It is the use, virtue, and efficacy of Parliamentary judicial procedure, that it puts an end to this dominion of faction, intrigue, cabal, and clandestine intelligences.  The acts of men are put to their proper test, and the works of darkness tried in the face of day,—­not the corrupted opinions of others on them, but their own intrinsic merits.  We charge it as his crime, that he bribed the Court of Directors to thank him for what they had condemned as breaches of his duty.

The East India Company, it is true, have thanked him.  They ought not to have done it; and it is a reflection upon their character that they did it.  But the Directors praise him in the gross, after having condemned each act in detail.  His actions are all, every one, censured one by one as they arise.  I do not recollect any one transaction, few there are, I am sure, in the whole body of that succession of crimes now brought before you for your judgment, in which the India Company have not censured him.  Nay, in one instance he pleads their censure in bar of this trial;[27] for he says, “In that censure I have already received my punishment.”  If, for any other reasons, they come and say, “We thank you, Sir, for all your services,” to that I answer, Yes; and I would thank him for his services, too, if I knew them.  But I do not;—­perhaps they do.  Let them thank him for those services.  I am ordered to prosecute him for these crimes.  Here, therefore, we are on a balance with the India Company; and your Lordships may perhaps think it some addition to his crimes, that he has found means to obtain the thanks of the India Company for the whole of his conduct, at the same time that their records are full of constant, uniform, particular censure and reprobation of every one of those acts for which he now stands accused.

He says, there is the testimony of Indian princes in his favor.  But do we not know how seals are obtained in that country?  Do we not know how those princes are imposed upon?  Do we not know the subjection and thraldom in which they are held, and that they are obliged to return thanks for the sufferings which they have felt?  I believe your Lordships will think that there is not, with regard to some of these princes, a more dreadful thing that can be said of them than that he has obtained their thanks.

I understand he has obtained the thanks of the miserable Princesses of Oude, whom he has cruelly imprisoned, whose treasure he has seized, and whose eunuchs he has tortured.[28] They thank him for going away; they thank him for leaving them the smallest trifle of their subsistence; and I venture to say, if he wanted a hundred more panegyrics, provided he never came again among them, he might have them.  I understand that Mahdajee Sindia has made his panegyric, too.  Mahdajee Sindia has not made his panegyric for nothing; for, if your Lordships will suffer him to enter into such a justification, we shall prove that he has sacrificed