The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

bribe, eagle to eagle; but at length he was driven to the wall. Some received his money, but
did him no service in return; others, more conscientious, refused to receive it; and in this
battle of bribes he was vanquished. A deputation was sent from Calcutta to the miserable
Nabob, to tear Nundcomar, his only support, from his side, and to put the object of all his
terrors, Mahomed Reza Khân, in his place.

Thus began a new division that split the Presidency into violent factions; but the faction
which adhered to Nundcomar was undoubtedly the weakest. That most miserable of men,
Mir Jaffier Ali Khân, clinging, as to the last pillar, to Nundcomar, trembling at Mahomed
Reza Khân, died in the struggle, a miserable victim to all the revolutions, to all the
successive changes and versatile politics at Calcutta. Like all the rest of the great
personages whom we have degraded and brutalized by insult and oppression, he betook
himself to the usual destructive resources of unprincipled misery,—sensuality, opium, and
wine. His gigantic frame of constitution soon gave way under the oppression of this relief,
and he died, leaving children and grandchildren by wives and concubines. On the old
Nabob's death, Mahomed Reza Khân was acknowledged Deputy Nabob, the money paid,
and this revolution completed.

Here, my Lords, opened a new source of plunder, peculation, and bribery, which was not
neglected. Revolutions were no longer necessary; succession supplied their places: and well
the object agreed with the policy. Rules of succession could not be very well ascertained to
an office like that of the Nabob, which was hereditary only by the appointment of the
Mogul. The issue by lawful wives would naturally be preferred by those who meant the
quiet of the country. But a more doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the
purposes of extortion and peculation. This miserable succession was sold, and the eldest of

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