him.-Merciful God! Here is a man accused by regular articles of impeachment. The accuser declares he is morally certain that the money had been received, but was prevented from being applied to its destination by the person accused, and he acquits him. Does he acquit him from his own knowledge, or from any evidence? No; but he applies to the man's conscience, and says, if you in your conscience can acquit yourself, I acquit you.

Here then is a proceeding, the most astonishing and shameless that perhaps was ever witnessed; a court trying a man for a delinquency and misapplication of money, destined, in the first instance, for the use of the judge, but which he declares ought, in his own opinion, to be set apart for the public use; and which he was desirous of applying to the Company's service, without regard to his own interest; and then the judge declaring he is not sorry that his purpose had been defeated by the party accused. Instead, however, of censuring the accused, he applies to the man's own conscience-Does your conscience, says he, acquit you of having acted wrong? The accused makes no reply; and then Mr. Hastings, by an hypothetical conclusion, acquits him.

Mr. Hastings is accused by the Commons, for that having a moral certainty of the money's being intended for his use, he would not have ceased to inquire into the actual application of it, but from some corrupt motive and intention. With this he is charged. He comes before you to make his defence. Mr. Middleton is in England. Does he call Mr. Middleton to explain it here? Does he call upon Mr. Johnson, who was the other day in this court, to account for it? Why did he not, when he sent for these curious papers and testimonials to Major Palmer (the person authorized, as he pretends, by him to resign all his pretensions to the money procured), send for Major Palmer, who is the person that accused him in this business? Why not send for him to bear some testimony respecting it? No; he had time enough; but at no one time, and in no one place, did he do this; therefore the imputation of the foulest corruption attaches upon him, joined with the infamy of a collusive prosecution, instituted for the sake of a collusive acquittal.

Having explained to your lordships the nature, and detailed the circumstances, as far as we are acquainted with them, of

this fraudulent transaction, we have only further to remind you that, though Mr. Middleton was declared guilty of five of the six charges brought against him by Mr. Hastings, yet the next thing you hear is, that Mr. Hastings, after declaring that this conduct of Mr. Middleton had been very bad, and that the conduct of the other servants of the Company concerned with him had been ten times worse, he directly appoints him to one of the most honourable and confidential offices the Company had to dispose of—he sends him ambassador to the Nizam; to give to all the courts of India a specimen of the justice, honour, and decency of the British government.

My lords, with regard to the bribe for the entertainment, I only beg leave to make one observation to you upon that article. I could say, if the time would admit it, a great deal upon that subject; but I wish to compress it, and I shall therefore only recommend it in general to your lordships' deliberate consideration. The covenant subsisting between the Company and its servants was made for the express purpose of putting an end to all such entertainments. By this convention it is ordered that no presents exceeding £200 shall be accepted upon any pretence for an entertainment. The covenant was intended to put an end to the custom of receiving money for entertainments, even when visiting an independent oriental prince. But your lordships know that the Nabob was no prince, but a poor, miserable, undone dependant upon the Company. The present was also taken by Mr. Hastings at a time when he went upon the cruel commission of cutting down the Nabob's allowance from £400,000 to £260,000-and when he was reducing to beggary thousands of persons who were dependent for bread upon the Nabob, and ruining perhaps forty thousand others. I shall say no more upon that subject, though, in truth, it is a thing upon which much observation might be made.

I shall now pass on to another article connected with, though not making a direct part of, that of corrupt bribery; I mean the swindling subterfuges by which he has attempted to justify his corrupt practices. At one time he defends them by pleading the necessities of his own affairs, as when he takes presents and entertainments avowedly for his own profits. At another time he defends them by pleading the

goodness of his intentions. He intended, he says, to give the money to the Company. His last plea has something in it (which shall I say?) of a more awful or of a more abandoned character, or of both. In the settlement of his public account before he left India, he takes credit for a bond which he had received from Nobkissin, upon some account or other. He then returns to England, and what does he do? Pay off? No. Give up the bond to the Company? No. He says, I will account to the Company for this money; and when he comes to give this account of the expenditure of this money, your lordships will not be a little astonished at the items of it. One is for founding a Mahomedan college. It is a very strange thing that Rajah Nobkissin, who is a Gentoo, should be employed by Mr. Hastings to found a Mahomedan college. We will allow Mr. Hastings, who is a Christian, or would be thought a Christian, to grow pious at last; and as many others have done who have spent their lives in fraud, repacity, and peculation, to seek amends, and to expiate his crimes by charitable foundations. Nay, we will suppose Mr. Hastings to have taken it into his head to turn Mahomedan (Gentoo he could not), and to have designed by a Mahomedan foundation to expiate his offences. Be it so; but why should Nobkissin pay for it? We will pass over this also. But when your lordships shall hear of what nature that foundation was, I believe you will allow that a more extraordinary history never did appear in the world.

In the first place, he stated to the council on the 18th of April, 1781, that in the month of November, 1780, a petition was presented to him by a considerable number of Mussulmen; in compliance with which this Mahomedan college appears to have been founded. It next appears from his statement, that in the April following (that is, within about six months after the foundation), many students had finished their education. You see what a hot-bed bribery and corruption is; our universities cannot furnish an education in six years. In India they have completed it within six months, and have taken their degrees.

Mr. Hastings says, I have supported this establishment to this time at my own expense; I desire the Company will now defray the charge of it. He then calculates what the expenses were; he calculates that the building would cost about

£6,000, and he gets from the Company a bond to raise money for paying this £6,000. You apparently have the building now at the public expense, and Mr. Hastings still stands charged with the expense of the college for six months. He then proposes that a tract of land should be given for the college, to the value of about 3,000 odd pounds a year; and that in the mean time there should be a certain sum allotted for its expenses. After this Mr. Hastings writes a letter from the Ganges to the Company, in which he says not a word about the expense of the building; but says that the college was founded and maintained at his own expense, though it was thought to be maintained by the Company; and he fixes the commencement of the expense in September, 1779. But after all, we find that the very professor who was to be settled there never so much as arrived in Calcutta, or showed his face there, till some time afterwards. And look at Mr. Larkins's private accounts, and you will find that he charges the expense to have commenced not until October, 1781. It is no error, because it runs through and is so accounted in the whole; and it thus appears that he has charged, falsely and fraudulently, a year more for that establishment than it cost him.

At last then, when he was coming away (for I hasten to the conclusion of an affair, ludicrous indeed in some respects, but not unworthy of your lordships' consideration), "after remarking that he had experienced for three years the utility of this institution, he recommends that they will establish a fund for £3,000 a year for it, and give it to the master." He had left Gunga Govin Sing as a Gentoo legacy, and he now leaves the Mussulmen as a Mahomedan legacy, to the Company. Your lordships shall now hear what was the upshot of the whole. The Company soon afterwards hearing that this college was become the greatest nuisance in Calcutta, and that it had raised the cries of all the inhabitants against it, one of their servants, a Mr. Chapman, was deputed by the Governor, Sir John Shore, to examine into it, and your lordships will find the account he gives of it in your minutes. In short, my lords, we find that this was a seminary of robbers, house-breakers, and every nuisance to society; so that the Company was obliged to turn out the master, and to remodel the whole. Your lordships will now judge of the

merits and value of this, one of the sets-off brought forward by the prisoner against the charges which we have brought forward against him; it began in injustice and peculation, and ended in a seminary for robbers and house-breakers.

Nothing now remains to be pressed by me upon your lordships' consideration, but the account given by the late Governor-General, Earl Cornwallis, of the state in which he found the country left by his predecessor, Mr. Hastings, the prisoner at your bar. But patient as I know your lordships to be, I also know that your strength is not inexhaustible, and though what I have further to add will not consume much of your lordships' time, yet I conceive that there is a necessity for deferring it to another day.

[Adjourned.

TRIAL.

MONDAY, 16TH JUNE, 1794.

NINTH DAY OF REPLY.

(MR. BURKE.)

MY LORDS,-I should think it necessary to make an apology to your lordships for appearing before you one day more, if I were inclined to measure this business either by the standard of my own ability, or by my own impatience, or by any supposed impatience of yours. I know no measure in such a case, but the nature of the subject and the duty which we owe to it. You will therefore, my lords, permit me in a few words to lead you back to what we did yesterday, that you may the better comprehend the manner in which I mean to conclude the business to-day.

My lords, we took the liberty of stating to you the condition of Bengal before our taking possession of it, and of the several classes of its inhabitants. We first brought before you the Mahomedan inhabitants, who had the judicial authority of the country in their hands; and we proved to you