The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

one of the judges had received bribes before his appointment to an higher judiciary office,
he would not still be open to prosecution.

So far from admitting it as a plea in bar, we charge, and we hope your Lordships will find it
an extreme aggravation of his offences, that no favors heaped upon him could make him
grateful, no renewed and repeated trusts could make him faithful and honest.

We have now gone through most of the general topics.

But he is not responsible, as being thanked by the Court of Directors. He has had the thanks
and approbation of the India Company for his services.—We know too well here, I trust the
world knows, and you will always assert, that a pardon from the crown is not pleadable
here, that it cannot bar the impeachment of the Commons,—much less a pardon of the East
India Company, though it may involve them in guilt which might induce us to punish them
for such a pardon. If any corporation by collusion with criminals refuse to do their duty in
coercing them, the magistrates are answerable.

It is the use, virtue, and efficacy of Parliamentary judicial procedure, that it puts an end to
this dominion of faction, intrigue, cabal, and clandestine intelligences. The acts of men are
put to their proper test, and the works of darkness tried in the face of day,—not the
corrupted opinions of others on them, but their own intrinsic merits. We charge it as his
crime, that he bribed the Court of Directors to thank him for what they had condemned as
breaches of his duty.

The East India Company, it is true, have thanked him. They ought not to have done it; and
it is a reflection upon their character that they did it. But the Directors praise him in the

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