the refuge of this consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of cleft bamboos.  Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would think it incredible.  But it did not end there.  Growing from crime to crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire—­(I cannot proceed for shame and horror!)—­these infernal furies planted death in the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason, distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural, monstrous, and nefarious cruelty,—­there, where the reverence of nature and the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe their practices.

These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature.  But there were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in mere sensitive nature can do.

The women thus treated lost their caste.  My Lords, we are not here to commend or blame the institutions and prejudices of a whole race of people, radicated in them by a long succession of ages, on which no reason or argument, on which no vicissitudes of things, no mixtures of men, or foreign conquest, have been able to make the smallest impression.  The aboriginal Gentoo inhabitants are all dispersed into tribes or castes,—­each caste born to an invariable rank, rights, and descriptions of employment, so that one caste cannot by any means pass into another.  With the Gentoos, certain impurities or disgraces, though without any guilt of the party, infer loss of caste; and when the highest caste, that of Brahmin, which is not only noble, but sacred, is lost, the person who loses it does not slide down into one lower, but reputable,—­he is wholly driven from all honest society.  All the relations of life are at once dissolved.  His parents are no longer his parents; his wife is no longer his wife; his children, no longer his, are no longer to regard him as their father.  It is something far worse than complete outlawry, complete attainder, and universal excommunication.  It is a pollution even to touch him; and if he touches any of his old caste, they are justified in putting him to death.  Contagion, leprosy, plague, are not so much shunned.  No honest occupation can be followed.  He becomes an halicore, if (which is rare) he survives that miserable degradation.