;

Scott he discovered all the engines of this Indian corruption. Mr. Hastings got that witness to swear, that this defence of his, from which the passages I have read to your Lordships are extracted, was not his, but that it was the work of his whole Council, composed of Mr. Middleton, Mr. Shore, Mr. Halhed, Mr. Baber, the whole body of his Indian Cabinet Council;-that this was their work and not his and that he disclaimed it, and therefore that it would be wrong to press it upon him. Good God, my Lords, what shall we say in this stage of the business? The Prisoner put in an elaborate defence, he now disclaims that defence. He told us, that it was of his own writing, that he had been able to compose it in five days, and he now gets five persons to contradict his own assertions, and to disprove on oath his most solemn declarations.

My Lords, this business appears still more alarming, when we find, not only Mr. Hastings, but his whole Council engaged in it. I pray your Lordships to observe, that Mr. Halhed, a person concerned with Mr. Hastings in compiling a code of Gentoo Laws, is now found to be one of the persons to whom this very defence is attributed, which contains such detestable and abominable doctrines. But are we to consider the contents of this paper as the defence

of

of the Prisoner, or not? Will any one say, that when an answer is sworn to in Chancery, when an answer is given here to an Impeachment of the Commons, or when a plea is made to an Indictment, that it is drawn by the defendant's counsel and therefore is not his? Did we not all hear him read this defence in part at our bar, did we not see him hand it to his secretary to have it read by his son, did he not then hear it read from end to end; did not he himself desire it to be printed, (for it was no act of ours,) and did he not superintend and revise the press, and has any breath but his own breathed upon it? No, my Lords, the whole composition is his by writing or adoption, and never till he found it pressed him in this House; never till your Lordships began to entertain the same abhorrence of it that we did, did he disclaim it.

But mark another stage of the propagation of these horrible principles. After having grounded upon them the defence of his conduct against our Charge, and after he had got a person to forswear them for him, and to prove him to have told falsehoods of the grossest kind to the House of Commons, he again adheres to this defence. The dog returned to his vomit. After having vomited out his vile, bilious stuff of arbitrary power, and afterwards denied it to be his, he gets his counsel in this place to resort to the

loathsome

loathsome mess again. They have thought proper, my Lords, to enter into an extended series of quotations from books of travellers, for the purpose of shewing that despotism was the only principle of government acknowledged in India; that the people have no laws, no rights, no pro perty moveable or immoveable, no distinction of ranks, nor any sense of disgrace. After citing a long line of travellers to this effect, they quote Montesquieu as asserting the same facts, declaring that the people of India had no sense of honour, and were only sensible of the whip as far as it produced corporal pain. They then proceed to state, that it was a government of misrule, productive of no happiness to the people, and that it so continued until subverted by the free government of Britain, namely, the government that Mr. Hastings describes as having himself exercised there.

My Lords, if the Prisoner can succeed in persuading us that these people have no laws, no rights, not even the common sentiments and feeling of men, he hopes your interest in them will be considerably lessened. He would persuade you, that their sufferings are much assuaged, by their being nothing new; and that having no right to property, to liberty, to honour, or to life, they must be more pleased with the little that is left to them, than grieved

.

for

for the much that has been ravished from them, by his cruelty and his avarice. This inference makes it very necessary for me, before I proceed further, to make a few remarks upon this part of the Prisoner's conduct, which your Lordships must have already felt with astonishment, perhaps with indignation. This man, who passed twenty-five years in India, who was fourteen years at the head of his government, master of all the offices, master of all the registers and records, master of all the lawyers and priests of all this empire, from the highest to the lowest, instead of producing to you the fruits of so many years local and official knowledge upon that subject, has called out a long line of the rabble of travellers, to inform you concerning the objects of his own government. That his learned counsel should be ignorant of those things, is a matter of course. That, if left to himself, the person, who has produced all this stuff, should, in pursuit of his darling arbitrary power, wander without a guide, or with false guides, is quite natural. But your Lordships must have heard with astonishment, that, upon points of law, relative to the tenure of lands, instead of producing any law document or authority on the usages and local customs of the country, he has referred to officers in the army, colonels of artillery and engineers, to young

gentlemen

gentlemen just come from school, not above three or four years in the country. Good God! would not one rather have expected to hear him put all these travellers to shame by the authority of a man, who had resided so long in the supreme situation of government; to set aside all these wild, loose, casual and silly observations of travellers and theorists? On the contrary, as if he was ignorant of every thing, as if he knew nothing of India, as if he had dropt from the clouds, he cites the observations of every stranger who had been hurried in a palanquin through the country, capable or incapable of observation, to prove to you the nature of the government, and of the power he had to exercise.

My Lords, the Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to resort to the ridiculous relations of travellers, or to the wild systems which ingenious men have thought proper to build on their authority; we will take another mode. We will undertake to prove the direct contrary of his assertions in every point and particular. We undertake to do this, because your Lordships know, and because the world knows, that if you go into a country, where you suppose man to be in a servile state; where, the despot excepted, there is no one person who can lift up his head above another; where all are a set of