Upon those whom all the shocking catalogue of tortures I have mentioned could not make to flinch one of the modes of losing caste for Brahmins and other principal tribes was practised.  It was to harness a bullock at the court-door, and to put the Brahmin on his back, and to lead him through the towns, with drums beating before him.  To intimidate others, this bullock, with drums, (the instrument, according to their ideas, of outrage, disgrace, and utter loss of caste,) was led through the country; and as it advanced, the country fled before it.  When any Brahmin was seized, he was threatened with this pillory, and for the most part he submitted in a moment to whatever was ordered.  What it was may be thence judged.  But when no possibility existed of complying with the demand, the people by their cries sometimes prevailed on the tyrants to have it commuted for cruel scourging, which was accepted as mercy.  To some Brahmins this mercy was denied, and the act of indelible infamy executed.  Of these men one came to the Company’s commissioner with the tale, and ended with these melancholy words:  “I have suffered this indignity; my caste is lost; my life is a burden to me:  I call for justice.”  He called in vain.

Your Lordships will not wonder that these monstrous and oppressive demands, exacted with such tortures, threw the whole province into despair.  They abandoned their crops on the ground.  The people, in a body, would have fled out of its confines; but bands of soldiers invested the avenues of the province, and, making a line of circumvallation, drove back those wretches, who sought exile as a relief, into the prison of their native soil.  Not suffered to quit the district, they fled to the many wild thickets which oppression had scattered through it, and sought amongst the jungles, and dens of tigers, a refuge from the tyranny of Warren Hastings.  Not able long to exist here, pressed at once by wild beasts and famine, the same despair drove them back; and seeking their last resource in arms, the most quiet, the most passive, the most timid of the human race rose up in an universal insurrection; and, what will always happen in popular tumults, the effects of the fury of the people fell on the meaner and sometimes the reluctant instruments of the tyranny, who in several places were massacred.  The insurrection began in Rungpore, and soon spread its fire to the neighboring provinces, which had been harassed by the same person with the same oppressions.  The English Chief in that province had been the silent witness, most probably the abettor and accomplice, of all these horrors.  He called in first irregular, and then regular troops, who by dreadful and universal military execution got the better of the impotent resistance of unarmed and undisciplined despair.  I am tired with the detail of the cruelties of peace.  I spare you those of a cruel and inhuman war, and of the executions which, without law or process, or even the shadow of authority, were ordered by the English Revenue Chief in that province.