Mr. Hastings comes before your Lordships not as a British governor answering to a British tribunal, but as a subahdar, as a bashaw of three tails.  He says, “I had an arbitrary power to exercise:  I exercised it.  Slaves I found the people:  slaves they are,—­they are so by their constitution; and if they are, I did not make it for them.  I was unfortunately bound to exercise this arbitrary power, and accordingly I did exercise it.  It was disagreeable to me, but I did exercise it; and no other power can be exercised in that country.”  This, if it be true, is a plea in bar.  But I trust and hope your Lordships will not judge by laws and institutions which you do not know, against those laws and institutions which you do know, and under whose power and authority Mr. Hastings went out to India.  Can your Lordships patiently hear what we have heard with indignation enough, and what, if there were nothing else, would call these principles, as well as the actions which are justified on such principles, to your Lordships’ bar, that it may be known whether the peers of England do not sympathize with the Commons in their detestation of such doctrine?  Think of an English governor tried before you as a British subject, and yet declaring that he governed on the principles of arbitrary power!  His plea is, that he did govern there on arbitrary and despotic, and, as he supposes, Oriental principles.  And as this plea is boldly avowed and maintained, and as, no doubt, all his conduct was perfectly correspondent to these principles, the principles and the conduct must be tried together.

If your Lordships will now permit me, I will state one of the many places in which he has avowed these principles as the basis and foundation of all his conduct.  “The sovereignty which they assumed, it fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such power, or powers of that nature, were delegated to me by any provisions of any act of Parliament, I confess myself too little of a lawyer to pronounce.  I only know that the acceptance of the sovereignty of Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any act of Parliament; and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the Council, the Company is clearly and indisputably seized of that sovereignty.”  So that this gentleman, because he is not a lawyer, nor clothed with those robes which distinguish, and well distinguish, the learning of this country, is not to know anything of his duty; and whether he was bound by any, or what act of Parliament, is a thing he is not lawyer enough to know!  Now, if your Lordships will suffer the laws to be broken by those who are not of the long robe, I am afraid those of the long robe will have none to punish but those of their own profession.  He therefore goes to a law he is better acquainted with,—­that is, the law of arbitrary power and force, if it deserves to be called by the name of law.  “If, therefore,” says he, “the sovereignty of Benares, as ceded