The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

instructors." And he did further, to bring into contempt the authority of the Company, and
to excite a resistance to their lawful orders, frame a supposition that the Court of Directors
had intended the restoration of the Rajah of Benares, and on that ground did presume in the
said libel to calumniate, in disrespectful and contumelious terms, the policy of the Court of
Directors, as well as the person whom he did conceive to be the object of their protection,
as followeth. "Of the consequences of such a policy I forbear to speak. Most happily, the
wretch whose hopes may be excited by the appearances in his favor is ill qualified to avail
himself of them, and the force which is stationed in the province of Benares is sufficient to
suppress any symptoms of internal sedition; but it cannot fail to create distrust and suspense
in the minds both of the rulers and of the people, and such a state is always productive of
disorder. But it is not in this partial consideration that I dread the effects of your commands;
it is in your proclaimed indisposition against the first executive member of your first
government in India. I almost shudder at the reflection of what might have happened, had
these denunciations against your own minister, in favor of a man universally considered in
this part of the world as justly attainted for his crimes, the murderer of your servants and
soldiers, and the rebel to your authority, arrived two months earlier."

VI. That the said Warren Hastings did also presume to censure and asperse the Court of
Directors for the moderate terms in which they had expressed their displeasure against him,
as putting him under the necessity of stating in his defence a strong accusation against
himself, and as implying in the said Court a consciousness that he was not guilty of the
offences charged upon him,—being, as he asserts, in the resolutions of the Court of
Directors, "arraigned and prejudged of a violation of national faith, in acts of such
complicated aggravation, that, if they were true, no punishment SHORT OF DEATH could
atone for the injury which the interest and credit of the public had sustained in them"; and

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