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Home Great Britain and India, 1763-1823 1763-1823; Part 4 |
1763-1823; Part 4Warren Hastings had not only, however, to fight and to organize, but also to secure dividends for the shareholders of the East India Company. His expenses, indeed, were so great that he committed actions for which he was impeached soon after his return home. Into the details of his famous trial, which lasted for a hundred and forty-five days and lingered over seven years (1788-95), we have no space to enter. He was finally acquitted, but Burke, the great orator of Warren Hastings' time, and Macaulay, the great historian of a subsequent generation, unsparingly condemned him. Of some charges, however, modern investigations show that he was quite innocent. He did not, for instance, connive at the hanging of a famous Hindoo, Nuncomar by name, on an unjust charge of forgery because Nuncomar was on the point of exposing Hastings' own acts of corruption (Nuncomar was hanged for forgery, but there is no reason for believing that the decision was an unjust one, or that Warren Hastings had anything to do with it). Nor did he, in order to extort money very unjustly from the blameless mother and grandmother of the Nabob of Oudh, cruelly torture their blameless ministers; the truth being that the Begums - as the mother and grandmother were called - had departed from Oudh with a large sum of money which really belonged to the State, and that probably only slight coercion was needed to induce the ministers to return it.In other matters Warren Hastings may have acted unwisely, as, for instance, when he let troops out on hire to the Nabob of Oudh for the suppression of the Rohillas, a turbulent tribe of Afghans; or inflicted upon the Rajah of Benares an enormous fine because he refused to pay a sum of money for the expenses of the war. But though it is impossible to justify everything that Clive or Hastings did, we must remember that to the former is due the beginning of our Empire in India, and that the latter not only succeeded in retaining, in the darkest days of our Imperial existence, every acre of land that we then possessed in India, but in leaving our dominions strengthened and organized. Warren Hastings is a not unworthy beginner of that long line of governor-generals and viceroys of whom it has been said that they represent a higher level of ruling qualities than has been attained by any line of hereditary sovereigns, or by any line of elected presidents. |
Chronology |
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