The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

distinguish, the learning of this country, is not to know anything of his duty; and whether he
was bound by any, or what act of Parliament, is a thing he is not lawyer enough to know!
Now, if your Lordships will suffer the laws to be broken by those who are not of the long
robe, I am afraid those of the long robe will have none to punish but those of their own
profession. He therefore goes to a law he is better acquainted with,—that is, the law of
arbitrary power and force, if it deserves to be called by the name of law. "If, therefore," says
he, "the sovereignty of Benares, as ceded to us by the Vizier, have any rights whatever
annexed to it, and be not a mere empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as
are held, countenanced, and established by the law, custom, and usage of the Mogul empire,
and not by the provisions of any British act of Parliament hitherto enacted. Those rights,
and none other, I have been the involuntary instrument of enforcing. And if any future act
of Parliament shall positively or by implication tend to annihilate those very rights, or their
exertion as I have exerted them, I much fear that the boasted sovereignty of Benares, which
was held up as an acquisition, almost obtruded on the Company against my consent and
opinion, (for I acknowledge that even then I foresaw many difficulties and inconveniences
in its future exercise,)—I fear, I say, that this sovereignty will be found a burden instead of
a benefit, a heavy clog rather than a precious gem to its present possessors: I mean, unless
the whole of our territory in that quarter shall be rounded and made an uniform compact
body by one grand and systematic arrangement.—such an arrangement as shall do away all
the mischiefs, doubts, and inconveniences (both to the governors and the governed) arising
from the variety of tenures, rights, and claims in all cases of landed property and feudal
jurisdiction in India, from the informality, invalidity, and instability of all engagements in
so divided and unsettled a state of society, and from the unavoidable anarchy and confusion
of different laws, religions, and prejudices, moral, civil, and political, all jumbled together

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