So far from admitting it as a plea in bar, we charge, and we hope your lordships will find it an extreme aggravation of his offences, that no favors heaped upon him could make him grateful, no renewed and repeated trusts could make him faithful and honest. We have now gone through most of the general topics. But, he is not reasponsible, as being thanked by the court of directors. He has had the thanks and approbation of the India Company for his services. We knew too well here, I trust the world knows,-and you will always assert, that a pardon from the crown is not pleadable here, that it cannot bar the impeachment of the Commons; much less a pardon of the East-India Company, though it may involve them in guilt, which might induce us to punish them for such a pardon. If any corporation by collusion with criminals refuse to do their duty in coercing them, the magistrates are answerable. It is the use, virtue, and efficacy of parliamentary judicial procedure, that it puts an end to this dominion of faction, intrigue, cabal, and clandestine intelligences. The acts of men are put to their proper test, and the works of darkness tried in the face of day-not the corrupted opinion of others on them, but their own intrinsic merits. We charge it as his crime, that he bribed the court of directors to thank him for what they had condemned as breaches of his duty. The East-India Company, it is true, have thanked him. They ought not to have done it; and it is a reflection upon their character, that they did it. But the directors praise him in the gross, after having condemned each act in detail. His actions are all, every one, censured one by one, as they arise. I do not reccollect any one transaction, few there are, I am sure, in the whole body of that succession of crimes now brought before you for your judgment, in which the India Company have not censured him. Nay, in one instance he pleads their censure in bar of this trial; * for he * See Mr. Hastings's answer to the first charge. says "In that censure I have already received my punishment." If, for any other reasons, they come and say, "We thank you Sir, for all your services:" To that I answer, yes; and I would thank him for his services too, if I knew them. But I do not ;-perhaps they do. Let them thank him for those services. I am ordered to prosecute him for these crimes. Here, therefore, we are on a balance with the India Company; and your lordships may perhaps think it some addition to his crimes, that he has found means to obtain the thanks of the India Company for the whole of his conduct, at the same time that their records are full of constant, uniform, particular censure and reprobation of every one of those acts, for which he now stands accused. He says, there is the testimony of Indian princes in his favor. But do we not know how seals are obtained in that country? do we not know, how those princes are imposed upon? do we not know the subjection and thraldom, in which they are held, and that thanks for the sufferings, which your lordships will think, that some of these princes, a more dreadful thing, that can be said of them, than that he has obtained their thanks. they are obliged to return they have felt? I believe there is not, with regard to I understand he has obtained the thanks of the miserable princesses of Oude, whom he has cruelly imprisoned, whose treasure he has seized, and whose eunuchs he has tortured.* They thank him for going away. They thank him for leaving them the smallest trifle of their subsistence; and I venture to say, if he wanted a hundred more panegyrics, provided he never came again among them, he might have them. I understand, that Mahdajee Scindia has made his panegyric too. Mahdajee Scindia has not made his panegyric for nothing; for, if your lordships will suffer him to enter into such a justification, we shall prove, that he has * A Latin sentence, which is quoted here, is omitted in the MS. of the short-hand writer. Ed. sacrificed the dignity of this country, and the interests of all its allies, to that prince. We appear here neither with panegyric, nor with satire; it is for substantial crimes we bring him before you, and amongst others for cruelly using persons of the highest rank and consideration in India; and, when we prove he has cruelly injured them, you will think the panegyrics either gross forgeries, or most miserable aggravations of his offences, since they show the abject and dreadful state, into which he has driven those people. For, let it be proved, that I have cruelly robbed and maltreated any persons, if I produce a certificate from them of my good behavior, would it not be a corroborative proof of the terror, into which those persons are thrown by my misconduct? My lords, these are, I believe, the general grounds of our charge ;—I have now closed completely, and I hope, to your lordships' satisfaction, the whole body of history, of which I wished to put your lordships in possession. I do not mean, that many of your lordships may not have known it more perfectly by your own previous inquiries; but bringing to your remembrance the state of the circumstances of the persons, with whom he acted, the persons and power he has abused, I have gone to the principles he maintains, the precedents he quotes, the laws and authorities, which he refuses to abide by, and those, on which he relies, and at last I have refuted all those pleas in bar, on which he depends, and for the effect of which he presumes on the indulgence and patience of this country, or on the corruption of some persons in it. And here I close what I had to say upon this subject; wishing and hoping, that, when I open before your lordships the case more particularly, so as to state rather a plan of the proceeding, than the direct proof of the crimes, your lordships will hear me with the same goodness and indulgence I have hitherto experienced; you will consider, if I have detained you long, it was not with a view of exhausting my own strength, or putting your that patience to too severe a trial; but from the sense I feel, that it is the most difficult and the most complicated cause, that was ever brought before any human tribunal. Therefore I was resolved to bring the whole substantially before you. And now, if your lordships will permit me, I will state the method of my future proceeding, and the future proceeding of the gentlemen assisting me. I mean first to bring before you the crimes as they are classed, and are of the same species and genus; and how they mutually arose from one another. I shall first show, that Mr. Hastings's crimes had root in that, which is the root of all evil, I mean avarice; that avarice and rapacity were the groundwork and foundation of all his other vicious system; that he showed it in setting to sale the native government of the country; in setting to sale the whole landed interest of the country; in setting to sale the British government and his own fellow servants, to the basest and wickedest of mankind. I shall then show your lordships, that when, in consequence of such a body of corruption and peculation, he justly dreaded the indignation of his country, and the vengeance of its laws, in order to raise himself a faction, embodied by the same guilt and rewarded in the same manner, he has, with a most abandoned profusion, thrown away the revenues of the country to form such a faction here. I shall next show your lordships, that, having exhausted the resources of the company, and brought it to extreme difficulties within, he has looked to his external resources, as he calls them. He has gone up into the country. I will show, that he has plundered, or attempted to plunder, every person dependent upon, connected, or allied with this country. We shall afterwards show what infinite mischief has followed in the case of Benares, upon which he first laid his hands; next, in the case of the begums of Oude. We shall then lay before you the profligate system, by which he endeavored to oppress that country, first by resi dents, next by spies under the name of British agents; and lastly, that, pursuing his way up to the mountains, he has found out one miserable chief, whose crimes were the prosperity of his country; that him he endeavored to torture and destroy, I do not mean in his body, but by exhausting the treasures, which he kept for the benefit of his people. In short, having shown your lordships, that no man, who is in his power, is safe from his arbitrary will; that no man, within or without, friend, ally, rival, has been safe from him; having brought it to this point-if I am not able in my own person immediately to go up into the country, and show the ramifications of the system, (I hope and trust I shall be spared to take my part in pursuing him through both, if I am not,) I shall go at least to the root of it; and some other gentleman, with a thousand times more ability than I possess, will take up each separate part in its proper order. And I believe it is proposed by the managers, that one of them shall, as soon as possible, begin with the affair of Benares. The point I now mean first to bring before your lordships is the corruption of Mr. Hastings, his system of peculation and bribery; and to show your lordships the horrible consequences, which resulted from it: for, at first sight, bribery and peculation do not seem to be so horrid a matter; they may seem to be only the transferring a little money out of one pocket into another; but I shall show, that by such a system of bribery the country is undone. I shall inform your lordships in the best manner I can, and afterwards submit the whole, as I do with a cheerful heart and with an easy and assured security, to that justice, which is the security for all the other justice in the kingdom. 10* |