The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

accumulation of many, and from a country whose resources have been wasted and
dissipated by three successive years of drought and one of anarchy." But the said Hastings
never did even realize the payments to be made in the first year, (as he confesses in the said
letter,) except by an anticipation of the second; and though he states in his letter aforesaid
the following facts and engagements, that is to say, "that a recovery of so large a part of
your property [the Company's] will afford a seasonable and substantial relief to the
necessities of your government, and enable it (for such is my confident hope) to begin on
the reduction of your debt at interest before the conclusion of this year (I mean the year of
this computation)." Whereas the said Warren Hastings did apply the whole produce of the
revenue to the mere pay of some part of the British army in Oude; and did not mention in
his correspondence that he had remitted any money whatsoever to Calcutta, nor to any other
place, (except the fifty thousand pounds taken from Almas Ali Khân, and said to be
remitted to Surat,) for the said "substantial relief," in consequence of the said pretended
"recovery of property,"—admitting that it had been suggested to him, and not by him
denied, that he had "disappointed the popular expectation by not adopting the policy which
he had, on the conception of better grounds, rejected; nor did he begin the reduction of the
interest debt" at the time stated, nor at any time; but the whole (he well knowing the state of
the country from whence the resources aforesaid were by him promised) was a
premeditated deceit and imposition on the Board of Council, his colleagues, and on the
Court of Directors, his masters.

LXIX. That no traces of regulation appear to have been adopted by the said Warren
Hastings during his residence at Lucknow, in conformity to the spirit and intentions of the
treaty of Chunar, or of his instructions to Middleton and Bristow, or of the proposed objects
of his own commission. But he did, in lieu thereof, pretend to free the Nabob's government

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