But now appeared, in the most striking light, the good policy of Mr. Hastings's system of 1780, in placing this screen of a Committee between him and his crimes. The Committee had their lesson. Whilst Paterson is left collecting his evidence and casting up his accounts in Rungpore, Debi Sing is called up, in seeming wrath, to the capital, where he is received as those who have robbed and desolated provinces, and filled their coffers with seven hundred thousand pounds sterling, have been usually received at Calcutta, and sometimes in Great Britain. Debi Sing made good his ground in Calcutta, and when he had well prepared his Committee, in due time Paterson returns, appears, and reports.
Persons even less informed than your Lordships are well apprised that all officers representing government, and making in that character an authorized inquiry, are entitled to a presumptive credit for all their proceedings, and that their reports of facts (where there is no evidence of corruption or malice) are in the first instance to be taken for truth, especially by those who have authorized the inquiry; and it is their duty to put the burden of proof to the contrary on those who would impeach or shake the report.
Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings's devising. In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.
This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty, into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril; the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to proceed by strict rules of law.
By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the credit due to the proceedings of government. They changed the natural situation of proofs. They rejected the depositions of Paterson's witnesses, as not on oath, though they had never ordered or authorized them so to be taken.
They went further, and disabled, in a body, all the deponents themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own rebellion. They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead of the culprit. They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) and made him a complainant and a witness against him in the stupidest and most improbable of all accusations,—namely, that Paterson had menaced him with punishment, if he did not, in so many words, slander and calumniate Debi Sing; and then the Committee, seating this wretch as an assessor at their own board, who a few days before would have trembled like a whipped slave at the look of an European, encouraged him to interrogate their own commissioner.
[Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit down. After some time Mr. Burke again addressed the House.]
My Lords, I am sorry to break the attention of your Lordships in such a way. It is a subject that agitates me. It is long, difficult, and arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you any further trouble, I will go through it this day.
I am to tell your Lordships, that the next step they took was, after putting Mr. Paterson as an accuser to make good a charge which he made out but too much to their satisfaction, they changed their battery.
[Mr. Burke's illness increased; upon which the House, on the motion of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, adjourned.]