The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

under his command as their immediate object, and ultimately the extirpation of the English
influence and power throughout all the Nabob's dominions," and that they did still
persevere in their rebellious conduct without deviation, "though the Nabob's, and not our
government, was then the object of it"; and he did direct the said Resident, if it should
appear, "on a fair and regular inquiry, that their conduct towards the Nabob had been such
as it had been reported to be, to insist upon the Nabob's punishing them with death, and to
treat with the same rigor every zemindar and every subject who shall be the leader in a
rebellion against his authority."

XLV. That the crime of the said Hastings, in his procedure aforesaid, was further highly
aggravated by his having received information of several striking circumstances which
strongly indicated the necessity of a regular magistracy and a legal judicature, from the total
failure of justice, affecting not only the subjects at large, but even the reigning family itself,
—as also of the causes why no legal magistracy could exist, and why the princes of the
reigning family were not only exposed to the attacks of assassins, but even to a want of the
protection which might be had from their servants and attendants, who were driven from
their masters for want of that maintenance which the princes, their masters, could not
procure even for themselves. And the circumstances aforesaid were detailed to him, the said
Hastings, by the Resident, Bristow, in a letter from Lucknow, dated the 29th January, 1784,
to the Governor-General, the said Warren Hastings, and the Council of Bengal, in the terms
following.

"The frequent robberies and murders perpetrated in his Excellency's, the Vizier's,
dominions, have been too often the subject of my representations to your honorable board.
From the total want of police, hardly a day elapses but I am informed of some tragical

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