Part 9 — SPEECH IN OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT. FIRST DAY: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1788. (continued 2)

The author, Mr. Holwell, divides the country of Bengal into its different provinces. He supposes what they then paid to the supreme government; he supposes what the country is capable of yielding; and his project is, to change entirely the application of the revenues of the country, and to secure the whole into the hands of government. In enumerating these provinces, at last he comes to the province of Burdwan.

"In truth," (says this author,) "it would be almost cruelty to molest this happy people; for in this district are the only vestiges of the beauty, purity, piety, regularity, equity, and strictness of the ancient Hindostan government. Here the property as well as the liberty of the people are inviolate. Here no robberies are heard of, either public or private. The traveller, either with or without merchandise, becomes the immediate care of the government, which allots him guards, without any expense, to conduct him from stage to stage; and these are accountable for the safety and accommodation of his person and effects. At the end of the first stage he is delivered over, with certain benevolent formalities, to the guards of the next, who, after interrogating the traveller as to the usage he had received in his journey, dismiss the first guard with a written certificate of their behavior, and a receipt for the traveller and his effects; which certificate and receipt are returnable to the commanding officer of the first stage, who registers the same, and regularly reports it to the rajah.

"In this form the traveller is passed through the country; and if he only passes, he is not suffered to be at any expense for food, accommodation, or carriage for his merchandise or baggage: but it is otherwise, if he is permitted to make any residence in one place above three days, unless occasioned by sickness, or any unavoidable accident. If anything is lost in this district,—for instance, a bag of money or other valuables,—the person who finds it hangs it upon the next tree, and gives notice to the nearest chowkey, or place of guard, the officer of which orders immediate publication of the same by beat of tomtom, or drum."

These, my Lords, are the effects universally produced by the Hindoo polity throughout that vast region, before it was distorted and put out of frame by the barbarism of foreign conquests. Some choice, reserved spots continued to flourish under it to the year 1756. Some remained till Mr. Hastings obtained the means of utterly defacing them. Such was the prospect of Benares under the happy government of Bulwant Sing. Such was the happy state of the same Benares in the happy days of Cheyt Sing, until, in the year 1781, Mr. Hastings introduced his reform into that country.

Having stated the general outline of the manners of the original people of Hindostan, having stated the general principles of their policy, which either prohibit connection, or oblige us to a connection very different from what we have hitherto used towards them, I shall leave it to your Lordships' judgment whether you will suffer such fair monuments of wisdom and benevolence to be defaced by the rapacity of your governors. I hope I have not gone out of my way to bring before you any circumstance relative to the Gentoo religion and manners, further than as they relate to the spirit of our government over them; for though there never was such food for the curiosity of the human mind as is found in the manners of this people, I pass it totally over.

I wish to divide this preliminary view into six periods; and your Lordships will consider that of the Hindoos, which I have now mentioned, as the first era.

The second era is an era of great misfortune to that country, and to the world in general: I mean, the time of the prophet Mahomed. The enthusiasm which animated his first followers, the despotic power which religion obtained through that enthusiasm, and the advantages derived from both over the enervated great empires, and broken, disunited, lesser governments of the world, extended the influence of that proud and domineering sect from the banks of the Ganges to the banks of the Loire.

This second period is the era of the Arabs. These people made a great and lasting impression on India. They established, very early, Mahomedan sovereigns in all parts of it, particularly in the kingdom of Bengal, which is the principal object of our present inquiry. They held that kingdom for a long series of years, under a dynasty of thirty-three kings,—having begun their conquest and founded their dominion in Bengal not very long after the time of their prophet.

These people, when they first settled in India, attempted, with the ferocious arm of their prophetic sword, to change the religion and manners of that country; but at length perceiving that their cruelty wearied out itself, and never could touch the constancy of the sufferers, they permitted the native people of the country to remain in quiet, and left the Mahomedan religion to operate upon them as it could, by appealing to the ambition or avarice of the great, or by taking the lower people, who had lost their castes, into this new sect, and thus, from the refuse of the Gentoo, increasing the bounds of the Mahomedan religion. They left many of the ancient rajahs of the country possessed of an inferior sovereignty; and where the strength of the country, or other circumstances, would not permit this subordination, they suffered them to continue in a separate state, approaching to independence, if not wholly independent.

The Mahomedans, during the period of the Arabs, never expelled or destroyed the native Gentoo nobility, zemindars, or landholders of the country. They all, or almost all, remained fixed in their places, properties, and dignities; and the shadows of several of them remain under our jurisdiction.

The next, which is the third era, is an era the more necessary to observe upon, because Mr. Hastings has made many applications to it in his defence before the Commons: namely, the invasion of the Tartars, or the era of Tamerlane. These Tartars did not establish themselves on the ruins of the Hindoos. Their conquests were over the other Mahomedans: for Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, as he invaded other countries, in the character of the great reformer of the Mahomedan religion. He came as a sort of successor to the rights of the Prophet, upon a divine title. He struck at all the Mahomedan princes who reigned at that time. He considered them as apostates, or at least as degenerated from the faith, and as tyrants abusing their power. To facilitate his conquests over these, he was often obliged to come to a sort of a composition with the people of the country he invaded. Tamerlane had neither time nor means nor inclination to dispossess the ancient rajahs of the country.

Your Lordships will observe that I propose nothing more than to give you an idea of the principles of policy which prevailed in these several revolutions, and not an history of the furious military achievements of a barbarous invader. Historians, indeed, are generally very liberal of their information concerning everything but what we ought to be very anxious to know. They tell us that India was conquered by Tamerlane, and conquered in such a year. The year will be found to coincide somewhere, I believe, with the end of the fourteenth century. Thinking the mere fact as of little moment, and its chronology as nothing, but thinking the policy very material, which, indeed, is to be collected only here and there, in various books written with various views, I shall beg leave to lay before you a very remarkable circumstance relative to that policy, and taken from the same book to which I formerly referred, Mr. Holwell's.

"When the Hindoo rajahs, or princes of Hindostan, submitted to Tamerlane, it was on these capital stipulations: that the emperor should marry a daughter of Rajah Cheyt Sing's house; that the head of this house should be in perpetuity governors of the citadel of Agra, and anoint the king at his coronation; and that the emperors should never impose the jessera (or poll-tax) upon the Hindoos."

Here was a conqueror, as he is called, coming in upon terms; mixing his blood with that of the native nobility of the country he conquered, and, in consequence of this mixture, placing them in succession upon the throne of the country he subdued; making one of them even hereditary constable of the capital of his kingdom, and thereby putting his posterity as a pledge into their hands. What is full as remarkable, he freed the Hindoos forever from that tax which the Mahomedans have laid upon every country over which the sword of Mahomet prevailed,—namely, a capitation tax upon all who do not profess the religion of the Mahomedans. But the Hindoos, by express charter, were exempted from that mark of servitude, and thereby declared not to be a conquered people. The native princes, in all their transactions with the Mogul government, carried the evident marks of this free condition in a noble independency of spirit. Within their own districts the authority of many of them seemed entire. We are often led into mistakes concerning the government of Hindostan, by comparing it with those governments where the prince is armed with a full, speculative, entire authority, and where the great people have, with great titles, no privileges at all, or, having privileges, have those privileges only as subjects. But in Hindostan the modes, the degrees, the circumstances of subjection varied infinitely. In some places hardly a trace at all of subjection was to be discerned; in some the rajahs were almost assessors of the throne, as in this case of the Rajah Cheyt Sing. These circumstances mark, that Tamerlane, however he may be indicated by the odious names of Tartar and Conqueror, was no barbarian; that the people who submitted to him did not submit with the abject submission of slaves to the sword of a conqueror, but admitted a great supreme emperor, who was just, prudent, and politic, instead of the ferocious, oppressive, lesser Mahomedan sovereigns, who had before forced their way by the sword into the country.

That country resembled more a republic of princes with a great chief at their head than a territory in absolute, uniform, systematic subjection from one end to the other,—in which light Mr. Hastings and others of late have thought proper to consider it. According to them, if a subordinate prince, like Cheyt Sing, was not ready to pay any exorbitant sum on instant demand, or submit to any extent of fine which should be inflicted upon him by the mere will of the person who called robbery a fine, and who took the measure of that fine without either considering the means of paying or the degree of delinquency that justified it, their properties, liberties, and lives were instantly forfeited. The rajahs of that country were armed; they had fortresses for their security; they had troops. In the receipt of both their own and the imperial revenue, their securities for justice were in their own hands: but the policy of the Mogul princes very rarely led them to push that people to such extremity as it is supposed that on every slight occasion we have a right to push those who are the subjects of our pretended conquest.

Mr. Holwell throws much light on this policy, which became the standing law of the empire.

In the unfortunate wars which followed the death of Mauz-o-Din, "Sevajee Cheyt Sing," (the great rajah we have just mentioned,) "with a select body of Rajpoots, by a well-conducted retreat recovered Agra, and was soon after reconciled to the king [the Mogul] and admitted to his favor,—conformable to the steady policy of this government, in keeping a good understanding with the principal rajahs, and more especially with the head of this house, who is ever capable of raising and fomenting a very formidable party upon any intended revolution in this despotic and precarious monarchy."

You see that it was the monarchy that was precarious, not the rights of the subordinate chiefs. Your Lordships see, that, notwithstanding our ideas of Oriental despotism, under the successors of Tamerlane, these principal rajahs, instead of being called wretches, and treated as such, as Mr. Hastings has thought it becoming to call and treat them, when they were in arms against their sovereign, were regarded with respect, and were admitted to easy reconciliations; because, in reality, in their occasional hostilities, they were not properly rebellious subjects, but princes often asserting their natural rights and the just constitution of the country.

This view of the policy which prevailed during the dynasty of Tamerlane naturally conducts me to the next, which is the fourth era in this history: I mean the era of the Emperor Akbar. He was the first of the successors of Tamerlane who obtained possession of Bengal. It is easy to show of what nature his conquest was. It was over the last Mahomedan dynasty. He, too, like his predecessor, Tamerlane, conquered the prince, not the country. It is a certain mark that it was not a conquered country in the sense in which we commonly call a country conquered, that the natives, great men and landholders, continued in every part in the possession of their estates, and of the jurisdictions annexed to them. It is true, that, in the several wars for the succession to the Mogul empire, and in other of their internal wars, severe revenges were taken, which bore resemblance to those taken in the wars of the Roses in this country, where it was the common course, in the heat of blood,—"Off with his head!—so much for Buckingham!" Yet, where the country again recovered its form and settlement, it recovered the spirit of a mild government. Whatever rigor was used with regard to the Mahomedan adventurers from Persia, Turkey, and other parts, who filled the places of servile grandeur in the Mogul court, the Hindoos were a favored, protected, gently treated people.

The next, which is the fifth era, is a troubled and vexatious period,—the era of the independent Subahs of Bengal. Five of these subahs, or viceroys, governed from about the year 1717, or thereabouts. They grew into independence partly by the calamities and concussions of that empire, which happened during the disputes for the succession of Tamerlane, and partly, and indeed principally, by the great shook which the empire received when Thamas Kouli Khân broke into that country, carried off its revenues, overturned the throne, and massacred not only many of the chief nobility, but almost all the inhabitants of the capital city. This rude shock, which that empire was never able to recover, enabled the viceroys to become independent; but their independence led to their ruin. Those who had usurped upon their masters had servants who usurped upon them. Aliverdy Khân murdered his master, and opened a way into Bengal for a body of foreign invaders, the Mahrattas, who cruelly harassed the country for several years. Their retreat was at length purchased, and by a sum which is supposed to amount to five millions sterling. By this purchase he secured the exhausted remains of an exhausted kingdom, and left it to his grandson, Surajah Dowlah, in peace and poverty. On the fall of Surajah Dowlah, in 1756, commenced the last, which is the sixth,—the era of the British empire.

On the fifth dynasty I have only to remark to your Lordships, that at its close the Hindoo chiefs were almost everywhere found in possession of the country; that, although Aliverdy Khân was a cruel tyrant, though he was an untitled usurper, though he racked and tormented the people under his government, urged, however, by an apparent necessity from an invading army of one hundred thousand horse in his dominions,—yet, under him, the rajahs still preserved their rank, their dignity, their castles, their houses, their seigniories, all the insignia of their situation, and always the right, sometimes also the means, of protecting their subordinate people, till the last and unfortunate era of 1756.

Through the whole of this sketch of history I wish to impress but one great and important truth upon your minds: namely, that, through all these revolutions in government and changes in power, an Hindoo polity, and the spirit of an Hindoo government, did more or less exist in that province with which he was concerned, until it was finally to be destroyed by Mr. Hastings.

My Lords, I have gone through all the eras precedent to those of the British power in India, and am come to the first of those eras. Mr. Hastings existed in India, and was a servant of the Company before that era, and had his education between both. He is an antediluvian with regard to the British dominion in Bengal. He was coexistent with all the acts and monuments of that revolution, and had no small share in all the abuses of that abusive period which preceded his actual government. Bat as it was during that transit from Eastern to Western power that most of the abuses had their origin, it will not be perfectly easy for your Lordships thoroughly to enter into the nature and circumstances of them without an explanation of the principal events that happened from the year 1756 until the commencement of Mr. Hastings's government,—during a good part of which time we do not often lose sight of him. If I find it agreeable to your Lordships, if I find that you wish to know these annals of Indian suffering and British delinquency, if you desire that I should unfold the series of the transactions from 1756 to the period of Mr. Hastings's government in 1771, that you may know how far he promoted what was good, how far he rectified what was evil, how far he abstained from innovation in tyranny, and contented himself with the old stock of abuse, your Lordships will have the goodness to consult the strength which from late indisposition, begins almost to fail me. And if you think the explanation is not time lost in this new world and in this new business, I shall venture to sketch out, as briefly and with as much perspicuity as I can give them, the leading events of that obscure and perplexed period which intervened between the British settlement in 1757 and Mr. Hastings's government. If I should be so happy as to succeed in that attempt, your Lordships' minds will be prepared for hearing this cause. Then your Lordships will have a clear view of the origin and nature of the abuses which prevailed in that government before Mr. Hastings obtained his greatest power, and since that time; and then we shall be able to enter fully and explicitly into the nature of the cause: and I should hope that it will pave the way and make everything easy for your subsequent justice.

I therefore wish to stop at this period, in which Mr. Hastings became active in the service, pretty near the time when he began his political career: and here, my Lords, I pause, wishing your indulgence at such time as will suit your convenience for pursuing the rest of this eventful history.