The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

great increase of revenue, to be exacted from the country by the means hereinbefore
described. That this settlement was not realized, but fell considerably short, even in the first
of the five years, when the demand was the lightest; and that on the whole of the five years
the real collections fell short of the settlement to the enormous amount of two millions and
a half sterling, and upwards. That such a settlement, if it had been or could have been
rigorously exacted from a country already so distressed, and from a population so impaired,
that, in the belief of the said Warren Hastings, it was impossible such loss could be
recruited in four or five years, would have been in fact, what it appeared to be in form, an
act of the most cruel and tyrannical oppression; but that the real use made of that unjust
demand upon the natives of Bengal was, to oblige them to compound privately with the
persons who formed the settlement, and who threatened to enforce it. That the enormous
balances and remissions on that settlement arose from a general collusion between the
farmers and collectors, and from a general peculation and embezzlement of the revenues, by
which the East India Company was grossly imposed on, in the first instance, by a promised
increase of revenue, and defrauded, in the second, not only by the failure of that increase,
but by the revenues falling short of what they were in the two years preceding the said
settlement to a great amount. That the said Warren Hastings, being then at the head of the
government of Bengal, was a party to all the said imposition, fraud, peculation, and
embezzlement, and is principally and specially answerable for the same; and that, whereas
sundry proofs of the said peculation and embezzlement were brought before the Court of
Directors, the said Directors (in a letter dated the 4th of March, 1778, and signed by
William Devaynes and Nathaniel Smith, Esquires, now Chairman and Deputy-Chairman of
the said Court, and members of this House) did declare, that, "although it was rather their
wish to prevent future evils than to enter into a severe retrospection of past abuses, yet, as
in some of the cases then before them they conceived there had been flagrant corruption,

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