The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

contradiction, and of opposition of action to principle, which can be used against men in
public trust, and did contend that the same could not be used against him; and as if false
assertions could be justified by factious motives, he did endeavor to do away the authority
of his own deliberate, recorded declarations, entered by him in writing on the Council-
Books of the Presidency; for, after asserting, but not attempting to prove, that his
declarations were consistent with his conduct, he writes in the said libel as follows: For
"were it otherwise, they were not to be made the rules of my conduct; and God forbid that
every expression dictated by the impulse of present emergency, and unpremeditatedly
uttered in the heat of party contention, should impose upon me the obligation of a fixed
principle, and be applied to every variable occasion!"

VIII. That the said Hastings, in order to draw the lawful dependence of the servants of the
Company from the Court of Directors to a factious dependence on himself, did, in the libel
aforesaid, treat the acts and appointments of their undoubted authority, when exercised in
opposition to his arbitrary will, as ruinous to their affairs, in the following terms. "It is as
well known to the Indian world as to the Court of English Proprietors, that the first
declaratory instruments of the dissolution of my influence, in the year 1774, were Mr. John
Bristow and Mr. Francis Fowke. By your ancient and known constitution the Governor has
been ever held forth and understood to possess the ostensible powers of government; all the
correspondence with foreign princes is conducted in his name; and every person resident
with them for the management of your political concerns is understood to be more
especially his representative, and of his choice: and such ought to be the rule; for how
otherwise can they trust an agent nominated against the will of his principal? When the
state of this administration was such as seemed to admit of the appointment of Mr. Bristow
to the Residency of Lucknow without much diminution of my own influence, I gladly seized

<<   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   >>

More intriguing information