Do I mean, by reading this to your Lordships, to express or intimate an approbation either of the cruelty of the punishment or of the coarse barbarism of the language?  Neither one nor the other.  I produce it to your Lordships to prove to you, from this dreadful example, the horror which that government felt, when any person subject to it assumed to himself a privilege to receive presents.  The cruelty and severity exercised by these princes is not levelled at the poor unfortunate people who complain at their gates, but, to use their own barbarous expression, to dogs that impose taxes and take presents.  God forbid I should use that language!  The people, when they complain, are not called dogs and sent away, but the governors, who do these things against the people:  they are called dogs, and treated in that cruel manner.  I quote them to show that no governors in the East, upon any principle of their constitution or any good practice of their government, can lay arbitrary imposts or receive presents.  When they escape, it is probably by bribery, by corruption, by creating factions for themselves in the seraglio, in the country, in the army, in the divan.  But how they escape such punishments is not my business to inquire; it is enough for me that the constitution disavows them, that the princes of the country disavow them,—­that they revile them with the most horrible expressions, and inflict dreadful punishments on them, when they are called to answer for these offences.  Thus much concerning the Mahomedan laws of Asia.  That the people of Asia have no laws, rights, or liberty, is a doctrine that wickedly is to be disseminated through this country.  But I again assert, every Mahomedan government is, by its principles, a government of law.

I shall now state, from what is known of the government of India, that it does not and cannot delegate, as Mr. Hastings has frequently declared, the whole of its powers and authority to him.  If they are absolute, as they must be in the supreme power, they ought to be arbitrary in none; they were, however, never absolute in any of their subordinate parts, and I will prove it by the known provincial constitutions of Hindostan, which are all Mahomedan, the laws of which are as clear, as explicit, and as learned as ours.

The first foundation of their law is the Koran.  The next part is the Fetwah, or adjudged cases by proper authority, well known there.  The next, the written interpretations of the principles of jurisprudence:  and their books are as numerous upon the principles of jurisprudence as in any country in Europe.  The next part of their law is what they call the Kanon,—­that is, a positive rule equivalent to acts of Parliament, the law of the several powers of the country, taken from the Greek word [Greek:  Kanon], which was brought into their country, and is well known.  The next is the Rawaj-ul-Mulk, or common law and custom of the kingdom, equivalent to our common law.  Therefore they have laws from more sources than we have, exactly in the same order, grounded upon the same authority, fundamentally fixed to be administered to the people upon these principles.