pretence taken, were made the legal property of the Company, in order to enable them to recover them out of any rapacious hands that might violate the new act of Parliament.  I have also stated this act of Parliament.  I have stated Mr. Hastings’s sense of it.  I have stated the violation of it by his taking bribes from all quarters.  I have stated the fraudulent bonds by which he claimed a security for money as his own which belonged to the Company.  I have stated the series of frauds, prevarications, concealments, and all that mystery of iniquity, which I waded through with pain to myself, I am sure, and with infinite pain, I fear, to your Lordships.  I have shown your Lordships that his evasions of the clear words of his covenant and the clear words of an act of Parliament were such as did not arise from an erroneous judgment, but from a corrupt intention; and I believe you will find that his attempt to evade the law aggravates infinitely his guilt in breaking it.  In all this I have only opened to you the package of this business; I have opened it to ventilate it, and give air to it; I have opened it, that a quarantine might be performed,—­that the sweet air of heaven, which is polluted by the poison it contains, might be let loose upon it, and that it may be aired and ventilated before your Lordships touch it.  Those who follow me will endeavor to explain to your Lordships what Mr. Hastings has endeavored to involve in mystery, by bringing proof after proof that every bribe that was here concealed was taken with corrupt purposes and followed with the most pernicious consequences.  These are things which will be brought to you in proof.  I have only regarded the system of bribery; I have endeavored to show that it is a system of mystery and concealment, and consequently a system of fraud.

You now see some of the means by which fortunes have been made by certain persons in India; you see the confederacies they have formed with one another for their mutual concealment and mutual support; you will see how they reply to their own deceitful inquiries by fraudulent answers; you will see that Cheltenham calls upon Calcutta, as one deep calls upon another, and that the call which is made for explanation is answered in mystery; in short, you will see the very constitution of their minds here developed.

And now, my Lords, in what a situation are we all placed!  This prosecution of the Commons, I wish to have it understood, and I am sure I shall not be disclaimed in it, is a prosecution not only for the punishing a delinquent, a prosecution not merely for preventing this and that offence, but it is a great censorial prosecution, for the purpose of preserving the manners, characters, and virtues that characterize the people of England.  The situation in which we stand is dreadful.  These people pour in upon us every day.  They not only bring with them the wealth which they have acquired, but they bring with them into our country the vices by which it was acquired.