The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

But he has told your Lordships, in his defence, that actions in Asia do not bear the same
moral qualities which the same actions would bear in Europe.

My Lords, we positively deny that principle. I am authorized and called upon to deny it.
And having stated at large what he means by saying that the same actions have not the same
qualities in Asia and in Europe, we are to let your Lordships know that these gentlemen
have formed a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men, in public and in
private situations, are not to be governed by their relation to the great Governor of the
Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels,
not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues die,
as they say some insects die when they cross the line; as if there were a kind of baptism,
like that practised by seamen, by which they unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in
Europe, and after which a new order and system of things commenced.

This geographical morality we do protest against; Mr. Hastings shall not screen himself
under it; and on this point I hope and trust many words will not be necessary to satisfy your
Lordships. But we think it necessary, in justification of ourselves, to declare that the laws of
morality are the same everywhere, and that there is no action which would pass for an act of
extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression in England, that is not an act of
extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the
world over. This I contend for not in the technical forms of it, but I contend for it in the
substance.

Mr. Hastings comes before your Lordships not as a British governor answering to a British
tribunal, but as a subahdar, as a bashaw of three tails. He says, "I had an arbitrary power to
exercise: I exercised it. Slaves I found the people: slaves they are,—they are so by their

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