The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

Governor-General and Council might arrive; and that the said Presidency of Bombay were
warranted by the treaty of Poorunder to join in a plan for conducting Ragonaut Row to
Poonah on the application of the ruling part of the Mahratta state": whereas the main object
of the said treaty on the part of the Mahrattas, and to obtain which they made many
important concessions to the India Company, was, that the English should withdraw their
forces, and give no assistance to Ragoba, and that he should be excluded forever from any
share in their government, being a person universally held in abhorrence in the Mahratta
empire; and if it had been true (instead of being, as it was, notoriously false) that the ruling
part of the administration of the Mahratta state solicited the return of Ragonaut Row to
Poonah, his return in that case might have been effected by acts of their own, without the
interposition of the English power, and without our interference in their affairs. That it was
the special duty of the said Warren Hastings, derived from a special trust reposed in him
and power committed to him by Parliament, to have restrained, as by law he had authority
to do, the subordinate Presidency of Bombay from entering into hostilities with the
Mahrattas, or from making engagements the manifest tendency of which was to enter into
those hostilities, and to have put a stop to them, if any such had been begun; that he was
bound by the duty of his office to preserve the faith of the British government, pledged in
the treaty of Poorunder, inviolate and sacred, as well as by the special orders and
instructions of the East India Company to fix his attention to the preservation of peace
throughout India: all which important duties the said Warren Hastings did wilfully violate,
in giving the sanction of the Governor-General and Council to the dangerous, faithless, and
ill-concerted projects of the President and Council of Bombay hereinbefore mentioned,
from which the subsequent Mahratta war, with all the expense, distress, and disgraces
which have attended it, took their commencement; and that the said Warren Hastings,
therefore, is specially and principally answerable for the said war, and for all the

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