The justification set up is, that he went up from Calcutta to Moorshedabad, and paid a visit of three months, and that there an allowance was made to him of two hundred pounds a day in lieu of an entertainment.  Now, my Lords, I leave it to you to determine, if there was such a custom, whether or no his covenant justifies his conformity with it.  I remember Lord Coke, talking of the Brehon law in Ireland, says it is no law, but a lewd custom.  A governor is to conform himself to the laws of his own country, to the stipulations of those that employ him, and not to the lewd customs of any other country:  those customs are more honored in the breach than in the observance.  If Mr. Hastings was really feasted and entertained with the magnificence of the country, if there was an entertainment of dancing-girls brought out to amuse him in his leisure hours, if he was feasted with the hookah and every other luxury, there is something to be said for him, though I should not justify a Governor-General wasting his days in that manner.  But in fact here was no entertainment that could amount to such a sum; and he has nowhere proved the existence of such a custom.

But if such a custom did exist, which I contend is more honored in the breach than in the observance, that custom is capable of being abused to the grossest extortion; and that it was so abused will strike your Lordships’ minds in such a manner that I hardly need detail the circumstances of it.  What! two hundred pounds to be given to a man for one day’s entertainment?  If there is an end of it there, it ruins nobody, and cannot be supposed, to a great degree, to corrupt anybody; but when that entertainment is renewed day after day for three months, it is no longer a compliment to the man, but a great pecuniary advantage, and, on the other hand, to the person giving it, a grievous, an intolerable burden.  It then becomes a matter of the most serious and dreadful extortion, tending to hinder the people who give it not only from giving entertainment, but from having bread to eat themselves.  Therefore, if any such entertainment was customary, the custom was perverted by the abuse of its being continued for three months together.  It was longer than Ahasuerus’s feast.  There is a feast of reason and a flow of soul; but Mr. Hastings’s feast was a feast of avarice and a flow of money.  No wonder he was unwilling to rise from such a table:  he continued to sit at that table for three months.

In his covenant he is forbidden expressly to take any allowance above 400_l._, and forbidden to take any allowance above 100_l._, without the knowledge, consent, and approbation of the Council to which he belongs.  Now he takes 16,000_l._, not only without the consent of the Council, but without their knowledge,—­without the knowledge of any other human being:  it is kept hid in the darkest and most secret recesses of his own black agents and confidants, and those of Munny Begum.  Why is it a secret?  Hospitality,