The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

possession of the said revenues, but did give to him a new lease thereof for the term of five
years. And on this renovation and increase of trust, the said Warren Hastings did not
consent to produce the informer upon whose credit he had made his charge of capital
crimes on the said Almas Ali, and had directed him to be put to death, or call upon him to
make good his charges; but, instead of this, totally changing his relation to the said Almas
Ali, did himself labor to procure from all parts attestations to prove him not guilty of the
perfidy and disloyalty of which the said Hastings himself appears to have been to that very
time his sole accuser, as he hath since been his most anxious advocate: but though he did
use many endeavors to acquit Almas Ali of his intended flight, yet concerning his
embezzlements and oppressions, the most important of all charges relative to that of the
revenue and collection, he, the said Hastings, hath made no inquiry whatever; by which it
might appear that he was not as fully guilty thereof as he had always represented him to be.
But some time after he, the said Warren Hastings, had arrived at Lucknow, in the year
1784, he suggested to the said Almas Ali Khân the advance to the Company's use of a sum
of money amounting to fifty thousand pounds or thereabouts; and the said suggested
advance was (as the said Warren Hastings asserts, no witness or document of the
transaction appearing) "cheerfully and without hesitation complied with, considering it as
an evidence seasonably offered for the general refutation of the charges of perfidy and
disloyalty": which practice of charging wealthy persons with treason and disloyalty, and
afterwards acquitting them on the payment of a sum of money, is highly scandalous to the
honor, justice, and government of Great Britain; and the offence is highly aggravated by the
said Hastings's declaration to the Court of Directors that the charges against Almas Ali
Khân have been too laboriously urged against him, and carried at one time to such an
excess as had nearly driven him to abandon his country "for the preservation of his life and
honor," and thus to give a "color to the charges themselves," when he, the said Warren

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