and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had been before made away with.  Even the lands and funds set aside for their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial sufferings of their lives,—­even the very feeble consolations of death, were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,—­a tyranny more consuming than the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than death itself,—­seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.

Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people.  Were the lower, the more industrious, spared?  Alas! as their situation was far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary.  To afford your Lordships some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr. Hastings’s hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing.  Debi Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country, had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.

“It is notorious,” says he, “that poverty generally prevails amongst the husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the country.  They are seldom possessed of any property, except at the time they reap their harvest; and at others barely procure their subsistence.  And this is the cause that such numbers of them were swept away by the famine.  Their effects are only a little earthen-ware, and their houses only a handful of straw, the sale of a thousand of which would not perhaps produce twenty shillings.”

These were the opulent people from whose superfluities Mr. Hastings was to obtain a gift of 40,000_l._, over and above a large increase of rent, over and above the exactions by which the farmer must reimburse himself for the advance of the money by which he must obtain the natural profit of the farm as well as supply the peculium of his own avarice.

Therefore your Lordships will not be surprised at the consequences.  All this unhappy race of little farmers and tillers of the soil were driven like a herd of cattle by his extortioners, and compelled by imprisonments, by fetters, and by cruel whippings, to engage for more than the whole of their substance or possible acquisition.

Over and above this, there was no mode of extortion, which the inventive imagination of rapacity could contrive, that was not contrived, and was not put in practice.  On its own day your Lordships will hear, with astonishment, detestation, and horror, the detail of these tyrannous inventions; and it will appear that the aggregate of these superadded demands amounted to as great a sum as the whole of the compulsory rent on which they were piled.