I shall now proceed to state to your Lordships, that this Debi Sing, fortified by this protection, which was extended even to the lowest of his instruments, thought it high time to assume the superiority that belonged to a personage who had the Governor-General for his pensioner.  No longer the sneaking tone of apology; no longer the modest allegations that the commissioner was misinformed;—­he boldly accuses the representative of English government of forgery in order to destroy him; he criminates and recriminates, and lays about him without mercy.

Things were now in a proper train; the Committee find the cause growing and ripening to their wishes;—­answers, replies, objections, and interrogatories,—­accounts opposed to accounts,—­balances now on the one side, now on the other,—­now debtor becomes creditor, and creditor debtor,—­until the proceedings were grown to the size of volumes, and the whole well fitted to perplex the most simple facts, and to darken the meridian sunshine of public notoriety.  They prepared a report for the Governor-General and Council suitable to the whole tenor of their proceedings.  Here the man whom they had employed and betrayed appeared in a new character.  Observe their course with him.  First he was made a commissioner.  Then he was changed from a commissioner to be a voluntary accuser.  He now undergoes another metamorphosis:  he appears as a culprit before Mr. Hastings, on the accusation of the donor of Mr. Hastings’s bribes.  He is to answer to the accusations of Debi Sing.  He is permitted to find materials for his own defence; and he, an old Company’s servant, is to acknowledge it as a favor to be again suffered to go into the province, without authority, without station, without public character, under the discountenance and frowns, and in a manner under prosecution, of the government.  As a favor, he is suffered to go again into Rungpore, in hopes of finding among the dejected, harassed, and enslaved race of Hindoos, and in that undone province, men bold enough to stand forward, against all temptations of emolument, and at the risk of their lives, with a firm adherence to their original charge,—­and at a time when they saw him an abandoned and persecuted private individual, whom they had just before looked upon as a protecting angel, carrying with him the whole power of a beneficent government, and whom they had applied to, as a magistrate of high and sacred authority, to hear the complaints and to redress the grievances of a whole people.

A new commission of junior servants was at the same time sent out to review and reexamine the cause, to inquire into the inquiry, to examine into the examination, to control the report, to be commissioners upon the commission of Mr. Paterson.  Before these commissioners he was made to appear as an accused person, and was put upon his defence, but without the authority and without the favor which ought to go with an accused person for the purpose of enabling him to make out such defence.