"trary to policy and good faith." This is what the Commons think of this business, which Mr. Hastings pleads as merits. But I have not yet done with it. These provinces are estimated as worth twenty-two lacks, or thereabouts, that is about 220,000l. a year. I believe they were improvable to a good deal more. But what does Mr. Hastings do? Instead of taking them into the Company's possession for the purpose of preserving them for the Mogul, upon the event of our being better satisfied with his conduct, or of appropriating them to the Company's advantage, he sells them to the Nabob of Oude, who he knew had the art, above all men, of destroying a country which he was to keep, or which he might fear he was not to keep permanent possession of. And what do you think he sold them for? He sold them at a little more than two years purchase. Will any man believe that Mr. Hastings, when he sold these provinces to the Vizier for two years purchase, (and when there was no man that would not have given ten years purchase for them,) did not put the difference between the real and pretended value into his own pocket, and that of his associates? We charge, therefore, first, that this act for which he assumes merit was in itself a breach of faith; next, that the sale of these provinces was scandalously scandalously conducted; and thirdly, that this sale, at one fifth of the real value, was effected for corrupt purposes. Thus an act of threefold delinquency is one of the merits stated with pomp by his counsel. great Another of his merits is the stoppage of the pension, which the Company was under an obligation to pay to Nudjeive Khan;—a matter which even if admitted to a merit, is certainly not worth, as a set-off, much consideration. But there is another set-off of merit upon which he plumes himself, and sets an exceedingly high value-the sale of the Rohilla nation to that worthless tyrant, the Vizier, their cruel and bitter enemy, the cruellest tyrant, perhaps, that ever existed, and their most implacable enemy, if we except Mr. Hastings, who appears to have had a concealed degree of animosity, publick, private, or political, against them. To this man he sold this whole nation, whose country, cultivated like a garden, was soon reduced, as Mr. Hastings, from the character of the Vizier, knew would be the consequence, to a mere desert, for 400,000l.; he sent a brigade of our troops to assist the Vizier in extirpating these people, who were the bravest, the most honourable, and generous nation upon earth. Those who were not left slaughtered to rot upon the soil of their native country, were cruelly expelled from it, and and sent to publish the merciless and scandalous behaviour of Great Britain from one end of India to the other. I believe there is not an honest, ingenuous, or feeling heart upon the face of the globe, I believe there is no man possessing the least degree of regard to honour and justice, humanity and good policy, that did not reprobate this act. The Court of Directors, when they heard of it, reprobated it in the strongest manner; the Court of Proprietors reprobated it in the strongest manner; by the House of Com mons, after the most diligent investigation, it was, in a resolution moved by Mr. Dundas, reprobated in the strongest manner: and this is the act which Mr. Hastings brings forward before your Lordships as a merit. But, again, I can prove, that in this, perhaps, the most atrocious of all his demerits, there is à most horrid and nefarious secret corruption lurking: I can tell your Lordships, that Sir Robert Barker was offered by this Vizier, for about one-half of this very country, namely, the country of the Rohillas, a sum of fifty lacks of rupees, that is, 500,000%. Mr. Hastings was Robert Baker, in informed of this offer by Sir from opportunity of magnifying the difficulties which, during his government, he had to contend with. Here he displays all his tactics. He spreads all his sails, and here catches every gale. He says, I found all India confederated against you. I found not the Mahrattas alone; I found war through a hundred hostile states fulminated against you; I found the Peshwa, the Nizam, Hyder Ally, the Rajah of Berar, all combined together for your destruction. I stemmed the torrent; fortitude is my character. I faced and overcame all these difficulties, till I landed your affairs safe on shore; till I stood the saviour of India. My Lords, we of the House of Commons have before heard all this, but we cannot forget that we examined into every part of it, and that we did not find a single fact stated by him, that was not a ground of censure and reprobation. The House of Commons, in the resolutions to which I have alluded, have declared, that Mr. Hastings, the first author of these proceedings, took advantage of an ambiguous letter of the Court of Directors, to break and violate the most solemn, the most advantageous, and useful treaty that the Company had ever made in India; and that this conduct of his produced the strange and unnatural junction, which he says he found formed against the Company, and with which he had to combat. |
