Here, my Lords, the secret comes out.  He declares it was not for a rebellion or a suspicion of rebellion that he resolved, over and above all his exorbitant demands, to take from the Rajah 500,000_l._, (a good stout sum to be taken from a tributary power!)—­that it was not for misconduct of this kind that he took this sum, but for personal ill behavior towards himself.  I must again beg your Lordships to note that he then considered the Rajah’s contumacy as having for its object, not the Company, but Warren Hastings, and that he afterwards declared publicly to the House of Commons, and now before your Lordships he declares finally and conclusively, that he did believe Cheyt Sing to have had the criminal intention imputed to him.

“So long,” says he, “as I conceived Cheyt Sing’s misconduct and contumacy to have me” (in Italics, as he ordered it to be printed,) “rather than the Company, for its object, so long I was satisfied with a fine:  I therefore entertained no serious thoughts of expelling him, or proceeding otherwise to violence.  But when he and his people broke out into the most atrocious acts of rebellion and murder, when the jus fortioris et lex ultima regum were appealed to on his part, and without any sufficient plea afforded him on mine, I from that moment considered him as the traitor and criminal described in the charge, and no concessions, no humiliations, could ever after induce me to settle on him the zemindary of Benares, or any other territory, upon any footing whatever.”

Thus, then, my Lords, he has confessed that the era and the only era of rebellion was when the tumult broke out upon the act of violence offered by himself to Cheyt Sing; and upon the ground of that tumult, or rebellion as he calls it, he says he never would suffer him to enjoy any territory or any right whatever.  We have fixed the period of the rebellion for which he is supposed to have exacted this fine; this period of rebellion was after the exaction of the fine itself:  so that the fine was not laid for the rebellion, but the rebellion broke out in consequence of the fine, and the violent measure accompanying it.  We have established this, and the whole human race cannot shake it.  He went up the country through malice, to revenge his own private wrongs, not those of the Company.  He fixed 500,000_l._ as a mulct for an insult offered to himself, and then a rebellion broke out in consequence of his violence.  This was the rebellion, and the only rebellion; it was Warren Hastings’s rebellion,—­a rebellion which arose from his own dreadful exaction, from his pride, from his malice and insatiable avarice,—­a rebellion which arose from his abominable tyranny, from his lust of arbitrary power, and from his determination to follow the examples of Sujah Dowlah, Asoph ul Dowlah, Cossim Ali Khan, Aliverdy Khan, and all the gang of rebels who are the objects of his imitation.