... fix principles, because your Lordships are not called upon to judge of facts. A jury may find facts, but no jury can form a judgment of law; it is an application of the law to the fact that makes the act criminal or laudable. You must find a fixed standard of some kind or other; for if there is no standard but the immediate momentary purpose of the day, guided and governed by the man who uses it, fixed not only for the disposition of all the wealth and strength of the state, but for the life, fortune, and property of every individual, your Lordships are left without a principle to direct your judgment. This high court-this supreme court of appeal from all the courts of the kingdom;-this highest court of criminal jurisdiction, exercised upon the requisition of the House of Commons, if left without a rule, would be as lawless as the wild savage, and as unprincipled as the Prisoner that stands at your bar. Our whole issue is upon principles, and what I shall say to you will be in perpetual reference to them, because it is better to have no principles at all than to have false principles of government and of morality. Leave a man to his passions, and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature. A wild beast indeed, when its stomach is full will caress you, and may lick your hands; in like manner when a tyrant is pleased or his pasison satiated, you may may have a happy and serene day under an arbitrary government. But when the principle founded on solid reason, which ought to restrain passion, is perverted from its proper end, the false principle will be substituted for it, and then man becomes ten times worse than a wild beast. The evil principle grown solid and perennial, goads him on and takes entire possession of his mind; and then perhaps the best refuge that you can have from that diabolical principle, is in the natural wild passions and unbridled appetites of mankind. This is a dreadful state of things; and therefore we have thought it necessary to say a great deal upon his principles. My Lords, we come next to apply these principles to facts which cannot otherwise be judged, as we have contended and do now contend. I will not go over facts which have been opened to you by my Fellow Managers; if I did so, I should appear to have a distrust, which I am sure no other man has, of the greatest abilities displayed in the greatest of all causes. I should be guilty of a presumption, which I hope I shall not dream of, but leave to those who exercise arbitrary power; in supposing that I could go over the ground which my Fellow Managers have once trodden, and make any thing more clear and forcible than they have done. In my humble opinion, human ability cannot go farther than than they have gone, and if I ever allude to any thing which they have already touched, it will be to shew it in another light;-to mark more particularly its departure from the principles upon which we contend you ought to judge or to supply those parts which through bodily infirmity, and I am sure nothing else, one of my excellent Fellow Managers has left untouched. I am here alluding to the case of Cheit Sing. My honourable Fellow Manager Mr. Grey, has stated to you all the circumstances requisite to prove two things:-First, that the demands made by Mr. Hastings upon Cheit Sing, were contrary to fundamental treaties between the Company and that Rajah:-and next, that they were the result and effect of private malice and corruption. This having been stated and proved to you, I shall take up the subject where it was left. My Lords, in the first place I have to remark to you, that the whole of the charge originally brought by Mr. Hastings against Cheit Sing, in justification of his wicked and tyrannical proceedings, is, that he had been dilatory, evasive, shuffling, and unwilling to pay that which, however unwilling, evasive, and shuffling, he did pay. And that, with regard to the business of furnishing cavalry, the Rajah has asserted, and his assertion has not been denied, that when he was desired desired by the Council to furnish these troopers, the purpose for which this application was made, was not mentioned or alluded to, nor was there any place of muster pointed out. We therefore contended, that the demand was not made for the service of the state; but for the oppression of the individual that suffered by it. But admitting the Rajah to have been guilty of delay and unwillingness, what is the nature of the offence? If you strip it of the epithets by which it has been disguised, it merely amounts to an unwillingness in the Rajah, to pay more than the sums stipulated by the mutual agreement existing between him and the Company. This is the whole of it; the whole front and head of the offence, and for this offence such as it is, and admitting that he could be legally fined for it, he was subjected to the secret punishment of giving a bribe to Mr. Hastings, by which he was to buy off the fine, and which was consequently a commutation for it. That your Lordships may be enabled to judge more fully of the nature of this offence, let us see in what relation Cheit Sing stood with the Company. He was, my Lords, a person cloathed with every one of the attributes of sovereignty, under a direct stipulation that the Company should not interfere in his internal government. The military and civil authority, the power of life and death, the whole revenue, and the whole administration of the law, rested in him. Such was the sovereignty he possessed within Benares; but he was a subordinate sovereign dependent upon a superior, according to the tenor of his compact, expressed or implied. Now having contended, as we still contend, that the law of nations is the law of India as well as of Europe, because it is the law of reason and the law of nature, drawn from the pure sources of morality, of publick good, and of natural equity, and recognised and digested into order by the labour of learned men, I will refer your Lordships to Vattel, book 1. cap. 16. where he treats of the breach of such agreements, by the protector refusing to give protection, or the protected refusing to perform his part of the engagement. My design in referring you to this author, is to prove that Cheit Sing, so far from being blameable in raising objections to the unauthorized demand made upon him by Mr. Hastings, was absolutely bound to do so, nor could he have done otherwise, without hazarding the whole benefit of the agreement upon which his subjection and protection were founded. The law is the same with respect to both contracting parties; if the protected or protector does not fulfil with fidelity each his separate stipulation, the protected may resist the unauthorized demand of the pro tector, |