But mark another stage of the propagation of these horrible principles.  After having grounded upon them the defence of his conduct against our charge, and after he had got a person to forswear them for him, and to prove him to have told falsehoods of the grossest kind to the House of Commons, he again adheres to this defence.  The dog returned to his vomit.  After having vomited out his vile, bilious stuff of arbitrary power, and afterwards denied it to be his, he gets his counsel in this place to resort to the loathsome mess again.  They have thought proper, my Lords, to enter into an extended series of quotations from books of travellers, for the purpose of showing that despotism was the only principle of government acknowledged in India,—­that the people have no laws, no rights, no property movable or immovable, no distinction of ranks, nor any sense of disgrace.  After citing a long line of travellers to this effect, they quote Montesquieu as asserting the same facts, declaring that the people of India had no sense of honor, and were only sensible of the whip as far as it produced corporal pain.  They then proceed to state that it was a government of misrule, productive of no happiness to the people, and that it so continued until subverted by the free government of Britain,—­namely, the government that Mr. Hastings describes as having himself exercised there.

My Lords, if the prisoner can succeed in persuading us that these people have no laws, no rights, not even the common sentiments and feeling of men, he hopes your interest in them will be considerably lessened.  He would persuade you that their sufferings are much assuaged by their being nothing new,—­and that, having no right to property, to liberty, to honor, or to life, they must be more pleased with the little that is left to them than grieved for the much that has been ravished from them by his cruelty and his avarice.  This inference makes it very necessary for me, before I proceed further, to make a few remarks upon this part of the prisoner’s conduct, which your Lordships must have already felt with astonishment, perhaps with indignation.  This man, who passed twenty-five years in India, who was fourteen years at the head of his government, master of all the offices, master of all the registers and records, master of all the lawyers and priests of all this empire, from the highest to the lowest, instead of producing to you the fruits of so many years’ local and official knowledge upon that subject, has called out a long line of the rabble of travellers to inform you concerning the objects of his own government.  That his learned counsel should be ignorant of those things is a matter of course.  That, if left to himself, the person who has produced all this stuff should, in pursuit of his darling arbitrary power, wander without a guide, or with false guides, is quite natural.  But your Lordships must have heard with astonishment, that, upon points of law relative to the tenure of lands,