Chapter VI: Part 6

Far, far from the Commons of Great Britain be all manner of real vice; but ten thousand times further from them, as far as from pole to pole, be the whole tribe of false, spurious, affected, counterfeit, hypocritical virtues! These are the things which are ten times more at war with real virtue, these are the things which are ten times more at war with real duty, than any vice known by its name and distinguished by its proper character. My Lords, far from us, I will add, be that false and affected candor that is eternally in treaty with crime,--that half virtue, which, like the ambiguous animal that flies about in the twilight of a compromise between day and night, is to a just man's eye an odious and disgusting thing! There is no middle point in which the Commons of Great Britain can meet tyranny and oppression. No, we never shall (nor can we conceive that we ever should) pass from this bar, without indignation, without rage and despair, if the House of Commons should, upon such a defence as has here been made against such a charge as they have produced, be foiled, baffled, and defeated. No, my Lords, we never could forget it; a long, lasting, deep, bitter memory of it would sink into our minds.

My Lords, the Commons of Great Britain have no doubt upon this subject. We came hither to call for justice, not to solve a problem; and if justice be denied us, the accused is not acquitted, but the tribunal is condemned. We know that this man is guilty of all the crimes which he stands accused of by us. We have not come here to you, in the rash heat of a day, with that fervor which sometimes prevails in popular assemblies, and frequently misleads them. No: if we have been guilty of error in this cause, it is a deliberate error, the fruit of long, laborious inquiry,--an error founded on a procedure in Parliament before we came here, the most minute, the most circumstantial, and the most cautious that ever was instituted. Instead of coming, as we did in Lord Strafford's case, and in some others, voting the impeachment and bringing it up on the same day, this impeachment was voted from a general sense prevailing in the House of Mr. Hastings's criminality after an investigation begun in the year 1780, and which produced in 1782 a body of resolutions condemnatory of almost the whole of his conduct. Those resolutions were formed by the Lord Advocate of Scotland, and carried in our House by the unanimous consent of all parties: I mean the then Lord Advocate of Scotland,--now one of his Majesty's principal Secretaries of State, and at the head of this very Indian department. Afterwards, when this defendant came home, in the year 1785, we reïnstituted our inquiry. We instituted it, as your Lordships and the world know, at his own request, made to us by his agent, then a member of our House. We entered into it at large; we deliberately moved for every paper which promised information on the subject. These papers were not only produced on the part of the prosecution, as is the case before grand juries, but the friends of the prisoner produced every document which they could produce for his justification. We called all the witnesses which could enlighten us in the cause, and the friends of the prisoner likewise called every witness that could possibly throw any light in his favor. After all these long deliberations, we referred the whole to a committee. When it had gone through that committee, and we thought it in a fit state to be digested into these charges, we referred the matter to another committee; and the result of that long examination and the labor of these committees is the impeachment now at your bar.

If, therefore, we are defeated here, we cannot plead for ourselves that we have done this from a sudden gust of passion, which sometimes agitates and sometimes misleads the most grave popular assemblies. No: it is either the fair result of twenty-two years' deliberation that we bring before you, or what the prisoner says is just and true,--that nothing but malice in the Commons of Great Britain could possibly produce such an accusation as the fruit of such an inquiry. My Lords, we admit this statement, we are at issue upon this point; and we are now before your Lordships, who are to determine whether this man has abused his power in India for fourteen years, or whether the Commons has abused their power of inquiry, made a mock of their inquisitorial authority, and turned it to purposes of private malice and revenge. We are not come here to compromise matters; we do not admit [do admit?] that our fame, our honors, nay, the very inquisitorial power of the House of Commons is gone, if this man be not guilty.

My Lords, great and powerful as the House of Commons is, (and great and powerful I hope it always will remain,) yet we cannot be insensible to the effects produced by the introduction of forty millions of money into this country from India. We know that the private fortunes which have been made there pervade this kingdom so universally that there is not a single parish in it unoccupied by the partisans of the defendant. We should fear that the faction which he has thus formed by the oppression of the people of India would be too strong for the House of Commons itself, with all its power and reputation, did we not know that we have brought before you a cause which nothing can resist.

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I shall now, my Lords, proceed to state what has been already done in this cause, and in what condition it now stands for your judgment.

An immense mass of criminality was digested by a committee of the House of Commons; but although this mass had been taken from another mass still greater, the House found it expedient to select twenty specific charges, which they afterwards directed us, their Managers, to bring to your Lordships' bar. Whether that which has been brought forward on these occasions or that which was left behind be more highly criminal, I for one, as a person most concerned in this inquiry, do assure, your Lordships that it is impossible for me to determine.

After we had brought forward this cause, (the greatest in extent that ever was tried before any human tribunal, to say nothing of the magnitude of its consequences,) we soon found, whatever the reasons might be, without at present blaming the prisoner, without blaming your Lordships, and far are we from imputing blame to ourselves, we soon found that this trial was likely to be protracted to an unusual length. The Managers of the Commons, feeling this, went up to their constituents to procure from them the means of reducing it within a compass fitter for their management and for your Lordships' judgment. Being furnished with this power, a second selection was made upon the principles of the first: not upon the idea that what we left could be less clearly sustained, but because we thought a selection should be made upon some juridical principle. With this impression on our minds, we reduced the whole cause to four great heads of guilt and criminality. Two of them, namely, Benares and the Begums, show the effects of his open violence and injustice; the other two expose the principles of pecuniary corruption upon which the prisoner proceeded: one of these displays his passive corruption in receiving bribes, and the other his active corruption, in which he has endeavored to defend his passive corruption by forming a most formidable faction both abroad and at home. There is hardly any one act of the prisoner's corruption in which there is not presumptive violence, nor any acts of his violence in which there are not presumptive proofs of corruption. These practices are so intimately blended with each other, that we thought the distribution which we have adopted would best bring before you the spirit and genius of his government; and we were convinced, that, if upon these four great heads of charge your Lordships should not find him guilty, nothing could be added to them which would persuade you so to do.

In this way and in this state the matter now comes before your Lordships. I need not tread over the ground which has been trod with such extraordinary abilities by my brother Managers, of whom I shall say nothing more than that the cause has been supported by abilities equal to it; and, my Lords, no abilities are beyond it. As to the part which I have sustained in this procedure, a sense of my own abilities, weighed with the importance of the cause, would have made me desirous of being left out of it; but I had a duty to perform which superseded every personal consideration, and that duty was obedience to the House of which I have the honor of being a member. This is all the apology I shall make. We are the Commons of Great Britain, and therefore cannot make apologies. I can make none for my obedience; they want none for their commands. They gave me this office, not from any confidence in my ability, but from a confidence in the abilities of those who were to assist me, and from a confidence in my zeal,--a quality, my Lords, which oftentimes supplies the want of great abilities.

In considering what relates to the prisoner and to his defence, I find the whole resolves itself into four heads: first, his demeanor, and his defence in general; secondly, the principles of his defence; thirdly, the means of that defence; and, fourthly, the testimonies which he brings forward to fortify those means, to support those principles, and to justify that demeanor.

As to his demeanor, my Lords, I will venture to say, that, if we fully examine the conduct of all prisoners brought before this high tribunal, from the time that the Duke of Suffolk appeared before it down to the time of the appearance of my Lord Macclesfield, if we fully examine the conduct of prisoners in every station of life, from my Lord Bacon, down to the smugglers who were impeached in the reign of King William, I say, my Lords, that we shall not, in the whole history of Parliamentary trials, find anything similar to the demeanor of the prisoner at your bar. What could have encouraged that demeanor your Lordships will, when you reflect seriously upon this matter, consider. God forbid that the authority either of the prosecutor or of the judge should dishearten the prisoner so as to circumscribe the means or enervate the vigor of his defence! God forbid that such a thing should even appear to be desired by anybody in any British tribunal! But, my Lords, there is a behavior which broadly displays a want of sense, a want of feeling, a want of decorum,--a behavior which indicates an habitual depravity of mind, that has no sentiments of propriety, no feeling for the relations of life, no conformity to the circumstances of human affairs. This behavior does not indicate the spirit of injured innocence, but the audacity of hardened, habitual, shameless guilt,--affording legitimate grounds for inferring a very defective education, very evil society, or very vicious habits of life. There is, my Lords, a nobleness in modesty, while insolence is always base and servile. A man who is under the accusation of his country is under a very great misfortune. His innocence, indeed, may at length shine out like the sun, yet for a moment it is under a cloud; his honor is in abeyance, his estimation is suspended, and he stands, as it were, a doubtful person in the eyes of all human society. In that situation, not a timid, not an abject, but undoubtedly a modest behavior, would become a person even of the most exalted dignity and of the firmest fortitude.

The Romans (who were a people that understood the decorum of life as well as we do) considered a person accused to stand in such a doubtful situation that from the moment of accusation he assumed either a mourning or some squalid garb, although, by the nature of their constitution, accusations were brought forward by one of their lowest magistrates. The spirit of that decent usage has continued from the time of the Romans till this very day. No man was ever brought before your Lordships that did not carry the outward as well as inward demeanor of modesty, of fear, of apprehension, of a sense of his situation, of a sense of our accusation, and a sense of your Lordships' dignity.

These, however, are but outward things; they are, as Hamlet says, "things which a man may play." But, my Lords, this prisoner has gone a great deal further than being merely deficient in decent humility. Instead of defending himself, he has, with a degree of insolence unparalleled in the history of pride and guilt, cast out a recriminatory accusation upon the House of Commons. Instead of considering himself as a person already under the condemnation of his country, and uncertain whether or not that condemnation shall receive the sanction of your verdict, he ranks himself with the suffering heroes of antiquity. Joining with them, he accuses us, the representatives of his country, of the blackest ingratitude, of the basest motives, of the most abominable oppression, not only of an innocent, but of a most meritorious individual, who, in your and in our service, has sacrificed his health, his fortune, and even suffered his fame and character to be called in question from one end of the world to the other. This, I say, he charges upon the Commons of Great Britain; and he charges it before the Court of Peers of the same kingdom. Had I not heard this language from the prisoner, and afterwards from his counsel, I must confess I could hardly have believed that any man could so comport himself at your Lordships' bar.

After stating in his defence the wonderful things he did for us, he says,--"I maintained the wars which were of your formation, or that of others, _not of mine_. I won one member of the great Indian confederacy from it by an act of seasonable restitution; with another I maintained a secret intercourse, and converted him into a friend; a third I drew off by diversion and negotiation, and employed him as the instrument of peace. When _you_ cried out for peace, and your cries were heard by those who were the objects of it, I resisted this and every other species of counteraction by rising in my demands, and accomplished a peace, and I hope an everlasting one, with one great state; and I at least afforded the efficient means by which a peace, if not so durable, more seasonable at least, was accomplished with another. I gave you _all_; and you have rewarded me with _confiscation, disgrace, and a life of impeachment_."

Comparing our conduct with that of the people of India, he says,--"_They_ manifested a generosity of which we have no example in the European world. Their conduct was the effect of their sense of gratitude for the benefits they had received from my administration. I wish I could say as much of my own countrymen."

My Lords, here, then, we have the prisoner at your bar in his demeanor not defending himself, but recriminating upon his country, charging it with perfidy, ingratitude, and oppression, and making a comparison of it with the banians of India, whom he prefers to the Commons of Great Britain.

My Lords, what shall we say to this demeanor? With regard to the charge of using him with ingratitude, there are two points to be considered. First, the charge implies that he had rendered great services; and, secondly, that he has been falsely accused.

My Lords, as to the great services, they have not, they cannot, come in evidence before you. If you have received such evidence, you have received it obliquely; for there is no other direct proof before your Lordships of such services than that of there having been great distresses and great calamities in India during his government. Upon these distresses and calamities he has, indeed, attempted to justify obliquely the corruption that has been charged upon him; but you have not properly in issue these services. You cannot admit the evidence of any such services received directly from him, as a matter of recriminatory charge upon the House of Commons, because you have not suffered that House to examine into the validity and merit of this plea. We have not been heard upon this recriminatory charge, which makes a considerable part of the demeanor of the prisoner; we cannot be heard upon it; and therefore I demand, on the part of the Commons of Great Britain, that it be dismissed from your consideration: and this I demand, whether you take it as an attempt to render odious the conduct of the Commons, whether you take it in mitigation of the punishment due to the prisoner for his crimes, or whether it be adduced as a presumption that so virtuous a servant never could be guilty of the offences with which we charge him. In whichever of these lights you may be inclined to consider this matter, I say you have it not in evidence before you; and therefore you must expunge it from your thoughts, and separate it entirely from your judgment. I shall hereafter have occasion, to say a few words on this subject of _merits_. I have said thus much at present in order to remove extraneous impressions from your minds. For, admitting that your Lordships are the best judges, as I well know that you are, yet I cannot say that you are not men, and that matter of this kind, however irrelevant, may not make an impression upon you. It does, therefore, become us to take some occasional notice of these supposed services, not in the way of argument, but with a view by one sort of prejudice to destroy another prejudice. If there is anything in evidence which tends to destroy this plea of merits, we shall recur to that evidence; if there is nothing to destroy it but argument, we shall have recourse to that argument; and if we support that argument by authority and document not in your Lordships' minutes, I hope it will not be the less considered as good argument because it is so supported.

I must now call your Lordships' attention from the vaunted services of the prisoner, which have been urged to convict us of ingratitude, to another part of his recriminatory defence. He says, my Lords, that we have not only oppressed him with unjust charges, (which is a matter for your Lordships to judge, and is now the point at issue between us,) but that, instead of attacking him by fair judicial modes of proceeding, by stating crimes clearly and plainly, and by proving those crimes, and showing their necessary consequences, we have oppressed him with all sorts of foul and abusive language,--so much so, that every part of our proceeding has, in the eye of the world, more the appearance of private revenge than of public justice.

Against this impudent and calumnious recriminatory accusation, which your Lordships have thought good to suffer him to utter here, at a time, too, when all dignity is in danger of being trodden under foot, we will say nothing by way of defence. The Commons of Great Britain, my Lords, are a rustic people: a tone of rusticity is therefore the proper accent of their Managers. We are not acquainted with the urbanity and politeness of extortion and oppression; nor do we know anything of the sentimental delicacies of bribery and corruption. We speak the language of truth, and we speak it in the plain, simple terms in which truth ought to be spoken. Even if we have anything to answer for on this head, we can only answer to the body which we represent and to that body which hears us: to any others we owe no apology whatever.

The prisoner at your bar admits that the crimes which we charge him with are of that atrocity, that, if brought home to him, he merits death. Yet, when, in pursuance of our duty, we come to state these crimes with their proper criminatory epithets, when we state in strong and direct terms the circumstances which heighten and aggravate them, when we dwell on the immoral and heinous nature of the acts, and the terrible effects which such acts produce, and when we offer to prove both the principal facts and the aggravatory ones by evidence, and to show their nature and quality by the rules of law, morality, and policy, then this criminal, then his counsel, then his accomplices and hirelings, posted in newspapers and dispersed in circles through every part of the kingdom, represent him as an object of great compassion, because he is treated, say they, with, nothing but opprobrious names and scurrilous invectives.

To all this the Managers of the Commons will say nothing by way of defence: it would be to betray their trust, if they did. No, my Lords, they have another and a very different duty to perform on this occasion. They are bound not to suffer public opinion, which often prevents judgment and often defeats its effects, to be debauched and corrupted. Much less is this to be suffered in the presence of our coördinate branch of legislature, and as it were with your and our own tacit acquiescence. Whenever the public mind is misled, it becomes the duty of the Commons of Great Britain to give it a more proper tone and a juster way of thinking. When ignorance and corruption have usurped the professor's chair, and placed themselves in the seats of science and of virtue, it is high time for us to speak out. We know that the doctrines of folly are of great use to the professors of vice. We know that it is one of the signs of a corrupt and degenerate age, and one of the means of insuring its further corruption and degeneracy, to give mild and lenient epithets to vices and to crimes. The world is much influenced by names. And as terms are the representatives of sentiments, when persons who exercise any censorial magistracy seem in their language to compromise with crimes and criminals by expressing no horror of the one or detestation of the other, the world will naturally think that they act merely to acquit themselves in its sight in form, but in reality to evade their duty. Yes, my Lords, the world must think that such persons palter with their sacred trust, and are tender to crimes because they look forward to the future possession of the same power which they now prosecute, and purpose to abuse it in the manner it has been abused by the criminal of whom they are so tender.

To remove such an imputation from us, we assert that the Commons of Great Britain are not to receive instructions about the language which they ought to hold from the gentlemen who have made profitable studies in the academies of Benares and of Oude. We know, and therefore do not want to learn, how to comport ourselves in prosecuting the haughty and overgrown delinquents of the East. We cannot require to be instructed by them in what words we shall express just indignation at enormous crimes; for we have the example of our great ancestors to teach us: we tread in their steps, and we speak in their language.

Your Lordships well know, for you must be conversant in this kind of reading, that you once had before you a man of the highest rank in this country, one of the greatest men of the law and one of the greatest men of the state, a peer of your own body, Lord Macclesfield. Yet, my Lords, when that peer did but just modestly hint that he had received hard measure from the Commons and their Managers, those Managers thought themselves bound _seriatim_, one after another, to express the utmost indignation at the charge, in the harshest language that could be used. Why did they do so? They knew it was the language that became them. They lived in an age in which politeness was as well understood and as much cultivated as it is at present; but they knew what they were doing, and they were resolved to use no language but what their ancestors had used, and to suffer no insolence which their ancestors would not have suffered. We tread in their steps; we pursue their method; we learn of them: and we shall never learn at any other school.

We know from history and the records of this House, that a Lord Bacon has been before you. Who is there, that, upon hearing this name, does not instantly recognize everything of genius the most profound, everything of literature the most extensive, everything of discovery the most penetrating, everything of observation on human life the most distinguishing and refined? All these must be instantly recognized, for they are all inseparably associated with the name of Lord Verulam. Yet, when this prodigy was brought before your Lordships by the Commons of Great Britain for having permitted his menial servant to receive presents, what was his demeanor? Did he require his counsel not "to let down the dignity of his defence"? No. That Lord Bacon, whose least distinction was, that he was a peer of England, a Lord High Chancellor, and the son of a Lord Keeper, behaved like a man who knew himself, like a man who was conscious of merits of the highest kind, but who was at the same time conscious of having fallen into guilt. The House of Commons did not spare him. They brought him to your bar. They found spots in that sun. And what, I again ask, was his behavior? That of contrition, that of humility, that of repentance, that which belongs to the greatest men lapsed and fallen through human infirmity into error. He did not hurl defiance at the accusations of his country; he bowed himself before it. Yet, with all his penitence, he could not escape the pursuit of the House of Commons, and the inflexible justice of this Court. Your Lordships fined him forty thousand pounds, notwithstanding all his merits, notwithstanding his humility, notwithstanding his contrition, notwithstanding the decorum of his behavior, so well suited to a man under the prosecution of the Commons of England before the Peers of England. You fined him in a sum fully equal to one hundred thousand pounds of the present day; you imprisoned him during the King's pleasure; and you disqualified him forever from having a seat in this House and any office in this kingdom. This is the way in which the Commons behaved formerly, and in which your Lordships acted formerly, when no culprit at this bar dared to hurl a recriminatory accusation against his prosecutors, or dared to censure the language in which they expressed their indignation at his crimes.

The Commons of Great Britain, following these examples and fortified by them, abhor all compromise with guilt either in act or in language. They will not disclaim any one word that they have spoken, because, my Lords, they have said nothing abusive or illiberal. It has been, said that we have used such language as was used to Sir Walter Raleigh, when he was called, not by the Commons, but by a certain person of a learned profession, "a spider of hell." My Lords, Sir Walter was a great soldier, a great mariner, and one of the first scholars of his age. To call him a spider of hell was not only indecent in itself, but perfectly foolish, from the term being totally inapplicable to the object, and fit only for the very pedantic eloquence of the person who used it. But if Sir Walter Raleigh had been guilty of numberless frauds and prevarications, if he had clandestinely picked up other men's money, concealed his peculation by false bonds, and afterwards attempted to cover it by the cobwebs of the law, then my Lord Coke would have trespassed a great deal more against decorum than against propriety of similitude and metaphor.

My Lords, the Managers for the Commons have not used any _inapplicable_ language. We have indeed used, and will again use, such expressions as are proper to portray guilt. After describing the magnitude of the crime, we describe the magnitude of the criminal. We have declared him to be not only a public robber himself, but the head of a system of robbery, the captain-general of the gang, the chief under whom a whole predatory band was arrayed, disciplined, and paid. This, my Lords, is what we offered to prove fully to you, what in part we have proved, and the whole of which I believe we could prove. In developing such a mass of criminality and in describing a criminal of such magnitude as we have now brought before you, we could not use lenient epithets without compromising with crime. We therefore shall not relax in our pursuits nor in our language. No, my Lords, no! we shall not fail to feel indignation, wherever our moral nature has taught us to feel it; nor shall we hesitate to speak the language which is dictated by that indignation. Whenever men are oppressed where they ought to be protected, we called [call?] it tyranny, and we call the actor a tyrant. Whenever goods are taken by violence from the possessor, we call it a robbery, and the person who takes it we call a robber. Money clandestinely taken from the proprietor we call theft, and the person who takes it we call a thief. When a false paper is made out to obtain money, we call the act a forgery. That steward who takes bribes from his master's tenants, and then, pretending the money to be his own, lends it to that master and takes bonds for it to himself, we consider guilty of a breach of trust; and the person who commits such crimes we call a cheat, a swindler, and a forger of bonds. All these offences, without the least softening, under all these names, we charge upon this man. We have so charged in our record, we have so charged in our speeches; and we are sorry that our language does not furnish terms of sufficient force and compass to mark the multitude, the magnitude, and the atrocity of his crimes.

How came it, then, that the Commons of Great Britain should be calumniated for the course which they have taken? Why should it ever have been supposed that we are actuated by revenge? I answer, There are two very sufficient causes: corruption and ignorance. The first disposes an innumerable multitude of people to a fellow-feeling with the prisoner. Under the shadow of his crimes thousands of fortunes have been made; and therefore thousands of tongues are employed to justify the means by which these fortunes were made. When they cannot deny the facts, they attack the accusers,--they attack their conduct, they attack their persons, they attack their language, in every possible manner. I have said, my Lords, that ignorance is the other cause of this calumny by which the House of Commons is assailed. Ignorance produces a confusion of ideas concerning the decorum of life, by confounding the rules of private society with those of public function. To talk, as we here talk, to persons in a mixed company of men and women, would violate the law of such societies; because they meet for the sole purpose of social intercourse, and not for the exposure, the censure, the punishment of crimes: to all which things private societies are altogether incompetent. In them crimes can never be regularly stated, proved, or refuted. The law has therefore appointed special places for such inquiries; and if in any of those places we were to apply the emollient language of drawing-rooms to the exposure of great crimes, it would be as false and vicious in taste and in morals as to use the criminatory language of this hall in drawing and assembling rooms would be misplaced and ridiculous. Every one knows that in common society palliating names are given to vices. Adultery in a lady is called gallantry; the gentleman is commonly called a man of good fortune, sometimes in French and sometimes in English. But is this the tone which would become a person in a court of justice, calling these people to an account for that horrible crime which destroys the basis of society? No, my Lords, this is not the tone of such proceedings. Your Lordships know that it is not; the Commons know that it is not; and because we have acted on that knowledge, and stigmatized crimes with becoming indignation, we are said to be actuated rather by revenge than justice.

If it should still be asked why we show sufficient acrimony to excite a suspicion of being in any manner influenced by malice or a desire of revenge, to this, my Lords, I answer, Because we would be thought to know our duty, and to have all the world know how resolutely we are resolved to perform it. The Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to quarrel with the Divine Wisdom and Goodness, which has moulded up revenge into the frame and constitution of man. He that has made us what we are has made us at once resentful and reasonable. Instinct tells a man that he ought to revenge an injury; reason tells him that he ought not to be a judge in his own cause. From that moment revenge passes from the private to the public hand; but in being transferred it is far from being extinguished. My Lords, it is transferred as a sacred trust to be exercised for the injured, in measure and proportion, by persons who, feeling as he feels, are in a temper to reason better than he can reason. Revenge is taken out of the hands of the original injured proprietor, lest it should be carried beyond the bounds of moderation and justice. But, my Lords, it is in its transfer exposed to a danger of an opposite description. The delegate of vengeance may not feel the wrong sufficiently: he may be cold and languid in the performance of his sacred duty. It is for these reasons that good men are taught to tremble even at the first emotions of anger and resentment for their own particular wrongs; but they are likewise taught, if they are well taught, to give the loosest possible rein to their resentment and indignation, whenever their parents, their friends, their country, or their brethren of the common family of mankind are injured. Those who have not such feelings, under such circumstances, are base and degenerate. These, my Lords, are the sentiments of the Commons of Great Britain.

Lord Bacon has very well said, that "revenge is a kind of wild justice." It is so, and without this wild austere stock there would be no justice in the world. But when, by the skilful hand of morality and wise jurisprudence, a foreign scion, but of the very same species, is grafted upon it, its harsh quality becomes changed, it submits to culture, and, laying aside its savage nature, it bears fruits and flowers, sweet to the world, and not ungrateful even to heaven itself, to which it elevates its exalted head. The fruit of this wild stock is revenge regulated, but not extinguished,--revenge transferred from the suffering party to the communion and sympathy of mankind. This is the revenge by which we are actuated, and which we should be sorry, if the false, idle, girlish, novel-like morality of the world should extinguish in the breast of us who have a great public duty to perform.

This sympathetic revenge, which is condemned by clamorous imbecility, is so far from being a vice, that it is the greatest of all possible virtues,--a virtue which the uncorrupted judgment of mankind has in all ages exalted to the rank of heroism. To give up all the repose and pleasures of life, to pass sleepless nights and laborious days, and, what is ten times more irksome to an ingenuous mind, to offer oneself to calumny and all its herd of hissing tongues and poisoned fangs, in order to free the world from fraudulent prevaricators, from cruel oppressors, from robbers and tyrants, has, I say, the test of heroic virtue, and well deserves such a distinction. The Commons, despairing to attain the heights of this virtue, never lose sight of it for a moment. For seventeen years they have, almost without intermission, pursued, by every sort of inquiry, by legislative and by judicial remedy, the cure of this Indian malady, worse ten thousand times than the leprosy which our forefathers brought from the East. Could they have done this, if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which, burning like the Vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the injured or in denouncing the crimes of the oppressor?

My Lords, the Managers for the Commons have been actuated by this passion; my Lords, they feel its influence at this moment; and so far from softening either their measures or their tone, they do here, in the presence of their Creator, of this House, and of the world, make this solemn declaration, and nuncupate this deliberate vow: that they will ever glow with the most determined and unextinguishable animosity against tyranny, oppression, and peculation in all, but more particularly as practised by this man in India; that they never will relent, but will pursue and prosecute him and it, till they see corrupt pride prostrate under the feet of justice. We call upon your Lordships to join us; and we have no doubt that you will feel the same sympathy that we feel, or (what I cannot persuade my soul to think or my mouth to utter) you will be identified with the criminal whose crimes you excuse, and rolled with him in all the pollution of Indian guilt, from generation to generation. Let those who feel with me upon this occasion join with me in this vow: if they will not, I have it all to myself.

It is not to defend ourselves that I have addressed your Lordships at such length on this subject. No, my Lords, I have said what I considered necessary to instruct the public upon the principles which induced the House of Commons to persevere in this business with a generous warmth, and in the indignant language which Nature prompts, when great crimes are brought before men who feel as they ought to feel upon such occasions.

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I now proceed, my Lords, to the next recriminatory charge, which is _delay_. I confess I am not astonished at this charge. From the first records of human impatience down to the present time, it has been complained that the march of violence and oppression is rapid, but that the progress of remedial and vindictive justice, even the divine, has almost always favored the appearance of being languid and sluggish. Something of this is owing to the very nature and constitution of human affairs; because, as justice is a circumspect, cautious, scrutinizing, balancing principle, full of doubt even of itself, and fearful of doing wrong even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed, my Lords, the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals, (especially in great and arduous cases like this,) if we did not look, not to the _immediate_, not to the _retrospective_, but to the _provident_ operation of justice. Its chief operation is in its future example; and this turns the balance, upon the total effect, in favor of vindictive justice, and in some measure reconciles a pious and humble mind to this great mysterious dispensation of the world.

Upon the charge of delay in this particular cause, my Lords, I have only to say that the business before you is of immense magnitude. The prisoner himself says that all the acts of his life are committed in it. With a due sense of this magnitude, we know that the investigation could not be short to us, nor short to your Lordships; but when we are called upon, as we have been daily, to sympathize with the prisoner in that delay, my Lords, we must tell you that we have no sympathy with him. Rejecting, as we have done, all false, spurious, and hypocritical virtues, we should hold it to be the greatest of all crimes to bestow upon the oppressors that pity which belongs to the oppressed. The unhappy persons who are wronged, robbed, and despoiled have no remedy but in the sympathies of mankind; and when these sympathies are suffered to be debauched, when they are perversely carried from the victim to the oppressor, then we commit a robbery still greater than that which was committed by the criminal accused.

My Lords, we do think this process long; we lament it in every sense in which it ought to be lamented; but we lament still more that the Begums have been so long without having a just punishment inflicted upon their spoiler. We lament that Cheyt Sing has so long been a wanderer, while the man who drove him from his dominions is still unpunished. We are sorry that Nobkissin has been cheated of his money for fourteen years, without obtaining redress. These are our sympathies, my Lords; and thus we reply to this part of the charge.

My Lords, there are some matters of fact in this charge of delay which I must beg your Lordships will look into. On the 19th of February, 1789, the prisoner presented a petition to your Lordships, in which he states, after many other complaints, that a great number of his witnesses were obliged to go to India, by which he has lost the benefit of their testimony, and that a great number of your Lordships' body were dead, by which he has lost the benefit of their judgment. As to the hand of God, though some members of your House may have departed this life since the commencement of this trial, yet the body always remains entire. The evidence before you is the same; and therefore there is no reason to presume that your final judgment will be affected by these afflicting dispensations of Providence. With regard to his witnesses, I must beg to remind your Lordships of one extraordinary fact. This prisoner has sent to India, and obtained, not testimonies, but testimonials to his general good behavior. He has never once applied, by commission or otherwise, to falsify any one fact that is charged upon, him,--no, my Lords, not one. Therefore that part of his petition which states the injury he has received from the Commons of Great Britain is totally false and groundless. For if he had any witnesses to examine, he would not have failed to examine them; if he had asked for a commission to receive their depositions, a commission would have been granted; if, without a commission, he had brought affidavits to facts, or regular recorded testimony, the Commons of Great Britain would never have rejected such evidence, even though they could not have cross-examined it.

Another complaint is, that many of his witnesses were obliged to leave England before he could make use of their evidence. My Lords, no delay in the trial has prevented him from producing any evidence; for we were willing that any of his witnesses should be examined at any time most convenient to himself. If many persons connected with his measures are gone to India, during the course of his trial, many others have returned to England. Mr. Larkins returned. Was the prisoner willing to examine him? No: and it was nothing but downright shame, and the presumptions which he knew would be drawn against him, if he did not call this witness, which finally induced him to make use of his evidence. We examined Mr. Larkins, my Lords; we examined all the prisoner's witnesses; your Lordships have their testimony; and down to this very hour he has not put his hand upon any one whom he thought a proper and essential witness to the facts, or to any part of the cause, whose examination has been denied him; nor has he even stated that any man, if brought here, would prove such and such points. No, not one word to this effect has ever been stated by the prisoner.

There is, my Lords, another case, which was noticed by my honorable fellow Manager yesterday. Mr. Belli, the confidential secretary of the prisoner, was agent and contractor for stores; and this raised a suspicion that the contracts were held by him for the prisoner's advantage. Mr. Belli was here during the whole time of the trial, and six weeks after we had closed our evidence. We had then no longer the arrangement of the order of witnesses, and he might have called whom he pleased. With the full knowledge of these circumstances, that witness did he suffer to depart for India, if he did not even encourage his departure. This, my Lords, is the kind of damage which he has suffered by the want of witnesses, through the protraction of this trial.

But the great and serious evil which he complains of, as being occasioned by our delay, is of so extraordinary a nature that I must request your Lordships to examine it with extraordinary strictness and attention. In the petition before your Lordships, the prisoner asserts that he was under the necessity, through his counsel and solicitors, "of collecting and collating from the voluminous records of the Company the whole history of his public life, in order to form a complete defence to every allegation which the Honorable House of Commons had preferred against him, and that he has expended upwards of thirty thousand pounds in preparing the materials of his defence."

It is evident, my Lords, that the expenditure of this thirty thousand pounds is not properly connected with the delay of which he complains; for he states that he had incurred this loss merely in collecting and collating materials, previous to his defence before your Lordships. If this were true, and your Lordships were to admit the amount as a rule and estimate by which the aggregate of his loss could be ascertained, the application of the rule of three to the sum and time given would bring out an enormous expenditure in the long period which has elapsed since the commencement of the trial,--so enormous, that, if this monstrous load of oppression has been laid upon him by the delay of the Commons, I believe no man living can stand up in our justification. But, my Lords, I am to tell your Lordships some facts, into which we trust _you_, will inquire: for this business is not in our hands, nor can we lay it as a charge before you. Your own Journals have recorded the document, in which the prisoner complains bitterly of the House of Commons, and indeed of the whole judicature of the country,--a complaint which your Lordships will do well to examine.

When we first came to a knowledge of this petition, which was not till some time after it was presented, I happened to have conversation with a noble lord,--I know not whether he be in his place in the House or not, but I think I am not irregular in mentioning his name. When I mention Lord Suffolk, I name a peer whom honor, justice, veracity, and every virtue that distinguishes the man and the peer would claim for their own. My Lord Suffolk told me, that, in a conversation with the late Lord Dover, who brought the prisoner's petition into your House, he could not refrain from expressing his astonishment at that part of the petition which related to the expense Mr. Hastings had been at; and particularly as a complaint had been made in the House of the enormous expense of the prosecution, which at that time had only amounted to fourteen thousand pounds, although the expense of the prosecutor is generally greater than that of the defendant, and public proceedings more expensive than private ones. Lord Dover said, that, before he presented the petition, he had felt exactly in the same manner; but that Mr. Hastings assured him that six thousand pounds had been paid to copying clerks in the India House, and that from this circumstance he might judge of the other expenses. Lord Dover was satisfied with this assurance, and presented the petition, which otherwise he should have declined to do, on account of the apparent enormity of the allegation it contained. At the time when Lord Suffolk informed me of these particulars, (with a good deal of surprise and astonishment,) I had not leisure to go down to the India House in order to make inquiries concerning them, but I afterwards asked the Secretary, Mr. Hudson, to whom _we_ had given a handsome reward, what sums he had received from Mr. Hastings for his services upon this occasion, and the answer was, "Not one shilling." Not one shilling had Mr. Hudson received from Mr. Hastings. The clerks of the Company informed us that the Court of Directors had ordered that every paper which Mr. Hastings wanted should be copied for him gratuitously,--and that, if any additional clerks were wanting for the effectual execution of his wishes, the expense would be defrayed by the Directors. Hearing this account, I next inquired what _expedition money_ might have been given to the clerks: for we know something of this kind is usually done. In reply to this question, Mr. Hudson told me that at various times they had received in little driblets to the amount of ninety-five pounds, or thereabouts. In this way the account stood when I made this inquiry, which was at least half a year after the petition had been presented to your Lordships. Thus the whole story of the six thousand pounds was absolutely false. At that time there was not one word of truth in it, whatever be the amount of the sums which he has paid since. Your Lordships will now judge whether you have been abused by false allegations or not,--allegations which could scarcely admit of being true, and which upon the best inquiry I found absolutely false; and I appeal to the testimony of the noble lord, who is now living, for the truth of the account he received from the worthy and respectable peer whose loss the nation has to bewail.

There are many other circumstances of fraud and falsehood attending this petition, (we must call things by their proper names, my Lords,)--there are, I say, many circumstances of fraud and falsehood. We know it to have been impossible, at the time of presenting this petition, that this man should have expended thirty thousand pounds in the preparation of materials for his defence; and your Lordships' justice, together with the credit of the House of Commons, are concerned in the discovery of the truth. There is, indeed, an ambiguous word in the petition. He asserts that he is _engaged_ for the payment of that sum. We asked the clerks of the India House whether he had given them any bond, note, security, or promise of payment: they assured us that he had not: they will be ready to make the same assurance to your Lordships, when you come to inquire into this matter, which before you give judgment we desire and claim that you will do. All is concealment and mystery on the side of the prisoner; all is open and direct with us. We are desirous that everything which is concealed may be brought to light.

In contradiction, then, to this charge of oppression and of an attempt to ruin his fortune, your Lordships will see that at the time when he made this charge he had not been, in fact, nor was for a long time after, one shilling out of pocket. But some other person had become security to his attorney for him. What, then, are we to think of these men of business, of these friends of Mr. Hastings, who, when he is possessed of nothing, are contented to become responsible for thirty thousand pounds, (was it thirty thousand pounds out of the bullock contracts?)--responsible, I say, for this sum, in order to maintain this suit previous to its actual commencement, and who consequently must be so engaged for every article of expense that has followed from that time to this?