[1788 A.D.]

satisfied the highly raised expectation of the audience, he described the character and institutions of the natives of India, recounted the circumstances in which the Asiatic empire of Britain had originated, and set forth the constitution of the company and of the English presidencies. Having thus attempted to communicate to his hearers an idea of eastern society, as vivid as that which existed in his own mind, he proceeded to arraign the administration of Hastings as systematically conducted in defiance of morality and public law. The energy and pathos of the great orator extorted expressions of unwonted admiration from the stern and hostile chancellor, and, for a moment, seemed to pierce even the resolute heart of the defendant. The ladies in the galleries, unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence, excited by the solemnity of the occasion, and perhaps not unwilling to display their taste and sensibility, were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles were handed round; hysterical sobs and screams were heard: and Mrs. Sheridan was carried out in a fit. At length the orator concluded. Raising his voice till the old arches of Irish oak resounded:

"Therefore," said he, "hath it with all confidence been ordered, by the commons of Great Britain, that I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanours. I impeach him in the name of the commons' house of parliament, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all!"

When the deep murmur of various emotions had subsided, Mr. Fox rose to address the lords respecting the course of proceeding to be followed. The wish of the accusers was that the court would bring to a close the investigation of the first charge before the second was opened. The wish of Hastings and of his counsel was that the managers should open all the charges, and produce all the evidence for the prosecution, before the defence began. The lords retired to their own house to consider the question. The chancellor took the side of Hastings. Lord Loughborough, who was now in opposition, supported the demand of the managers. The division showed which way the inclination of the tribunal leaned. A majority of near three to one decided in favour of the course for which Hastings contended.

When the court sat again, Mr. Fox, assisted by Mr. Grey, opened the charge respecting Cheyte Sing, and several days were spent in reading papers and hearing witnesses. The next article was that relating to the princesses of Oudh. The conduct of this part of the case was entrusted to Sheridan. The curiosity of the public to hear him was unbounded. His sparkling and highly finished declamation lasted two days; but the hall was crowded to suffocation during the whole time. It was said that fifty guineas had been paid for a single ticket. Sheridan when he concluded contrived, with a knowledge of stage effect which his father might have envied, to sink back, as if exhausted, into the arms of Burke, who hugged him with the energy of generous admiration.

June was now far advanced. The session could not last much longer; and the progress which had been made in the impeachment was not very satisfactory. There were twenty charges. On two only of these had even the case for the prosecution been heard; and it was now a year since Hastings had been admitted to bail.

The interest taken by the public in the trial was great when the court

[1788-1795 A.D.]

began to sit, and rose to the height when Sheridan spoke on the charge relating to the begums: From that time the excitement went down fast. The spectacle had lost the attraction of novelty. The great displays of rhetoric were over. What was behind was not of a nature to entice men of letters from their books in the morning, or to tempt ladies who had left the masquerade at two to be out of bed before eight. There remained examinations and cross-examinations. There remained statements of accounts. There remained the reading of papers, filled with words unintelligible to English ears, with lacs and crores, zemindars and aumils, sunnuds and perwannahs, jaghires and nuzzurs. There remained bickerings, not always carried on with the best taste or with the best temper, between the managers of the impeachment and the counsel for the defence, particularly between Mr. Burke and Mr. Law. There remained the endless marches and countermarches of the peers between their house and the hall; for as often as a point of law was to be discussed, their lordships retired to discuss it apart; and the consequence was, as a peer wittily said, that the judges walked and the trial stood still.r

THE FINAL ACQUITTAL OF HASTINGS (1795 A.D.)

The sessions of 1788, 1789, and 1790 were consumed in going through the case for the prosecution. In 1791 the commons expressed their willingness to abandon some part of the charges, with the view of bringing this extraordinary trial sooner to an end; and on the 2nd of June, the seventy-third day, Mr. Hastings began his defence. This was protracted until April 17th, 1795, on which (the one hundred and forty-eighth) day he was acquitted by a large majority on every separate article charged against him.

The opposition party, who at that time almost monopolised the public press, had deeply blackened the character of the benefactor of his country and the people of India; yet public opinion changed greatly during the long trial, and Hastings came to be regarded as an oppressed, instead of an offending man. The malice of Francis was so far defeated; but the law charges of the defence had exhausted the fortune of the late governor-general; and but for an annuity of £4,000, and a loan of ready money granted to him by the East India Company, in 1796, the illustrious and (in private life) amiable Hastings might have been left to end his days in a prison or a poorhouse.

Strenuous efforts had also been made by the parliamentary opposition to couple Sir Elijah Impey, the first chief-justice of Bengal, with the first governor-general. Prompted by Francis, and acting in concert with Burke, Fox, and the rest of the opposition leaders, Sir Gilbert Elliot, on the 12th of December, 1787, denounced Sir Elijah, in the house of commons, as the single sole murderer of Nandkumar, and moved his impeachment upon that and upon five other charges. But on the 9th of May, Sir Elijah was acquitted of the Nandkumar charge by a parliament majority, and this put an end to all proceedings against him.9

Macaulay's Estimate of Hastings

As Hastings himself said, the arraignment had taken place before one generation, and the judgment was pronounced by another. Of about one hundred and sixty nobles who walked in the procession on the first day, sixty had been laid in their family vaults. Still more affecting must have been the sight of the manager's box. It had been scattered by calamities more

[1788-1795 A.D.} bitter than the bitterness of death. The great chiefs were still living. But their friendship was at an end.

Hastings was a ruined man. The legal expenses of his defence had been enormous. The expenses which did not appear in his attorney's bill were perhaps larger still. Great sums had been paid to Major Scott. Great sums had been laid out in bribing newspapers, rewarding pamphleteers, and circulating tracts. Burke, so early as 1790, declared in the house of commons that twenty thousand pounds had been employed in corrupting the press. It is certain that no controversial weapon, from the gravest reasoning to the coarsest ribaldry, was left unemployed. Logan defended the accused governor with great ability in prose. For the lovers of verse the speeches of the managers were burlesqued in Simpkin's letters. It is, we are afraid, indisputable that Hastings stooped so low as to court the aid of that malignant and filthy baboon John Williams, who called himself Anthony Pasquin. It was necessary to subsidise such allies largely. The private hoards of Mrs. Hastings had disappeared. It is said that the banker to whom they had been entrusted had failed. Still if Hastings had practised strict economy, he would after all his losses have had a moderate competence; but in the management of his private affairs he was imprudent. The dearest wish of his heart had always been to regain Daylesford. At length, in the very year in which his trial commenced, the wish was accomplished; and the domain, alienated more than seventy years before, returned to the descendants of its old lords. But the manor house was a ruin; and the grounds round it had during many years been utterly neglected. Hastings proceeded to build, to plant, to form a sheet of water, to excavate a grotto; and, before he was dismissed from the bar of the house of lords, he had expended more than forty thousand pounds in adorning his seat.

On a general review of the long administration of Hastings, it is impossible to deny that, against the great crimes by which it is blemished, we have to set off great public services. England had passed through a perilous crisis. Nevertheless, in every part of the world, except one, she had been a loser. Not only had she been compelled to acknowledge the independence of thirteen colonies peopled by her children, and to conciliate the Irish by giving up the right of legislating for them; but, in the Mediterranean, in the Gulf of Mexico, on the coast of Africa, on the continent of America, she had been compelled to cede the fruits of her victories in former wars. Spain regained Minorca and Florida; France regained Senegal, Goree, and several West Indian islands. The only quarter of the world in which Britain had lost nothing was the quarter in which her interests had been committed to the care of Hastings. In spite of the utmost exertions both of European and Asiatic enemies, the power of our country in the East had been greatly augmented. Benares was subjected; the nawab vizir reduced to vassalage. That our influence had been thus extended, nay, that Fort William and Fort St. George had not been occupied by hostile armies, was owing, if we may trust the general voice of the English in India, to the skill and resolution of Hastings.

His internal administration, with all its blemishes, gives him a title to be considered as one of the most remarkable men in our history. He dissolved the double government. He transferred the direction of affairs to English hands. Out of a frightful anarchy, he educed at least a rude and imperfect order. The whole organisation by which justice was dispensed, revenue collected, peace maintained throughout a territory not inferior in population to the dominions of Louis XVI or of the emperor Joseph, was formed and superintended by him. He boasted that every public office, which existed when he left Bengal, without exception, was his creation.”

[1784 A.D.]

Sir A. Lyall on Warren Hastings

Hastings carried the government of India safely through one of the sharpest crises in our national history, when our transmarine possessions were in great peril all over the world, because all the naval powers of Europe were banded against us. In America, the insurgents after an arduous struggle tore down the British flag; in India the end of a long and exhausting contest found our flag not only flying but still more firmly planted than ever; nor had either the vindictive hostility of Mysore, or the indefatigable activity of the Mahrattas, succeeded in wresting an acre of British territory from the grasp of Warren Hastings.

PITT REFORMS THE ADMINISTRATION (1784 A.D.)

When Mr. Fox succeeded to the head of affairs in 1783, all parties were already prepared for a great and important change in the government of Great Britain's eastern empire. But the scheme of that able and ambitious statesman far outstripped either the reason or necessity of the case. He proposed — in his famous India Bill, which convulsed the nation from end to end, and in its ultimate results occasioned the downfall of his administration -to vest the exclusive right of governing India in seven directors, "to be named in the act," that is, appointed by the legislature under the direction of the ministry for the time. The vacancies in these commissioners were to be filled up by the house of commons under the same direction. But this important innovation was defeated, after it had passed the lower house, by a small majority of nineteen in the house of peers, and this defeat was immediately followed by the dismissal of Mr. Fox and his whole administration.

Although, however, Mr. Fox's India Bill was rejected, yet the numerous abuses of Great Britain's Indian dominions, as well as the imminent hazard which they had run during the war with Hyder Ali, from the want of a firmly constituted central government, were too fresh in the public recollection to permit the existing state of matters to continue. Mr. Pitt, accordingly, was no sooner installed in power, than be brought forward an India Bill of his own, which, it was hoped, would prove exempt from the objections to which its predecessor had been liable, and, at the same time, remedy the serious evils to which the administration of affairs in India had hitherto been exposed. This bill passed both houses (1784) and formed the basis of the system under which, with some subsequent but inconsiderable amendments, the affairs of India were for many years administered. By it the court of directors appointed by the East India Company remained as before, and to them the general administration of Indian affairs was still entrusted.

The great change introduced was the institution of the Board of Control, a body composed of six members of the privy council, chosen by the king the chancellor of the exchequer and one of the secretaries of state being twoin whom the power of directing and controlling the proceedings of the Indian Empire was vested. The duties of this board were very loosely defined, and were all ultimately centred in the president, an officer who became a fourth secretary of state for the Indian Empire. They were described as being "from time to time to check, superintend, and control all acts, operations, and concerns which in anywise relate to the civil or military government or revenues of the territories and possessions of the East India Company." These powers were ample enough; but in practice they led to little more than a control of the company in the more important political or military concerns

[1786 A.D.]

of the East, leaving the directors in possession of the practical direction of affairs in ordinary cases. All vacancies in official situations, with the exception of the offices of governor-general of India, governors of Madras and Bombay, and commanders-in-chief, which were to be filled up by the British government, were left at the disposal of the East India directors. A most important provision was made in the institution of a secret committee, who were to send to India in duplicate such despatches as they might receive from the board of control, and in the establishment of the supreme government of Calcutta, with a controlling power over the other presidencies- a change which at once introduced unity of action into all parts of the peninsula.

It cannot be affirmed that this anomalous constitution will stand the test of theoretical examination, or is confirmed by history as regards other states. Still less could it be presumed that a distribution of supreme power between a governor-general and two subordinate governors in the East, and a board of control and body of directors in the British Islands, gave any fair prospect either of unity of purpose or efficiency of action. Nevertheless, if experience, the great test of truth, be consulted, and the splendid progress of the Indian Empire of Great Britain since it was directed in this manner be alone considered, there is reason to hold this system of government one of the most perfect that ever was devised by human wisdom for the advancement and confirmation of political greatness. The secret of this apparent anomaly is to be found in the fact, that this division of power existed in theory only; that from the great distance of India from the home government, and the pressing interests which so frequently called for immediate decision, the supreme direction of affairs practically came to be vested in the governors-general; and that in them were found a succession of great men, second to none who ever appeared in the world for vigour and capacity, and who vindicated the truth of the saying of Sallust, that it is in the strenuous virtue of a few that the real cause of national greatness is in general to be found.

It soon appeared how much the vigour and efficiency of the Indian administration had been increased by the important changes made in its central government. By Mr. Pitt's India Bill, all ideas of foreign conquest in the East had been studiously repressed - it having been declared, that "to pursue schemes of conquest or extension of dominion in India are measures repugnant to the wish, the honour, and the policy of the nation." But this declaration, in appearance so just and practicable, was widely at variance with the conduct which extraneous events shortly after forced upon the British gov

ernment.

LORD CORNWALLIS AS GOVERNOR-GENERAL; THE WAR WITH_TIPU

(1786-1792 A.D.)

In order, however, to carry into execution the pacific views of ministers at home, a nobleman of high rank and character, Lord Cornwallis, was sent out by Mr. Pitt, who united in his person the two offices of governor-general and commander-in-chief, so as to give the greatest possible unity to the action of government [1786]. No sooner, however, had he arrived there, than he discovered that Tipu was intriguing with the other native powers for the subversion of Great Britain's Indian dominion; and, as a rupture with France was apprehended at that juncture, four strong regiments were despatched to India. As the company complained of the expense which this additional force entailed upon their finances, a bill was brought into parliament by Mr. Pitt, which fixed the number of king's troops who might be ordered to India by