honor of the countenance and protection of the Court of Directors, was, without the pretence of any inquiry whatsoever into his conduct, stripped of all his employments, and reduced to the lowest condition.  His ancient rival for power, the Rajah Nundcomar, was, by an insult on everything which India holds respectable and sacred, hanged in the face of all his nation by the judges you sent to protect that people:  hanged for a pretended crime, upon an ex post facto British act of Parliament, in the midst of his evidence against Mr. Hastings.  The accuser they saw hanged.  The culprit, without acquittal or inquiry, triumphs on the ground of that murder:  a murder, not of Nundcomar only, but of all living testimony, and even of evidence yet unborn.  From that time not a complaint has been heard from the natives against their governors.  All the grievances of India have found a complete remedy.

Men will not look to acts of Parliament, to regulations, to declarations, to votes, and resolutions.  No, they are not such fools.  They will ask, What is the road to power, credit, wealth, and honors?  They will ask, What conduct ends in neglect, disgrace, poverty, exile, prison, and gibbet?  These will teach them the course which they are to follow.  It is your distribution of these that will give the character and tone to your government.  All the rest is miserable grimace.

When I accuse the Court of Directors of this habitual treachery in the use of reward and punishment, I do not mean to include all the individuals in that court.  There have been, Sir, very frequently men of the greatest integrity and virtue amongst them; and the contrariety in the declarations and conduct of that court has arisen, I take it, from this,—­that the honest Directors have, by the force of matter of fact on the records, carried the reprobation of the evil measures of the servants in India.  This could not be prevented, whilst these records stared them in the face; nor were the delinquents, either here or there, very solicitous about their reputation, as long as they were able to secure their power.  The agreement of their partisans to censure them blunted for a while the edge of a severe proceeding.  It obtained for them a character of impartiality, which enabled them to recommend with some sort of grace, what will always carry a plausible appearance, those treacherous expedients called moderate measures.  Whilst these were under discussion, new matter of complaint came over, which seemed to antiquate the first.  The same circle was here trod round once more; and thus through years they proceeded in a compromise of censure for punishment, until, by shame and despair, one after another, almost every man who preferred his duty to the Company to the interest of their servants has been driven from that court.

This, Sir, has been their conduct:  and it has been the result of the alteration which was insensibly made in their constitution.  The change was made insensibly; but it is now strong and adult, and as public and declared as it is fixed beyond all power of reformation:  so that there is none who hears me that is not as certain as I am, that the Company, in the sense in which it was formerly understood, has no existence.