characteristics, and rewards of honor and of virtue,—­when it is seen that high station, great rank, general applause, vast wealth follow the commission of peculation and bribery.  Is it to be believed that men can long be ashamed of that which they see to be the road to honor?  As to fear, let a Governor-General once take bribes, there is an end of all fear in the service.  What have they to fear?  Is it the man whose example they follow that is to bring them before a tribunal for their punishment?  Can he open any inquiry?  He cannot:  he that opens a channel of inquiry under these circumstances opens a high-road to his own detection.  Can he make any laws to prevent it?  None:  for he can make no laws to restrain that practice without the breach of his own laws immediately in his own conduct.  If we once can admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope left in the supreme justice of the country.  We are sensible of all these difficulties; we have felt them; and perhaps it has required no small degree of exertion for us to get the better of these difficulties which are thrown in our way by a Governor-General accepting bribes, and thereby screening and protecting the whole service in such iniquitous proceedings.

With regard to this matter, we are to state to your Lordships, in order to bring it fully and distinctly before you, what the nature of this distemper of bribery is in the Indian government.  We are to state what the laws and rules are which have been opposed to prevent it, and the utter insufficiency of all that have been proposed:  to state the grievance, the instructions of the Company and government, the acts of Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of Parliament.  We are to state to your Lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are to state the trust the Company had in him for the prevention of all those evils; and then we are to prove that every evil, that all those grievances which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a special, direct, and immediate trust to prevent.  We are to prove to your Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person collectively, has done more mischief than all those persons whose evil practices have produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own appointment.

The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company’s affairs in India, from the time of their first establishment there.  Very often there are no words nor any description which can adequately convey the state of a thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself:  because