and of Tamerlane; we have referred you to the Mahometan law, which is binding upon all, from the crowned head to the meanest subject,—­a law interwoven with a system of the wisest, the most learned, and most enlightened jurisprudence that perhaps ever existed in the world.  We have shown you, that, if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so.  The rights of the people are everything, as they ought to be, in the true and natural order of things.  God forbid that these maxims should trench upon sovereignty, and its true, just, and lawful prerogative!—­on the contrary, they ought to support and establish them.  The sovereign’s rights are undoubtedly sacred rights, and ought to be so held in every country in the world, because exercised for the benefit of the people, and in subordination to that great end for which alone God has vested power in any man or any set of men.  This is the law that we insist upon, and these are the principles upon which your Lordships are to try the prisoner at your bar.

Let me remind your Lordships that these people lived under the laws to which I have referred you, and that these laws were formed whilst we, I may say, were in the forest, certainly before we knew what technical jurisprudence was.  These laws are allowed to be the basis and substratum of the manners, customs, and opinions of the people of India; and we contend that Mr. Hastings is bound to know them and to act by them; and I shall prove that the very condition upon which he received power in India was to protect the people in their laws and known rights.  But whether Mr. Hastings did know these laws, or whether, content with credit gained by as base a fraud as was ever practised, he did not read the books which Nobkissin paid for, we take the benefit of them:  we know and speak after knowledge of them.  And although I believe his Council have never read them, I should be sorry to stand in this place, if there was one word and tittle in these books that I had not read over.

We therefore come here and declare to you that he is not borne out by these Institutes, either in their general spirit or in any particular passage to which he has had the impudence to appeal, in the assumption of the arbitrary power which he has exercised.  We claim, that, as our own government and every person exercising authority in Great Britain is bound by the laws of Great Britain, so every person exercising authority in another country shall be subject to the laws of that country; since otherwise they break the very covenant by which we hold our power there.  Even if these Institutes had been arbitrary, which they are not, they might have been excused as the acts of conquerors.  But, my Lords, he is no conqueror, nor anything but what you see him,—­a bad scribbler of absurd papers, in which he can put no two sentences together without contradiction.  We know him in no other character than that of having