a miserable victim to all the revolutions, to all the successive changes and versatile politics at Calcutta. Like all the rest of the great personages whom we have degraded and brutalized by insult and oppression, he betook himself to the usual destructive resources of unprincipled misery,—sensuality, opium, and wine. His gigantic frame of constitution soon gave way under the oppression of this relief, and he died, leaving children and grandchildren by wives and concubines. On the old Nabob's death, Mahomed Reza Khân was acknowledged Deputy Nabob, the money paid, and this revolution completed.
Here, my Lords, opened a new source of plunder, peculation, and bribery, which was not neglected. Revolutions were no longer necessary; succession supplied their places: and well the object agreed with the policy. Rules of succession could not be very well ascertained to an office like that of the Nabob, which was hereditary only by the appointment of the Mogul. The issue by lawful wives would naturally be preferred by those who meant the quiet of the country. But a more doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the purposes of extortion and peculation. This miserable succession was sold, and the eldest of the issue of Munny Begum, an harlot, brought in to pollute the harem of the seraglio, of whom you will hear much hereafter, was chosen. He soon succeeded to the grave. Another son of the same prostitute succeeded to the same unhappy throne, and followed to the same untimely grave. Every succession was sold; and between venal successions and venal revolutions, in a very few years seven princes and six sales were seen successively in Bengal. The last was a minor, the issue
of a legitimate wife, admitted to succeed because a minor, and because there was none illegitimate left. He was instantly stripped of the allowance of his progenitors, and reduced to a pension of 160,000 a year. He still exists, and continued to the end of Mr. Hastings's government to furnish constant sources of bribery and plunder to him and his creatures.
The offspring of Munny Begum clinging, as his father did, to Nundcomar, they tore Nundcomar from his side, as they had done from the side of his father, and carried him down as a sort of prisoner to Calcutta; where, having had the weakness to become the first informer, he was made the first example. This person, pushed to the wall, and knowing that the man he had to deal with was desperate and cruel in his resentments, resolves on the first blow, and enters before the Council a regular information in writing of bribery against Mr. Hastings. In his preface to that charge he excuses himself for what is considered to be an act equally insane and wicked, and as the one inexpiable crime of an Indian, the discovery of the money he gives,—that Mr. Hastings had declaredly determined on his ruin, and to accomplish it had newly associated himself with one Mohun Persaud, a name I wish your Lordships to remember, a bitter enemy of his, an infamous person, whom Mr. Hastings knew to be such, and as such had turned him out of his house,—that Mr. Hastings had lately recalled, and held frequent communications with this Mohun Persaud, the subject of which he had no doubt was his ruin. In the year 1775 he was hanged by those incorrupt English judges who were sent to India by Parliament to protect the natives from oppression.
Your Lordships will observe that this new sale of the office of ministers succeeded to the sale of that of nabobs. All these varied and successive sales shook the country to pieces. As if those miserable exhausted provinces were to be cured of inanition by phlebotomy, while Cossim Ali was racking it above, the Company were drawing off all its nutriment below. A dreadful, an extensive, and most chargeable war followed. Half the northern force of India poured down like a torrent on Bengal, endangered our existence, and exhausted all our resources. The war was the fruit of Mr. Hastings's cabals. Its termination, as usual, was the result of the military merit and the fortune of this nation. Cossim Ali, after having been defeated toy the military genius and spirit of England, (for the Adamses, Monroes, and others of that period, I believe, showed as much skill and bravery as any of their predecessors,) in his flight swept away above three millions in money, jewels, or effects, out of a country which he had plundered and exhausted by his unheard-of exactions. However, he fought his way like a retiring lion, turning his face to his pursuers. He still fought along his frontier. His ability and his money drew to his cause the Subahdar of Oude, the famous Sujah ul Dowlah. The Mogul entered into these wars, and penetrated into the lower provinces on one side, whilst Bulwant Sing, the Rajah of Benares, entered them on another. After various changes of party and changes of fortune, the loss which began in the treachery of the civil service was, as I have before remarked, redeemed by military merit. Many examples of the same sort have since been seen.
Whilst these things were transacted in India, the Court of Directors in London, hearing of so many changes, hearing of such an incredible mass of perfidy and venality, knowing that there was a general market made of the country and of the Company, that the flame of war spread from province to province, that, in proportion as it spread, the fire glowed with augmented fierceness, and that the rapacity which originally gave rise to it was following it in all its progress,—the Company, my Lords, alarmed not only for their acquisitions, but their existence, and finding themselves sinking lower and lower by every victory they obtained, thought it necessary at length to come to some system and some settlement. After composing their differences with Lord Clive, they sent him out to that country about the year 1765, in order, by his name, weight, authority, and vigor of mind, to give some sort of form and stability to government, and to rectify the innumerable abuses which prevailed there, and particularly that great source of disorders, that fundamental abuse, presents: for the bribes by which all these revolutions were bought had not the name of conditions, stipulations, or rewards; they even had the free and gratuitous style of presents. The receivers contended that they were mere gratuities given for service done, or mere tokens of affection and gratitude to the parties. They may give them what names they please, and your Lordships will think of them what you please; but they were the donations of misery to power, the gifts of sufferers to the oppressors; and consequently, where they prevailed, they left no certain property or fixed situation to any man in India, from the highest to the lowest.
The Court of Directors sent out orders to enlarge
the servants' covenants with new and severe clauses, strongly prohibiting the practice of receiving presents. Lord Clive himself had been a large receiver of them. Yet, as it was in the moment of a revolution which gave them all they possessed, the Company would hear no more of it. They sent him out to reform: whether they chose well or ill does not signify. I think, upon the whole, they chose well; because his name and authority could do much. They sent him out to redress the grievances of that country, and it was necessary he should be well armed for that service. They sent him out with such powers as no servant of the Company ever held before. I would not be understood here in my own character, much less in the delegated character in which I stand, to contend for any man in the totality of his conduct. Perhaps in some of his measures he was mistaken, and in some of his acts reprehensible; but justice obliges me to say, that the plan which he formed and the course which he pursued were in general great and well imagined,—that he laid great foundations, if they had been properly built upon. For, in the first place, he composed all the neighboring countries torn to pieces by the wars of Cossim Ali, and quieted the apprehensions raised by the opinion of the boundless ambition of England. He took strong measures to put an end to a great many of the abuses that prevailed in the country subject to the Company. He then proceeded to the upper provinces, and formed a plan which, for a military man, has great civil and political merit. He put a bound to the aspiring spirit of the Company's servants; he limited its conquests; he prescribed bounds to its ambition. "First" (says he) "quiet the minds of the