THE natives scarcely know what it is to see the grey head of an Englishman. Young men (boys almost) govern there, without society, and without sympathy with the natives. They have no more social habits with the people, than if they still resided in England. Animated with all the avarice of age, and all the impetuosity of youth, they roll in one after another; wave after wave; and there is nothing before the eyes of the natives but an endless, hopeless prospect of new flights of birds of prey and passage,* with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India.
With us no pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and which adorn a country out of its own spoils. England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by any thing better than the ouran-outang or the tiger.*
abridged
* A bird of passage is a migratory bird, one that does not reside permanently in a place.
* The orangutan is, of course, not a native of India, but this was a Bill concerning the whole East India Company, which had lively interests in Malaysia and right across the Far East. Britain’s administration of India did get better with the passage of time. Samuel Smiles, who quoted from this very speech, declared that with the coming of the railways in the 1850s, the English had at last done something for the Indians that the Indians could not have done for themselves: see Britain’s Best Gift to India. Indeed, if contemporary Indian historian Harsukh Rai is to be believed, British administration had improved out of all knowledge within twenty years of Burke’s speech: see Justice and Equity.