own power, but made whole establishments, altered and perverted others, and created complete revolutions in the country’s government, for the purpose of making the power which ought to be subservient to legal government subservient to corruption; that, when he could no longer cover these fraudulent proceedings by artifice, he endeavored to justify them by principle.  These artifices we mean to detect; these principles we mean to attack, and, with your Lordships’ aid, to demolish, destroy, and subvert forever.

My Lords, I must say, that in this business, which is a matter of collusion, concealment, and deceit, your Lordships will, perhaps, not feel the same degree of interest as in the others.  Hitherto you have had before you crimes of dignity:  you have had before you the ruin and expulsion of great and illustrious families, the breach of solemn public treaties, the merciless pillage and total subversion of the first houses in Asia.  But the crimes which are the most striking to the imagination are not always the most pernicious in their effects:  in these high, eminent acts of domineering tyranny, their very magnitude proves a sort of corrective to their virulence.  The occasions on which they can be exercised are rare; the persons upon whom they can be exercised few; the persons who can exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many.  These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of superior wickedness in eminent station.

But, my Lords, when the vices of low, sordid, and illiberal minds infect that high situation,—­when theft, bribery, and peculation, attended with fraud, prevarication, falsehood, misrepresentation, and forgery—­when all these follow in one train,—­when these vices, which gender and spawn in dirt, and are nursed in dunghills, come and pollute with their slime that throne which ought to be a seat of dignity and purity, the evil is much greater; it may operate daily and hourly; it is not only imitable, but improvable, and it will be imitated, and will be improved, from the highest to the lowest, through all the gradations of a corrupt government.  They are reptile vices.  There are situations in which the acts of the individual are of some moment, the example comparatively of little importance.  In the other, the mischief of the example is infinite.

My Lords, when once a Governor-General receives bribes, he gives a signal to universal pillage to all the inferior parts of the service.  The bridles upon hard-mouthed passion are removed; they are taken away; they are broken.  Fear and shame, the great guards to virtue next to conscience, are gone.  Shame! how can it exist?—­it will soon blush away its awkward sensibility.  Shame, my Lords, cannot exist long, when it is seen that crimes which naturally bring disgrace are attended with all the outward symbols,