The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

article, to make no peace with us which should not include him; that they pleaded the
sacred nature of this obligation in answer to all our requisitions on this head, while the said
Hastings, still importunate for his favorite point, suggested to them various means of
reconciling a substantial breach of their engagement with a formal observance of it, and
taught them how they might at once be parties in a peace with Hyder Ali and in an
offensive alliance for immediate hostility against him. That these lessons of public duplicity
and artifice, and these devices of ostensible faith and real treachery, could have no effect
but to degrade the national character, and to inspire the Mahrattas themselves, with whom
we were in treaty, with a distrust in our sincerity and good faith. That the object of this
fraudulent policy (viz., the utter destruction of Hyder Ali, and a partition of his dominions)
was neither wise in itself, or authorized by the orders and instructions of the Company to
their servants; that it was incompatible with the treaty of peace, in which Hyder Ali was
included, and contrary to the repeated and best-understood injunctions of the Company,—
being, in the first place, a bargain for a new war, and, in the next, aiming at an extension of
our territory by conquest. That the best and soundest political opinions on the relations of
these states have always represented our great security against the power of the Mahrattas
to depend on its being balanced by that of Hyder Ali; and the Mysore country is so placed
as a barrier between the Carnatic and the Mahrattas as to make it our interest rather to
strengthen and repair that barrier than to level and destroy it. That the said treaty of
partition does express itself to be eventual with regard to the making and keeping of peace;
but through the whole course of the said Hastings's proceeding he did endeavor to prevent
any peace with the Sultan or Nabob of Mysore, Tippoo Sahib, and did for a long time
endeavor to frustrate all the methods which could have rendered the said treaty of conquest
and partition wholly unnecessary.

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