These are the charges which were made upon him,—­not loosely, in the heat of conversation, but deliberately, in writing, entered upon record, and sent to his employers, the Court of Directors, those whom the law had set over him, and to whose judgment and opinion he was responsible.  Do your Lordships believe that it was conscious innocence that made him endure such reproaches, so recorded, from his own colleague?  Was it conscious innocence that made him abandon his defence, renounce his explanation, and bear all this calumny, (if it was calumny,) in such a manner, without making any one attempt to refute it?  Your Lordships will see by this, and by other minutes with which the books are filled, that Mr. Hastings is charged quite to the brim with corruptions of all sorts, and covered with every mode of possible disgrace.  For there is something so base and contemptible in the crimes of peculation and bribery, that, when they come to be urged home and strongly against a man, as here they are urged, nothing but a consciousness of guilt can possibly make a person so charged support himself under them.  Mr. Hastings considered himself, as he has stated, to be under the necessity of bearing them.  What is that necessity?  Guilt.  Could he say that Sir John Clavering (for I say nothing now of Colonel Monson and Mr. Francis, who were joined with him) was a man weak and contemptible?  I believe there are those among your Lordships who remember that Sir John Clavering was known before he went abroad, and better known by his conduct after, to be a man of the most distinguished honor that ever served his Majesty; he served his Majesty in a military situation for many years, and afterwards in that high civil situation in India.  It is known that through every step and gradation of a high military service, until he arrived at the highest of all, there never was the least blot upon him, or doubt or suspicion of his character; that his temper for the most part, and his manners, were fully answerable to his virtues, and a noble ornament to them; that he was one of the best natured, best bred men, as well as one of the highest principled men to be found in his Majesty’s service; that he had passed the middle time of life, and come to an age which makes men wise in general; so that he could be warmed by nothing but that noble indignation at guilt which is the last thing that ever was or will be extinguished in a virtuous mind.  He was a man whose voice was not to be despised; but if his character had been personally as contemptible as it was meritorious and honorable in every respect, yet his situation as a commissioner named by an act of Parliament for the express purpose of reforming India gave him a weight and consequence that could not suffer Mr. Hastings, without a general and strong presumption of his guilt, to acquiesce in such recorded minutes from him.  But if he had been a weak, if he had been an intemperate man, (in reality he was as cool, steady, temperate, judicious a man as