do your Lordships think?  They were sold for less than one year’s purchase,—­at less than one year’s purchase, at the most underrated value; so that the fee-simple of an English acre of rent-free land sold at the rate of seven or eight shillings.  Such a sale, on such terms, strongly indicated the purchaser.  And how did it turn out in fact?  The purchaser was the very agent and instrument of Mr. Hastings, Debi Sing himself.  He made the exaction; he forced the sale; he reduced the rate; and he became the purchaser at less than one year’s purchase, and paid with the very money which he had extorted from the miserable vendors.

When he had thus sold and separated these lands, he united the whole body of them, amounting to about 7,000_l._ sterling a year (but, according to the rate of money and living in that country, equivalent to a rental in England of 30,000_l._ a year); and then having raised in the new letting, as on the sale he had fraudulently reduced those lands, he reserved them as an estate for himself, or to whomsoever resembling himself Mr. Hastings should order them to be disposed.

The lands, thus sold for next to nothing, left of course the late landholder still in debt.  The failure of fund, the rigorous exaction of debt, and the multiplication of new arbitrary taxes next carried off the goods.

There is a circumstance attending this business which will call for your Lordships’ pity.  Most of the landholders or zemindars in that country happened at that time to be women.  The sex there is in a state certainly resembling imprisonment, but guarded as a sacred treasure with all possible attention and respect.  None of the coarse male hands of the law can reach them; but they have a custom, very cautiously used in all good governments there, of employing female bailiffs or sergeants in the execution of the law, where that sex is concerned.  Guards, therefore, surrounded the houses; and then female sergeants and bailiffs entered into the habitations of these female zemindars, and held their goods and persons in execution,—­nothing being left but what was daily threatened, their life and honor.  The landholders, even women of eminent rank and condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous, without protection and without bread.  The monthly instalment of Mr. Hastings’s bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the vitals of the people.

The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of violence