The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

former period to which the ancient policy with regard to the Mogul applied, the king's
authority was sufficiently respected" (which he knew not to be true,—having himself
declared, in his minute of the 25th of October, 1774, "that he remained at Delhi, the ancient
capital of the empire, a mere cipher in the administration of it") to maintain itself against
common vicissitudes; that he would not have advised interference, if the king himself
retained the exercise of it, however feeble, in his own hands; that, if it [the Mogul's
authority] is suffered to receive its final extinction, it is impossible to foresee what power
may arise out of its ruins, or what events may be linked in the same chain of revolution
with it: but your interests may suffer by it, your reputation certainly will, as his right to our
assistance has been constantly acknowledged, and by a train of consequences to which our
government has not intentionally given birth, but most especially by the movements which
its influence, by too near an approach, has excited, it has unfortunately become the
efficient instrument of a great portion of the king's present distresses and dangers,—
intimating (as well as the studied obscurity of his expressions will permit anything to be
discerned) that his own late intrigues had been among the causes of the distresses and
dangers, which by new intrigues he did pretend to remove: and he did conclude this part of
his letter with some loose general expressions of his caution not to affect the Company's
interests or revenues by any measures he might at that time take.

XIV. That the principle, so far as the same hath been directly avowed, of the said
proceedings at the Mogul's court, was as altogether irrational, and the pretended object as
impracticable, as the means taken in pursuit of it were fraudulent and dishonorable, namely,
the restoration of the Mogul in some degree to the dignity of his situation, and to his free
agency in the conduct of his affairs. For the said Hastings, at the very time in which he did
with the greatest apparent earnestness urge the purpose which he pretended to have in view

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