will be restrained by no dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions.  Their protection is sure.  The authority that is to restrain, to control, to punish them is previously engaged; he has his retaining fee for the support of their crimes.  Mr. Hastings never dared, because he could not, arrest oppression in its course, without drying up the source of his own corrupt emolument.  Mr. Hastings never dared, after the fact, to punish extortion in others, because he could not, without risking the discovery of bribery in himself.  The same corruption, the same oppression, and the same impunity will reign through all the subordinate gradations.

A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of wicked, violent, and unjust instruments.  But when once the line of just and legal demand is transgressed, such instruments are of absolute necessity; and they comport themselves accordingly.  When we know that men must be well paid (and they ought to be well paid) for the performance of honorable duty, can we think that men will be found to commit wicked, rapacious, and oppressive acts with fidelity and disinterestedness for the sole emolument of dishonest employers?  No:  they must have their full share of the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer and more necessary instruments of the general extortion.  We must not, therefore, flatter ourselves, when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000_l._ in bribes for Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the people nothing more than 40,000_l._ is extorted.  I speak within compass, four times forty must be levied on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable tortures, imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general despair, general insurrection, the massacre of the officers of revenue by the people, the massacre of the people by the soldiery, and the total waste and destruction of the finest provinces in India, are things of course,—­and all a necessary consequence involved in the very substance of Mr. Hastings’s bribery.

I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed, for private purposes, the whole system of government by the six Provincial Councils, which he had no right to destroy.

I charge him with having delegated to others that power which the act of Parliament had directed him to preserve unalienably in himself.

I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere instruments and tools, at the enormous expense of 62,000_l._ per annum.

I charge him with having appointed a person their dewan to whom these Englishmen were to be subservient tools,—­whose name, to his own knowledge, was, by the general voice of India, by the general recorded voice of the Company, by recorded official transactions, by everything that can make a man known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy; and with giving him the whole power which he had thus separated from the Council-General, and from the Provincial Councils.