I certainly should very far prefer it to any other in the kingdom. My habits are made to it; and it is in general more unpleasant to be rejected after a long trial than not to be chosen at all. But, gentlemen, I will see nothing except your former kindness, and I will give way to no other sentiments than those of gratitude. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for what you have done for me. You have given me a long term, which is now expired. I have performed the conditions, and enjoyed all the profits to the full; and I now surrender your estate into your hands without being in a single tile or a single stone impaired or wasted by my use. I have served the public for fifteen years. I have served you, in particular, for six. What is past is well stored. It is safe, and out of the power of fortune. What is to come is in wiser hands than ours, and He in whose hands it is, best knows whether it is best for you and me that I should be in Parliament, or even in the world. Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, while his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.1 It has been usual for a candidate who declines, to take his leave by a letter to the sheriffs; but I received your trust in the face of day, and in the face of day I accept your dismission. I am not-I am not at all ashamed to look upon you, nor can my presence discompose the order of business here. I humbly and respectfully take my leave of the sheriffs, the candidates, and the electors, wishing heartily that the choice may be for the best at a time which calls, if ever time did call, for service that is not nominal. It is no plaything you are about. I tremble when I consider the trust I have presumed to ask. I confided perhaps too much in my intentions. They were really fair and upright; and I am bold to say that I ask no ill thing for you when, on parting from this place, I pray that whomever you choose to succeed me, he may resemble me exactly in all things except in my abilities to serve and my fortune to please you. SPEECH OF MR. BURKE ON THE EAST INDIA BILL OF MR. FOX, DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, DECEMBER 1, 1783. INTRODUCTION. So enormous were the abuses of the British power in India, that men of all parties demanded strong measures to secure an effectual remedy. Those embraced in the East India bill of Mr. Fox, as matured between him and Mr. Burke, were certainly of this character. All the concerns of the Company were taken into the hands of the English government. Seven commissioners, to be appointed for four years by Parliament, were intrusted with the civil and military government of the country; while the commercial concerns of the Company were committed to the hands of nine assistant directors, to be chosen out of the proprietors of East India stock. A second bill provided for the correction of numerous abuses in the administration of Indian affairs. The first bill was brought into the House of Commons by Mr. Fox, on the 18th of November, 1783, and was strenuously opposed at every stage of its progress. The principal objections were, that it set aside the charter of the East India Company, threw too much patronage into the hands of the ministry, and might operate injuriously to the national credit. Mr. Fox's coalition with Lord North, which had brought the ministry into power, was also a subject of the severest animadversion. When the question came up, on the 1st of December, for going into a committee on the bill, Mr. Powys, a former friend and adherent of Mr. Fox, opposed it with all his strength. He had great authority in the House, as a country gentleman representing an extensive county, and sustained by a reputation for strong sense and unimpeachable integ rity. He denounced the measure in the strongest terms, as a violation of chartered rights, and as designed to make Mr. Fox minister for life, by giving him an amount of patronage which would render it impossible for the King to remove him. Mr. Wraxall, who was then a member of the House, and who was equally opposed with Mr. Powys to the passing of the bill, observes, in his Historical Memoirs, vol. iv., p. 566, "Burke, unable longer to ob serve silence after such reflections, then rose; and, in a dissertation rather than a speech, which lasted more than three hours, exhausted all the powers of his mighty mind in the justification of his friend's measure. The most ignorant member of the House, who had attended to the mass of information, his torical, political, and financial, which fell from the lips of Burke on that occasion, must have departed rich in knowledge of Hindostan. It seemed impossible to crowd a greater variety of matter applicable to the subject into a smaller compass; and those who differed most widely from him in opinion did not render the less justice to his gigantic range of ideas, his lucid exposition of events, and the harmonic flow of his 1 Mr. Burke here refers to Mr. Coombe, one of his competitors, who, overcome by the excitement and exhaustion of the contest, had died suddenly the evening before. periods. There were portions of his harangue in which he appeared to be animated by feelings and con siderations the most benign, as well as elevated; and the classic language in which he made Fox's panegyric, for having dared to venture on a measure so beset with dangers, but so pregnant, as he asserted, with benefits to mankind, could not be exceeded in beauty." In giving this speech, those parts are omitted which contain minute details of the abuses of power ou the part of the Company's servants in India. Though essential to the argument as originally stated, they would only be tedious at the present day, and, indeed, can hardly be understood without an intimate acquaintance with the concerns of the East India Company. SPEECH, &c. MR. SPEAKER,I thank you for pointing to me; I really wished much to engage your at tention in an early stage of the debate. I have been ng very deeply, though perhaps ineffectually, engaged in the preliminary inquiries which have continued without intermission for some years. Though I have felt, with some degree of sensibility, the natural and inevitable impressions of the several matters of fact, as they have been succe, sively disclosed, I have not at any time attempted trouble you on the merits of the subject, and very little on any of the points which incidentally arose in the course of our proceedings. But I should be sorry to be found totally silent upon this day. Our inquiries are now come to their final issue. It is now to be determined whether the three years of laborious parliamentary research,' whether the twenty years of patient Indian suffering, are to produce a substantial reform in our Eastern administration; or, whether our knowledge of the grievances has abated our zeal for the correction of them, and our very inquiry into the evil was only a pretext to elude the remedy which is demanded from us by humanity, by justice, and by every principle of true policy. Depend upon it, this business can not be indifferent to our fame. It will turn out a matter of great disgrace or great glory to the whole British nation. We are on a conspicuous stage, and the world marks our demeanor. Mode in which posed. I am therefore a little concerned to perceive the spirit and temper in which the the bill was op debate has been all along pursued upon one side of the House. The declamation of the gentlemen who oppose the bill has been abundant and vehement; but they have been reserved, and even silent about the fitness or unfitness of the plan to attain the direct object it has in view. By some gentlemen it is taken up (by way of exercise, I presume) as a point of law on a question of private property and corporate franchise; by others it is regarded as the petty intrigue of a faction at court, and argued merely as it tends to set this man a little higher, or that a little lower in situation and power. All the void has been filled up with invectives against coalition; with allusions to the loss of America; with the activity and inactivity of ministers. The total silence of these gentlemen concerning the interest and well-being of the people of India, and concerning the interest which this nation has in the commerce and rev Mr. Burke had taken a very active part in these researches as a member of a committee of the House. enues of that country, is a strong indication of the value which they set upon these objects It has been a little painful to me to observe the intrusion into this important debate of such company as quo warranto, and mandamus, and certiorari; as if we were on a trial about mayors and aldermen, and capital burgesses; or engaged in a suit concerning the borough of Penryn, or Saltash, or St. Ives, or St. Mawes. Gentlemen have argued with as much heat and passion, as if the first things in the world were at stake; and their topics are such as belong only to matter of the lowest and meanest litigation. It is not right, it is not worthy of us, in this manner to depreciate the value, to degrade the majesty of this grave deliberation of policy and empire. For my part, I have thought myself bound, when a matter of this extraordinary weight came before me, not to consider (as some gentlemen are so fond of doing) whether the bill originated from a Secretary of State for the Home Department, or from a secretary for the foreign; from a minister of influence or a minister of the people; from Jacob or from Esau. I asked mvself, and I asked myself nothing else, what part it was fit for a member of Parliament, who has supplied a mediocrity of talents by the extreme of diligence, and who has thought himself obliged, by the research of years, to wind himself into the inmost recesses and labyrinths of the Indian detail, what part, I say, it became such a member of Parliament to take, when a minister of state, in conformity to a recommendation from the Throne, has brought before us a system for the better government of the territory and commerce of the East. In this light, and in this only, I will trouble you with my sentiments. called for. It is not only agreed but demanded, by the right honorable gentleman [Mr. Pitt], Measure and by those who act with him, that a whole system ought to be produced; that it ought not to be a half measure; that it ought to be no palliative; but a legislative provision, vigorous, substantial, and effective. I believe that no man who understands the subject can doubt for a moment that those must be the conditions of any thing deserving the name of a reform in the Indian government; that any thing short of them would not only be delusive, but, in this matter, which admits no medium, noxious in the extreme. Mr. Powys, who retained a lingering affection for Mr. Fox, had ascribed the bill to the influence of Lord North, saying, " the voice is Jacob's, but the hands are the hands of Esau." To all the conditions proposed by his adversa- | subverted but by rooting up the holding radical ries the mover of the bill perfectly agrees; and principles of government, and even of society on his performance of them he rests his cause. itself. The charters which we call, by distincOn the other hand, not the least objection has tion, "great," are public instruments of this nabeen taken with regard to the efficiency, the ture; I mean the charters of King John and vigor, or the completeness of the scheme. I King Henry the Third. The things secured by am, therefore, warranted to assume, as a thing these instruments may, without any deceitful amadmitted, that the bills accomplish what both biguity, be very fitly called the chartered rights sides of the House demand as essential. The of men.3 end is completely answered, so far as the direct and immediate object is concerned. But though there are no direct, yet there are various collateral objections made; objections from the effects which this plan of reform for Indian administration may have on the privileges of great public bodies in England; from its probable influence on the constitutional rights, or on the freedom and integrity of the several branches of the Legislature. Auswer to Before I answer these objections, I must beg leave to observe, that if we are not able objections, to contrive some method of governing India well, which will not of necessity become the means of governing Great Britain ill, a ground is laid for their eternal separation; but none for sacrificing the people of that country to our constitution. I am, however, far from being persuaded that any such incompatibility of interest does at all exist. On the contrary, I am certain that every means effectual to preserve India from oppression is a guard to preserve the Bish Constitution from its worst corruption. To show this, I will consider the objections, which I think are four: 1st. That the bill is an attack on the chartered rights of men. 2dly. That it increases the influence of the Crown. These charters have made the very name of a charter dear to the heart of every Englishman. But, sir, there may be, and there are charters, not only different in nature, but formed on principles the very reverse of those of the great charter. Of this kind is the charter of the East India Company. Magna Charta is a charter to restrain power, and to destroy monopoly. The East India charter is a charter to establish monopoly, and to create power. Political power and commercial monopoly are not the rights of men; and the rights to them derived from charters, it is fallacious and sophistical to call "the chartered rights of men." These chartered rights (to speak of such charters and of their effects in terms of the greatest possible moderation) do at least suspend the natural rights of mankind at large, and in their very frame and constitution are liable to fall into a direct violation of them. It is a charter of this latter description (that is to say, a charter of power and monopoly) which is affected by the bill before you. The bill, sir, does, without question, affect it; it does affect it essentially and substantially; but, having stated to you of what description the chartered rights are which this bill touches, I feel no difficulty at all in acknowledging the existence of those chartered rights in their fullest extent. They belong 3dly. That it does not increase, but diminishes to the Company in the surest manner, and they the influence of the Crown, in order to promote are secured to that body by every sort of public the interests of certain ministers and their party. sanction. They are stamped by the faith of the 4thly. That it deeply affects the national credit. King; they are stamped by the faith of ParliaI. As to the first of these objections, I must ment; they have been bought for money, for observe that the phrase of "the char-money honestly and fairly paid; they have been the Compa- tered rights of men" is full of affecta- bought for valuable consideration, over and over ny's Charter. tion, and very unusual in the discus- again. sion of privileges conferred by charters of the present description. But it is not difficult to discover what end that ambiguous mode of expression, so often reiterated, is meant to answer. Violation of The rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things; and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. If these natural rights are farther affirmed and declared by express covenants, if they are clearly defined and secured against chicane, against power, and authority, by written instruments and positive engagements, they are in a still better condition; they partake not only of the sanctity of the object so secured, but of that solemn public faith itself, which secures an object of such importance. Indeed, this formal recognition, by the sovereign power, of an original right in the subject, can never be I therefore freely admit to the East India Company their claim to exclude their fellowsubjects from the commerce of half the globe. I admit their claim to administer an annual territorial revenue of seven millions sterling, to command an army of sixty thousand men, and to dispose (under the control of a sovereign imperial discretion, and with the due observance of the natural and local law) of the lives and fortunes of thirty millions of their fellow-creatures. this they possess by charter and by acts of Parliament (in my opinion) without a shadow of controversy. All Those who carry the rights and claims of the Company the farthest do not contend for more than this, and all this I freely grant; but, grant 3 This opening of the subject with a distinction thus clearly drawn and illustrated, is highly charac teristic of Mr. Burke, and lays the foundation of his entire argument. is a trust for the public. ing all this, they must grant to me in my turn that That charter all political power which is set over the benefit of men, and that all privilege claimed or exercised in exclusion of them, being wholly artificial, and for so much a derogation from the natural equality of mankind at large, ought to be some way or other exercised ultimately for their benefit. If this is true with regard to every species of political dominion and every description of commercial privilege, none of which can be original, self-derived rights, or grants for the mere private benefit of the holders, then such rights, or privileges, or whatever else you choose to call them, are all in the strictest sense a trust; and it is of the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable, and even totally to cease, when it substantially varies from the purposes for which alone it could have a lawful existence. be revoked and we re-enter into all our rights, that is, into the exercise of all our duties. Our own Is liable to authority is indeed as much a trust orig-t inally as the Company's authority is a be abused. trust derivatively; and it is the use we make of the resumed power that must justify or condemn us in the resumption of it. When we have perfected the plan laid before us by the right honorable mover, the world will then see what it is we destroy, and what it is we create. By that test we stand or fall, and by that test I trust that it will be found in the issue, that we are going to supersede a charter abused to the full extent of all the powers which it could abuse, and exercised in the plenitude of despotism, tyranny, and corruption; and that, in one and the same plan, we provide a real chartered security for the rights of men cruelly violated under that charter. This bill, and those connected with it, are intended to form the Magna Charta of Hindostan." Whatever the treaty of Westphalia is to the liberty of the princes and free cities of the empire, and to the three religions there professed; whatever the great charter, the statute of tallage, the This I conceive, sir, to be true of trusts of power vested in the highest hands, and of such as seem to hold of no human creature ; but about the application of this principle to subordinate derivative trusts, I do not see how a controversy can be maintained. To whom, then, would I make the East India Company account-petition of right, and the declaration of right, are able? why, to Parliament, to be sure; to Par- to Great Britain, these bills are to the people of liament, from whom their trust was derived; to India. Of this benefit, I am certain, their conParliament, which alone is capable of compre-dition is capable, and when I know that they are hending the magnitude of its object and its abuse, and alone capable of an effectual legislative remedy. The very charter which is held out to exclude Parliament from correcting malversation with regard to the high trust vested in the Company is the very thing which at once gives a title and imposes a duty on us to interfere with effect wherever power and authority originating from ourselves are perverted from their purposes, and become instruments of wrong and violence. If Parliament, sir, had nothing to do with this charter, we might have some sort of Epicurean excuse to stand aloof, indifferent spectators of what passes in the Company's name in India and in London; but if we are the very cause of the evil, we are in a special manner engaged to the redress; and for us passively to bear with oppressions committed under the sanction of our own authority is, in truth and reason, for this House to be an active accomplice in the abuse. capable of more, my vote shall most assuredly be for our giving to the full extent of their capacity of receiving, and no charter of dominion shall stand as a bar in my way to their charter of safety and protection. The strong admission I have made of the Company's rights (I am conscious of it) binds me to do a great deal. I do not presume to condemn those who argue à priori against the propriety of leaving such extensive political powers in the hands of a company of merchants. I know much is, and much more may be said against such a system; but with my particular ideas and sentiments, I can not go that way to work. I feel an insuperable reluctance in giv. ing my hand to destroy any established institution of government upon a theory, however plausible it may be. My experience in life teaches me nothing clear upon the subject. I have known merchants with the sentiments and the That the power notoriously, grossly abused abilities of great statesmen, and I have seen perhas been bought from us, is very certain; but sons in the rank of statesmen, with the concepthis circumstance, which is urged against the tion and character of peddlers. Indeed, my obbill, becomes an additional motive for our inter-servation has furnished me with nothing that is ference, lest we should be thought to have sold to be found in any habits of life or education, the blood of millions of men for the base consid 5 This is an instance of Mr. Burke's habit of rising from the particular case before him, and connecting eration of money. We sold, I admit, all that we had to sell, that is our authority, not our control. We had not a right to make a market of our du-it with a higher range of collateral thought. It is in ties. I ground myself, therefore, on this principle, that if the abuse is proved, the contract is broken, 4 Mr. Burke here alludes to regal authority, and hints at the argument drawn from the exclusion of James II. at the Revolution of 1688, on which Mr. Fox insisted so powerfully in his speech the same evening. this way that he adds great dignity to his subject, repugnance to argue any question on the ground of which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of government, but that by which the power of exercising those functions is very frequently obtained, I mean a spirit and habits of low cabal and intrigue, which I have never, in one instance, seen united with a capacity for sound and manly policy. To justify us in taking the administration of their affairs out of the hands of the East What abuse revocation. Population siderably larger than England; and the whole of lation at much less than thirty millions of souls ; more than four times the number of persons in the island of Great Britain. justifies a India Company, on my principles, I must see several conditions. 1st. The object affected by the abuse should be great and important. 2d. The abuse affecting this great object ought to be a great abuse. 3d. It ought to be habitual, and not accidental. 4th. It ought to be utterly incurable in the body as it now stands constituted. All this ought to be made as visible to me as the light of the sun, before I should strike off an atom of their charter. A right honorable gentleman [Mr. Pitt] has said, and said, I think, but once, and that very slightlygions, we can not, in my opinion, rate the popu(whatever his original demand for a plan might seem to require), that "there are abuses in the Company's government." If that were all, the scheme of the mover of this bill, the scheme of his learned friend, and his own scheme of reformation (if he has any), are all equally needless. There are, and must be, abuses in all governments. It amounts to no more than a nugatory proposition. But before I consider of what nature these abuses are of which the gentleman speaks so very lightly, permit me to recall to your recollection the map of the country which this abused chartered right affects. This I shall do, that you may judge whether in that map I can discover any thing like the first of my conditions, that is, whether the object affected by the abuse of the East India Company's power be of importance sufficiently to justify the measure and means of reform applied to it in this bill. Magnitude of fected (1.) With very few, and those inconsiderable intervals, the British dominion, either the object af in the Company's name, or in the names of princes absolutely dependent upon the Company, extends from the mountains that separate India from Tartary to Cape Comorin, that is, one-and-twenty degrees of latitude! In the northern parts it is a solid mass of land, about eight hundred miles in length, and four or five hundred broad. As you go southward, it becomes narrower for a space. It afterward dilates; but, narrower or broader, you possess the whole eastern and northeastern coast of that vast country, quite from the borders of Pegu. Extent. Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, with Benares (now unfortunately in our immediate possession), measure 161,978 square English miles; a territory considerably larger than the whole kingdom of France. Oude, with its dependent provinces, is 53,286 square miles, not a great deal less than England. The Carnatic, with Tanjore and the Circars, is 65,948 square miles, very con 7 France has since been materially enlarged, its extent being at present two hundred and four thousand square miles. My next inquiry to that of the number is the quality and description of the inhabit- Character of ants. This multitude of men does not the people. consist of an abject and barbarous populace, much less of gangs of savages, like the Guaranies and Chiquitos, who wander on the waste borders of the River of Amazon or the Plate, but a people for ages civilized and cultivated; cultivated by all the arts of polished life, while we were yet in the woods. There have been (and still the skeletons remain) princes once of great dignity, authority, and opulence. There are to be found the chiefs of tribes and nations. There is to be found an ancient and venerable priesthood, the depository of their laws, learning, and history, the guides of the people while living, and their consolation in death; a nobility of great antiquity and renown; a multitude of cities not exceeded in population and trade by those of the first class in Europe; merchants and bankers, individual houses of whom have once vied in capital with the Bank of England, whose credit had often supported a tottering state, and preserved their governments in the midst of war and desolation; millions of ingenious manufacturers and mechanics; millions of the most diligent, and not the least intelligent, tillers of the earth. Here are to be found almost all the religions professed by men; the Braininical, the Mussulmen, the Eastern and the Western Christians. If I were to take the whole aggregate of our possessions there, I should compare it, as the nearest parallel I can find, with the empire of Germany. Our immediate possessions I should compare with the Austrian dominions, and they would not suffer in the comparison. The Nabob of Oude might stand for the King of Prussia; the Nabob of Arcot I would compare, as superior in territory and equal in revenue, to the Elector Now one hundred and fifty millions, great addi tions having been made to the territory. |