The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

should they interfere with our notions of political expediency; and that such a principle is
highly derogatory to the justice and honor of the English name, and fundamentally injurious
to our interests, inasmuch as it hath an immediate tendency to excite distrust, jealousy, fear,
and hatred against us among all the subordinate potentates of Hindostan.

X. That, in prosecution of the said despotic principle, the President, Warren Hastings
aforesaid, did persist to obstruct, as far as in him lay, every advance towards an
accommodation between the Vizier Sujah ul Dowlah and the Nabob Fyzoola Khân; and
particularly on the 16th of September, only eight days after the said Hastings, in,
conjunction with the other members of the Select Committee of Bengal, had publicly
testified his satisfaction in the prospect of an accommodation, and had hoped that "his
Excellency [the Vizier] would be disposed to conciliate the affections [of the Rohillas] to
his government by acceding to lenient terms," he, the said Hastings, did nevertheless write,
and without the consent or knowledge of his colleagues did privately dispatch, a certain
answer to a letter of the commander-in-chief, in which answer the said Hastings did express
other contradictory hopes, namely, that the commander-in-chief had resolved on
prosecuting the war to a final issue,—"because" (as the said Hastings explains himself) "it
appears very plainly that Fyzoola Khân and his adherents lay at your mercy, because I
apprehend much inconveniency from delays, and because I am morally certain that no good
will he gained by negotiating": thereby artfully suggesting his wishes of what might be, in
his hopes of what had been, resolved; and plainly, though indirectly, instigating the
commander-in-chief to much effusion of blood in an immediate attack on the Rohillas,
posted as they were "in a very strong situation," and "combating for all."

XI. That the said Hastings, in the answer aforesaid, did further endeavor to inflame the

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