These people, when they first settled in India, attempted, with the ferocious arm of their prophetic sword, to change the religion and manners of that country; but at length perceiving that their cruelty wearied out itself, and never could touch the constancy of the sufferers, they permitted the native people of the country to remain in quiet, and left the Mahomedan religion to operate upon them as it could, by appealing to the ambition or avarice of the great, or by taking the lower people, who had lost their castes, into this new sect, and thus, from the refuse of the Gentoo, increasing the bounds of the Mahomedan religion.  They left many of the ancient rajahs of the country possessed of an inferior sovereignty; and where the strength of the country, or other circumstances, would not permit this subordination, they suffered them to continue in a separate state, approaching to independence, if not wholly independent.

The Mahomedans, during the period of the Arabs, never expelled or destroyed the native Gentoo nobility, zemindars, or landholders of the country.  They all, or almost all, remained fixed in their places, properties, and dignities; and the shadows of several of them remain under our jurisdiction.

The next, which is the third era, is an era the more necessary to observe upon, because Mr. Hastings has made many applications to it in his defence before the Commons:  namely, the invasion of the Tartars, or the era of Tamerlane.  These Tartars did not establish themselves on the ruins of the Hindoos.  Their conquests were over the other Mahomedans:  for Tamerlane invaded Hindostan, as he invaded other countries, in the character of the great reformer of the Mahomedan religion.  He came as a sort of successor to the rights of the Prophet, upon a divine title.  He struck at all the Mahomedan princes who reigned at that time.  He considered them as apostates, or at least as degenerated from the faith, and as tyrants abusing their power.  To facilitate his conquests over these, he was often obliged to come to a sort of a composition with the people of the country he invaded.  Tamerlane had neither time nor means nor inclination to dispossess the ancient rajahs of the country.

Your Lordships will observe that I propose nothing more than to give you an idea of the principles of policy which prevailed in these several revolutions, and not an history of the furious military achievements of a barbarous invader.  Historians, indeed, are generally very liberal of their information concerning everything but what we ought to be very anxious to know.  They tell us that India was conquered by Tamerlane, and conquered in such a year.  The year will be found to coincide somewhere, I believe, with the end of the fourteenth century.  Thinking the mere fact as of little moment, and its chronology as nothing, but thinking the policy very material, which, indeed, is to be collected only here and there, in various books written with various views, I shall beg leave to lay before you a very remarkable circumstance relative to that policy, and taken from the same book to which I formerly referred, Mr. Holwell’s.