Your Lordships will remark that there is nowhere a clear and positive denial of the fact.  Promising a defence, I will admit, does not directly and ex vi termini suppose that a man may not deny the fact, because it is just compatible with the defence; but it does by no means exclude the admission of the fact, because the admission of the fact may be attended with a justification:  but when a man says that he will explain his conduct with regard to a fact, then he admits that fact, because there can be no explanation of a fact which has no existence.  Therefore Mr. Hastings admits the fact by promising an explanation, and he shows he has no explanation nor justification to give by never having given it.  Goaded, provoked, and called upon for it, in the manner I have mentioned, he chooses to have a feast of disgrace, (if I may say so,) to have a riot of infamy, served up to him day by day for a course of years, in every species of reproach that could be given by his colleagues, and by the Court of Directors, “from whom,” he says, “I received nothing but opprobrious and disgraceful epithets,” and he says “that his predecessors possessed more of their confidence than he had.”  Yet for years he lay down in that sty of disgrace, fattening in it, feeding upon that offal of disgrace and excrement, upon everything that could be disgustful to the human mind, rather than deny the fact and put himself upon a civil justification.  Infamy was never incurred for nothing.  We know very well what was said formerly:—­

        “Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo
    Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in arca.”

And never did a man submit to infamy for anything but its true reward, money.  Money he received; the infamy he received along with it:  he was glad to take his wife with all her goods; he took her with her full portion, with every species of infamy that belonged to her; and your Lordships cannot resist the opinion that he would not have suffered himself to be disgraced with the Court of Directors, disgraced with his colleagues, disgraced with the world, disgraced upon an eternal record, unless he was absolutely guilty of the fact that was charged upon him.

He frequently expresses that he reserves himself for a court of justice.  Does he, my Lords?  I am sorry that Mr. Hastings should show that he always mistakes his situation; he has totally mistaken it:  he was a servant, bound to give a satisfactory account of his conduct to his masters, and, instead of that, he considers himself and the Court of Directors as litigant parties,—­them as the accusers, and himself as the culprit.  What would your Lordships, in private life, conceive of a steward who was accused of embezzling the rents, robbing and oppressing the tenants, and committing a thousand misdeeds in his stewardship, and who, upon your wishing to make inquiry into his conduct, and asking an explanation of it, should answer, “I will give no reply:  you may intend to prosecute me and convict me as a cheat, and therefore I will not give you any satisfaction”:  what would you think of that steward?  You could have no doubt that such a steward was a person not fit to be a steward, nor fit to live.