XXXI. That the said Warren Hastings did also advance another dangerous
and pernicious principle in justification of his violent, arbitrary, and
iniquitous actings aforesaid: namely, "that, if he had acted with an
unwarrantable rigor, and even injustice, towards Cheyt Sing, yet, first,
if he did _believe_ that extraordinary means were necessary, and those
exerted with a strong hand, to preserve the Company's interests from
sinking under the accumulated weight that oppressed them, or, secondly,
if he saw a _political necessity_ for curbing the _overgrown_ power of a
great member of their dominion, and to make it contribute to the relief
of their pressing exigencies, that his error would be excusable, as
prompted by an excess of zeal for their [the Company's] interest,
operating with too strong a bias on his judgment; but that much stronger
is the presumption, that such acts are founded on just principles than
that they are the result of a misguided judgment." That the said
doctrines are, in both the members thereof, subversive of all the
principles of just government, by empowering a governor with delegated
authority, in the first case, on his own private _belief_ concerning the
necessities of the state, not to levy an impartial and equal rate of
taxation suitable to the circumstances of the several members of the
community, but to select any individual from the same as an object of
arbitrary and unmeasured imposition,--and, in the second case, enabling
the same governor, on the same arbitrary principles, to determine whose
property should be considered as overgrown, and to reduce the same at
his pleasure.
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