He first asserts, that he was possessed of an arbitrary and despotic power, restrained by no laws but his own will.  He next says, that “the rights of the people he governed in India are nothing, and that the rights of the government are everything.”  The people, he asserts, have no liberty, no laws, no inheritance, no fixed property, no descendable estate, no subordinations in society, no sense of honor or of shame, and that they are only affected by punishment so far as punishment is a corporal infliction, being totally insensible of any difference between the punishment of man and beast.  These are the principles of his Indian government, which Mr. Hastings has avowed in their full extent.  Whenever precedents are required, he cites and follows the example of avowed tyrants, of Aliverdy Khan, Cossim Ali Khan, and Sujah Dowlah.  With an avowal of these principles he was pleased first to entertain the House of Commons, the active assertors and conservators of the rights, liberties, and laws of his country; and then to insist upon them more largely and in a fuller detail before this awful tribunal, the passive judicial conservator of the same great interests.  He has brought out these blasphemous doctrines in this great temple of justice, consecrated to law and equity for a long series of ages.  He has brought them forth in Westminster Hall, in presence of all the Judges of the land, who are to execute the law, and of the House of Lords, who are bound as its guardians not to suffer the words “arbitrary power” to be mentioned before them.  For I am not again to tell your Lordships, that arbitrary power is treason in the law,—­that to mention it with law is to commit a contradiction in terms.  They cannot exist in concert; they cannot hold together for a moment.

Let us now hear what the prisoner says.  “The sovereignty which they [the subahdars, or viceroys of the Mogul empire] assumed, it fell to my lot, very unexpectedly, to exert; and whether or not such power, or powers of that nature, were delegated to me by any provisions of any act of Parliament I confess myself too little of a lawyer to pronounce.  I only know that the acceptance of the sovereignty of Benares, &c., is not acknowledged or admitted by any act of Parliament; and yet, by the particular interference of the majority of the Council, the Company is clearly and indisputably seized of that sovereignty.  If, therefore, the sovereignty of Benares, as ceded to us by the Vizier, have any rights whatever annexed to it, and be not a mere empty word without meaning, those rights must be such as are held, countenanced, and established by the law, custom, and usage of the Mogul empire, and not by the provisions of any British act of Parliament hitherto enacted. Those rights, and none other, I have been the involuntary instrument of enforcing.  And if any future act of Parliament shall positively or by implication tend to annihilate those very rights, or their exertion, as I have exerted