The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

constitution; and if they are, I did not make it for them. I was unfortunately bound to
exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I did exercise it. It was disagreeable to me,
but I did exercise it; and no other power can be exercised in that country." This, if it be true,
is a plea in bar. But I trust and hope your Lordships will not judge by laws and institutions
which you do not know, against those laws and institutions which you do know, and under
whose power and authority Mr. Hastings went out to India. Can your Lordships patiently
hear what we have heard with indignation enough, and what, if there were nothing else,
would call these principles, as well as the actions which are justified on such principles, to
your Lordships' bar, that it may be known whether the peers of England do not sympathize
with the Commons in their detestation of such doctrine? Think of an English governor tried
before you as a British subject, and yet declaring that he governed on the principles of
arbitrary power! His plea is, that he did govern there on arbitrary and despotic, and, as he
supposes, Oriental principles. And as this plea is boldly avowed and maintained, and as, no
doubt, all his conduct was perfectly correspondent to these principles, the principles and the
conduct must be tried together.

If your Lordships will now permit me, I will state one of the many places in which he has
avowed these principles as the basis and foundation of all his conduct. "The sovereignty
which they assumed, it fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such
power, or powers of that nature, were delegated to me by any provisions of any act of
Parliament, I confess myself too little of a lawyer to pronounce. I only know that the
acceptance of the sovereignty of Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any act
of Parliament; and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the Council, the
Company is clearly and indisputably seized of that sovereignty." So that this gentleman,
because he is not a lawyer, nor clothed with those robes which distinguish, and well

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