from this arbitrary power, but by having nothing to do with the British Government.

My Lords, the House of Commons has already well considered what may be our future moral and political condition when the persons who come from that school of pride, insolence, corruption, and tyranny, are more intimately mixed up with us of purer morals. Nothing but contamination can be the result, nothing but corruption can exist in this Country, unless we expunge this doctrine out of the very hearts and souls of the people. It is not to the gang of plunderers and robbers, of which I say this man is at the head, that we are only, or indeed principally, to look. Every man in Great Britain will be contaminated and must be corrupted, if you let loose among us whole legions. of men, generation after generation, tainted with these abominable vices, and avowing these detestable principles. It is therefore to preserve the integrity and honour of the Commons of Great Britain, that we have brought this man to your Lordships' Bar.

When these matters were first explained to your Lordships, and strongly enforced by abilities greater than I can exert, there was something like compunction shewn by the Prisoner: but he took the most strange mode to cover his guilt. Upon the cross-examination of Major

Scott

;

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 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 property 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 know. ledge 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