From the book The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss.
Lev concludes his indictment of the Soviet secret police by recalling Edmund Burke‘s indictment, in Parliament, of Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India. Hastings had been impeached on a charge of oppressing the natives, and argued in his own defense that his actions could not be considered illegal because he had been granted arbitrary power in India.
To this the British conservative and hater of revolutionary injustice – but also of all kinds of injustice, whether revolutionary or not – replied:
“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…
Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal.”
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