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Internet Modern History Sourcebook
Edmund Burke:
Speech in Commons on India, 1783
Despite the act if 1773, there were still concerns about the administration of
India.
... Our conquest there, after twenty years, is as crude as it was the first day.
The natives scarcely know what it Is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men
(boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They
have no more social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England; nor,
indeed, any species of intercourse but that which is necessary to making a sudden fortune,
with a view to a remote settlement. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the
impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave; and there is
nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of
birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is
continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to
India. With us are no retributory superstitions, by which a foundation of charity
compensates, through ages, to the poor, for the rapine and injustice of a day. With us no
pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and
which adorn a country out of its own spoils. England has erected no churches, no
hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut
no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description
has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven
out of India this day, nothing would remain, to tell that It had been possessed, during
the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the ourang-ourang or the
tiger.
There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse, than in the boys whom we are
whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home. But as
English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before
their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they
are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves
for remedy of the excesses of their premature power. The consequences of their conduct,
which in good minds, (and many of theirs are probably such,) might produce penitence or
amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight. Their prey is lodged in
England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every
breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean. In India all the vices
operate by which sudden fortune is acquired; in England are often displayed by the same
persons, the virtues which dispense hereditary wealth. Arrived in England, the destroyers
of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the best company in this nation,
at a board of elegance and hospitality. Here the manufacturer and husbandman will bless
the just and punctual hand that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the
scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very
opium in which he forgot his oppressions and his oppressor. They marry into your families;
they enter into your senate; they ease your estates by loans; they raise their value by
demand; they cherish and protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage; and
there is scarcely a house in the kingdom that does not feel some concern and interest,
that makes all reform of our eastern government appear officious and disgusting; and, on
the whole, a most discouraging attempt. In such an attempt you hurt those who are able to
return kindness, or to resent injury. If you succeed, you save those who cannot so much as
give you thanks. All these things show the difficulty of the work we have on hand; but
they show its necessity too. Our Indian government is in its best state a grievance. It is
necessary that the corrective should be uncommonly vigorous; and the work of men,
sanguine, warm, and even impassioned in the cause. But it is an arduous thing to plead
against abuses of a power which originates from your own country, and affects those whom
we are used to consider as strangers....
Source:
Taken from From D. B. Horn and Mary Ransome, eds., English Historical Documents,
17141783 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1957), pp. 821-822
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