advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals. (especially in great and arduous cases like this,) if we did not look, not to the immediate, not to the retrospective, but to the provident operation of justice. Its chief operation is in its future. example; and this turns the balance, upon the total effect, in favour of vindictive justice, and in some measure reconciles a pious and humble mind to this great, mysterious dispensation of the world.

Upon the charge of delay in this particular Cause, my Lords, I have only to say, that the business before you is of immense magnitude. The Prisoner himself says, that all the acts of his life are committed in it. With a due sense of this magnitude, we know that the investigation could not be short to us, nor short to your Lordships; but when we are called upon, as we have been daily, to sympathize with the Prisoner in that delay, my Lords, we must tell you, that we have no sympathy with him. Rejecting, as we have done, all false, spurious, and hypocritical virtues, we should hold it to be the greatest of all crimes, to bestow upon the oppressors that pity which belongs to the oppressed. The unhappy persons who are wronged, robbed, and despoiled, have no remedy but in the sympathies of mankind; and when these sympathies

are

are suffered to be debauched, when they are perversely carried from the victim to the oppressor, then we commit a robbery still greater than that which was committed by the criminal accused.

We

My Lords, we do think this process long, we lament it in every sense in which it ought to be lamented; but we lament still more that the Begums have been so long without having a just punishment inflicted upon their spoiler. lament that Cheit Sing has so long been a wanderer, while the man who drove him from his dominions is still unpunished. We are sorry that Nobkissen has been cheated of his money for fourteen years, without obtaining redress. These are our sympathies, my Lords, and thus we reply to this part of the Charge.

My Lords, there are some matters of fact in this charge of delay, which I must beg your Lordships will look into. On the 19th of February 1789, the Prisoner presented a petition to your Lordships, in which he states, after many other complaints, that a great number of his witnesses were obliged to go to India, by which he has lost the benefit of their testimony; and that a great number of your Lordships' body were dead, by which he has lost the benefit of their judgment. As to the hand of God, though some Members of your House may have departed

D 2

parted this life since the commencement of this Trial, yet the body always remains entire. The evidence before you is the same; and therefore there is no reason to presume that your final judgment will be affected by these afflicting dispensations of Providence. With regard to his witnesses, I must beg to remind your Lordships of one extraordinary fact. This Prisoner has sent to India, and obtained, not testimonies, but testimonials to his general good behaviour. He has never once applied, by commission or otherwise, to falsify any one fact that is charged upon him. No, my Lords, not one; therefore that part of his petition, which states the injury he has received from the Commons of Great Britain, is totally false and groundless; for if he had any witnesses to examine, he would not have failed to examine them. If he had asked for a commission to receive their depositions, a commission would have been granted; if, without a commission, he had brought affidavits to facts, or regular recorded testimony, the Commons of Great Britain would never have rejected such evidence, even though they could not have cross-examined it.

Another complaint is, that many of his witnesses were obliged to leave England, before he could make use of their evidence. My Lords, no delay in the Trial has prevented him from

producing

producing any evidence, for we were willing that any of his witnesses should be examined at any time most convenient to himself. If many persons connected with his measures are gone to India, during the course of his Trial, many others have returned to England. Mr. Larkins returned; was the Prisoner willing to examine him? No; and it was nothing but downright shame, and the presumptions which he knew would be drawn against him, if he did not call this witness, which finally induced him to make use of his evidence. We examined Mr. Larkins, my Lords; we examined all the Prisoners witnesses; your Lordships have their testimony; and down to this very hour, he has not put his hand upon any one, whom he thought a proper and essential witness to the facts, or to any part of the Cause, whose examination has been denied him; nor has he even stated, that any man, if brought here, would prove such and such points. No, not one word to this effect has ever been stated by the Prisoner.

There is, my Lords, another case, which was noticed by my honourable Fellow Manager yesterday. Mr. Belli, the confidential secretary of the Prisoner, was agent and contractor for stores; and this raised a suspicion, that the contracts were held by him for the Prisoner's advantage. Mr. Belli was here during the whole time of the D 3 trial,

trial, and six weeks after we had closed our evidence. We had then no longer the arrangement of the order of witnesses, and he might have called whom he pleased. With the full knowledge of these circumstances, that witness did he suffer to depart for India, if he did not even encourage his departure. This, my Lords, is the kind of damage, which he has suffered by the want of witnesses, through the protraction of this trial.

But the great and serious evil which he complains of, as being occasioned by our delay, is of so extraordinary a nature, that I must request your Lordships to examine it with extraordinary strictness and attention. In the petition before your Lordships, the Prisoner asserts, that he was under the necessity, through his counsel and solicitors, "of collecting and collating from the voluminous records of the Company the whole history of his publick life, in order to form a complete defence to every allegation, which the Honourable House of Commons had preferred against him. And that he has expended upwards of thirty thousand pounds in preparing the materials of his defence."

It is evident, my Lords, that the expenditure of this thirty thousand pounds is not properly connected with the delay of which he complains; for he states, that he had incurred this loss

17

merely