My Lords, this is the resolution of the House of Commons.  Your Lordships well know and remember my having used such or similar words, and the end and purpose for which I used them.  I owe a few words of explanation to the Commons of Great Britain, who attend in a committee of the whole House to be the observers and spectators of my conduct.  I owe it to your Lordships, I owe it to this great auditory, I owe it to the present times and to posterity, to make some apology for a proceeding which has drawn upon me the disavowal of the House which I represent.  Your Lordships will remember that this charge which I have opened to your Lordships is primarily a charge founded upon the evidence of the Rajah Nundcomar; and consequently I thought myself obliged, I thought it a part of my duty, to support the credit of that person, who is the principal evidence to support the direct charge that is brought before your Lordships.  I knew that Mr. Hastings, in his anticipated defence before the House of Commons, had attempted to shake the credit of that witness.  I therefore thought myself justified in informing your Lordships, and in warning him, that, if he did attempt to shake the credit of an important witness against him by an allegation of his having been condemned and executed for a forgery, I would endeavor to support his credit by attacking that very prosecution which brought on that condemnation and that execution; and that I did consider it, and would lay grounds before your Lordships to prove it, to be a murder committed, instead of a justification set up, or that ought to be set up.

Now, my Lords, I am ordered by the Commons no longer to persist in that declaration; and I, who know nothing in this place, and ought to know nothing in this place, but obedience to the Commons, do mean, when Mr. Hastings makes that objection (if he shall be advised to make it) against the credit of Rajah Nundcomar, not thus to support that credit; and therefore that objection to the credit of the witness must go unrefuted by me.  My Lords, I must admit, perhaps against my private judgment, (but that is of no consideration for your Lordships, when opposed to the judgment of the House of Commons,) or, at least, not contest, that a first minister of state, in a great kingdom, who had the benefit of the administration, and of the entire and absolute command of a revenue of fifteen hundred thousand pounds a year, had been guilty of a paltry forgery in Calcutta; that this man, who had been guilty of this paltry forgery, had waited for his sentence and his punishment, till a body of English judges, armed with an English statute, came to Calcutta; and that this happened at the very happy nick and moment when he was accusing Mr. Hastings of the bribery with which we now in the name of the Commons charge him; that it was owing to an entirely fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, in which Mr. Hastings had no share, or that it was owing to something beyond this, something