My Lords, the House of Commons has already well considered what may be our future moral and political condition, when the persons who come from that school of pride, insolence, corruption, and tyranny are more intimately mixed up with us of purer morals.  Nothing but contamination can be the result, nothing but corruption can exist in this country, unless we expunge this doctrine out of the very hearts and souls of the people.  It is not to the gang of plunderers and robbers of which I say this man is at the head, that we are only, or indeed principally, to look.  Every man in Great Britain will be contaminated and must be corrupted, if you let loose among us whole legions of men, generation after generation, tainted with these abominable vices, and avowing these detestable principles.  It is, therefore, to preserve the integrity and honor of the Commons of Great Britain, that we have brought this man to your Lordships’ bar.

When these matters were first explained to your Lordships, and strongly enforced by abilities greater than I can exert, there was something like compunction shown by the prisoner:  but he took the most strange mode to cover his guilt.  Upon the cross-examination of Major Scott, he discovered all the engines of this Indian corruption.  Mr. Hastings got that witness to swear that this defence of his, from which the passages I have read to your Lordships are extracted, was not his, but that it was the work of his whole Council, composed of Mr. Middleton, Mr. Shore, Mr. Halhed, Mr. Baber,—­the whole body of his Indian Cabinet Council; that this was their work, and not his; and that he disclaimed it, and therefore that it would be wrong to press it upon him.  Good God! my Lords, what shall we say in this stage of the business?  The prisoner put in an elaborate defence:  he now disclaims that defence.  He told us that it was of his own writing, that he had been able to compose it in five days; and he now gets five persons to contradict his own assertions, and to disprove on oath his most solemn declarations.

My Lords, this business appears still more alarming, when we find not only Mr. Hastings, but his whole Council, engaged in it.  I pray your Lordships to observe, that Mr. Halhed, a person concerned with Mr. Hastings in compiling a code of Gentoo laws, is now found to be one of the persons to whom this very defence is attributed which contains such detestable and abominable doctrines.  But are we to consider the contents of this paper as the defence of the prisoner or not?  Will any one say, that, when an answer is sworn to in Chancery, when an answer is given here to an impeachment of the Commons, or when a plea is made to an indictment, that it is drawn by the defendant’s counsel, and therefore is not his?  Did we not all hear him read this defence in part at our bar?—­did we not see him hand it to his secretary to have it read by his son?—­did he not then hear it read from end to end?—­did not he himself desire it to be printed, (for it was no act of ours,) and did he not superintend and revise the press?—­and has any breath but his own breathed upon it?  No, my Lords, the whole composition is his, by writing or adoption; and never, till he found it pressed him in this House, never, till your Lordships began to entertain the same abhorrence of it that we did, did he disclaim it.