire dependence on the Company. The Nabob, without military, without federal capacity, is extinguished as a potentate; but then he is carefully kept alive as an independent and sovereign power, for the purpose of rapine and extortion,--for the purpose of perpetuating the old intrigues, animosities, usuries, and corruptions.

It was not enough that this mockery of tribute was to be continued without the correspondent protection, or any of the stipulated equivalents, but ten years of arrear, to the amount of 400,000_l._ sterling, is added to all the debts to the Company and to individuals, in order to create a new debt, to be paid (if at all possible to be paid in whole or in part) only by new usuries,--and all this for the Nabob of Arcot, or rather for Mr. Benfield and the corps of the Nabob's creditors and their soucars. Thus these miserable Indian princes are continued in their seats for no other purpose than to render them, in the first instance, objects of every species of extortion, and, in the second, to force them to become, for the sake of a momentary shadow of reduced authority, a sort of subordinate tyrants, the ruin and calamity, not the fathers and cherishers, of their people.

But take this tribute only as a mere charge (without t.i.tle, cause, or equivalent) on this people; what one step has been taken to furnish grounds for a just calculation and estimate of the proportion of the burden and the ability? None,--not an attempt at it. They do not adapt the burden to the strength, but they estimate the strength of the bearers by the burden they impose. Then what care is taken to leave a fund sufficient to the future reproduction of the revenues that are to bear all these loads? Every one, but tolerably conversant in Indian affairs, must know that the existence of this little kingdom depends on its control over the river Cavery. The benefits of Heaven to any community ought never to be connected with political arrangements, or made to depend on the personal conduct of princes, in which the mistake, or error, or neglect, or distress, or pa.s.sion of a moment, on either side, may bring famine on millions, and ruin an innocent nation perhaps for ages. The means of the subsistence of mankind should be as immutable as the laws of Nature, let power and dominion take what course they may.--Observe what has been done with regard to this important concern.

The use of this river is, indeed, at length given to the Rajah, and a power provided for its enjoyment _at his own charge_; but the means of furnis.h.i.+ng that charge (and a mighty one it is) are wholly out off. This use of the water, which ought to have no more connection than clouds and rains and suns.h.i.+ne with the politics of the Rajah, the Nabob, or the Company, is expressly contrived as a means of enforcing demands and arrears of tribute. This horrid and unnatural instrument of extortion had been a distinguis.h.i.+ng feature in the enormities of the Carnatic politics, that loudly called for reformation. But the food of a whole people is by the reformers of India conditioned on payments from its prince, at a moment that he is overpowered with a swarm of their demands, without regard to the ability of either prince or people. In fine, by opening an avenue to the irruption of the Nabob of Arcot's creditors and soucars, whom every man, who did not fall in love with oppression and corruption on an experience of the calamities they produced, would have raised wall before wall and mound before mound to keep from a possibility of entrance, a more destructive enemy than Hyder Ali is introduced into that kingdom. By this part of their arrangement, in which they establish a debt to the Nabob of Arcot, in effect and substance, they deliver over Tanjore, bound hand and foot, to Paul Benfield, the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of a country which has for years been an object of an unremitted, but, unhappily, an unequal struggle, between the bounties of Providence to renovate and the wickedness of mankind to destroy.

The right honorable gentleman[56] talks of his fairness in determining the territorial dispute between the Nabob of Arcot and the prince of that country, when he superseded the determination of the Directors, in whom the law had vested the decision of that controversy. He is in this just as feeble as he is in every other part. But it is not necessary to say a word in refutation of any part of his argument. The mode of the proceeding sufficiently speaks the spirit of it. It is enough to fix his character as a judge, that he _never heard the Directors in defence of their adjudication, nor either of the parties in support of their respective claims_. It is sufficient for me that he takes from the Rajah of Tanjore by this pretended adjudication, or rather from his unhappy subjects, 40,000_l._ a year of his and their revenue, and leaves upon his and their shoulders all the charges that can be made on the part of the Nabob, on the part of his creditors, and on the part of the Company, without so much as hearing him as to right or to ability. But what princ.i.p.ally induces me to leave the affair of the territorial dispute between the Nabob and the Rajah to another day is this,--that, both the parties being stripped of their all, it little signifies under which of their names the unhappy, undone people are delivered over to the merciless soucars, the allies of that right honorable gentleman and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In them ends the account of this long dispute of the Nabob of Arcot and the Rajah of Tanjore.

The right honorable gentleman is of opinion that his judgment in this case can be censured by none but those who seem to act as if they were paid agents to one of the parties. What does he think of his Court of Directors? If they are paid by either of the parties, by which of them does he think they are paid? He knows that their decision has been directly contrary to his. Shall I believe that it does not enter into his heart to conceive that any person can steadily and actively interest himself in the protection of the injured and oppressed without being well paid for his service? I have taken notice of this sort of discourse some days ago, so far as it may be supposed to relate to me. I then contented myself, as I shall now do, with giving it a cold, though a very direct contradiction. Thus much I do from respect to truth. If I did more, it might be supposed, by my anxiety to clear myself, that I had imbibed the ideas which, for obvious reasons, the right honorable gentleman wishes to have received concerning all attempts to plead the cause of the natives of India, as if it were a disreputable employment.

If he had not forgot, in his present occupation, every principle which ought to have guided him, and I hope did guide him, in his late profession, he would have known that he who takes a fee for pleading the cause of distress against power, and manfully performs the duty he has a.s.sumed, receives an honorable recompense for a virtuous service. But if the right honorable gentleman will have no regard to fact in his insinuations or to reason in his opinions, I wish him at least to consider, that, if taking an earnest part with regard to the oppressions exercised in India, and with regard to this most oppressive case of Tanjore in particular, can ground a presumption of interested motives, he is himself the most mercenary man I know. His conduct, indeed, is such that he is on all occasions the standing testimony against himself.

He it was that first called to that case the attention of the House; the reports of his own committee are ample and affecting upon that subject;[57] and as many of us as have escaped his ma.s.sacre must remember the very pathetic picture he made of the sufferings of the Tanjore country, on the day when he moved the unwieldy code of his Indian resolutions. Has he not stated over and over again, in his reports, the ill treatment of the Rajah of Tanjore (a branch of the royal house of the Mahrattas, every injury to whom the Mahrattas felt as offered to themselves) as a main cause of the alienation of that people from the British power? And does he now think that to betray his principles, to contradict his declarations, and to become himself an active instrument in those oppressions which he had so tragically lamented, is the way to clear himself of having been actuated by a pecuniary interest at the time when he chose to appear full of tenderness to that ruined nation?

The right honorable gentleman is fond of parading on the motives of others, and on his own. As to himself, he despises the imputations of those who suppose that anything corrupt could influence him in this his unexampled liberality of the public treasure. I do not know that I am obliged to speak to the motives of ministry, in the arrangements they have made of the pretended debts of Arcot and Tanjore. If I prove fraud and collusion with regard to public money on those right honorable gentlemen, I am not obliged to a.s.sign their motives; because no good motives can be pleaded in favor of their conduct. Upon that case I stand; we are at issue; and I desire to go to trial. This, I am sure, is not loose railing, or mean insinuation, according to their low and degenerate fas.h.i.+on, when they make attacks on the measures of their adversaries. It is a regular and juridical course; and unless I choose it, nothing can compel me to go further.

But since these unhappy gentlemen have dared to hold a lofty tone about their motives, and affect to despise suspicion, instead of being careful not to give cause for it, I shall beg leave to lay before you some general observations on what I conceive was their duty in so delicate a business.

If I were worthy to suggest any line of prudence to that right honorable gentleman, I would tell him that the way to avoid suspicion in the settlement of pecuniary transactions, in which great frauds have been very strongly presumed, is, to attend to these few plain principles:--First, to hear all parties equally, and not the managers for the suspected claimants only; not to proceed in the dark, but to act with as much publicity as possible; not to precipitate decision; to be religious in following the rules prescribed in the commission under which we act; and, lastly, and above all, not to be fond of straining constructions, to force a jurisdiction, and to draw to ourselves the management of a trust in its nature invidious and obnoxious to suspicion, where the plainest letter of the law does not compel it. If these few plain rules are observed, no corruption ought to be suspected; if any of them are violated, suspicion will attach in proportion; if all of them are violated, a corrupt motive of some kind or other will not only be suspected, but must be violently presumed.

The persons in whose favor all these rules have been violated, and the conduct of ministers towards them, will naturally call for your consideration, and will serve to lead you through a series and combination of facts and characters, if I do not mistake, into the very inmost recesses of this mysterious business. You will then be in possession of all the materials on which the principles of sound jurisprudence will found, or will reject, the presumption of corrupt motives, or, if such motives are indicated, will point out to you of what particular nature the corruption is.

Our wonderful minister, as you all know, formed a new plan, a plan _insigne, recens, indictum ore alio_, a plan for supporting the freedom of our Const.i.tution by court intrigues, and for removing its corruptions by Indian delinquency. To carry that bold, paradoxical design into execution, sufficient funds and apt instruments became necessary. You are perfectly sensible that a Parliamentary reform occupies his thoughts day and night, as an essential member in this extraordinary project. In his anxious researches upon this subject, natural instinct, as well as sound policy, would direct his eyes and settle his choice on Paul Benfield. Paul Benfield is the grand Parliamentary reformer, the reformer to whom the whole choir of reformers bow, and to whom even the right honorable gentleman himself must yield the palm: for what region in the empire, what city, what borough, what county, what tribunal in this kingdom is not full of his labors? Others have been only speculators; he is the grand practical reformer; and whilst the Chancellor of the Exchequer pledges in vain the man and the minister, to increase the provincial members, Mr. Benfield has auspiciously and practically begun it. Leaving far behind him even Lord Camelford's generous design of bestowing Old Sarum on the Bank of England, Mr.

Benfield has thrown in the borough of Cricklade to reinforce the county representation. Not content with this, in order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten Const.i.tution of his native country. For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House,--to furnish it, not with the faded tapestry figures of antiquated merit, such as decorate, and may reproach, some other houses, but with real, solid, living patterns of true modern virtue. Paul Benfield made (reckoning himself) no fewer than eight members in the last Parliament.

What copious streams of pure blood must he not have transfused into the veins of the present!

But what is even more striking than the real services of this new-imported patriot is his modesty. As soon as he had conferred this benefit on the Const.i.tution, he withdrew himself from our applause. He conceived that the duties of a member of Parliament (which with the elect faithful, the true believers, the _Islam_ of Parliamentary reform, are of little or no merit, perhaps not much better than specious sins) might he as well attended to in India as in England, and the means of reformation to Parliament itself be far better provided. Mr. Benfield was therefore no sooner elected than he set off for Madras, and defrauded the longing eyes of Parliament. We have never enjoyed in this House the luxury of beholding that minion of the human race, and contemplating that visage which has so long reflected the happiness of nations.

It was therefore not possible for the minister to consult personally with this great man. What, then, was he to do? Through a sagacity that never failed him in these pursuits, he found out, in Mr. Benfield's representative, his exact resemblance. A specific attraction, by which he gravitates towards all such characters, soon brought our minister into a close connection with Mr. Benfield's agent and attorney, that is, with the grand contractor, (whom I name to honor,) Mr. Richard Atkinson,--a name that will be well remembered as long as the records of this House, as long as the records of the British Treasury, as long as the monumental debt of England, shall endure.

This gentleman, Sir, acts as attorney for Mr. Paul Benfield. Every one who hears me is well acquainted with the sacred friends.h.i.+p and the steady mutual attachment that subsists between him and the present minister. As many members as chose to attend in the first session of this Parliament can best tell their own feelings at the scenes which were then acted. How much that honorable gentleman was consulted in the original frame and fabric of the bill, commonly called Mr. Pitt's India Bill, is matter only of conjecture, though by no means difficult to divine. But the public was an indignant witness of the ostentation with which the measure was made his own, and the authority with which he brought up clause after clause, to stuff and fatten the rankness of that corrupt act. As fast as the clauses were brought up to the table, they were accepted. No hesitation, no discussion. They were received by the new minister, not with approbation, but with implicit submission. The reformation may be estimated by seeing who was the reformer. Paul Benfield's a.s.sociate and agent was held up to the world as legislator of Hindostan. But it was necessary to authenticate the coalition between the men of intrigue in India and the minister of intrigue in England by a studied display of the power of this their connecting link. Every trust, every honor, every distinction, was to be heaped upon him. He was at once made a Director of the India Company, made an alderman of London, and to be made, if ministry could prevail, (and I am sorry to say how near, how very near, they were prevailing,) representative of the capital of this kingdom. But to secure his services against all risk, he was brought in for a ministerial borough. On his part, he was not wanting in zeal for the common cause. His advertis.e.m.e.nts show his motives, and the merits upon which he stood. For your minister, this worn-out veteran submitted to enter into the dusty field of the London contest; and you all remember that in the same virtuous cause he submitted to keep a sort of public office or counting-house, where the whole business of the last general election was managed. It was openly managed by the direct agent and attorney of Benfield. It was managed upon Indian principles and for an Indian interest. This was the golden cup of abominations,--this the chalice of the fornications of rapine, usury, and oppression, which was held out by the gorgeous Eastern harlot,--which so many of the people, so many of the n.o.bles of this land had drained to the very dregs. Do you think that no reckoning was to follow this lewd debauch? that no payment was to be demanded for this riot of public drunkenness and national prost.i.tution? Here, you have it here before you! The princ.i.p.al of the grand election-manager must be indemnified; accordingly, the claims of Benfield and his crew must be put above all inquiry.

For several years Benfield appeared as the chief proprietor, as well as the chief agent, director, and controller of this system of debt. The worthy chairman of the Company has stated the claims of this single gentleman on the Nabob of Arcot as amounting to five hundred thousand pound.[58] Possibly at the time of the chairman's state they might have been as high. Eight hundred thousand pound had been mentioned some time before;[59] and, according to the practice of s.h.i.+fting the names of creditors in these transactions, and reducing or raising the debt itself at pleasure, I think it not impossible that at one period the name of Benfield might have stood before those frightful figures. But my best information goes to fix his share no higher than four hundred thousand pounds. By the scheme of the present ministry for adding to the princ.i.p.al twelve per cent from the year 1777 to the year 1781, four hundred thousand pounds, that smallest of the sums ever mentioned for Mr. Benfield, will form a capital of 592,000_l._ at six per cent. Thus, besides the arrears of three years, amounting to 106,500_l._, (which, as fast as received, may be legally lent out at twelve per cent,) Benfield has received, by the ministerial grant before you, an annuity of 35,520_l._ a year, charged on the public revenues.

Our mirror of ministers of finance did not think this enough for the services of such a friend as Benfield. He found that Lord Macartney, in order to frighten the Court of Directors from the project of obliging the Nabob to give soucar security for his debt, a.s.sured them, that, if they should take that step, Benfield[60] would infallibly be the soucar, and would thereby become the entire master of the Carnatic. What Lord Macartney thought sufficient to deter the very agents and partakers with Benfield in his iniquities was the inducement to the two right honorable gentlemen to order this very soucar security to be given, and to recall Benfield to the city of Madras from the sort of decent exile into which he had been relegated by Lord Macartney. You must therefore consider Benfield as soucar security for 480,000_l._ a year, which, at twenty-four per cent, (supposing him contented with that profit,) will, with the interest of his old debt, produce an annual income of 149,520_l._ a year.

Here is a specimen of the new and pure aristocracy created by the right honorable gentleman,[61] as the support of the crown and Const.i.tution against the old, corrupt, refractory, natural interests of this kingdom; and this is the grand counterpoise against all odious coalitions of these interests. A single Benfield outweighs them all: a criminal, who long since ought to have fattened the region kites with his offal, is by his Majesty's ministers enthroned in the government of a great kingdom, and enfeoffed with an estate which in the comparison effaces the splendor of all the n.o.bility of Europe. To bring a little more distinctly into view the true secret of this dark transaction, I beg you particularly to advert to the circ.u.mstances which I am going to place before you.

The general corps of creditors, as well as Mr. Benfield himself, not looking well into futurity, nor presaging the minister of this day, thought it not expedient for their common interest that such a name as his should stand at the head of their list. It was therefore agreed amongst them that Mr. Benfield should disappear, by making over his debt to Messrs. Taylor, Majendie, and Call, and should in return be secured by their bond.

The debt thus exonerated of so great a weight of its odium, and otherwise reduced from its alarming bulk, the agents thought they might venture to print a list of the creditors. This was done for the first time in the year 1783, during the Duke of Portland's administration. In this list the name of Benfield was not to be seen. To this strong negative testimony was added the further testimony of the Nabob of Arcot. That prince[62] (or rather Mr. Benfield for him) writes to the Court of Directors a letter[63] full of complaints and accusations against Lord Macartney, conveyed in such terms as were natural for one of Mr. Benfield's habits and education to employ. Amongst the rest he is made to complain of his Lords.h.i.+p's endeavoring to prevent an intercourse of politeness and sentiment between him and Mr. Benfield; and to aggravate the affront, he expressly declares Mr. Benfield's visits to be only on account of respect and of grat.i.tude, as no pecuniary transaction subsisted between them.

Such, for a considerable s.p.a.ce of time, was the outward form of the loan of 1777, in which Mr. Benfield had no sort of concern. At length intelligence arrived at Madras, that this debt, which had always been renounced by the Court of Directors, was rather like to become the subject of something more like a criminal inquiry than of any patronage or sanction from Parliament. Every s.h.i.+p brought accounts, one stronger than the other, of the prevalence of the determined enemies of the Indian system. The public revenues became an object desperate to the hopes of Mr. Benfield; he therefore resolved to fall upon his a.s.sociates, and, in violation of that faith which subsists among those who have abandoned all other, commences a suit in the Mayor's Court against Taylor, Majendie, and Call, for the bond given to him, when he agreed to disappear for his own benefit as well as that of the common concern. The a.s.signees of his debt, who little expected the springing of this mine, even from such an engineer as Mr. Benfield, after recovering their first alarm, thought it best to take ground on the real state of the transaction. They divulged the whole mystery, and were prepared to plead that they had never received from Mr. Benfield any other consideration for the bond than a transfer, in trust for himself, of his demand on the Nabob of Arcot. An universal indignation arose against the perfidy of Mr. Benfield's proceeding; the event of the suit was looked upon as so certain, that Benfield was compelled to retreat as precipitately as he had advanced boldly; he gave up his bond, and was reinstated in his original demand, to wait the fortune of other claimants. At that time, and at Madras, this hope was dull indeed; but at home another scene was preparing.

It was long before any public account of this discovery at Madras had arrived in England, that the present minister and his Board of Control thought fit to determine on the debt of 1777. The recorded proceedings at this time knew nothing of any debt to Benfield. There was his own testimony, there was the testimony of the list, there was the testimony of the Nabob of Arcot, against it. Yet such was the ministers' feeling of the true secret of this transaction, that they thought proper, in the teeth of all these testimonies, to give him license to return to Madras.

Here the ministers were under some embarra.s.sment. Confounded between their resolution of rewarding the good services of Benfield's friends and a.s.sociates in England, and the shame of sending that notorious incendiary to the court of the Nabob of Arcot, to renew his intrigues against the British government, at the time they authorize his return, they forbid him, under the severest penalties, from any conversation with the Nabob or his ministers: that is, they forbid his communication with the very person on account of his dealings with whom they permit his return to that city. To overtop this contradiction, there is not a word restraining him from the freest intercourse with the Nabob's second son, the real author of all that is done in the Nabob's name; who, in conjunction with this very Benfield, has acquired an absolute dominion over that unhappy man, is able to persuade him to put his signature to whatever paper they please, and often without any communication of the contents. This management was detailed to them at full length by Lord Macartney, and they cannot pretend ignorance of it.[64]

I believe, after this exposure of facts, no man can entertain a doubt of the collusion of ministers with the corrupt interest of the delinquents in India. Whenever those in authority provide for the interest of any person, on the real, but concealed state of his affairs, without regard to his avowed, public, and ostensible pretences, it must be presumed that they are in confederacy with him, because they act for him on the same fraudulent principles on which he acts for himself. It is plain that the ministers were fully apprised of Benfield's real situation, which he had used means to conceal, whilst concealment answered his purposes. They were, or the person on whom they relied was, of the cabinet council of Benfield, in the very depth of all his mysteries. An honest magistrate compels men to abide by one story. An equitable judge would not hear of the claim of a man who had himself thought proper to renounce it. With such a judge his shuffling and prevarication would have d.a.m.ned his claims; such a judge never would have known, but in order to animadvert upon, proceedings of that character.

I have thus laid before you, Mr. Speaker, I think with sufficient clearness, the connection of the ministers with Mr. Atkinson at the general election; I have laid open to you the connection of Atkinson with Benfield; I have shown Benfield's employment of his wealth in creating a Parliamentary interest to procure a ministerial protection; I have set before your eyes his large concern in the debt, his practices to hide that concern from the public eye, and the liberal protection which he has received from the minister. If this chain of circ.u.mstances does not lead you necessarily to conclude that the minister has paid to the avarice of Benfield the services done by Benfield's connections to his ambition, I do not know anything short of the confession of the party that can persuade you of his guilt. Clandestine and collusive practice can only be traced by combination and comparison of circ.u.mstances. To reject such combination and comparison is to reject the only means of detecting fraud; it is, indeed, to give it a patent and free license to cheat with impunity.

I confine myself to the connection of ministers, mediately or immediately, with only two persons concerned in this debt. How many others, who support their power and greatness within and without doors, are concerned originally, or by transfers of these debts, must be left to general opinion. I refer to the reports of the Select Committee for the proceedings of some of the agents in these affairs, and their attempts, at least, to furnish ministers with the means of buying General Courts, and even whole Parliaments, in the gross.[65]

I know that the ministers will think it little less than acquittal, that they are not charged with having taken to themselves some part of the money of which they have made so liberal a donation to their partisans, though the charge may be indisputably fixed upon the corruption of their politics. For my part, I follow their crimes to that point to which legal presumptions and natural indications lead me, without considering what species of evil motive tends most to aggravate or to extenuate the guilt of their conduct. But if I am to speak my private sentiments, I think that in a thousand cases for one it would be far less mischievous to the public, and full as little dishonorable to themselves, to be polluted with direct bribery, than thus to become a standing auxiliary to the oppression, usury, and peculation of mult.i.tudes, in order to obtain a corrupt support to their power. It is by bribing, not so often by being bribed, that wicked politicians bring rum on mankind. Avarice is a rival to the pursuits of many. It finds a mult.i.tude of checks, and many opposers, in every walk of life. But the objects of ambition are for the few; and every person who aims at indirect profit, and therefore wants other protection than innocence and law, instead of its rival, becomes its instrument. There is a natural allegiance and fealty due to this domineering, paramount evil, from all the va.s.sal vices, which acknowledge its superiority, and readily militate under its banners; and it is under that discipline alone that avarice is able to spread to any considerable extent, or to render itself a general, public mischief. It is therefore no apology for ministers, that they have not been bought by the East India delinquents, but that they have only formed an alliance with them for screening each other from justice, according to the exigence of their several necessities. That they have done so is evident; and the junction of the power of office in England with the abuse of authority in the East has not only prevented even the appearance of redress to the grievances of India, but I wish it may not be found to have dulled, if not extinguished, the honor, the candor, the generosity, the good-nature, which used formerly to characterize the people of England. I confess, I wish that some more feeling than I have yet observed for the sufferings of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects in that oppressed part of the world had manifested itself in any one quarter of the kingdom, or in any one large description of men.

That these oppressions exist is a fact no more denied than it is resented as it ought to be. Much evil has been done in India under the British authority. What has been done to redress it? We are no longer surprised at anything. We are above the unlearned and vulgar pa.s.sion of admiration. But it will astonish posterity, when they read our opinions in our actions, that, after years of inquiry, we have found out that the sole grievance of India consisted in this, that the servants of the Company there had not profited enough of their opportunities, nor drained it sufficiently of its treasures,--when they shall hear that the very first and only important act of a commission specially named by act of Parliament is, to charge upon an undone country, in favor of a handful of men in the humblest ranks of the public service, the enormous sum of perhaps four millions of sterling money.

It is difficult for the most wise and upright government to correct the abuses of remote, delegated power, productive of unmeasured wealth, and protected by the boldness and strength of the same ill-got riches. These abuses, full of their own wild native vigor, will grow and flourish under mere neglect. But where the supreme authority, not content with winking at the rapacity of its inferior instruments, is so shameless and corrupt as openly to give bounties and premiums for disobedience to its laws,--when it will not trust to the activity of avarice in the pursuit of its own gains,--when it secures public robbery by all the careful jealousy and attention with which it ought to protect property from such violence,--the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its purposes; neither G.o.d nor man will long endure it; nor will it long endure itself. In that case, there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint, fermenting in the const.i.tution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off, or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death,--and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carca.s.s, full of stench and poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson to the world.

In my opinion, we ought not to wait for the fruitless instruction of calamity to inquire into the abuses which bring upon us ruin in the worst of its forms, in the loss of our fame and virtue. But the right honorable gentleman[66] says, in answer to all the powerful arguments of my honorable friend, "that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this transaction." But it is exposed; it is perfectly known in every member, in every particle, and in every way, except that which may lead to a remedy. He knows that the papers of correspondence are printed, and that they are in every hand.

He and delicacy are a rare and a singular coalition. He thinks that to divulge our Indian politics may be highly dangerous. He! the mover, the chairman, the reporter of the Committee of Secrecy! he, that brought forth in the utmost detail, in several vast, printed folios, the most recondite parts of the politics, the military, the revenues of the British empire in India! With six great chopping b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,[67] each as l.u.s.ty as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the sight of his new bridegroom, a.s.sumes a virgin delicacy; or, to use a more fit, as well as a more poetic comparison, the person so squeamish, so timid, so trembling lest the winds of heaven should visit too roughly, is expanded to broad suns.h.i.+ne, exposed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud with all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of her delicate amours,--

Triginta capitum ftus enixa jacebat, Alba, solo recubans, albi circ.u.m ubera nati.

Whilst discovery of the misgovernment of others led to his own power, it was wise to inquire, it was safe to publish: there was then no delicacy; there was then no danger. But when his object is obtained, and in his imitation he has outdone the crimes that he had reprobated in volumes of reports and in sheets of bills of pains and penalties, then concealment becomes prudence, and it concerns the safety of the state that we should not know, in a mode of Parliamentary cognizance, what all the world knows but too well, that is, in what manner he chooses to dispose of the public revenues to the creatures of his politics.

The debate has been long, and as much so on my part, at least, as on the part of those who have spoken before me. But long as it is, the more material half of the subject has hardly been touched on: that is, the corrupt and destructive system to which this debt has been rendered subservient, and which seems to be pursued with at least as much vigor and regularity as ever. If I considered your ease or my own, rather than the weight and importance of this question, I ought to make some apology to you, perhaps some apology to myself, for having detained your attention so long. I know on what ground I tread. This subject, at one time taken up with so much fervor and zeal, is no longer a favorite in this House. The House itself has undergone a great and signal revolution. To some the subject is strange and uncouth; to several, harsh and distasteful; to the relics of the last Parliament it is a matter of fear and apprehension. It is natural for those who have seen their friends sink in the tornado which raged during the late s.h.i.+ft of the monsoon, and have hardly escaped on the planks of the general wreck, it is but too natural for them, as soon as they make the rocks and quicksands of their former disasters, to put about their new-built barks, and, as much as possible, to keep aloof from this perilous lee sh.o.r.e.

But let us do what we please to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation. Our attempts to banish this importunate duty will only make it return upon us again and again, and every time in a shape more unpleasant than the former. A government has been fabricated for that great province; the right honorable gentleman says that therefore you ought not to examine into its conduct. Heavens! what an argument is this! We are not to examine into the conduct of the Direction, because it is an old government; we are not to examine into this Board of Control, because it is a new one. Then we are only to examine into the conduct of those who have no conduct to account for. Unfortunately, the basis of this new government has been laid on old, condemned delinquents, and its superstructure is raised out of prosecutors turned into protectors. The event has been such as might be expected. But if it had been otherwise const.i.tuted, had it been const.i.tuted even as I wished, and as the mover of this question had planned, the better part of the proposed establishment was in the publicity of its proceedings, in its perpetual responsibility to Parliament. Without this check, what is our government at home, even awed, as every European government is, by an audience formed of the other states of Europe, by the applause or condemnation of the discerning and critical company before which it acts? But if the scene on the other side of the globe, which tempts, invites, almost compels, to tyranny and rapine, be not inspected with the eye of a severe and unremitting vigilance, shame and destruction must ensue. For one, the worst event of this day, though it may deject, shall not break or subdue me. The call upon us is authoritative. Let who will shrink back, I shall be found at my post. Baffled, discountenanced, subdued, discredited, as the cause of justice and humanity is, it will be only the dearer to me. Whoever, therefore, shall at any time bring before you anything towards the relief of our distressed fellow-citizens in India, and towards a subversion of the present most corrupt and oppressive system for its government, in me shall find a weak, I am afraid, but a steady, earnest, and faithful a.s.sistant.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Right Honorable Henry Dundas.

[2] Sir Thomas Rumbold, late Governor of Madras.

[3] Appendix, No. 1.

[4] The whole of the net Irish hereditary revenue is, on a medium of the last seven years, about 330,000_l._ yearly. The revenues of all denominations fall short more than 150,000_l._ yearly of the charges. On the _present_ produce, if Mr. Pitt's scheme was to take place, he might gain from seven to ten thousand pounds a year.

[5] Mr. Smith's Examination before the Select Committee. Appendix, No.