“As the advantages which the Company may receive from the appointment of such minister will depend on his readiness to promote our views and advance our interest, we are willing to allow him so liberal a gratification as may excite his zeal and insure his attachment to the Company; we therefore empower you to grant to the person whom you shall think worthy of this trust an annual allowance not exceeding three lacs of rupees, which we consider not only as a munificent reward for any services he shall render the Company, but sufficient to enable him to support his station with suitable rank and dignity.  And here we must add, that, in the choice you shall make of a person to be the active minister of the Nabob’s government, we hope and trust that you will show yourselves worthy of the confidence we have placed in you by being actuated therein by no other motives than those of the public good and the safety and interest of the Company.”

My Lords, here they have given a reward, and they have described a person fit to succeed in all capacities the man whom they had thought fit to depose.  Now, as we have seen how Mr. Hastings obeyed the Company’s orders in the manner of removing Mahomed Reza Khan from his office, let us see how he obeyed their order for filling it up.  Your Lordships will naturally suppose that he made all the orders of Mahometan and Hindoo princes to pass in strict review before him; that he had considered their age, authority, dignity, the goodness of their manners; and upon the collation of all these circumstances had chosen a person fit to be a regent to guard the Nabob’s minority from all rapacity whatever, and fit to instruct him in everything.  I will give your Lordships Mr. Hastings’s own idea of the person necessary to fill such offices.

“That his rank ought to be such as at least ought not to wound the Nabob’s honor, or lessen his credit in the estimation of the people, by the magisterial command which the new guardian must exercise over him,—­with abilities and vigor of mind equal to the support of that authority; and the world will expect that the guardian be especially qualified by his own acquired endowments to discharge the duties of that relation in the education of his young pupil, to inspire him with sentiments suitable to his birth, and to instruct him in the principles of his religion.”

This, upon another occasion, is Mr. Hastings’s sense of the man who ought to be placed in that situation of trust in which the Company ordered him to place him.  Did Mr. Hastings obey that order?  No, my Lords, he appointed no man to fill that office.  What, no man at all?  No, he appointed no person at all in the sense which is mentioned there, which constantly describes a person at least of the male sex:  he appointed a woman to fill that office; he appointed a woman, in a country where no woman can be seen, where no woman can be spoken to by any one without a curtain between them; for all these various duties, requiring all these qualifications described by himself, he appointed a woman.  Do you want more proof than this violent transgression of the Company’s orders upon that occasion that some corrupt motive must have influenced him?