My Lords, I have one farther remark to make upon these accounts.  The cabooleats, or agreements for the payments of these bribes, amount, in the three specified provinces, to 95,000_l._ Do you believe that these provinces were thus particularly favored?  Do you think that they were chosen as a little demesne for Mr. Hastings? that they were the only provinces honored with his protection, so far as to take bribes from them?  Do you perceive anything in their local situation that should distinguish them from other provinces of Bengal?  What is the reason why Dinagepore, Patna, Nuddea, should have the post of honor assigned them?  What reason can be given for not taking bribes also from Burdwan, from Bissunpore, in short, from all the sixty-eight collections which comprise the revenues of Bengal, and for selecting only three?  How came he, I say, to be so wicked a servant, that, out of sixty-eight divisions, he chose only three to supply the exigencies of the Company?  He did not do his duty in making this distinction, if he thought that bribery was the best way of supplying the Company’s treasury, and that it formed the most useful and effectual resource for them,—­which he has declared over and over again.  Was it right to lay the whole weight of bribery, extortion, and oppression upon those three provinces, and neglect the rest?  No:  you know, and must know, that he who extorts from three provinces will extort from twenty, if there are twenty.  You have a standard, a measure of extortion, and that is all:  ex pede Herculem:  guess from thence what was extorted from all Bengal.  Do you believe he could be so cruel to these provinces, so partial to the rest, as to charge them with that load, with 95,000_l._, knowing the heavy oppression they were sinking under, and leave all the rest untouched?  You will judge of what is concealed from us by what we have discovered through various means that have occurred, in consequence both of the guilty conscience of the person who confesses the fact with respect to these provinces, and of the vigor, perseverance and sagacity of those who have forced from him that discovery.  It is not, therefore, for me to say that the 100,000_l._ and 95,000_l._ only were taken.  Where the circumstances entitle me to go on, I must not be stopped, but at the boundary where human nature has fixed a barrier.

You have now before you the true reason why he did not choose that this affair should come before a court of justice.  Rather than this exposure should be made, he to-day would call for the mountains to cover him:  he would prefer an inquiry into the business of the three seals, into anything foreign to the subject I am now discussing, in order to keep you from the discovery of that gross bribery, that shameful peculation, that abandoned prostitution and corruption, which he has practised with indemnity and impunity to this day, from one end of India to the other.