practices of it, and practices authorized only by public tumult, contention, war, and riot, he may indeed find as clear an acquittal in the practices as he would find condemnation in the institutions of it.  He has rejected the law of England.  Your Lordships will not suffer it.  God forbid!  For my part, I should have no sort of objection to let him choose his law,—­Mahomedan, Tartarian, Gentoo.  But if he disputes, as he does, the authority of an act of Parliament, let him state to me that law to which he means to be subject, or any law which he knows that will justify his actions.  I am not authorized to say that I shall, even in that case, give up what is not in me to give up, because I represent an authority of which I must stand in awe; but, for myself, I shall confess that I am brought to public shame, and am not fit to manage the great interests committed to my charge.  I therefore again repeat of that Asiatic government with which we are best acquainted, which has been constituted more in obedience to the laws of Mahomet than any other, that the sovereign cannot, agreeably to that constitution, exercise any arbitrary power whatever.

The next point for us to consider is, whether or no the Mahomedan constitution of India authorizes that power.  The gentleman at your Lordships’ bar has thought proper to say, that it will be happy for India, (though soon after he tells you it is an happiness they can never enjoy,) “when the despotic institutes of Genghiz Khan or Tamerlane shall give place to the liberal spirit of a British legislature; and,” says he, “I shall be amply satisfied in my present prosecution, if it shall tend to hasten the approach of an event so beneficial to the great interests of mankind.”

My Lords, you have seen what he says about an act of Parliament.  Do you not now think it rather an extraordinary thing, that any British subject should, in vindication of the authority which he has exercised, here quote the names and institutes, as he calls them, of fierce conquerors, of men who were the scourges of mankind, whose power was a power which they held by force only?

As to the institutes of Genghiz Khan, which he calls arbitrary institutes, I never saw them.  If he has that book, he will oblige the public by producing it.  I have seen a book existing, called Yassa of Genghiz Khan; the other I never saw.  If there be any part of it to justify arbitrary power, he will produce it.  But if we may judge by those ten precepts of Genghiz Khan which we have, there is not a shadow of arbitrary power to be found in any one of them.  Institutes of arbitrary power!  Why, if there is arbitrary power, there can be no institutes.