children) have for more than fifteen years past furnished the investment for our trade with China, and been sent annually out, and without recompense, to purchase for us that delicate meal with which your Lordships, and all this auditory, and all this country, have begun every day for these fifteen years at their expense.  To those beneficent hands that labor for our benefit the return of the British government has been cords and hammers and wedges.  But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands will act with resistless power.  What is it that they will not pull down, when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors?  Then what can withstand such hands?  Can the power that crushed and destroyed them?  Powerful in prayer, let us at least deprecate and thus endeavor to secure ourselves from the vengeance which these mashed and disabled hands may pull down upon us.  My Lords, it is an awful consideration:  let us think of it.

But to pursue this melancholy, but necessary detail.  I am next to open to your Lordships, what I am hereafter to prove, that the most substantial and leading yeomen, the responsible farmers, the parochial magistrates and chiefs of villages, were tied two and two by the legs together; and their tormentors, throwing them with their heads downwards, over a bar, beat them on the soles of the feet with rattans, until the nails fell from the toes; and then attacking them at their heads, as they hung downward, as before at their feet, they beat them with sticks and other instruments of blind fury, until the blood gushed out at their eyes, mouths, and noses.  Not thinking that the ordinary whips and cudgels, even so administered, were sufficient, to others (and often also to the same who had suffered as I have stated) they applied, instead of rattan and bamboo, whips made of the branches of the bale tree,—­a tree full of sharp and strong thorns, which tear the skin and lacerate the flesh far worse than ordinary scourges.  For others, exploring with a searching and inquisitive malice, stimulated by an insatiate rapacity, all the devious paths of Nature for whatever is most unfriendly to man, they made rods of a plant highly caustic and poisonous, called Bechettea, every wound of which festers and gangrenes, adds double and treble to the present torture, leaves a crust of leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of life itself.  At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment.  They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe and almost intolerable,—­they were led out before break of day, and, stiff and sore as they were with