arbitrary power.  The conduct and event of this cause will put an end to such doubts, wherever they may be entertained.  Your Lordships will exercise the great plenary powers with which you are invested in a manner that will do honor to the protecting justice of this kingdom, that will completely avenge the great people who are subjected to it.  You will not suffer your proceedings to be squared by any rules but by their necessities, and by that law of a common nature which cements them to us and us to them.  The reports to the contrary have been spread abroad with uncommon industry; but they will be speedily refuted by the humanity, simplicity, dignity, and nobleness of your Lordships’ justice.

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Having said all that I am instructed to say concerning the process which the House of Commons has used, concerning the crimes which they have chosen, concerning the criminal upon whom they attach the crimes, and concerning the evidence which they mean to produce, I am now to proceed to open that part of the business which falls to my share.  It is rather an explanation of the circumstances than an enforcement of the crimes.

Your Lordships of course will be apprised that this cause is not what occurs every day, in the ordinary round of municipal affairs,—­that it has a relation to many things, that it touches many points in many places, which are wholly removed from the ordinary beaten orbit of our English affairs.  In other affairs, every allusion immediately meets its point of reference; nothing can be started that does not immediately awaken your attention to something in your own laws and usages which you meet with every day in the ordinary transactions of life.  But here you are caught, as it were, into another world; you are to have the way pioneered before you.  As the subject is new, it must be explained; as it is intricate as well as new, that explanation can be only comparatively short:  and therefore, knowing your Lordships to be possessed, along with all other judicial virtues, of the first and foundation of them all, judicial patience, I hope that you will not grudge a few hours to the explanation of that which has cost the Commons fourteen years’ assiduous application to acquire,—­that your Lordships will not disdain to grant a few hours to what has cost the people of India upwards of thirty years of their innate, inveterate, hereditary patience to endure.

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My Lords, the powers which Mr. Hastings is charged with having abused are the powers delegated to him by the East India Company.  The East India Company itself acts under two very dissimilar sorts of powers, derived from two sources very remote from each other.  The first source of its power is under charters which the crown of Great Britain was authorized by act of Parliament to grant; the other is from several charters derived from the Emperor of the Moguls, the person in whose dominions they were chiefly conversant,—­particularly that great charter by which, in the year 1765, they acquired the high-stewardship of the kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa.  Under those two bodies of charters, the East India Company, and all their servants, are authorized to act.