These are the principles by which we have examined the conduct of this man, and upon which we have brought him to your Lordships’ bar for judgment.  This is our table of the law.  Your Lordships shall now be shown the table by which he claims to be judged.  But I will first beg your Lordships to take notice of the utter contempt with which he treats all our acts of Parliament.

Speaking of the absolute sovereignty which he would have you believe is exercised by the princes of India, he says, “The sovereignty which they 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,” and so on.  This is the manner in which he treats an act of Parliament!  In the place of acts of Parliament he substitutes his own arbitrary will.  This he contends is the sole law of the country he governed, as laid down in what he calls the arbitrary Institutes of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane.  This arbitrary will he claims, to the exclusion of the Gentoo law, the Mahometan law, and the law of his own country.  He claims the right of making his own will the sole rule of his government, and justifies the exercise of this power by the examples of Aliverdy Khan, Cossim Ali Khan, Sujah Dowlah Khan, and all those Khans who have rebelled against their masters, and desolated the countries subjected to their rule.  This, my Lords, is the law which he has laid down for himself, and these are the examples which he has expressly told the House of Commons he is resolved to follow.  These examples, my Lords, and the principles with which they are connected, without any softening or mitigation, he has prescribed to you as the rule by which his conduct is to be judged.

Another principle of the prisoner is, that, whenever the Company’s affairs are in distress, even when that distress proceeds from his own prodigality, mismanagement, or corruption, he has a right to take for the Company’s benefit privately in his own name, with the future application of it to their use reserved in his own breast, every kind of bribe or corrupt present whatever.

I have now restated to your Lordships the maxims by which the prisoner persists in defending himself, and the principles upon which we claim to have him judged.  The issue before your Lordships is a hundred times more important than the cause itself, for it is to determine by what law or maxims of law the conduct of governors is to be judged.

On one side, your Lordships have the prisoner declaring that the people have no laws, no rights, no usages, no distinctions of rank, no sense of honor, no property,—­in short, that they are nothing but a herd of slaves, to be governed by the arbitrary will of a master.  On the other side, we assert that the direct contrary of this is true.  And to prove our assertion we have referred you to the Institutes of Genghis Khan