The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

were their purport, would, as an undue assumption of and participation in the government,
from which he was absent, become a high misdemeanor; but, being to the purport of
opening the said treaty after its solemn ratification, and proposing a new clause and a new
party to the same, was also an aggravation of such misdemeanor, as it tended to convey to
the Indian powers an idea of the unsteadiness of the councils and determinations of the
British government, and to take away all reliance on its engagements, and as, above all, it
exposed the affairs of the nation and the Company to the hazard of seeing renewed all the
calamities of war, from whence by the conclusion of the treaty they had emerged, and upon
a pretence so weak as that of proposing the Nabob of Arcot to be a party to the same,—
though he had not been made a party by the said Warren Hastings in the Mahratta treaty,
which professed to be for the relief of the Carnatic,—though he was not a party to the
former treaty with Hyder, also relative to the Carnatic,—though it was not certain, if the
treaty were once opened, and that even Tippoo should then consent to that Nabob's being a
party, whether he, the said Nabob, would agree to the clauses of the same, and consequently
whether the said treaty, once opened, could afterwards be concluded: an uncertainty of
which he, the said Hastings, should have learned to be aware, having already once been
disappointed by the said Nabob's refusing to accede to a treaty which he, the said Warren
Hastings, made for him with the Dutch, about a year before.

That the said Warren Hastings,—having broken a solemn and honorable treaty of peace by
an unjust and unprovoked war,—having neglected to conclude that war when he might have
done it without loss of honor to the nation,—having plotted and contrived, as far as
depended on him, to engage the India Company in another war as soon as the former should
be concluded,—and having at last put an end to a most unjust war against the Mahrattas by
a most ignominious peace with them, in which he sacrificed objects essential to the

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