We charge this as a
substantive crime, and as the forerunner of the oppression, desolation,
and ruin of that miserable country.
Mr. Hastings having thus rendered the Council blind and ignorant, and
consequently fit for subserviency, what does he next do? I am speaking,
not with regard to the time of his particular acts, but with regard to
the general spirit of the proceedings. He next flies in the face of the
Company upon the same principle on which he removed Mr. Fowke from
Benares. "I removed _him_ on political grounds," says he, "against the
orders of the Court of Directors, because I thought it necessary that
the Resident should be a man of my own nomination and confidence." At
Oude he proceeds on the same principle. Mr. Bristow had been nominated
to the office of Resident by the Court of Directors. Mr. Hastings, by an
act of Parliament, was ordered to obey the Court of Directors. He
positively refuses to receive Mr. Bristow, for no other reason that we
know of but because he was nominated by the Court of Directors; he
defies the Court, and declares in effect that they shall not govern that
province, but that he will govern it by a Resident of his own.
Your Lordships will mark his progress in the establishment of that new
system, which, he says, he had been obliged to adopt by the evil system
of his predecessors.
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