neglected.  To select from the miscellaneous heap which each day’s exigencies present to our choice those points on which the general welfare of your affairs most essentially depends, to provide expedients for future advantages and guard against probable evils, are all that your administration can faithfully promise to perform for your service with their united labors most diligently exerted.  They cannot look back without sacrificing the objects of their immediate duty, which are those of your interests, to endless researches, which can produce no real good, and may expose your affairs to all the ruinous consequences of personal malevolence, both here and at home.”

My Lords, this is the first man, I believe, that ever took credit for his sincerity from his breach of his promises.  “I could not,” he says, “have made these promises, if I had not thought that I could perform them.  Now I find I cannot perform them, and you have in that non-performance and in that profession a security for my sincerity when I promised them.”  Upon this principle, any man who makes a promise has nothing to do afterwards, but to say that he finds himself (without assigning any particular cause for it) unable to perform it,—­not only to justify himself for his non-performance, but to justify himself and claim credit for sincerity in his original profession.  The charge was given him specially, and he promised obedience, over and over, upon the spot, and in the country, in which he was no novice, for he had been bred in it:  it was his native country in one sense, it was the place of his renewed nativity and regeneration.  Yet this very man, as if he was a novice in it, now says, “I promised you what I now find I cannot perform.”  Nay, what is worse, he declares no man could perform it, if he gave up his whole time to it.  And lastly, he says, that the inquiry into these corruptions, even if you succeeded in it, would do more harm than good.  Now was there ever an instance of a man so basely deserting a duty, and giving so base a reason for it?  His duty was to put an end to corruption in every channel of government.  It cannot be done.  Why?  Because it would expose our affairs to malignity and enmity, and end, perhaps, to our disadvantage.  Not only will he connive himself, but he advises the Company to do it.  For fear of what?  For fear that their service was so abandoned and corrupt, that the display of the evil would tend more to their disreputation than all their attempts to reform it would tend to their service.

Mr. Hastings should naturally have imagined that the law was a resource in this desperate case of bribery.  He tells you, that in “that charge of oppression, though they were supported by the cries of the people and the most authentic representations, it is yet impossible in most cases to obtain legal proofs.”  Here is a system of total despair upon the business, which I hope and believe is not a desperate one, and has not proved a desperate one, whenever a rational