reduced to a wretched dependent on the Company, and subject to all the evils of that des graded state :-subject to extortion, to indignity, to oppression. All these, your Lordships are called upon to sanction; and, because they may be connected with an existing system, you are to declare them to be an allowable part of a code for the government of British India.

In the year 1775, that powerful, magnificent and illustrious Prince Sujah Dowlah, died in possession of the country of Oude. He had long governed a happy and contented people, and, if we except the portion of tyranny which we admit he really did exercise towards some few individuals, who resisted his power, he was a wise and beneficent governour. This prince died in the midst of his power and fortune, leaving somewhere about fourscore children. Your Lordships know, that the princes of the East have a great number of wives; and we know that these women, though reputed of a secondary rank, are yet of a very high degree, and honourably maintained according to the customs of the East. Sujah Dowlah had but one lawful wife: he had by her but one lawful child, Azoph ul Dowlah. He had about twenty-one male children; the eldest of whom was a person whom you have heard of very often in these proceedings, called Saadit Ali. Azoph ul Dowlah,

being the sole legitimate son, had all the pretensions to succeed his father as Sabadar of Oude, which could belong to any person under the Mogul government.

Your Lordships will distinguish between a Zemindar, who is a perpetual landholder, the hereditary proprietor of an estate; and a Subadar, who derives from his master's will and pleasure all his employments, and who, instead of having the jaghirdars subject to his supposed arbitrary will, is himself a subject, and must have his sovereign's patent for his place. Therefore, strictly and properly speaking, there is no succession in the office of Subadar. At this time the Company, who alone could obtain the sunnuds or patent from the Great Mogul, upon account of the power they possessed in India, thought, and thought rightly, that with an officer who had no hereditary power, there could be no hereditary engagements; and that in their treaty with Azoph ul Dowlah, for whom they had procured the sunnud from the Great Mogul, they were at liberty to propose their own terms, which, if honourable and mutually advantageous to the new Subadar and to the Company, they had a right to insist upon. A treaty was therefore concluded between the Company and Azoph ul Dowlah, in which the latter stipulated to pay a fixed subsidy for the maintenance of a certain number

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number of troops; by which the Company's finances were greatly relieved and their military strength greatly increased.

This treaty did not contain one word which could justify any interference in the Nabob's government. That evil system, as Mr. Hastings calls it, is not even mentioned or alluded to; nor is there, I again say, one word which authorized Warren Hastings, or any other person whatever, to interfere in the interior affairs of his country. He was legally constituted Viceroy of Oude. His dignity of Vizier of the Empire, with all the power which that office gave him, derived from and held under the Mogul government, he legally possessed; and this evil system, which Mr. Hastings says led him to commit the enormities. of which you shall hear by and by, was neither more nor less than what I have now stated.

A

But, my Lords, the Prisoner thinks, that when under any pretence any sort of means could be furnished, of interfering in the government of the country, he has a right to avail himself of them; to use them at his pleasure; and to govern by his own arbitrary will. The Vizier, he says, by this treaty, was reduced to a state of vassalage; and he makes this curious distinction in proof of it. It was, he says, an optional vassalage, for if he chose to get rid of our troops, he might do so and be free; if he had not a

mind to do that and found a benefit in it, then he was a vassal. But there is nothing less true. Here is a person who keeps a subsidiary body of your troops, which he is to pay for you, and in consequence of this Mr. Hastings maintains, that he becomes a vassal. I shall not dispute whether vassalage is optional, or by force, or in what way Mr. Hastings considered this prince as a vassal of the Company. Let it be as he pleased. I only think it necessary that your Lordsips should truly know the actual state of that country, and the ground upon which Mr. Hastings stood. Your Lordships will find it a fairy land, in which there is a perpetual masquerade, where no one thing appears as it really is, where the person who seems to have the authority is a slave, while the person who seems to be the slave has the authority. In that ambiguous government every thing favours fraud; every thing favours peculation; every thing favours violence; every thing favours concealment. You will, therefore, permit me to shew to you what were the principles upon which Mr. Hastings appears, according to the evidence before you, to have acted; what the state of the country was, according to his conceptions of it; and then you will see how he applied those principles to that state.

"The means by which our government ac