This scheme of covenants would have been wise and proper, if it had belonged to a judicious order, and rational, consistent scheme of discipline.  The orders of the Company have forbidden their servants to take any extraneous emoluments.  The act of Parliament has fulminated against them.  Clear, positive laws, and clear, positive private engagements, have no exception of circumstances in them, no difference quoad majus et minus; but every one who offends against the law is liable to the law.  The consequence is this:  he who has deviated but an inch from the straight line, he who has taken but one penny of unlawful emolument, (and all have taken many pennies of unlawful emolument,) does not dare to complain of the most abandoned extortion and cruel oppression in any of his fellow-servants.  He who has taken a trifle, perhaps as the reward of a good action, is obliged to be silent, when he sees whole nations desolated around him.  The great criminal at the head of the service has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the small offence, and crush the person who has committed it.  This is one grand source of Mr. Hastings’s power.  After he had got the better of the Parliamentary commission, no complaint from any part of the service has appeared against Mr. Hastings.  He is bold enough to state it as one presumption of his merit, that there has been no such complaint.  No such complaint, indeed, can exist.  The spirit of the corps would of itself almost forbid it,—­to which spirit an informer is the most odious and detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been hunted down, as a common enemy.  But here is a new security.  Who can complain, or dares to accuse?  The whole service is irregular:  nobody is free from small offences; and, as I have said, the great offender can always crush the small one.

If you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine, from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company’s service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption; but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes, you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary perfection.  He was fourteen years at the head of that service; and there is not an instance, no, not one single instance, in which he endeavored to detect corruption, or that he ever, in any one single instance, attempted to punish it; but the whole service, with that whole mass of enormity which he attributes to it, slept, as it were, at once, under his terror and his protection:  under his protection, if they did not dare to move against him; under terror, from his power to pluck out individuals and make a public example of them, whenever he thought fit.  And therefore that service, under his guidance and influence, was, beyond even what its own nature disposed it to, a service of confederacy, a service of connivance, a service composed of various systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head