been a bullock-contractor for some years, of having acted fraudulently in that capacity, and afterwards giving fraudulent contracts to others; and yet I will maintain that the first conquerors of the world would have been base and abandoned, if they had assumed such a right as he dares to claim.  It is the glory of all such great men to have for their motto, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.  These were men that said they would recompense the countries which they had obtained through torrents of blood, through carnage and violence, by the justice of their institutions, the mildness of their laws, and the equity of their government.  Even if these conquerors had promulgated arbitrary institutes instead of disclaiming them in every point, you, my Lords, would never suffer such principles of defence to be urged here; still less will you suffer the examples of men acting by violence, of men acting by wrong, the example of a man who has become a rebel to his sovereign in order that he should become the tyrant of his people, to be examples for a British governor, or for any governor.  We here confidently protest against this mode of justification, and we maintain that his pretending to follow these examples is in itself a crime.  The prisoner has ransacked all Asia for principles of despotism; he has ransacked all the bad and corrupted part of it for tyrannical examples to justify himself:  and certainly in no other way can he be justified.

Having established the falsehood of the first principle of the prisoner’s defence, that sovereignty, wherever it exists in India, implies in its nature and essence a power of exacting anything from the subject, and disposing of his person and property, we now come to his second assertion, that he was the true, full, and perfect representative of that sovereignty in India.

In opposition to this assertion we first do positively deny that he or the Company are the perfect representative of any sovereign power whatever.  They have certain rights by their charter, and by acts of Parliament, but they have no other.  They have their legal rights only, and these do not imply any such thing as sovereign power.  The sovereignty of Great Britain is in the King; he is the sovereign of the Lords and the sovereign of the Commons, individually and collectively; and as he has his prerogative established by law, he must exercise it, and all persons claiming and deriving under him, whether by act of Parliament, whether by charter of the Crown, or by any other mode whatever, all are alike bound by law, and responsible to it.  No one can assume or receive any power of sovereignty, because the sovereignty is in the Crown, and cannot be delegated away from the Crown; no such delegation ever took place, or ever was intended, as any one may see in the act by which Mr. Hastings was nominated Governor.  He cannot, therefore, exercise that high supreme sovereignty which is vested by the law, with the consent of both Houses of Parliament,