The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

improper; and that the imprisonment of his person, thereby disgracing him in the eyes of his
subjects and others, was unwarrantable and highly impolitic, and may tend to weaken the
confidence which the native princes of India ought to have in the justice and moderation of
the Company's government."

IV. That the said resolutions being transmitted to the said Warren Hastings, he, the said
Warren Hastings, did write, and cause to be printed and published, a certain false, insolent,
malicious, and seditious libel, purporting to be a letter from him, the said Warren Hastings,
to the Court of Directors, dated Fort William, 20th March, 1783, "calculated," as the
Directors truly affirm, "to bring contempt, as well as an odium, on the Court of Directors,
for their conduct on that occasion"; and the said libel had a direct tendency to excite a spirit
of disobedience to the lawful government of this nation in India through all ranks of their
service.

V. That he, the said Warren Hastings, among other insolent and contumacious charges and
aspersions on the Court of Directors, did address them in the printed letter aforesaid as
follows. "I deny that Rajah Cheyt Sing was a native prince of India. Cheyt Sing is the son of
a collector of the revenue of that province, which his arts, and the misfortunes of his master,
enabled him to convert to a permanent and hereditary possession. This man, whom you
have thus ranked among the princes of India, will be astonished, when he hears it, at an
elevation so unlooked for, nor less at the independent rights which your commands have
assigned him,—rights which are so foreign to his conceptions, that I doubt whether he will
know in what language to assert them, unless the example which you have thought it
consistent with justice, however opposite to policy, to show, of becoming his advocates
against your own interests, should inspire any of your own servants to be his advisers and

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