The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

contradiction to his former declaration, "that the influence of Mahomed Reza Khân still
prevailed generally throughout the country, in the Nabob's household, and at the capital,
and was scarcely affected by his present disgrace,"—notwithstanding, as he, the said
Hastings, doth confess, he had used his utmost endeavors "to break that influence, by
removing his dependants, and putting the direction of all the affairs that had been
committed to his care into the hands of the most powerful or active of his enemies; that he
depended on the activity of their hatred to Mahomed Reza Khân, incited by the expectation
of rewards, for investigating the conduct of the latter; that with this the institution of the
new dewanny coincided; and that the same principle had guided him in the choice of
Munny Begum and Rajah Gourdas,—the former for the chief administration, the latter" (the
son of Nundcomar, and a mere instrument in the hands of his father) "for the dewanny of
the Nabob's household,—both the declared enemies of Mahomed Reza Khân."

XIII. That, although it might be true that enemies will become the most active prosecutors,
and as such may, though under much guard and many precautions, be used even as
witnesses, and that it ought not to be an exception, supposing their character and capacity
otherwise good, to the appointing them to power, yet to advance persons to power on the
ground not of their honor and integrity, which might have produced the enmity of bad men,
but merely for the enmity itself, without any reference whatsoever to a laudable cause, and
even with a declared ill opinion of the morals of one of the party, such as was actually
delivered in the said letter by him, the said Hastings, of Nundcomar, (and which time has
shown he might also on good ground have conceived of others,) was, in the circumstances
of a criminal inquiry, a motive highly disgraceful to the honor of government, and
destructive of impartial justice, by holding out the greatest of all possible temptation to
false accusation, to corrupt and factious conspiracies, to perjury, and to every species of

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