in this, that the servants of the Company there had not profited enough of their opportunities, nor drained it sufficiently of its treasures,—­when they shall hear that the very first and only important act of a commission specially named by act of Parliament is, to charge upon an undone country, in favor of a handful of men in the humblest ranks of the public service, the enormous sum of perhaps four millions of sterling money.

It is difficult for the most wise and upright government to correct the abuses of remote, delegated power, productive of unmeasured wealth, and protected by the boldness and strength of the same ill-got riches.  These abuses, full of their own wild native vigor, will grow and flourish under mere neglect.  But where the supreme authority, not content with winking at the rapacity of its inferior instruments, is so shameless and corrupt as openly to give bounties and premiums for disobedience to its laws,—­when it will not trust to the activity of avarice in the pursuit of its own gains,—­when it secures public robbery by all the careful jealousy and attention with which it ought to protect property from such violence,—­the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its purposes; neither God nor man will long endure it; nor will it long endure itself.  In that case, there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint, fermenting in the constitution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off, or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death,—­and instead of what was but just now the delight and boast of the creation, there will be cast out in the face of the sun a bloated, putrid, noisome carcass, full of stench and poison, an offence, a horror, a lesson to the world.

In my opinion, we ought not to wait for the fruitless instruction of calamity to inquire into the abuses which bring upon us ruin in the worst of its forms, in the loss of our fame and virtue.  But the right honorable gentleman[66] says, in answer to all the powerful arguments of my honorable friend, “that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this transaction.”  But it is exposed; it is perfectly known in every member, in every particle, and in every way, except that which may lead to a remedy.  He knows that the papers of correspondence are printed, and that they are in every hand.

He and delicacy are a rare and a singular coalition.  He thinks that to divulge our Indian politics may be highly dangerous.  He! the mover, the chairman, the reporter of the Committee of Secrecy! he, that brought forth in the utmost detail, in several vast, printed folios, the most recondite parts of the politics, the military, the revenues of the British empire in India!  With six great chopping bastards,[67] each as lusty as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the sight of his new bridegroom, assumes a virgin delicacy; or, to use a more fit, as well as a more poetic comparison, the person so squeamish, so timid, so trembling lest the winds of heaven should visit too roughly, is expanded to broad sunshine, exposed like the sow of imperial augury, lying in the mud with all the prodigies of her fertility about her, as evidence of her delicate amours,—­