The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

he did therefore censure the said Court for applying no stronger or more criminating
epithets than those of "improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic," to an offence so by
them charged, and by him described. And though it be true that the expressions aforesaid
are much too reserved for the purpose of duly characterizing the offences of the said
Hastings, yet was it in him most indecent to libel the Court of Directors for the same; and
his implication, from the tenderness of the epithets and descriptions aforesaid used towards
him, was not only indecent, but ungrounded, malicious, and scandalous,—he having
himself highly, though truly, aggravated "the charge of the injuries done by him to the
Rajah of Benares," in order to bring the said Directors into contempt and suspicion, the
paragraphs in the said libel being as follow.—"Here I must crave leave to say, that the terms
'improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic' are much too gentle, as deductions from
such premises; and as every reader of the latter will obviously feel, as he reads, the
deductions which inevitably belong to them, I will add, that the strict performance of
solemn engagements on one part, followed by acts directly subversive of them and by total
dispossession on the other, stamps on the perpetrators of the latter the guilt of the greatest
possible violation of faith and justice."—"There is an appearance of tenderness in this
deviation from plain construction, of which, however meant, I have a right to complain;
because it imposes on me the necessity of framing the terms of the accusation against
myself, which you have only not made, but have stated the leading arguments to it so
strongly, that no one who reads these can avoid making it, or not know it to have been
intended."

VII. That the said Hastings, being well aware that his own declarations did contain the
clearest condemnation of his own conduct from his own pen, did in the said libel attempt to
overturn, frustrate, and render of none effect all the proofs to be given of prevarication,

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