In the description I have given of banians a distinction is to be made.  Your Lordships must distinguish the banians of the British servants in subordinate situations and the banians who are such to persons in higher authority.  In the latter case the banian is in strict subordination, because he may always be ruined by his superior; whereas in the former it is always in his power to ruin his nominal superior.  It was not through fear, but voluntarily, and not for the banian’s purposes, but his own, Mr. Hastings has brought forward his banian.  He seated him in the houses of the principal nobility, and invested him with farms of the revenue; he has given him enormous jobs; he has put him over the heads of a nobility which, for their grandeur, antiquity, and dignity, might almost be matched with your Lordships.  He has made him supreme ecclesiastical judge, judge even of the very castes, in the preservation of the separate rules and separate privileges of which that people exists.  He who has dominion over the caste has an absolute power over something more than life and fortune.

Such is that first, or last, (I know not which to call it,) order in the Company’s service called a banian.  The mutseddies, clerks, accountants, of Calcutta, generally fall under this description.  Your Lordships will see hereafter the necessity of giving you, in the opening the case, an idea of the situation of a banian.  You will see, as no Englishman, properly speaking, acts by himself, that he must be made responsible for that person called his banian,—­for the power he either uses under him, or the power he has acquired over him.  The banian escapes, in the night of his complexion and situation, the inquiry that a white man cannot stand before in this country.  Through the banians, or other black natives, a bad servant of the Company receives his bribes.  Through them he decides falsely against the titles of litigants in the court of castes, or in the offices of public registry.  Through them Mr. Hastings has exercised oppressions which, I will venture to say, in his own name, in his own character, daring as he is, (and he is the most daring criminal that ever existed,) he never would dare to practise.  Many, if not most, of the iniquities of his interior bad administration have been perpetrated through these banians, or other native agents and confidants; and we shall show you that he is not satisfied with one of them, confiding few of his secrets to Europeans, and hardly any of his instruments, either native or European, knowing the secrets of each other.  This is the system of banianism, and of concealment, which Mr. Hastings, instead of eradicating out of the service, has propagated by example and by support, and enlarged by converting even Europeans into that dark and insidious character.