We purpose to make good to your lordships the first of these by submitting to you, that part of those sums, which are specified in the charge, were taken by him with his own hand, and in his own person; but that much the greater part have been taken from the natives by the instrumentality of his black agents, banyans, and other dependants; whose confidential connexion with him, and whose agency, on his part, in corrupt transactions, if his counsel should be bold enough to challenge us to the proof, we shall fully prove before you.

The next part, and the second branch of his corruption, namely, what is commonly called his active corruption, distinguishing the personal under the name of passive, will appear from his having given, under colour of contracts, a number of corrupt and lucrative advantages, from a number of unauthorized and unreasonable grants, pensions, and allowances, by which he corrupted actively the whole service of the company. And, lastly, we shall show, that by establishing a universal connivance from one end of the service to the other, he has not only corrupted and contaminated it in all its parts, but bound it in a common league of iniquity to support mutually each other against the inquiry, that should detect, and the justice, that should punish, their offences. These two charges, namely, of his active, and passive corruption, we shall bring one after the other, as strongly and clearly illustrating, and as powerfully confirming, each other.

The first, which we shall bring before you, is his own passive corruption, so we commonly call it. Bribes are so little known in this country, that we can hardly get clear and specifick technical names to distinguish them; but, in future, I am afraid, the conduct of Mr. Hastings will improve our law vocabulary. The first, then, of these offences, with which Mr. Hastings stands charged here, is receiving bribes himself, or through his banyans; every one of these are overt acts of the general charge of bribery, and they are every one of them, separately taken, substantive crimes. But whatever the criminal nature of these acts was-and the nature was very criminal, and the conse

quences to the country very dreadful,-yet we mean to prove to your lordships, that they were not single acts, that they were not acts committed, as opportunity offered, or as necessity tempted, or urged upon the occasion; but, that they are parts of a general systematick plan of corruption, for advancing his fortune at the expense of his integrity; that he has, for that purpose, not only taken the opportunity of his own power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and created complete revolutions in the country's government for the purpose of making the power, which ought to be subservient to legal government, subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice, he endeavoured to justify them by principle. These artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean to attack, and, with your lordships' aid, to demolish, destroy, and subvert for ever.

My lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of collusion, concealment, and deceit, your lordships will, perhaps, not feel the same degree of interest as in the others. Hitherto, you have had before you crimes of dignity. You have had before you the ruin and expulsion of great and illustrious families; the breach of solemn publick treaties; the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses in Asia: but the crimes, which are the most striking to the imagination, are not always the most pernicious in their effects in these high eminent acts of domineering tyranny their very magnitude proves a sort of corrective to their virulence. The occasions, on which they can be exercised, are rare; the persons, upon whom they can be exercised, few; the persons, who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many. These high tragick acts of superiour overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superiour wickedness in eminent station.

But, my lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect that high situation, when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication, falsehood, mis

representation, and forgery; when all these follow in one train when these vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime that throne, which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is much greater: it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt government. They are reptile vices. There are situations, in which the acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of little importance. In the other, the mischief of the example is infinite.

My lords, when once a governour-general receives bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the inferiour parts of the service. The bridles upon hard-mouthed passion are removed, they are taken away, they are broken; fear and shame, the great guards to virtue next to conscience, are gone;-shame! how can it exist?-it will soon blush away its awkward sensibility; shame, my lords, cannot exist long when it is seen, that crimes, which naturally bring disgrace, are attended with all the outward symbols, characteristics, and rewards of honour and of virtue; when it is seen, that high station, great rank, general applause, vast wealth, follow the commission of peculation and bribery; is it to be believed, that men can long be ashamed of that, which they see to be the road to honour? As to fear, let a governourgeneral once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service. What have they to fear? Is it the man, whose example they follow, that is to bring them before a tribunal for their punishment ?-Can he open any inquiry? he cannot; he, that opens a channel of inquiry under these circumstances, opens a high road to his own detection. Can he make any laws to prevent it? none; for he can make no laws to restrain that practice without the breach of his own laws immediately in his own conduct. If we once can admit, for a single instant, in a governour-general, a principle however defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope left in the supreme

justice of the country. We are sensible of all these difficulties; we have felt them, and perhaps it has required no small degree of exertion for us to get the better of these difficulties, which are thrown in our way by a governourgeneral accepting bribes, and thereby screening and protecting the whole service in such iniquitous proceedings.

With regard to this matter, we are to state to your lordships, in order to bring it fully and distinctly before you, what the nature of this distemper of bribery is in the Indian government. We are to state, what the laws and rules are, which have been opposed to prevent it, and the utter insufficiency of all, that have been proposed to state the grievance, the instructions of the company, and government, the acts of parliament, the constructions upon the acts of parliament. We are to state to your lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings. We are to state the trust the company had in him for the prevention of all those evils; and then we are to prove, that every evil, that all those grievances, which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a special, direct and immediate trust, to prevent.-We are to prove to your lordships, that he is the man, who, in his own person collectively, has done more mischief than all those persons, whose evil practices have produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own appointment.

The first thing, that we shall do, is to state, and which we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the antient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper of the company's affairs in India, from the time of their first establishment there. Very often, there are no words, nor any description, which can adequately convey the state of a thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself, because the former might be suspected of exaggeration. You might think that, which was really fact, to be nothing but the colouring of the person, that explained it; and therefore I think, that it will be much better to give to your lordships here a direct state of the presidency at the time, when the company enact

ed those covenants, which Mr. Hastings entered into, and when they took those measures to prevent the very evils from persons placed in those very stations, and in those very circumstances, in which we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the offences, we now bring before you.

I wish your lordships to know, that we are going to read a consultation of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming the state of the company, in order to show the magnitude of the pecuniary corruptions, that prevailed in it.

"It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and profess to your interests and to our own honour, that we think it indispensably necessary to lay open to your view a series of transactions too notoriously known to be suppressed, and too affecting to your interest, to the national character, and to the existence of the company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured :-transactions, which seem to demonstrate, that every spring of this government was smeared with corruption, that principles of rapacity and oppression universally prevailed, and that every spark of sentiment and publick spirit was lost and extinguished in the unbounded lust of unmerited wealth.

"To illustrate these positions we must exhibit to your view a most unpleasing variety of complaints, inquiries, accusations, and vindications, the particulars of which are entered in our proceedings, and the appendix; assuring you, that we undertake this task with peculiar reluctance, from the personal regard we entertain for some of the gentlemen, whose characters will appear to be deeply affected.

"At Fort St. George we received the first advices of the demise of Meer Jaffier, and of Shuja Dowla's defeat: It was there firmly imagined, that no definitive measures would be taken, either in respect to a peace, or filling the vacancy in the nizamut, before our arrival; as the Lapwing arrived in the month of January with your general letter, and the appointment of a committee with express powers to that purpose; for the successful exertion of which the happiest occasion now offered. However, a contrary resolution prevailed in the council. The opportunity of acquiring im