instead of producing any law document or authority on the usages and local customs of the country, he has referred to officers in the army, colonels of artillery and engineers, to young gentlemen just come from school, not above three or four years in the country.  Good God! would not one rather have expected to hear him put all these travellers to shame by the authority of a man who had resided so long in the supreme situation of government,—­to set aside all these wild, loose, casual, and silly observations of travellers and theorists?  On the contrary, as if he was ignorant of everything, as if he knew nothing of India, as if he had dropped from the clouds, he cites the observations of every stranger who had been hurried in a palanquin through the country, capable or incapable of observation, to prove to you the nature of the government, and of the power he had to exercise.

My Lords, the Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to resort to the ridiculous relations of travellers, or to the wild systems which ingenious men have thought proper to build on their authority.  We will take another mode.  We will undertake to prove the direct contrary of his assertions in every point and particular.  We undertake to do this, because your Lordships know, and because the world knows, that, if you go into a country where you suppose man to be in a servile state,—­where, the despot excepted, there is no one person who can lift up his head above another,—­where all are a set of vile, miserable slaves, prostrate and confounded in a common servitude, having no descendible lands, no inheritance, nothing that makes man feel proud of himself, or that gives him honor and distinction with others,—­this abject degradation will take from you that kind of sympathy which naturally attaches you to men feeling like yourselves, to men who have hereditary dignities to support, and lands of inheritance to maintain, as you peers have; you will, I say, no longer have that feeling which you ought to have for the sufferings of a people whom you suppose to be habituated to their sufferings and familiar with degradation.  This makes it absolutely necessary for me to refute every one of these misrepresentations; and whilst I am endeavoring to establish the rights of these people, in order to show in what manner and degree they have been violated, I trust that your Lordships will not think that the time is lost:  certainly I do not think that my labor will be misspent in endeavoring to bring these matters fully before you.

In determining to treat this subject at length, I am also influenced by a strong sense of the evils that have attended the propagation of these wild, groundless, and pernicious opinions.  A young man goes to India before he knows much of his own country; but he cherishes in his breast, as I hope every man will, a just and laudable partiality for the laws, liberties, rights, and institutions of his own nation.  We all do this; and God forbid we should not prefer