Mr. Hastings flew to this court, which was meant to protect in their situations informers against bribery and corruption, rather than to protect the accused from any of the preliminary methods which must indispensably be used for the purpose of detecting their guilt,—­he flew to this court, charging this Nundcomar and others with being conspirators.

A man might be convicted as a conspirator, and yet afterwards live; he might put the matter into other hands, and go on with his information; nothing less than stone-dead would do the business.  And here happened an odd concurrence of circumstances.  Long before Nundcomar preferred his charge, he knew that Mr. Hastings was plotting his ruin, and that for this purpose he had used a man whom he, Nundcomar, had turned out of doors, called Mohun Persaud.  Mr. Hastings had seen papers put upon the board, charging him with this previous plot for the destruction of Nundcomar; and this identical person, Mohun Persaud, whom Nundcomar had charged as Mr. Hastings’s associate in plotting his ruin, was now again brought forward as the principal evidence against him.  I will not enter (God forbid I should!) into the particulars of the subsequent trial of Nundcomar; but you will find the marks and characters of it to be these.  You will find a close connection between Mr. Hastings and the chief-justice, which we shall prove.  We shall prove that one of the witnesses who appeared there was a person who had been before, or has since been, concerned with Mr. Hastings in his most iniquitous transactions.  You will find, what is very odd, that in this trial for forgery with which this man stood charged, forgery in a private transaction, all the persons who were witnesses or parties to it had been, before or since, the particular friends of Mr. Hastings,—­in short, persons from that rabble with whom Mr. Hastings was concerned, both before and since, in various transactions and negotiations of the most criminal kind.  But the law took its course.  I have nothing more to say than that the man is gone,—­hanged justly, if you please; and that it did so happen,—­luckily for Mr. Hastings,—­it so happened, that the relief of Mr. Hastings, and the justice of the court, and the resolution never to relax its rigor, did all concur just at a happy nick of time and moment; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, had the full benefit of them all.

His accuser was supposed to be what men may be, and yet very competent for accusers, namely, one of his accomplices in guilty actions,—­one of those persons who may have a great deal to say of bribes.  All that I contend for is, that he was in the closest intimacy with Mr. Hastings, was in a situation for giving bribes,—­and that Mr. Hastings was proved afterwards to have received a sum of money from him, which may be well referred to bribes.