generosity, virtues of that kind, are full of display; there is an ostentation, a pomp, in them; they want to be shown to the world, not concealed.  The concealment of acts of charity is what makes them acceptable in the eyes of Him with regard to whom there can be no concealment; but acts of corruption are kept secret, not to keep them secret from the eye of Him, whom the person that observes the secrecy does not fear, nor perhaps believe in, but to keep them secret from the eyes of mankind, whose opinions he does fear, in the immediate effect of them, and in their future consequences.  Therefore he had but one reason to keep this so dark and profound a secret, till it was dragged into day in spite of him; he had no reason to keep it a secret, but his knowing it was a proceeding that could not bear the light.  Charity is the only virtue that I ever heard of that derives from its retirement any part of its lustre; the others require to be spread abroad in the face of day.  Such candles should not be hid under a bushel, and, like the illuminations which men light up when they mean to express great joy and great magnificence for a great event, their very splendor is a part of their excellence.  We upon our feasts light up this whole capital city; we in our feasts invite all the world to partake them.  Mr. Hastings feasts in the dark; Mr. Hastings feasts alone; Mr. Hastings feasts like a wild beast; he growls in the corner over the dying and the dead, like the tigers of that country, who drag their prey into the jungles.  Nobody knows of it, till he is brought into judgment for the flock he has destroyed.  His is the entertainment of Tantalus; it is an entertainment from which the sun hid his light.

But was it an entertainment upon a visit?  Was Mr. Hastings upon a visit?  No:  he was executing a commission for the Company in a village in the neighborhood of Moorshedabad, and by no means upon a visit to the Nabob.  On the contrary, he was upon something that might be more properly called a visitation.  He came as a heavy calamity, like a famine or a pestilence on a country; he came there to do the severest act in the world,—­as he himself expresses, to take the bread, literally the bread, from above a thousand of the nobles of the country, and to reduce them to a situation which no man can hear of without shuddering.  When you consider, that, while he was thus entertained himself, he was famishing fourteen hundred of the nobility and gentry of the country, you will not conceive it to be any extenuation of his crimes, that he was there, not upon a visit, but upon a duty, the harshest that could be executed, both to the persons who executed and the people who suffered from it.