The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

Carnatic.

XCIV. That, from the declaration of the said Hastings himself, that it was the conviction of
Mr. Bristow and Mr. Cowper that could alone oblige and compel him to acknowledge
certain of his aforesaid practices, and that nothing but the necessity of self-defence could
have induced Mr. Bristow to make public another and much stronger instance of the same,
it is to be violently presumed, that, where these two, or either, or both necessities did not
exist, many evil and oppressive practices of the said Hastings do remain undiscovered,—
that, if it had not been for the contests between him, the said Hastings, and the Resident
Bristow, not only the before-mentioned particulars, but the whole of the expensive civil
establishments for English servants at Oude, would have been forever concealed from the
Directors and from Parliament: and yet the said Hastings has had the audacity to pretend so
complete an ignorance of the facts, that, representing the Vizier as objecting to the
largeness of the payments made by Bristow, and stating a very reduced list, which he was
willing to allow for, amounting to 30,000l. a year, the said Hastings did affect to be alarmed
at the magnitude even of the list so curtailed, expressing himself as follows, in his minute of
the 7th of December, 1784: "For my own part, when the Vizier's minister first informed me
that the amount which his master had authorized, and was willing to admit, for the charges
of the Residency, and the allowances of the gentlemen at Lucknow, was 25,000 rupees per
month, I own I was startled at the magnitude of the sum, and was some days hesitating in
my mind whether I could with propriety admit of it": whereas he well knew that the three
sums alone of which the necessities aforesaid had compelled the discovery did greatly
exceed that sum of which at the first hearing he affects to have been so exceedingly alarmed
and thrown into a state of hesitation which continued for some days, and although he, the
said Hastings, was conscious that he had at the very time authorized an establishment to

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