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It is not wonderful, says Sir Alfred Lyall, that Hastings's application failed entirely, "remembering that even Lord Nelson's last testamentary appeal on behalf of a woman 'the only favor I ask of my King and my country at the moment when I am going to fight their battle' had been rejected and utterly disregarded." Mrs.
"Ah, true! to carry what thy pannier contains; open it. Holy Paul! a strange jonglerie indeed! This Master Adam Warner, methinks, I have heard his name a learned man um let me see his safe conduct. Right, it is Lord Hastings's signature."
Our desire of acquiring sovereignty in India undoubtedly originated first in ideas of safety and necessity; its next step was a step of ambition. That ambition, as generally happens in conquest, was followed by gains of money; but afterwards there was no mixture at all; it was, during Mr. Hastings's time, altogether a business of money. This is directly contrary to the principles of conquerors.
Hastings on the river Ganges, in September, 1784, that Ganges whose purifying water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings's hands a little clean of bribery, and would have rolled down its golden sands like another Pactolus. Here we find him discovering another of his bribes.
They assembled at every rallying point, and, drawing up on all sides nearer and nearer to Hastings's army, they finally stopped his march, and forced him to call all his forces in, and intrench himself in the first place of retreat that he could find. Thus his very success was the means of turning his good fortune into disaster.
And the said Hastings did assume, as to a dependant of the lowest order, to prescribe to him the conditions on which he is to hold his place, to threaten him with scrutinies into his conduct, with dismission, with punishment, that he was guilty of falsehood and duplicity, and that he had made his master assert what was true to be false, that he suspected he had withheld from his master what he ought to have paid to him, that the event of his having prevailed on the Nabob to intrust him as aforesaid was, according to his, the said Hastings's, own letter, written to the said Hyder Beg Khân himself, "an accumulation of distress, debasement, and dissatisfaction to the Nabob, and of disappointment and disgrace to me.
While, however, these negotiations were going on between the two camps, Alfred suddenly found that the main body of Hastings's army had stolen away in the rear, and were marching off by stealth to another part of the country. The negotiations were, of course, immediately abandoned, and Alfred set off with all his forces in full pursuit.
I wish your Lordships always to take Mr. Hastings's word, where it can be had, or Mr. Larkins's, who was the representative of and memory-keeper to Mr. Hastings; and then I may perhaps take the liberty of making some observations upon it. Extract of a Letter from William Larkins, Accountant-General of Bengal, to the Chairman of the East India Company, dated 5th August, 1786. "Mr.
Hastings's account, he was giving daily and hourly wounds to his humanity in depriving of their sustenance hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of a great fallen kingdom.
To afford your Lordships some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr. Hastings's hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing.
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