what else could have been expected or designed by this sweeping subversion of the control of the company's servants over the collection of the revenue, and the vesting of it in a black dewan, but fraud and peculation? What else, I say, was to be expected in the inextricable turnings and windings of that black mystery of iniquity, but the concealment of every species of wrong, violence, outrage, and oppression? Your lordships then have seen, that the whole country was put into the hands of Gunga Govin Sing; and when you remember who this Gunga Govin Sing was, and how effectually Mr. Hastings had secured him against detection, in every part of his malpractices and atrocities, can you for a moment hesitate to believe, that the whole project was planned and executed for the purpose of putting all Bengal under contribution to Mr. Hastings? But if you are resolved, after all this, to entertain a good opinion of Mr. Hastings-if you have taken it into your heads, for reasons best known to yourselves, to imagine that he has some hidden virtues, which in the government of Bengal he has not displayed, and which, to us of the House of Commons, have not been discernible in any one single instance; these virtues may be fit subjects for paragraphs in newspapers -they may be pleaded for him by the partisans of his Indian faction. But your lordships will do well to remember that it is not to Mr. Hastings himself that you are trusting, but to Gunga Govin Sing. If the committee were tools in his hands, must not Mr. Hastings have also been a tool in his hands? If they, with whom he daily and hourly had to transact business, and whose office it was to control and restrain him, were unable so to do, is this control and restraint to be expected from Mr. Hastings, who was his confidant, and whose corrupt transactions he could at any time discover to the world? My worthy colleague has traced the whole of Mr. Hastings's bribe account, in the most clear and satisfactory manner, to Gunga Govin Sing-him first-him lasthim midst, and without end. If we fail of the conviction

of the prisoner at your bar, your lordships will not have acquitted Mr. Hastings merely, but you will confirm all the robberies and rapines of Gunga Govin Sing. You will recognise him as a faithful governor of India. Yes, my lords, let us rejoice in this man. Let us adopt him as our own. Let our country-let this House be proud of him! If Mr. Hastings can be acquitted, we must admit Gunga Govin Sing's government to be the greatest blessing that ever happened to mankind. But if Gunga Govin Sing's government be the greatest curse that ever befel suffering humanity, as we assert it to have been, there is the man that placed him in it; there is his father, his godfather, the first author and origin of all these evils and calamities. My lords, remember Dinagepore; remember the bribe of £40,000, which Gunga Govin Sing procured for Mr. Hastings in that province, and the subsequent horror of that scene.

But, my lords, do you extend your confidence to Gunga Govin Sing? Not even the face of this man, to whom the revenues of the company, together with the estates, fortunes, reputations, and lives of the inhabitants of that country were delivered over, is known in those provinces. He resides at Calcutta, and is represented by a variety of under agents. Do you know Govin Ghose? Do you know Nundalol? Do you know the whole tribe of peculators, whom Mr. Hastings calls his faithful domestic servants? Do you know all the persons that Gunga Govin Sing must employ in the various ramifications of the revenues throughout all the provinces? Are you prepared to trust all these? The board of revenue has confessed that it could not control them. Mr. Hastings himself could not control them. The establishment of this system was like Sin's opening the gates of hell; like her he could open the gate, but to shut, as Milton says, exceeded his power. The former establishments, if defective, or if abuses were found in them, might have been corrected. There was at least the means of detecting and punishing abuse. But Mr. Hastings destroyed the means of doing

either, by putting the whole country into the hands of Gunga Govin Sing.

Now, having seen all these things done, look to the account. Your lordships will now be pleased to look at this business, as a mere account of revenue. You will find, on comparing the three years in which Mr. Hastings was in the minority, with the three years after the appointment of this committee, that the assessment upon the country increased, but that the revenue was diminished; and you will also find, which is a matter that ought to astonish you, that the expenses of the collections were increased, by no less a sum than £500,000. You may judge from this what riot there was in rapacity and ravage, both amongst the European and native agents, but chiefly amongst the natives; for Mr. Hastings did not divide the greatest part of this spoil among the company's servants, but among this gang of black dependants.

These accounts are in pages 1273 and 1274 of your minutes. My lords, weighty indeed would have been the charge brought before your lordships by the Commons of Great Britain, against the prisoner at your bar, if they had fixed upon no other crime or misdemeanor than that which I am now pressing upon you. His throwing off the allegiance of the company, his putting a black master over himself, and his subjecting the whole of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, the whole of the company's servants, the company's revenues, the company's farms, to Gunga Govin Sing. But, my lords, it is a very curious and remarkable thing, that we have traced this man as Mr. Hastings's bribe broker, up to the time of the nomination of this committee; we have traced him through a regular series of bribery; he is Mr. Hastings's bribe broker at Patna; he is Mr. Hastings's bribe broker at Nuddea; he is his bribe broker at Dinagepore; we find him his bribe broker in all these places; but from the moment that this committee was constituted, it became a gulph in which the prevention, the detection, and the correction of all kind of abuses were

sunk and lost for ever. From the time when this committee and Gunga Govin Sing were appointed, you do not find one word more of Mr. Hastings's bribes. Had he then ceased to receive any? or where are you to look for them? You are to look for them in that £500,000 excess of expense in the revenue department, and in the rest of all that corrupt traffic of Gunga Govin Sing, of which we gave you specimens at the time we proved his known bribes to you. These are nothing but index hands to point out to you the immense mass of corruption which had its origin, and was daily accumulating in these provinces, under the protection of Mr. Hastings. And can you think, and can we talk of such transactions, without feeling emotions of indignation and horror not to be described? Can we contemplate such scenes as these -can we look upon those desolated provinces-upon a country so ravaged-a people so subdued-Mahomedans, Gentoos, our own countrymen all trampled under foot, by this tyrant; can we do this without giving expression to those feelings, which, after animating us in this life, will comfort us when we die, and will form our best part in another?

My lords, I am now at the last day of my endeavors to inspire your lordships with a just sense of these unexampled atrocities. I have had a great encyclopedia of crimes to deal with; I will get through them as soon as I can; and I pray your lordships to believe, that if I omit any thing, it is to time I sacrifice it; that it is to want of strength I sacrifice it; that it is to necessity, and not from any despair of making, from the records and from the evidence, matter so omitted as black as any thing that I have yet brought before you.

The next thing, of which I have to remind your lordships respecting these black agents of the prisoner, is, that we find him just before his departure from India, recommending three of them-Gunga Govin Sing, Gunga Ghose, and Nundalol, as persons fit and necessary to be rewarded for their services by the company. Now your lordships will find that of these faithful domestic servants, there is not one of them who was

not concerned in these enormous briberies, and in betraying their own native and natural master. If I had time for it, I believe, I could trace every person to be, in proportion to Mr. Hastings's confidence in him, the author of some great villany. These persons, he thinks, had not been sufficiently rewarded, and accordingly he recommends to the board, as his dying legacy, provision for these faithful, attached servants of his, and particularly for Gunga Govin Sing. The manner in which this man was to be rewarded makes a part of the history of these transactions, as curious perhaps as was ever exhibited to the world. Your lordships will find it in page 2841 of your minutes.

The rajah of Dinagepore was a child at that time about eleven years old, and had succeeded to the rajahship, (by what means I shall say nothing,) when he was about five years old. He is made to apply to Mr. Hastings for leave to grant a very considerable part of his estate to Gunga Govin Sing, as a reward for his services. These services could only be known to the rajah's family, by having robbed it of at least £40,000, the bribe given to Mr. Hastings. But the rajah's family is so little satisfied with this bountiful and liberal donation to Gunga Govin Sing, that they desire that several pergunnahs or farms, that are mentioned in the application made to the the council, should be separated from the family estate and given to this man. Such was this extraordinary gratitude; gratitude not for money received, but for money taken away; a species of gratitude unknown in any part of the world but in India; gratitude pervading every branch of the family; his mother coming forward and petitioning likewise, that her son should be disinherited; his uncle, the natural protector and guardian of his minority, coming forward, and petitioning most earnestly, that his nephew should be disinherited; all the family join in one voice of supplication to Mr. Hastings, that Gunga Govin Sing may have a very large and considerable part of their family estate given to him. Mr. Hastings, after declaring that cer