Thus began a new division that split the Presidency into violent factions; but the faction which adhered to Nundcomar was undoubtedly the weakest.  That most miserable of men, Mir Jaffier Ali Khan, clinging, as to the last pillar, to Nundcomar, trembling at Mahomed Reza Khan, died in the struggle, a miserable victim to all the revolutions, to all the successive changes and versatile politics at Calcutta.  Like all the rest of the great personages whom we have degraded and brutalized by insult and oppression, he betook himself to the usual destructive resources of unprincipled misery,—­sensuality, opium, and wine.  His gigantic frame of constitution soon gave way under the oppression of this relief, and he died, leaving children and grandchildren by wives and concubines.  On the old Nabob’s death, Mahomed Reza Khan was acknowledged Deputy Nabob, the money paid, and this revolution completed.

Here, my Lords, opened a new source of plunder, peculation, and bribery, which was not neglected.  Revolutions were no longer necessary; succession supplied their places:  and well the object agreed with the policy.  Rules of succession could not be very well ascertained to an office like that of the Nabob, which was hereditary only by the appointment of the Mogul.  The issue by lawful wives would naturally be preferred by those who meant the quiet of the country.  But a more doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the purposes of extortion and peculation.  This miserable succession was sold, and the eldest of the issue of Munny Begum, an harlot, brought in to pollute the harem of the seraglio, of whom you will hear much hereafter, was chosen.  He soon succeeded to the grave.  Another son of the same prostitute succeeded to the same unhappy throne, and followed to the same untimely grave.  Every succession was sold; and between venal successions and venal revolutions, in a very few years seven princes and six sales were seen successively in Bengal.  The last was a minor, the issue of a legitimate wife, admitted to succeed because a minor, and because there was none illegitimate left.  He was instantly stripped of the allowance of his progenitors, and reduced to a pension of 160,000 a year.  He still exists, and continued to the end of Mr. Hastings’s government to furnish constant sources of bribery and plunder to him and his creatures.

The offspring of Munny Begum clinging, as his father did, to Nundcomar, they tore Nundcomar from his side, as they had done from the side of his father, and carried him down as a sort of prisoner to Calcutta; where, having had the weakness to become the first informer, he was made the first example.  This person, pushed to the wall, and knowing that the man he had to deal with was desperate and cruel in his resentments, resolves on the first blow, and enters before the Council a regular information in writing of bribery against Mr. Hastings.  In his preface to that charge he excuses himself for what is considered