Such is the imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally failed in their well-laid project.  They were totally mistaken in their man.  Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling heart.  My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age.  The son, as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded the consequences.  He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts.  He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune.  This letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life.  He laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper frame of mind for doing his duty.

He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full support in the execution of it,—­as he, with every other white man in Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact, that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent, had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold them to his discretion for a great sum of money.  If Paterson had known this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi Sing.  Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.

But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to perform a duty.  He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people, concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie, with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings, left him no sort of doubt of the real cause of the late tumults.  In his first letters he conveyed his sentiments to the Committee with these memorable words.  “In my two reports I have set forth in a general manner the oppressions which provoked the ryots to rise.  I shall, therefore, not enumerate them now.  Every day of my inquiry serves but to confirm the facts.  The wonder would have been, if they had not risen.  It was not collection, but real robbery, aggravated by corporal punishment