Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

After a stay of four years, during which he renewed his intimacy with his old schoolfellow, the creator of the immortal John Gilpin, and made the acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell, he found himself so reduced in circumstances that he not only had to ask the Directors of the Company to give him more employment in India, but when he got it he was forced to borrow the money to pay his passage out again.

It is quite impossible to form any just and reasonable judgment of the work which Warren Hastings now went out to do unless one first gets an adequate idea of the condition of things obtaining in India before the English went there, and of the conditions that would have obtained, if men like Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley had not by one means and another—some good, some bad, but all just what were possible under the circumstances—succeeded in imposing the Pax Britannica upon the rival and constantly warring potentates who governed the native populations.

No doubt the war on the Rohillas, or the so-called spoliation of the Begums of Oude, together with more or less magnified incidentals, formed famous themes in after years for the inflated eloquence and grandiloquent over-statements of Edmund Burke and Sheridan, and for the far less comprehensible or excusable special pleading of Lord Macaulay.

It was, no doubt, very affecting to see the patched and powdered fine ladies who paid their fifty guineas a seat in Westminster Hall to watch the men of words mangling the reputation of the man of deeds, weeping and fainting at the harrowing pictures they drew—mostly on their own imaginations—of the sufferings which he had not caused; but we of to-day are sufficiently far removed from the personal spite and the passion and rivalry which inspired the enemies and accusers of the great Governor to be able to look at things as they actually were, and in doing so we shall see that, however heavy was the hand that Warren Hastings laid upon the subject peoples, it was but as a caress to a blow when compared with the oppression and extortion with which conqueror after conqueror, Mohammedan and Hindoo, Sikh, Afghan, and Mahratta, had ground down and despoiled the helpless races which successively passed under their sway.

Order, however dearly bought, is always less expensive than anarchy, and the impassioned periods of Burke and Sheridan look somewhat silly when we compare them with the sober facts. It never seems to have struck them or their audience to make any comparison between the English gentleman and loyal servant of his country whom they would have handed down to history as a monster of iniquity, and those real tyrants of the type of Surajah Dowlah, Hyder-Ali, and Nana-Sahib, whose brutal rule and ruthless wars of conquest and extermination must have been, under the circumstances, the only possible alternative to the strong and steady control of the Englishman.

The first thing that Warren Hastings did on his return was to reorganise the trade of the Province, and in this he succeeded so well that the Directors rewarded him in 1772 with the Governorship of Bengal; and if they could have stopped there, leaving him to do the rest, the immediately subsequent history of India might have been very much more creditable to the rulers and more pleasant reading for the descendants of the ruled than it was. But unhappily a body of traders and shareholders became possessed with the idea that they were the proper sort of people to rule a country divided by political and religious factions, with a history of almost constant warfare stretching back for centuries, and situated fifteen thousand miles away.

This, on the face of it, was an impossibility. When they had found their Governor they should have trusted him to govern, instead of sending out his personal enemies to sit at his council-table to spy upon his actions and hamper and oppose him in everything that he did.

But there was something else in its way quite as serious as this. Practically all the charges that were brought against Warren Hastings on his impeachment are answered and disposed of by the fact that the only condition upon which he could retain his position and do the work that he had set his soul upon doing was, in three words, making India pay. John Company looked upon his new possession as a trader on a market. With the Directors, who, after all were Hastings’ masters, it was business first, and policy and government a good distance after.

Even Macaulay admits that every exhortation to govern leniently and respect the rights of the native princes and their subjects was accompanied by a demand for increased contributions. “The inconsistency was at once manifest to their vice-regent at Calcutta, who, with an empty treasury, with an unpaid army, with his own salary often in arrear, with deficient crops, with Government tenants daily running away, was called upon to remit home another half-million without fail.”

There is another thing to be remembered before we can judge Warren Hastings fairly in the matter of his forced contributions. The tea that was flung overboard in Boston Harbour in the December of 1773 was imported by the East India Company. The connection will appear more obvious when we look at what followed.