With very few intermissions, the affairs of India have constantly engaged the attention of the Commons for more than fourteen years.  We may safely affirm we have tried every mode of legislative provision before we had recourse to anything of penal process.  It was in the year 1774 [1773?] we framed an act of Parliament for remedy to the then existing disorders in India, such as the then information before us enabled us to enact.  Finding that the act of Parliament did not answer all the ends that were expected from it, we had, in the year 1782, recourse to a body of monitory resolutions.  Neither had we the expected fruit from them.  When, therefore, we found that our inquiries and our reports, our laws and our admonitions, were alike despised, that enormities increased in proportion as they were forbidden, detected, and exposed,—­when we found that guilt stalked with an erect and upright front, and that legal authority seemed to skulk and hide its head like outlawed guilt,—­when we found that some of those very persons who were appointed by Parliament to assert the authority of the laws of this kingdom were the most forward, the most bold, and the most active in the conspiracy for their destruction,—­then it was time for the justice of the nation to recollect itself.  To have forborne longer would not have been patience, but collusion; it would have been participation with guilt; it would have been to make ourselves accomplices with the criminal.

We found it was impossible to evade painful duty without betraying a sacred trust.  Having, therefore, resolved upon the last and only resource, a penal prosecution, it was our next business to act in a manner worthy of our long deliberation.  In all points we proceeded with selection.  We have chosen (we trust it will so appear to your Lordships) such a crime, and such a criminal, and such a body of evidence, and such a mode of process, as would have recommended this course of justice to posterity, even if it had not been supported by any example in the practice of our forefathers.

First, to speak of the process:  we are to inform your Lordships, that, besides that long previous deliberation of fourteen years, we examined, as a preliminary to this proceeding, every circumstance which could prove favorable to parties apparently delinquent, before we finally resolved to prosecute.  There was no precedent to be found in the Journals, favorable to persons in Mr. Hastings’s circumstances, that was not applied to.  Many measures utterly unknown to former Parliamentary proceedings, and which, indeed, seemed in some degree to enfeeble them, but which were all to the advantage of those that were to be prosecuted, were adopted, for the first time, upon this occasion.  In an early stage of the proceeding, the criminal desired to be heard.  He was heard; and he produced before the bar of the House that insolent and unbecoming paper which lies upon our table.  It was deliberately given in by his own hand, and signed with his own name.  The Commons, however, passed by everything offensive in that paper with a magnanimity that became them.  They considered nothing in it but the facts that the defendant alleged, and the principles he maintained; and after a deliberation not short of judicial, we proceeded with confidence to your bar.