of the kingdom, this highest court of criminal jurisdiction, exercised upon the requisition of the House of Commons, if left without a rule, would be as lawless as the wild savage, and as unprincipled as the prisoner that stands at your bar.  Our whole issue is upon principles, and what I shall say to you will be in perpetual reference to them; because it is better to have no principles at all than to have false principles of government and of morality.  Leave a man to his passions, and you leave a wild beast to a savage and capricious nature.  A wild beast, indeed, when its stomach is full, will caress you, and may lick your hands; in like manner, when a tyrant is pleased or his passion satiated, you may have a happy and serene day under an arbitrary government.  But when the principle founded on solid reason, which ought to restrain passion, is perverted from its proper end, the false principle will be substituted for it, and then man becomes ten times worse than a wild beast.  The evil principle, grown solid and perennial, goads him on and takes entire possession of his mind; and then perhaps the best refuge that you can have from that diabolical principle is in the natural wild passions and unbridled appetites of mankind.  This is a dreadful state of things; and therefore we have thought it necessary to say a great deal upon his principles.

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My Lords, we come next to apply these principles to facts which cannot otherwise be judged, as we have contended and do now contend.  I will not go over facts which have been opened to you by my fellow Managers:  if I did so, I should appear to have a distrust, which I am sure no other man has, of the greatest abilities displayed in the greatest of all causes.  I should be guilty of a presumption which I hope I shall not dream of, but leave to those who exercise arbitrary power, in supposing that I could go over the ground which my fellow Managers have once trodden, and make anything more clear and forcible than they have done.  In my humble opinion, human ability cannot go farther than they have gone; and if I ever allude to anything which they have already touched, it will be to show it in another light,—­to mark more particularly its departure from the principles upon which we contend you ought to judge, or to supply those parts which through bodily infirmity, and I am sure nothing else, one of my excellent fellow Managers has left untouched.  I am here alluding to the case of Cheyt Sing.

My honorable fellow Manager, Mr. Grey, has stated to you all the circumstances requisite to prove two things:  first, that the demands made by Mr. Hastings upon Cheyt Sing were contrary to fundamental treaties between the Company and that Rajah; and next, that they were the result and effect of private malice and corruption.  This having been stated and proved to you, I shall take up the subject where it was left.