The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

LXXIX. That the said Warren Hastings did, in his letter, dated Benares, the 1st of October,
1784, to the Court of Directors, write, "that, if they [the Directors] manifested no symptoms
of an (1.) intended interference, the objects of his engagements will be obtained; (2.) but if
a different policy shall be adopted,—if new agents are sent into the country, and armed with
authority for the purposes of vengeance or corruption (for to no other will they be applied),
—if new demands are made on the Nabob Vizier, (4.) and accounts overcharged on one
side, with a wide latitude taken on the other, to swell his debt beyond the means of payment,
—(5.) if political dangers are portended, to ground on them the plea of burdening his
country with unnecessary defences and enormous subsidies,—(6.) or if, even abstaining
from direct encroachment on the Nabob's rights, your government shall show but a degree
of personal kindness to the partisans of the late usurpation, or by any constructive
indication of partiality and dissatisfaction furnish grounds for the expectation of an
approaching change of system,—I am sorry to say, that all my labors will prove abortive."

LXXX. That all the measures deprecated in future by the said Warren Hastings, with a
reference to former conduct, in his several letters aforesaid, being (so far as the same are
intelligible) six in number, have been all of them the proper acts and measures of the said
Warren Hastings himself. For he did himself first of all introduce, and did afterwards
continue and support, that interference which he now informs the Court of Directors "is
ruinous and disreputable, and which the very symptoms of an intention to renew" he
considers in the highest degree dangerous; he did direct, with a controlling and absolute
authority, in every department of government, and in every district in the dominions of the
Nabob of Oude. Secondly, the appointment of agents, which was eminently the act of his
own administration: he not only retaining many agents in the country of Oude, both "secret
and avowed," but also sending some of them, in defiance to the orders of that very Court of

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