Chapter 2, Footnote #01 to Footnote #02
Oppression in India
Additional Note by the Author, July 1822.
Add, and that the bad system, of Mahometan and other native law was to be put down at all events, to make way for the inapplicable and still more mischievous system of English Judge-made law, and, by the hand of his accomplice Hastings, was to be put into the pocket of Impey —Importer of this instrument of subversion, £8,000 a-year contrary to law, in addition to the £8,000 a-year lavished upon him, with the customary profusion, by the hand of law. —See the Account of the transaction in Mill's British India.
To this Governor a statue is erecting by a vote of East India Directors and Proprietors: on it should be inscribed —Let it but put money into our pockets, no tyranny too flagitious to be worshipped by us.
To this statue of the Arch-malefactor should be added, for a companion, that of the long. robed accomplice: the one lodging the bribe in the hand of the other. The hundred millions of plundered and oppressed Hindoos and Mahometans pay for the one: a Westminster Hall subscription might pay for the other.
What they have done for Ireland with her seven millions of souls, the authorized deniers and perverters of justice have done for Hindostan with her hundred millions. In this there is nothing wonderful. The wonder is —that, under such institutions, men, though in ever such small number, should be found, whom the view of the injustices which, by English Judge-made law, they are compelled to commit, and the miseries they are thus compelled to produce, deprive of health and rest. witness the Letter of an English Hindostan Judge, Sept. 1, 1819, which lies before me. I will not make so cruel a requital for his honesty, as to put his name in print: indeed the House of Commons' Documents already published leave little need of it.