A.D. 1784.1

INHUMAN TREATMENT OF THE NATIVES IN INDIA.

most. They were then beat on the soles of their feet till their toe-nails dropped off! They were afterwards flogged upon the naked body with bamboo canes and prickly bushes, and, above all, with some poisonous weeds, which were of a caustic nature, and burnt at every touch. The cruelty of the minister who had ordered all this, had contrived how to tear the mind as well as the body. He frequently had a father and son tied naked to one another by the feet and arms, and then flogged till the skin was torn from the flesh; and he had the devilish satisfaction to know that every blow must hurt; for if one escaped the son, his sensibility was wounded by the knowledge that the blow had fallen upon his father. The same torture was felt by the father, when he knew that every blow that missed him had fallen upon the son.

"The treatment of the females could not be described. Dragged from the inmost recesses of their houses, which the religion of their country had made so many sanctuaries, they were exposed naked to public view! The virgins were carried to the court of justice, where they might naturally have looked for protection, but they now looked for it in vain ; for in the face of the ministers of justice, in the face of the spectators, in the face of the sun, those tender and modest virgins were brutally violated. The only difference between their treatment and that of their mothers was, that the former were dishonoured in the face of day, and the latter in the gloomy recesses of their dungeon. Other females had the nipples of their breasts put into a cleft bamboo, and torn off!"

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us, which was not likely to decrease from the necessity they were under of concealing it. My attention," he said, "has been, during the last five-and-twenty years, particularly directed to the dangerous species of secret war carried on against our authority, which is always carried on by numerous, though unseen hands. The spirit is kept up by letters, by exaggerated reports, by pretended prophecies. When the time appears favourable, from the occurrence of misfortune to our arms, from rebellion in our provinces, or from mutiny in our troops, circular letters and proclamations are dispersed over the country with a celerity that is incredible. Such documents are read with avidity. Their contents are, in most cases, the same. The English are depicted as usurpers of low caste, and as tyrants, who have sought India only to degrade the natives, to rob them of their wealth, and subvert their usages and religion. The native soldiers are always appealed to, and the advice to them is, in all instances that I have met with, the same, Your European tyrants are few in number-murder them!'"

The attempt has at length been made on a mighty scale; nor is this the only retribution of our deeds in India. The cholera, which has repeatedly swept Europe with its deathwing, has been traced to Bengal as its source, where it has been, in the opinion of scientific men, created by the privation of salt, so necessary to the natives with their vegetable food, that salt being placed, for the most part, beyond their reach by an imposition of two hundred per cent.

Hastings, one of the earliest and most inexorable of the tyrants who have ultimately produced such awful fruits— Hastings, the patron of Devi Sing, and numbers like himwas now traversing the countries cursed by his rule. He arrived on the 27th of March at Lucknow, and remained there five months, busily engaged in vain endeavours to

drain of the English governinent at Calcutta. In fact, one of the main objects of his suit was to obtain more money from the nabob; and he did obtain it, but he agreed to relieve him of part of the company's troops, which the nabob had so long prayed to be rid of, and for which he paid enormously. Another matter was to do some little justice to the begum. This was strictly enjoined him by the board of directors. That board, spite of the gilded statements of Hastings regarding his proceedings at Benares, had not been able to shut their eyes to the monstrous conduct of their governor-general. They had written him, that it nowhere appeared, from the papers laid before them, that the begums had anything to do with the insurrection, and they therefore ordered that the jaghires should be returned to them. If they were innocent, as undoubtedly they were, the money ought to have been returned too; but that would have been inconvenient. Hastings ordered the nabob to go to Fyzabad and surrender the jaghires to his mother and grandmother, but the nabob only returned part of them, protesting that the Begums had made a voluntary gift of the rest to him.

What follows is too shocking and indecent to transcribe. It is almost impossible, in the perusal of these frightful and savage enormities, to believe that we are reading the history of a country under a British government, and that these deeds were perpetrated by British agents, and for the purpose of extort-remedy the evils which had their hopeless roots in the huge ing the British revenue. But these innocent and unhappy people were thus treated because Warren Hastings wanted money, and had sold them to a wretch, whom he knew to be a wretch, for a bribe; they were thus treated because Devi Sing had paid him four lacs of rupees, and must wring them again out of the miserable ryots, though it were with their very life's blood, and with fire and tortures, before unheard of, even in the long, black catalogue of human crimes. And it should never be forgotten, that though Mr. Burke pledged himself, if permitted, under the most awful imprecations, to prove every word of this barbarous recital, such permission was stoutly refused; and that, moreover, the evidence of commissioner Patterson stands on the company's. own records. In fact, this, terrible as it is, is but a small portion of the iniquity of the treatment of the natives of India then, and, indeed, so long as the company continued to hold the destinies of India in their hands. The reader cannot help wondering, as he reads, at the non-interference of an indignant Providence; but the Nemesis has come in our own time. There has been, indeed, an active endeavour to represent the revolt and terrible vengeance of the sepoys as having nothing to do with the feelings of the people at large. But those who think so have only to read what was said by Sir John Malcolm in a debate at the India-house in 1824, himself a governor and laudator of our system, that "even the instructed class of natives have a hostile feeling towards

Whilst Hastings was at Lucknow, the eldest son of poor old Shah Alum, the great mogul, paid him a visit to persuade him to intercede with the Mahrattas, who kept the shah still a prisoner at Delhi. Hastings was not likely to risk a war with the Mihrattas on account of the mogul,

On the 1st of June Burke brought forward his first charge

vation, that I possess the good opinion of my country.” His country had not yet been fully enlightened on his doings—the Rohilla war. The debate was not finished till seven in India-doings, however, which do not seem to have in any degree troubled his own conscience, for he had one of those accommodating ones which have in all ages induced some of the greatest tyrants to regard themselves as the peculiar benefactors of their race. He was busy trying to purchase Daylesford, the old family estate, and anticipating

a peerage.

o'clock on the morning of the 3rd. In it Fox, Wyndhara, Wilbraham, and many others supported the charge. Dundas, Pitt, lord Mornington, the pious Wilberforce, &c., opposed it. It was the first appearance of lord Mornington, afterwards marquis of Wellesley, and destined to figure greatly himself in India. The motion was rejected by one hundred and nineteen against sixty-seven, and it was fondly hoped that the proceedings against Hastings were altogether crushed. Lord Thurlow advised the king to carry out his intention to make Hastings baron Daylesford, and the great talk in the clubs and west-end assemblies was the triumph of Hastings. But the rejoicing was premature. On the 13th of June Fox took up the second charge-the treatment of Cheyte Sing, and Francis, with all the bitterness of his character and of his hatred of Hastings, supported it. So black were the facts now produced that Pitt was compelled to give way. He defended the governor-general for calling on Cheyte Sing to contribute men and money for the war against Mysore; he lauded the firmness, decision, and great ability of Hastings, but he was forced to admit that he had been excessive in his demands on the zemindars of Benares, and must support the charge!

But this was only the lull before the storm. Burke and Sheridan were living, and the thunderbolts were already forged which were to shatter his pleasing dream of approval. His agreeable delusion was, indeed, quickly at an end. On the 24th of January parliament met, and an officious friend of Hastings, unfortunately for the ex-governor-general, relying on the manifestation of approbation of Hastings by the court and the fashionable circles, for the people regarded him in a very different light, got up and asked where now was that menace of impeachment which Mr. Burke had so long and often held out? Burke thus challenged, on the 17th of February rose and made a call for papers and correspondence deposited in the India-house, relative to the proceedings of Hastings in India. He also reminded Pitt and Dundas of the motion of the latter on the 29th of May, 1782, in censure of the conduct of Hastings on the occasions This was a thunderstroke to Hastings and his friends. in question. This was nailing the ministers to the question; Fifty of Pitt's followers immediately wheeled round with but Dundas, now at the head of the board of control, re- him; Dundas voted with Pitt, and the motion was carried peated that he still condemned the conduct of Hastings, but by an exact inversion of the numbers which had negatived taken with the services which he had rendered to the coun- the former article on the Rohilla war, one hundred and try in India, he did not conceive that this conduct demanded nineteen against sixty-seven. The very next day Hastings more than censure, certainly not impeachment. Fox sup- presented a magnificent diamond, sent by the nabob of Oude ported Burke, and Pitt defended Hastings, and attacked in a purse containing also a letter to his majesty. The Fox without mercy. There was a feeling abroad that the presentation of this diamond the day after the defeat, at a king was determined to support Hastings, and the proceed-public levee, created universal remark. Caricatures, songs, ings of Pitt, who extenuated now what he had so often condemned, in the cases of the Rohilla war, Cheyte Sing, the begums, &c., confirmed this. Burke's demand for papers was refused, but this did not deter Burke. On the 4th of April he rose again and presented nine articles of impeachment against Hastings, and in the course of the week twelve more articles. To these a twenty-second article was afterwards added. These articles included all those extraordinary transactions which we have already detailed the Rohilla war; the affair of Benares; of the great mogul; the treaties with and coercions in Oude; the outrages on the begums and their ministers; the hanging of Nuncomar; the attempts upon Fyzoola Khan, the Rohilla chief, &c.

The affair was now becoming serious, and Hastings demanded to be heard at the bar, where he appeared on the 1st of May, and read a long defence, which did not go to a denial of the charges, but a justification of them, from the need of money to save India, and from the approbation awarded to these actions both in India and at the India-house. But this was no answer to Burke's accusations, which did not relate to the benefits he might have conferred on the English in India, or on the company, but to the crimes and atrocities perpetrated on the natives. Nobody doubted the satisfaction of the company, which had pouched forty lacs of rupees, or of the English in India, who were there to get all the money they could from the natives.

and epigrams, were issued in abundance. The king was represented on his knees, and Hastings putting the diamond into his mouth; in another caricature Hastings was wheeling George away in a wheelbarrow, with his crown and sceptre, and a label from Hastings' mouth, "What a man buys he may sell!" Sheridan passed some very severe witticisms on the circumstance in the house of commons. On the other hand, it was stated that the diamond had only reached Hastings on the 2nd of June, but this did not remove the significance of its presentation precisely the day after this adverse vote; and the session closed on the 11th of July with the rest of the charges hanging over the ex-governor's head in ominous gloom.

With this continuous narrative of Indian affairs we close this chapter, having now brought them to the present date of general history.

CHAPTER XI.

REIGN OF GEORGE III. (Continued.) The King attacked by a Mad Woman-Dissipations of the Prince of WalesOffers of Money to him from France-Arrangements for the Younger Princes-Death of Frederick of Prussia-Impending Troubles betwixt Prussia and Holland-Proposed Commercial Treaty with France-Ques tion regarding Scotch Peers-Beaufoy's Motion for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act rejected-Prince of Wales' Debts and Marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert-Transportation to New South Wales-Aboses in the Post Office-Lord Elcho unscated as the Eldest Son of a Scotch Peer -Burke proceeds with his Impeachment of Hastings-Various Charges

DISSIPATIONS OF THE PRINCE OF WALES.

admitted-A Committee appointed to conduct the Impeachment-last- | prince to maintain more respect for his father, never disings impeached at the Bar of the Lords-Hastings taken into Custody played the slightest disposition to act so generous and truly Holland-Insurrection in Belgium-Lord Rawdon on Naval Promotion-politic a part. On this account the prince hated him, and Pitt's Declaratory Indian Bill-Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey-Trial of Hastings in Westminster Hall-Parliament prorogued-Insanity of the Congratulations, &c.—Report on the Slave Trade-Pitt's Schemes of Finance-Hastings' Trial resumed-Differences betwixt the King and Prince of Wales-Death of Charles Edward, the Pretender-War betwixt Russia and Turkey-Ditto, betwixt Russia and Sweden-Ditto, betwixt Austria and Turkey-Affairs of Sweden-Austrian Troubles in Hungary