Theirs must be something superior to the government of angels; for I verily believe, if one out of the choir of the heavenly angels were sent to govern the earth, such is the nature of man, that many would be found discontented with it. But these people have no complaint, they feel no hardships, no sorrow. Mr. Hastings has realized more than the golden age. I am ashamed for human nature, I am ashamed for our government, I am ashamed for this court of justice, that these things are brought before us; but here they are, and we must observe upon them.

My lords, we have done on our part; we have made out our case; and it only remains for me to make a few observations upon what Mr. Hastings has thought proper to put forward in his defence. Does he meet our case with any thing but these general attestations, upon which I must first remark, that there is not one single matter of fact touched upon in them? Your lordships will observe, and you may hunt them out through the whole body of your minutes, that you do not find a single fact mentioned in any of them. But there is an abundance of panegyric; and if we were doing nothing but making satires, as the newspapers charge us with doing against Mr. Hastings, panegyric would be a good an

swer.

But Mr. Hastings sets up pleas of merit upon this occasion. Now, undoubtedly no plea of merit can be admitted to extinguish, as your lordships know very well, a direct charge of crime; merit cannot extinguish crime. For instance, if Lord Howe, to whom this country owes so much as it owes this day for the great and glorious victory which makes our hearts glad, and I hope will ensure the security of this country; yet if Lord Howe, I say, was charged with embezzling the king's stores, or applying them in any manner unbecoming his situation, to any shameful or scandalous purpose; if he was accused of taking advantage of his station to oppress any of the captains of his ships; if he was stated to have gone into a port of the allies of this country, and to have

plundered the inhabitants, to have robbed their women, and broken into the recesses of their apartments; if he had committed atrocities like these, his glorious victory could not change the nature and quality of such acts.

My Lord Malmesbury has been lately sent to the king of Prussia, and we hope and trust that his embassy will be successful, and that this country will derive great benefit from his negotiations. But if Lord Malmesbury, from any subsidy that was to be paid to the king of Prussia, was to put £50,000 in his own pocket, I believe that his making a good and advantageous treaty with the king of Prussia would never be thought a good defence for him. We admit, that, if a man has done great and eminent services, though they cannot be a defence against a charge of crimes, and cannot obliterate them; yet, when sentence comes to be passed upon such a man, you will consider first, whether his transgressions were common lapses of human frailty, and whether the nature and weight of the grievances resulting from them were light in comparison with the services performed. I say that you cannot acquit him. But your lordships might think some pity due to him, that might mitigate the severity of your sentence. In the second place, you would consider whether the evidence of the services, alleged to be performed, was as clear and undoubted as that of the crimes charged. I confess that, if a man has done great services, it may be some alleviation of lighter faults; but then they ought to be urged as such, with modesty, with humility, with confession of the faults; and not with a proud and insolent defiance. They should not be stated as proofs that he stands justified in the eye of mankind, for committing unexampled and enormous crimes. Indeed humility, suppliant guilt, always makes impression in our bosoms; so that, when we see it before us, we always remember that we are all frail men; and nothing but a proud defiance of law and justice can make us forget this for one moment. I believe the Commons of Great Britain, and I hope the persons that speak to you, know very well

how to allow for the faults and frailties of mankind equitably.

Let us now see what are the merits which Mr. Hastings has set up against the just vengeance of his country, and against his proved delinquencies. From the language of the prisoner, and of his counsel, you would imagine some great, known, acknowledged services had been done by him. Your lordships recollect that most of these presumed services have been considered, and we are persuaded justly considered as in themselves crimes. He wishes your lordships to suppose and believe, that these services were put aside, either because we could not prove the facts against him, or could not make out that they were criminal, and consequently that your lordships ought to presume them to have been meritorious; and this is one of the grounds upon which he demands to be acquitted of the charges that have been brought forward and proved against him. Finding in our proceedings, and recorded upon our journals, an immense mass of criminality with which he is charged; and finding that we had selected, as we were bound to select, such parts as might be most conveniently brought before your lordships, (for to have gone through the whole would have been nearly impossible,) he takes all the rest that we have left behind and have not brought here as charges, and converts them, by a strange metamorphosis, into merits.

My lords, we must insist, on the part of the House of Commons, we must conjure your lordships, for the honor of a coördinate branch of the legislature, that, whenever you are called upon to admit what we have condemned as crimes to be merits, you will at least give us an opportunity of being heard upon the matter; that you will not suffer Mr. Hastings, when attempting to defend himself against our charges, in an indirect and oblique manner, to condemn or censure the House of Commons itself, as having misrepresented to be crimes the acts of a meritorious servant of the public. Mr. Hastings has pleaded a variety of merits, and every one of

these merits, without the exception of one of them, have been either directly censured by the House of Commons, and censured as a ground for legislative provision, or they remain upon the records of the House of Commons, with the vouchers for them, and proofs; and though we have not actually come to the question upon every one of them, we had come before the year 1782 to forty-five direct resolutions upon his conduct. These resolutions were moved by a person to whom this country is under many obligations, and whom we must always mention with honor, whenever we are speaking of high situations in this country, and of great talents to support them, and of long public services in the House of Commons. I mean Mr. Dundas, then lord advocate of Scotland, and now one of the principal secretaries of state, and at the head, and worthily and deservedly at the head, of the East Indian department. This distinguished statesman moved forty-five resolutions, the major part of them directly condemning these very acts, which Mr. Hastings has pleaded as his merits, as being delinquencies and crimes. All that the House of Commons implore of your lordships is, that you will not take these things, which we call crimes, to be merits, without hearing the House of Commons upon the subjectmatter of them. I am sure you are too noble and too generous, as well as too just and equitable, to act in such a

manner.

The first thing that Mr. Hastings brings forward in his defence is, that, whereas the company were obliged to pay a certain tribute to the mogul, in consideration of a grant by which the moguls gave to us the legal title under which we hold the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, he did stop the payment of that tribute or acknowledgment, small as it was; that though bound by a treaty recognised by the company, and recognised by the nation; though bound by the very sunnud by which he held the very office he was exercising, yet he had broken the treaty, and refused to pay the stipulated acknowledgment. Where are we, my lords? Is

this merit? Good God Almighty! the greatest blockhead, the most ignorant, miserable wretch, a person without either virtue or talents, has nothing to do but to order a clerk to strike a pen through such an account, and then to make a merit of it to you. Oh! says he, I have by a mere breach of your faith, by a single dash of my pen, saved you all this money, which you were bound to pay. I have exonerated you from the payment of it. I have gained you £250,000 a year for ever. Will you not reward a person, who did you such a great and important service, by conniving a little at his delinquencies?

But the House of Commons will not allow that this was a great and important service; on the contrary, they have declared the act itself to be censurable. There is our resolution-resolution the 7th; "That the conduct of the company and their servants in India to the king, (meaning the Mogul king,) and Nudjiff Cawn, with respect to the tribute payable to the one, and stipend to the other, and with respect to the transfer of the provinces of Corah and Illahabad to the vizier, was contrary to policy and good faith; and that such wise and practicable measures should be adopted in future, as may tend to redeem the national honor, and recover the confidence and attachment of the princes of India."

This act of injustice, against which we have fulminated the thunder of our resolutions as a heavy crime-as a crime that dishonored the nation, and which measures ought to be taken to redress, this man has the insolence to bring before your lordships as a set-off against the crimes we charge him. with. This outrageous defiance of the House of Commons, this outrageous defiance of all the laws of his country, I hope your lordships will not countenance. You will not let it pass for nothing. On the contrary, you will consider it as aggravating, heavily, his crimes; and, above all, you will not suffer him to set off this, which we have declared to be injurious to our national honor and credit, and which he himself does not deny to be a breach of the public