The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III | Page 5

(which every man delicate with regard to character
would rather have sought constructions to avoid) were perfectly sound
and perfectly legal, of this I am certain, that they cannot be justified in
declining the inquiry which had been prescribed to the Court of

Directors. If the Board of Control did lawfully possess the right of
executing the special trust given to that court, they must take it as they
found it, subject to the very same regulations which bound the Court of
Directors. It will be allowed that the Court of Directors had no
authority to dispense with either the substance or the mode of inquiry
prescribed by the act of Parliament. If they had not, where in the act did
the Board of Control acquire that capacity? Indeed, it was impossible
they should acquire it. What must we think of the fabric and texture of
an act of Parliament which should find it necessary to prescribe a strict
inquisition, that should descend into minute regulations for the conduct
of that inquisition, that should commit this trust to a particular
description of men, and in the very same breath should enable another
body, at their own pleasure, to supersede all the provisions the
legislature had made, and to defeat the whole purpose, end, and object
of the law? This cannot be supposed even of an act of Parliament
conceived by the ministers themselves, and brought forth during the
delirium of the last session.
My honorable friend has told you in the speech which introduced his
motion, that fortunately this question is not a great deal involved in the
labyrinths of Indian detail. Certainly not. But if it were, I beg leave to
assure you that there is nothing in the Indian detail which is more
difficult than in the detail of any other business. I admit, because I have
some experience of the fact, that for the interior regulation of India a
minute knowledge of India is requisite. But on any specific matter of
delinquency in its government you are as capable of judging as if the
same thing were done at your door. Fraud, injustice, oppression,
peculation, engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family,
and cast with those that are born and bred in England. To go no farther
than the case before us: you are just as competent to judge whether the
sum of four millions sterling ought or ought not to be passed from the
public treasury into a private pocket without any title except the claim
of the parties, when the issue of fact is laid in Madras, as when it is laid
in Westminster. Terms of art, indeed, are different in different places;
but they are generally understood in none. The technical style of an
Indian treasury is not one jot more remote than the jargon of our own
Exchequer from the train of our ordinary ideas or the idiom of our
common language. The difference, therefore, in the two cases is not in

the comparative difficulty or facility of the two subjects, but in our
attention to the one and our total neglect of the other. Had this attention
and neglect been regulated by the value of the several objects, there
would be nothing to complain of. But the reverse of that supposition is
true. The scene of the Indian abuse is distant, indeed; but we must not
infer that the value of our interest in it is decreased in proportion as it
recedes from our view. In our politics, as in our common conduct, we
shall be worse than infants, if we do not put our senses under the tuition
of our judgment, and effectually cure ourselves of that optical illusion
which makes a brier at our nose of greater magnitude than an oak at
five hundred yards' distance.
I think I can trace all the calamities of this country to the single source
of our not having had steadily before our eyes a general,
comprehensive, well-connected, and well-proportioned view of the
whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their true bearings and
relations. After all its reductions, the British empire is still vast and
various. After all the reductions of the House of Commons, (stripped as
we are of our brightest ornaments and of our most important privileges,)
enough are yet left to furnish us, if we please, with means of showing
to the world that we deserve the superintendence of as large an empire
as this kingdom ever held, and the continuance of as ample privileges
as the House of Commons, in the plenitude of its power, had been
habituated to assert. But if we make ourselves too little for the sphere
of our duty, if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds
to