h the directness of an epigram and with the
authority of a law. "Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation,
engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and caste,
with those that are born and bred in England." Outside the noble
simplicity of that ethical doctrine Burke could not and would not
budge. That sentence represents the whole difference between him and
the man whom he afterwards accused, between him and the men of whom
that man came to be the representative. Burke's morality was direct,
uncompromising, unalterable by climatic conditions or by the supple
moralities of other races. The morality of Warren Hastings and of
those who thought with and acted for Warren Hastings was the morality
of Clive beforehand, was the morality that had been professed and
practised time and again since the days of Clive and Hastings by the
inheritors of their policy in India. The ingenious theory was set up
that in {274} dealing with Oriental races it was essential for the
Englishman to employ Oriental means of carrying his point. If an
Oriental would lie and cheat and forge and, if needs were, murder, why
then the Englishman dealing with him must lie and cheat and forge and
murder too, in order to gain the day. Things that he would not dare to
do, things that, to do him justice, he would not dream of doing in
England, were not merely permissible but justifiable, not merely
justifiable but essential in his intercourse with Asiatic princes and
peoples, with dexterous Mohammedan and dexterous Hindoo. The policy
was inevitably new in Burke's time; it has been upheld again and again
since Burke's time. The theory which allowed Clive to forge and Warren
Hastings to plunder was the same principle which led English soldiers
three generations later to make Brahmins wipe up blood before being
killed, which prompted them to blow their prisoners from the cannon's
mouth in the hope that their victims should believe that their souls as
well as their bodies were about to perish, which instigated gallant men
to suggest in all seriousness the advisability of flaying alive their
captured mutineers. The influence of the East is not always a
wholesome influence upon the wanderer from the West. It is displayed
at its worst when it leads great men, as Clive and Hastings undoubtedly
were great men, into the perpetration of evil actions, and the
justification of them on the principle that in dealing with an Oriental
the Englishman