for a moment from your Lordships this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation in Mr. Hastings’s favor, and we shall produce it as a part of our evidence.  Oh, my Lords, consider the situation of a people who are forced to mix their praises with their groans, who are forced to sign, with hands which have been in torture, and with the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an attestation in favor of the person from whom all their sufferings have been derived!  When we prove to you the things that we shall prove, this will, I hope, give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory proof of the misery to which these people have been reduced.  You will see before you, what is so well expressed by one of our poets as the homage of tyrants, “that homage with the mouth which the heart would fain deny, but dares not.”  Mr. Hastings has received that homage, and that homage we mean to present to your Lordships:  we mean to present it, because it will show your Lordships clearly, that, after Mr. Hastings has ransacked Bengal from one end to the other, and has used all the power which he derives from having every friend and every dependant of his in every office from one end of that government to the other, he has not, in all those panegyrics, those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums, got one word of refutation or one word of evidence against any charge whatever which we produce against him.  Every one knows, that, in the course of criminal trials, when no evidence of alibi can be brought, when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted, the last thing produced is evidence to character.  His cause, therefore, is gone, when, having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at length appeals to his character.  In those little papers which are given us of our proceedings in our criminal courts, it is always an omen of what is to follow:  after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or robbery, it ends in his character:  “He has an admirable character; I have known him from a boy; he is wonderfully good; he is the best of men; I would trust him with untold gold”:  and immediately follows, “Guilty,—­Death.”  This is the way in which, in our courts, character is generally followed by sentence.  The practice is not modern.  Undoubtedly Mr. Hastings has the example of criminals of high antiquity; for Caius Verres, Antonius, and every other man who has been famous for the pillage and destruction of provinces, never failed to bring before their judges the attestations of the injured to their character.  Voltaire says, “Les bons mots sont toujours redits.”  A similar occasion has here produced a similar conduct.  He has got just the same character as Caius Verres got in another cause; and the laudationes, which your Lordships know always followed, to save trouble, we mean ourselves to give your Lordships; we mean to give them with this strong presumption of guilt, that in all this panegyric there is not one word of defence to a single article of charge; they are mere