Other principles of policy, and other rules of government, and other maxims of office prevailed in the Committee of Mr. Hastings’s devising.  In order to destroy that just and natural credit of the officer, and the protection and support they were bound to afford him, they in an instant shift and reverse all the relations in which the parties stood.

This executive board, instituted for the protection of the revenue and of the people, and which was no court of justice in fact or name, turned their own representative officer, reporting facts according to his duty, into a voluntary accuser who is to make good his charge at his peril; the farmer-general, whose conduct was not criminally attacked, but appeared as one of the grounds of a public inquiry, is turned into a culprit before a court of justice, against whom everything is to be juridically made out or not admitted; and the members of an executive board, by usurpation and fraud, erect themselves into judges bound to proceed by strict rules of law.

By this infamous juggle they took away, as far as in them lay, the credit due to the proceedings of government.  They changed the natural situation of proofs.  They rejected the depositions of Paterson’s witnesses, as not on oath, though they had never ordered or authorized them so to be taken.

They went further, and disabled, in a body, all the deponents themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own rebellion.  They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead of the culprit.  They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) and made him a complainant and a witness against him in the stupidest and most improbable of all accusations,—­namely, that Paterson had menaced him with punishment, if he did not, in so many words, slander and calumniate Debi Sing; and then the Committee, seating this wretch as an assessor at their own board, who a few days before would have trembled like a whipped slave at the look of an European, encouraged him to interrogate their own commissioner.

[Here Mr. Burke was taken ill, and obliged to sit down.  After some time Mr. Burke again addressed the House.]

My Lords, I am sorry to break the attention of your Lordships in such a way.  It is a subject that agitates me.  It is long, difficult, and arduous; but with the blessing of God, if I can, to save you any further trouble, I will go through it this day.

I am to tell your Lordships, that the next step they took was, after putting Mr. Paterson as an accuser to make good a charge which he made out but too much to their satisfaction, they changed their battery.

[Mr. Burke’s illness increased; upon which the House, on the motion of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, adjourned.]