There is a revenue in that country, raised by a tax more productive than laudable. It is an imposition on public prost.i.tutes, a duty upon the societies of dancing-girls,--those seminaries from which Mr. Hastings has selected an administrator of justice and governor of kingdoms. Debi Sing thought it expedient to farm this tax,--not only because he neglected no sort of gain, but because he regarded it as no contemptible means of power and influence. Accordingly, in plain terms, he opened a legal brothel, out of which he carefully reserved (you may be sure) the very flower of his collection for the entertainment of his young superiors: ladies recommended not only by personal merit, but, according to the Eastern custom, by sweet and enticing names which he had given them. For, if they were to be translated, they would sound,--Riches of my Life, Wealth of my Soul, Treasure of Perfection, Diamond of Splendor, Pearl of Price, Ruby of Pure Blood, and other metaphorical descriptions, that, calling up dissonant pa.s.sions to enhance the value of the general harmony, heightened the attractions of love with the allurements of avarice. A moving seraglio of these ladies always attended his progress, and were always brought to the splendid and multiplied entertainments with which he regaled his Council. In these festivities, whilst his guests were engaged with the seductions of beauty, the intoxications of the most delicious wines of France, and the voluptuous vapor of perfumed India smoke, uniting the vivid satisfactions of Europe with the torpid blandishments of Asia, the great magician himself, chaste in the midst of dissoluteness, sober in the centre of debauch, vigilant in the lap of negligence and oblivion, attended with an eagle"s eye the moment for thrusting in business, and at such times was able to carry without difficulty points of shameful enormity, which at other hours he would not so much as have dared to mention to his employers, young men rather careless and inexperienced than intentionally corrupt. Not satisfied with being pander to their pleasures, he antic.i.p.ated and was purveyor to their wants, and supplied them with a constant command of money; and by these means he reigned with an uncontrolled dominion over the province and over its governors.
For you are to understand that in many things we are very much misinformed with regard to the true seat of power in India. Whilst we were proudly calling India a British government, it was in substance a government of the lowest, basest, and most flagitious of the native rabble, to whom the far greater part of the English who figured in employment and station had from their earliest youth been slaves and instruments. Banians had antic.i.p.ated the period of their power in premature advances of money, and have ever after obtained the entire dominion over their nominal masters.
By these various ways and means Debi Sing contrived to add job to job, employment to employment, and to hold, besides the farms of two very considerable districts, various trusts in the revenue,--sometimes openly appearing, sometimes hid two or three deep in false names, emerging into light or shrouding himself in darkness, as successful or defeated crimes rendered him bold or cautious. Every one of these trusts was marked with its own fraud; and for one of those frauds, committed by him in another name, by which he became deeply in balance to the revenue, he was publicly whipped _by proxy_.
All this while Mr. Hastings kept his eye upon him, and attended to his progress. But as he rose in Mr. Hastings"s opinion, he fell in that of his immediate employers. By degrees, as reason prevailed, and the fumes of pleasure evaporated, the Provincial Council emerged from their first dependence, and, finding nothing but infamy attending the councils and services of such a man, resolved to dismiss him. In this strait and crisis of his power the artist turned himself into all shapes. He offered great sums individually, he offered them collectively, and at last put a _carte blanche_ on the table,--all to no purpose. "What are you?--stones? Have I not men to deal with? Will flesh and blood refuse me?"
When Debi Sing found that the Council had entirely escaped, and were proof against his offers, he left them with a sullen and menacing silence. He applied where he had good intelligence that these offers would be well received, and that he should at once be revenged of the Council, and obtain all the ends which through them he had sought in vain.
Without hesitation or scruple Mr. Hastings sold a set of innocent officers,--sold his fellow-servants of the Company, ent.i.tled by every duty to his protection,--sold English subjects, recommended by every tie of national sympathy,--sold the honor of the British government itself,--without charge, without complaint, without allegation of crime in conduct, or of insufficiency in talents: he sold them to the most known and abandoned character which the rank servitude of that clime produces. For _him_ he entirely broke and quashed the Council of Moorshedabad, which had been the settled government for twelve years, (a long period in the changeful history of India,)--at a time, too, when it had acquired a great degree of consistency, an official experience, a knowledge and habit of business, and was making full amends for early errors.
For now Mr. Hastings, having buried Colonel Monson and General Clavering, and having shaken off Mr. Francis, who retired half dead from office, began at length to respire; he found elbow-room once more to display his genuine nature and disposition, and to make amends in a riot and debauch of peculation for the forced abstinence to which he was reduced during the usurped dominion of honor and integrity.
It was not enough that the English were thus sacrificed to the revenge of Debi Sing. It was necessary to deliver over the natives to his avarice. By the intervention of bribe-brokerage he united the two great rivals in iniquity, who before, from an emulation of crimes, were enemies to each other,--Gunga Govind Sing and Debi Sing. He negotiated the bribe and the farm of the latter through the former; and Debi Sing was invested in farm for two years with the three provinces of Dinagepore, Edrackpore, and Rungpore,--territories making together a tract of land superior in dimensions to the northern counties of England, Yorkshire included.
To prevent anything which might prove an obstacle on the full swing of his genius, he removed all the restraints which had been framed to give an ostensible credit, to give some show of official order, to the plans of revenue administration framed from time to time in Bengal. An officer, called a _dewan_, had been established in the provinces, expressly as a check on the person who should act as farmer-general.
This office he conferred along with that of farmer-general on Debi Sing, in order that Debi might become an effectual check upon Sing; and thus these provinces, without inspection, without control, without law, and without magistrates, were delivered over by Mr. Hastings, bound hand and foot, to the discretion of the man whom he had before recorded as the destroyer of Purneah, and capable of every the most atrocious wickedness that could be imputed to man.
Fatally for the natives of India, every wild project and every corrupt sale of Mr. Hastings, and those whose example he followed, is covered with a pretended increase of revenue to the Company. Mr. Hastings would not pocket his bribe of 40,000_l._ for himself without letting the Company in as a sharer and accomplice. For the province of Rungpore, the object to which I mean in this instance to confine your attention, 7,000_l._ a year was added. But lest this avowed increase of rent should seem to lead to oppression, great and religious care was taken in the covenant so stipulated with Debi Sing, that _this_ increase should not arise from any additional a.s.sessment whatsoever on the country, but solely from improvements in the cultivation, and the encouragement to be given to the landholder and husbandman. But as Mr. Hastings"s bribe, of a far greater sum, was not guarded by any such provision, it was left to the discretion of the donor in what manner he was to indemnify himself for it.
Debi Sing fixed the seat of his authority at Dinagepore, where, as soon as he arrived, he did not lose a moment in doing his duty. If Mr.
Hastings can forget his covenant, you may easily believe that Debi Sing had not a more correct memory; and accordingly, as soon as he came into the province, he instantly broke every covenant which he had entered into as a restraint on his avarice, rapacity, and tyranny, which, from the highest of the n.o.bility and gentry to the lowest husbandmen, were afterwards exercised, with a stern and unrelenting impartiality, upon the whole people. For, notwithstanding the province before Debi Sing"s lease was, from various causes, in a state of declension, and in balance for the revenue of the preceding year, at his very first entrance into office he forced from the zemindars or landed gentry an enormous increase of their tribute. They refused compliance. On this refusal he threw the whole body of zemindars into prison, and thus in bonds and fetters compelled them to sign their own ruin by an increase of rent which they knew they could never realize. Having thus gotten them under, he added exaction to exaction, so that every day announced some new and varied demand, until, exhausted by these oppressions, they were brought to the extremity to which he meant to drive them, the sale of their lands.
The lands held by the zemindars of that country are of many descriptions. The first and most general are those that pay revenue; the others are of the nature of demesne lands, which are free, and pay no rent to government. The latter are for the immediate support of the zemindars and their families,--as from the former they derive their influence, authority, and the means of upholding their dignity. The lands of the former description were immediately attached, sequestered, and sold for the most trifling consideration. The rent-free lands, the best and richest lands of the whole province, were sold,--sold for--what do your Lordships think? They were sold for less than one year"s purchase,--at less than one year"s purchase, at the most underrated value; so that the fee-simple of an English acre of rent-free land sold at the rate of seven or eight shillings. Such a sale, on such terms, strongly indicated the purchaser. And how did it turn out in fact? The purchaser was the very agent and instrument of Mr. Hastings, Debi Sing himself. He made the exaction; he forced the sale; he reduced the rate; and he became the purchaser at less than one year"s purchase, and paid with the very money which he had extorted from the miserable vendors.
When he had thus sold and separated these lands, he united the whole body of them, amounting to about 7,000_l._ sterling a year (but, according to the rate of money and living in that country, equivalent to a rental in England of 30,000_l._ a year); and then having raised in the new letting, as on the sale he had fraudulently reduced those lands, he reserved them as an estate for himself, or to whomsoever resembling himself Mr. Hastings should order them to be disposed.
The lands, thus sold for next to nothing, left of course the late landholder still in debt. The failure of fund, the rigorous exaction of debt, and the multiplication of new arbitrary taxes next carried off the goods.
There is a circ.u.mstance attending this business which will call for your Lordships" pity. Most of the landholders or zemindars in that country happened at that time to be women. The s.e.x there is in a state certainly resembling imprisonment, but guarded as a sacred treasure with all possible attention and respect. None of the coa.r.s.e male hands of the law can reach them; but they have a custom, very cautiously used in all good governments there, of employing female bailiffs or sergeants in the execution of the law, where that s.e.x is concerned. Guards, therefore, surrounded the houses; and then female sergeants and bailiffs entered into the habitations of these female zemindars, and held their goods and persons in execution,--nothing being left but what was daily threatened, their life and honor. The landholders, even women of eminent rank and condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous, without protection and without bread. The monthly instalment of Mr.
Hastings"s bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the vitals of the people.
The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all the lands a.s.signed to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of violence and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had been before made away with. Even the lands and funds set aside for their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial sufferings of their lives,--even the very feeble consolations of death, were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,--a tyranny more consuming than the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than death itself,--seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.
Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people. Were the lower, the more industrious, spared? Alas! as their situation was far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary. To afford your Lordships some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr.
Hastings"s hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing. Debi Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country, had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.
"It is notorious," says he, "that poverty generally prevails amongst the husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the country. They are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence.
And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the famine. Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a _thousand_ of which would not perhaps produce twenty shillings."
These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was to obtain a gift of 40,000_l._, over and above a large increase of rent, over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.
Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences. All this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.
Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was not put in practice. On its own day your Lordships will hear, with astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent on which they were piled.
The country being in many parts left wholly waste and in all parts considerably depopulated by the first rigors, the full rate of the district was exacted from the miserable survivors. Their burdens were increased, as their fellow-laborers, to whose joint efforts they were to owe the means of payment, diminished. Driven to make payments beyond all possible calculation, previous to receipts and above their means, in a very short time they fell into the hands of usurers.
The usurers, who under such a government held their own funds by a precarious tenure, and were to lend to those whose substance was still more precarious, to the natural hardness and austerity of that race of men had additional motives to extortion, and made their terms accordingly. And what were the terms these poor people were obliged to consent to, to answer the bribes and peshcush paid to Mr.
Hastings?--five, ten, twenty, forty per cent? No! at an interest of six hundred per cent per annum, payable by the day! A tiller of land to pay six hundred per cent to discharge the demands of government! What exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted, overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. An universal treasury extent and process of execution followed on the cattle and stock, and was enforced with more or less rigor in every quarter. We have it in evidence, that in those sales five cows were sold for not more than seven or eight shillings. All other things were depreciated in the same proportion. The sale of the instruments of husbandry succeeded to that of the corn and stock. Instances there are, where, all other things failing, the farmers were dragged from the court to their houses, in order to see them first plundered, and then burnt down before their faces. It was not a rigorous collection of revenue, it was a savage war made upon the country.
The peasants were left little else than their families and their bodies.
The families were disposed of. It is a known observation, that those who have the fewest of all other worldly enjoyments are the most tenderly attached to their children and wives. The most tender of parents sold their children at market. The most fondly jealous of husbands sold their wives. The tyranny of Mr. Hastings extinguished every sentiment of father, son, brother, and husband!
I come now to the last stage of their miseries. Everything visible and vendible was seized and sold. Nothing but the bodies remained.
It is the nature of tyranny and rapacity never to learn moderation from the ill-success of first oppressions; on the contrary, all oppressors, all men thinking highly of the methods dictated by their nature, attribute the frustration of their desires to the want of sufficient rigor. Then they redouble the efforts of their impotent cruelty, which producing, as they must ever produce, new disappointments, they grow irritated against the objects of their rapacity; and then rage, fury, and malice, implacable because unprovoked, recruiting and reinforcing their avarice, their vices are no longer human. From cruel men they are transformed into savage beasts, with no other vestiges of reason left but what serves to furnish the inventions and refinements of ferocious subtlety, for purposes of which beasts are incapable and at which fiends would blush.
Debi Sing and his instruments suspected, and in a few cases they suspected justly, that the country people had purloined from their own estates, and had hidden in secret places in the circ.u.mjacent deserts, some small reserve of their own grain to maintain themselves during the unproductive months of the year, and to leave some hope for a future season. But the under-tyrants knew that the demands of Mr. Hastings would admit no plea for delay, much less for subtraction of his bribe, and that he would not abate a shilling of it to the wants of the whole human race. These h.o.a.rds, real or supposed, not being discovered by menaces and imprisonment, they fell upon the last resource, the naked bodies of the people. And here, my Lords, began such a scene of cruelties and tortures as I believe no history has ever presented to the indignation of the world,--such as I am sure, in the most barbarous ages, no politic tyranny, no fanatic persecution, has ever yet exceeded.
Mr. Paterson, the commissioner appointed to inquire into the state of the country, makes his own apology and mine for opening this scene of horrors to you in the following words: "That the punishments inflicted upon the ryots, both of Rungpore and Dinagepore, for non-payment, were in many instances of such a nature that I would rather wish to draw a veil over them than shock your feelings by the detail, but that, however disagreeable the task may be to myself, it is absolutely necessary, for the sake of justice, humanity, and the honor of government, that they should be exposed, to be prevented in future."
My Lords, they began by winding cords round the fingers of the unhappy freeholders of those provinces, until they clung to and were almost incorporated with one another; and then they hammered wedges of iron between them, until, regardless of the cries of the sufferers, they had bruised to pieces and forever crippled those poor, honest, innocent, laborious hands, which had never been raised to their mouths but with a penurious and scanty proportion of the fruits of their own soil; but those fruits (denied to the wants of their own children) have for more than fifteen years past furnished the investment for our trade with China, and been sent annually out, and without recompense, to purchase for us that delicate meal with which your Lordships, and all this auditory, and all this country, have begun every day for these fifteen years at their expense. To those beneficent hands that labor for our benefit the return of the British government has been cords and hammers and wedges. But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands will act with resistless power. What is it that they will not pull down, when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors? Then what can withstand such hands? Can the power that crushed and destroyed them?
Powerful in prayer, let us at least deprecate and thus endeavor to secure ourselves from the vengeance which these mashed and disabled hands may pull down upon us. My Lords, it is an awful consideration: let us think of it.
But to pursue this melancholy, but necessary detail. I am next to open to your Lordships, what I am hereafter to prove, that the most substantial and leading yeomen, the responsible farmers, the parochial magistrates and chiefs of villages, were tied two and two by the legs together; and their tormentors, throwing them with their heads downwards, over a bar, beat them on the soles of the feet with rattans, until the nails fell from the toes; and then attacking them at their heads, as they hung downward, as before at their feet, they beat them with sticks and other instruments of blind fury, until the blood gushed out at their eyes, mouths, and noses. Not thinking that the ordinary whips and cudgels, even so administered, were sufficient, to others (and often also to the same who had suffered as I have stated) they applied, instead of rattan and bamboo, whips made of the branches of the bale tree,--a tree full of sharp and strong thorns, which tear the skin and lacerate the flesh far worse than ordinary scourges. For others, exploring with a searching and inquisitive malice, stimulated by an insatiate rapacity, all the devious paths of Nature for whatever is most unfriendly to man, they made rods of a plant highly caustic and poisonous, called _Bechettea_, every wound of which festers and gangrenes, adds double and treble to the present torture, leaves a crust of leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment.
They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe and almost intolerable,--they were led out before break of day, and, stiff and sore as they were with the bruises and wounds of the night, were plunged into water; and whilst their jaws clung together with the cold, and their bodies were rendered infinitely more sensible, the blows and stripes were renewed upon their backs; and then, delivering them over to soldiers, they were sent into their farms and villages to discover where a few handfuls of grain might be found concealed, or to extract some loan from the remnants of compa.s.sion and courage not subdued in those who had reason to fear that their own turn of torment would be next, that they should succeed them in the same punishment, and that their very humanity, being taken as a proof of their wealth, would subject them (as it did in many cases subject them) to the same inhuman tortures. After this circuit of the day through their plundered and ruined villages, they were remanded at night to the same prison, whipped, as before, at their return to the dungeon, and at morning whipped at their leaving it, and then sent, as before, to purchase, by begging in the day, the reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long time made up all the vicissitude of life to these miserable people.
But there are persons whose fort.i.tude could bear their own suffering; there are men who are hardened by their very pains, and the mind, strengthened even by the torments of the body, rises with a strong defiance against its oppressor. They were a.s.saulted on the side of their sympathy. Children were scourged almost to death in the presence of their parents. This was not enough. The son and father were bound close together, face to face and body to body, and in that situation cruelly lashed together, so that the blow which escaped the father fell upon the son, and the blow which missed the son wound over the back of the parent. The circ.u.mstances were combined by so subtle a cruelty that every stroke which did not excruciate the sense should wound and lacerate the sentiments and affections of nature.
On the same principle, and for the same ends, virgins, who had never seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses, and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was to be sought against all wrong and all violence, (but where no judge or lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench,) these virgins, vainly invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all the people, publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the circ.u.mstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the nipples of their b.r.e.a.s.t.s were put between the sharp and elastic sides of cleft bamboos. Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would think it incredible. But it did not end there. Growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging s.e.x, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire--(I cannot proceed for shame and horror!)--these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason, distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty,--there, where the reverence of nature and the sanct.i.ty of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe their practices.
These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature. But there were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in mere sensitive nature can do.
The women thus treated lost their caste. My Lords, we are not here to commend or blame the inst.i.tutions and prejudices of a whole race of people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of men, or foreign conquest, have been able to make the smallest impression. The aboriginal Gentoo inhabitants are all dispersed into tribes or castes,--each caste born to an invariable rank, rights, and descriptions of employment, so that one caste cannot by any means pa.s.s into another. With the Gentoos, certain impurities or disgraces, though without any guilt of the party, infer loss of caste; and when the highest caste, that of Brahmin, which is not only n.o.ble, but sacred, is lost, the person who loses it does not slide down into one lower, but reputable,--he is wholly driven from all honest society. All the relations of life are at once dissolved. His parents are no longer his parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his, are no longer to regard him as their father. It is something far worse than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal excommunication. It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death.
Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned. No honest occupation can be followed. He becomes an _halicore_, if (which is rare) he survives that miserable degradation.
Upon those whom all the shocking catalogue of tortures I have mentioned could not make to flinch one of the modes of losing caste for Brahmins and other princ.i.p.al tribes was practised. It was to harness a bullock at the court-door, and to put the Brahmin on his back, and to lead him through the towns, with drums beating before him. To intimidate others, this bullock, with drums, (the instrument, according to their ideas, of outrage, disgrace, and utter loss of caste,) was led through the country; and as it advanced, the country fled before it. When any Brahmin was seized, he was threatened with this pillory, and for the most part he submitted in a moment to whatever was ordered. What it was may be thence judged. But when no possibility existed of complying with the demand, the people by their cries sometimes prevailed on the tyrants to have it commuted for cruel scourging, which was accepted as mercy. To some Brahmins this mercy was denied, and the act of indelible infamy executed. Of these men one came to the Company"s commissioner with the tale, and ended with these melancholy words: "I have suffered this indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me: I call for justice." He called in vain.
Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into despair. They abandoned their crops on the ground. The people, in a body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of circ.u.mvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a relief, into the prison of their native soil. Not suffered to quit the district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings. Not able long to exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most quiet, the most pa.s.sive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults, the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were ma.s.sacred. The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire to the neighboring provinces, which had been hara.s.sed by the same person with the same oppressions. The English Chief in that province had been the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all these horrors. He called in first irregular, and then regular troops, who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair. I am tired with the detail of the cruelties of peace. I spare you those of a cruel and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief in that province.
In our Indian government, whatever grievance is borne is denied to exist, and all mute despair and sullen patience is construed into content and satisfaction. But this general insurrection, which at every moment threatened to blaze out afresh, and to involve all the provinces in its flames, rent in pieces that veil of fraud and mystery that covers all the miseries of all the provinces. Calcutta rung with it; and it was feared it would go to England. The English Chief in the province, Mr.
Goodlad, represented it to Mr. Hastings"s Revenue Committee to be (what it was) the greatest and most serious disturbance that ever happened in Bengal. But, good easy man, he was utterly unable to guess to what cause it was to be attributed. He thought there was some irregularity in the collection, but on the whole judged that it had little other cause than a general conspiracy of the husbandmen and landholders, who, as Debi Sing"s lease was near expiring, had determined not to pay any more revenue.
Mr. Hastings"s Committee of Revenue, whilst these wounds were yet bleeding, and whilst a total failure was threatened in the rents of these provinces, thought themselves obliged to make an inquiry with some sort of appearance of seriousness into the causes of it. They looked, therefore, about them carefully, and chose what they judged would be most plausible and least effective. They thought that it was necessary to send a special commissioner into the province, and one, too, whose character would not instantly blast the credit of his mission. They cast their eyes on a Mr. Paterson, a servant of the Company, a man of fair character, and long standing in the service. Mr. Paterson was a person known to be of a very cool temper, placid manners, moderate and middle opinions, unconnected with parties; and from such a character they looked for (what sometimes is to be expected from it) a compromising, balanced, neutralized, equivocal, colorless, confused report, in which the blame was to be impartially divided between the sufferer and the oppressor, and in which, according to the standing manners of Bengal, he would recommend oblivion as the best remedy, and would end by remarking, that retrospect could have no advantage, and could serve only to irritate and keep alive animosities; and by this kind of equitable, candid, and judge-like proceeding, they hoped the whole complaint would calmly fade away, the sufferers remain in the possession of their patience, and the tyrant of his plunder. In confidence of this event from this presumed character, Mr. Hastings"s Committee, in appointing Mr. Paterson their commissioner, were not deficient in arming him with powers equal to the object of his commission. He was enabled to call before him all accountants, to compel the production of all accounts, to examine all persons,--not only to inquire and to report, but to decide and to redress.
Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son, as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts.
He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper frame of mind for doing his duty.
He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full support in the execution of it,--as he, with every other white man in Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact, that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent, had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.
But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people, concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie, with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults. In his first letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable words. "In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise. I shall, therefore, not enumerate them now. Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the facts. The wonder would have been, if they had not risen. It was not collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment and every insult of disgrace,--and this not confined to a few, but extended over every individual. Let the mind of man be ever so much inured to servitude, still there is a point where oppressions will rouse it to resistance. Conceive to yourselves what must be the situation of a ryot, when he sees everything he has in the world seized, to answer an exaggerated demand, and sold at so low a price as not to answer one half of that demand,--when he finds himself so far from being released, that he remains still subject to corporal punishment. But what must be his feelings, when his tyrant, seeing that kind of severity of no avail, adds family disgrace and loss of caste! You, Gentlemen, who know the reserve of the natives in whatever concerns their women, and their attachment to their castes, must allow the full effect of these prejudices under such circ.u.mstances."
He, however, proceeded with steadiness and method, and in spite of every discouragement which could be thrown in his way by the power, craft, fraud, and corruption of the farmer-general, Debi Sing, by the collusion of the Provincial Chief, and by the decay of support from his employers, which gradually faded away and forsook him, as his occasions for it increased. Under all these, and under many more discouragements and difficulties, he made a series of able, clear, and well-digested reports, attended with such evidence as never before, and, I believe, never will again appear, of the internal provincial administration of Bengal,--of evils universally understood, which no one was ever so absurd as to contradict, and whose existence was never denied, except in those places where they ought to be rectified, although none before Paterson had the courage to display the particulars. By these reports, carefully collated with the evidence, I have been enabled to lay before you some of the effects, in one province and part of another, of Governor Hastings"s general system of bribery.
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 ent.i.tled 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.