The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

offence.

And, first, I am to state to your Lordships, by the direction of those whom I am bound to
obey, the principles on which Mr. Hastings declares he has conducted his government,—
principles which he has avowed, first in several letters written to the East India Company,
next in a paper of defence delivered to the House of Commons explicitly, and more
explicitly in his defence before your Lordships. Nothing in Mr. Hastings's proceedings is so
curious as his several defences; and nothing in the defences is so singular as the principles
upon which he proceeds. Your Lordships will have to decide not only upon a large,
connected, systematic train of misdemeanors, but an equally connected system of principles
and maxims of government, invented to justify those misdemeanors. He has brought them
forward and avowed them in the face of day. He has boldly and insultingly thrown them in
the face of the representatives of a free people, and we cannot pass them by without
adopting them. I am directed to protest against those grounds and principles upon which he
frames his defence; for, if those grounds are good and valid, they carry off a great deal at
least, if not entirely, the foundation of our charge.

My Lords, we contend that Mr. Hastings, as a British governor, ought to govern on British
principles, not by British forms,—God forbid!—for if ever there was a case in which the
letter kills and the spirit gives life, it would be an attempt to introduce British forms and the
substance of despotic principles together into any country. No! We call for that spirit of
equity, that spirit of justice, that spirit of protection, that spirit of lenity, which ought to
characterize every British subject in power; and on these, and these principles only, he will
be tried.

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