Writings and Speeches, Volume 9

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J. F. Taylor, 1901 - Great Britain

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Page 453 - Lords, this arbitrary power is not to be had by conquest. Nor can any sovereign have it by succession ; for no man can succeed to fraud, rapine, and violence. Neither by compact, covenant, or...
Page 333 - We charge this offender with no crimes that have not arisen from passions which it is criminal to harbor; with no offences that have not their root in avarice, rapacity, pride, insolence, ferocity, treachery, cruelty, malignity of temper; in short, in nothing that does not argue a total extinction of all moral principle, that does not manifest an inveterate blackness of heart, dyed in grain with malice, vitiated, corrupted, gangrened to the very core.
Page 450 - But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any country in Asia that we are acquainted with. It is certainly not true of any Mahomedan constitution. But if it were, do your Lordships really think that the nation would bear, that any human creature would bear, to hear an English governor defend himself on such principles ? or, if he can defend himself on such principles, is it possible to deny the conclusion, that no man in India has a security for anything, but by being totally...
Page 453 - ... title, by which it may rule others at its pleasure. By conquest, which is a more immediate designation of the hand of God, the conqueror succeeds to all the painful duties and subordination to the power of God which belonged to the sovereign whom he lias displaced, just as if he had come in by the positive law of some descent or some election. To this at least he is strictly bound : he ought to govern them as he governs his own subjects.
Page 454 - Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property ; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms ; it is blasphemy in religion ; it is wickedness in politicks, to say, that any man can have arbitrary power.
Page 477 - Hastings the snpreme power of King and Parliament, that he should act with the plenitude of authority of the British legislature, you are to judge. Mr. Hastings has no refuge here. Let him run from law to law ; let him fly from the common law and the sacred institutions of the country in which he was born ; let him fly from acts of Parliament, from which his power originated ; let him plead his ignorance of them, or fly in the face of them.
Page 262 - An Act for establishing certain Regulations for the better Management of the Affairs of the East India Company, as well in India as in Europe...
Page 345 - But those high sovereign powers were given to the East India Company. So that when it had acquired them all, which it did about the end of the reign of Charles the Second, the East India Company did not seem to be merely a company formed for the extension of the British commerce, but in reality a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of this kingdom sent into the East.
Page 339 - ... there were no tribunals at all. In my humble opinion, it would be better a thousand times to give all complainants the short answer the Dey of Algiers gave a British ambassador, representing certain grievances suffered by the British merchants, — " My friend," (as the story is related by Dr.
Page 451 - He have arbitrary power ! My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him ; the king has no arbitrary power to give him ; your Lordships have not ; nor the Commons, nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give.

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