Mr. Hastings reserves himself for a court of justice:  that single circumstance, my Lords, proves that he was guilty.  It may appear very odd that his guilt should be inferred from his desire of trial in a court in which he could be acquitted or condemned.  But I shall prove to you from that circumstance that Mr. Hastings, in desiring to be tried in a court of justice, convicts himself of presumptive guilt.

When Mr. Hastings went to Bengal in the year 1772, he had a direction exactly similar to this which he has resisted in his own case:  it was to inquire into grievances and abuses.  In consequence of this direction, he proposes a plan for the regulation of the Company’s service, and one part of that plan was just what you would expect from him,—­that is, the power of destroying every Company’s servant without the least possibility of his being heard in his own defence or taking any one step to justify himself, and of dismissing him at his own discretion:  and the reason he gives for it is this.  “I shall forbear to comment upon the above propositions:  if just and proper, their utility will be self-apparent.  One clause only in the last article may require some explanation, namely, the power proposed for the Governor of recalling any person from his station without assigning a reason for it.  In the charge of oppression,” (now here you will find the reason why Mr. Hastings wishes to appeal to a court of justice, rather than to give satisfaction to his employers,) “though supported by the cries of the people and the most authentic representations, it is yet impossible in most cases to obtain legal proofs of it; and unless the discretionary power which I have recommended be somewhere lodged, the assurance of impunity from any formal inquiry will baffle every order of the board, as, on the other hand, the fear of the consequence will restrain every man within the bounds of his duty, if he knows himself liable to suffer by the effects of a single control.”  You see Mr. Hastings himself is of opinion that the cries of oppression, though extorted from a whole people by the iron hand of severity,—­that these cries of a whole people, attended even with authentic documents sufficient to satisfy the mind of any man, may be totally insufficient to convict the oppressor in a court; and yet to that court, whose competence he denies, to that very court, he appeals, in that he puts his trust, and upon that ground he refuses to perform the just promise he had given of any explanation to those who had employed him.

Now I put this to your Lordships:  if a man is of opinion that no public court can truly and properly bring him to any account for his conduct, that the forms observable in courts are totally adverse to it, that there is a general incompetency with regard to such a court, and yet shuns a tribunal capable and competent, and applies to that which he thinks is incapable and incompetent, does not that man plainly show that he has rejected what he thinks will prove