as ever were chosen, I suppose, since the world began.  Perhaps their merit was giving a bribe of 40,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings.  How he disposed of it I don’t know.  He says, “I disposed of it to the public, and it was in a case of emergency.”  You will see in the course of this business the falsehood of that pretence; for you will see, though the obligation is given for it as a round sum of money, that the payment was not accomplished till a year after; that therefore it could not answer any immediate exigence of the Company.  Did it answer in an increase of the revenue?  The very reverse.  Those persons who had given this bribe of 40,000_l._ at the end of that year were found 80,000_l._ in debt to the Company.  The Company always loses, when Mr. Hastings takes a bribe; and when he proposes an increase of the revenue, the Company loses often double.  But I hope and trust your Lordships will consider this idea of a monstrous rise of rent, given by men of desperate fortunes and characters, to be one of the grievances instead of one of the advantages of this system.

It has been necessary to lay these facts before you, (and I have stated them to your Lordships far short of their reality, partly through my infirmity, and partly on account of the odiousness of the task of going through things that disgrace human nature,) that you may be enabled fully to enter into the dreadful consequences which attend a system of bribery and corruption in a Governor-General.  On a transient view, bribery is rather a subject of disgust than horror,—­the sordid practice of a venal, mean, and abject mind; and the effect of the crime seems to end with the act.  It looks to be no more than the corrupt transfer of property from one person to another,—­at worst a theft.  But it will appear in a very different light, when you regard the consideration for which the bribe is given,—­namely, that a Governor-General, claiming an arbitrary power in himself, for that consideration delivers up the properties, the liberties, and the lives of an whole people to the arbitrary discretion of any wicked and rapacious person, who will be sure to make good from their blood the purchase he has paid for his power over them.  It is possible that a man may pay a bribe merely to redeem himself from some evil.  It is bad, however, to live under a power whose violence has no restraint except in its avarice.  But no man ever paid a bribe for a power to charge and tax others, but with a view to oppress them.  No man ever paid a bribe for the handling of the public money, but to peculate from it.  When once such offices become thus privately and corruptly venal, the very worst men will be chosen (as Mr. Hastings has in fact constantly chosen the very worst); because none but those who do not scruple the use of any means are capable, consistently with profit, to discharge at once the rigid demands of a severe public revenue and the private bribes of a rapacious chief magistrate.  Not only the worst men will be thus chosen, but they