XX. 1782. BOOK very ill received by his colleagues, Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Stables, who strongly remonstrated against involving the Company in new wars and dangerous foreign connections. But Mr. Hastings was not a man to be discouraged by trivial obstacles. Early in the following year, 1784, Mr. Hastings made a progress to the city of Lucknow, and there had an interview with the prince Mirza Jehander Shah, eldest son of the Mogul, and who, as the governor-general in his public letter says, "had long held the principal part in the administration of the king his father." From Mr. Hastings's account of this interview, which he represents as wholly unexpected and fortuitous, the prince having left the court of Dehli without even the knowledge of the emperor, it appears that urgent solicitations were made by the heir of the Mogul empire to the Engfish governor, for aid and assistance to raise the KING his father from that state of degradation and insignificance into which he had fallen intimating his readiness even to go in person to England to represent the distresses of the emperor of Hindostan, in the hope of obtaining relief. Mr. Hastings, in reply, informed the prince, "that the English nation, just emerged from a state of universal warfare, required repose, and would be alarmed at any movement of which it could not immediately see the issue or the progress, but which might eventually create XX. 1782. new hostilities; that, as to himself, he could not BOOK engage, if he chose it, in a business of this nature, without the concurrence of his colleagues in office, who, he believed, would be averse to it; that he would, however, represent his situation to the joint members of his own government, and wait their determination. In the mean time he advised him to make advances to Madajee Scindia, as the effective head of the Mahratta state, and who was in intimate union and sworn connexion with the English." In his subsequent dispatches to the council at Calcutta, Mr. Hastings requests to be invested with discretionary powers of acting in relation to the court of Dehli, under a vague promise of "not proceeding against their sense." The council, in reply, not only refused to grant any such powers, but exhorted him "most sedulously and cautiously to avoid, in his correspondence with the different potentates of India, whatever might commit, or be strained into an interpretation of committing, the Company as to their army or treasure-observing, that the Company's orders are positive against their interference in the objects of dispute between the Country Powers." But this injunction the sophistical subtlety of Mr. Hastings was at no loss how to evade; for in his letter, of June 1784, to the court of directors, he says, "The faction which now surrounds the THRONE is widely different from the idea which your commands are intended to convey XX. 1782. BOOK by the expressions to which you have generally applied them, of Country Powers,' to which that of permanency is a necessary adjunct, and which may be more properly compared to a splendid bubble, which the slightest breath of opposition may dissi- pate, with every trace of its existence-That if the Mogul's authority is suffered to receive its final extinction, it is impossible to foresee what power may arise out of its ruins, or what events may be linked in the same chain of revolution with it.-Your interests may suffer by it; your reputation certainly will, as his right to our assistance has been constantly acknowledged; more especially as, by the movements which the influence of our government by too near an approach has excited, it has unfortunately become the efficient instrument of a great portion of the king's present distresses and dan gers." According to this most curious logic, the Company's orders, not to interpose in the disputes of "the country powers,' were not violated by entering into a war for the re-establishment of the authority of the Mogul; because, the imperial crown of Hindostan being reduced to a "splendid bubble," the emperor could not now be reckoned amongst the country powers. But, either recollecting or forgetting himself, he immediately offers another argument directly the reverse of the former, viz. " that the authority of the Mogul, even in its present state, XX. 1782. was so considerable, that, if it was suffered to be BOOK annihilated, great danger might arise to the Company's interests from the power which should be established on its ruins." And lastly he urges, "that the English Company are bound in equity and justice to assist in raising the throne of the Mogul to its former state of exaltation, because they have been the efficient instrument of its present distress and degradation" (alluding no doubt to the deprivation of his tribute and the seizure of his demesne), in lieu of which they were now bound in honor to enable him to seize upon the property of others; and his imperial majesty would, no doubt, deem himself bound in return to reward his honorable allies, the Company, with a reasonable share of the plunder.. On the first advice of the flight of the prince from Dehli, Mr. Hastings wrote to the Mahratta chief, Madajee Scindia, to apprise him of this event, and, professing himself unprepared, to ask his advice how to act in this emergency and certain confidential agents from the Mahratta chief repairing to Lucknow, held frequent and secret conferences with the governor, the purport of which was never communicated to the Board at Calcutta. The whole of this tissue of cabals and intrigues terminated, however, very unexpectedly, in the sudden invasion of the emperor's territories by the Mah BOOK rattas, who made themselves masters of Dehli; and 1782. XX. the emperor, being a second time prisoner in their hands, was obliged to declare the head of the Mahratta state to be vicegerent of the Mogul empire; in which capacity great and indefinite claims of superiority were advanced on the part of the peishwa, and a specific claim set up to the tribute due to the emperor from Bengal. Far from being alarmed at this addition to the Mahratta power, Mr. Hastings declared, "that such was the attachment of Scindia to the English, that, while he lives, every accession of territory obtained by him will be an advantage to this government." Upon which it has been authoritatively remarked, "That if this were true respecting the personal disposition of Scindia, yet does it not lessen the criminality of establishing a power which must survive the man to whom a power more than personal was given*." What is perhaps the most extraordinary circumstance in these extraordinary transactions, Mr. Has * Vide Articles of Impeachment exhibited against Warren Hastings, Esq. by Edmund Burke. But these articles must not be confounded with the articles actually presented by the commons, at the bar of the house of lords, which, being reduced by a subsequent revisión, from 22 to 20 in number, assumed a new and very different form. In the latter, the important charges relative to the Rohillas, the Mahrattas, the treatment of the |