My Lords, I must again beg leave to call your attention to his mode of proceeding in this business.  He never entered any charge.  He never answered any letter.  Not that he was idle.  He was carrying on a wicked and clandestine plot for the destruction of the Rajah, under the pretence of this fine; although the plot was not known, I verily believe, to any European at the time.  He does not pretend that he told any one of the Company’s servants of his intentions of fining the Rajah; but that some hostile project against him had been formed by Mr. Hastings was perfectly well known to the natives.  Mr. Hastings tells you, that Cheyt Sing had a vakeel at Calcutta, whose business it was to learn the general transactions of our government, and the most minute particulars which could in any manner affect the interest of his employer.

I must here tell your Lordships, that there is no court in Asia, from the highest to the lowest, no petty sovereign, that does not both employ and receive what they call hircarrahs, or, in other words, persons to collect and to communicate political intelligence.  These men are received with the state and in the rank of ambassadors; they have their place in the durbar; and their business, as authorized spies, is as well known there as that of ambassadors extraordinary and ordinary in the courts of Europe.  Mr. Hastings had a public spy, in the person of the Resident, at Benares, and he had a private spy there in another person.  The spies employed by the native powers had by some means come to the knowledge of Mr. Hastings’s clandestine and wicked intentions towards this unhappy man, Cheyt Sing, and his unhappy country, and of his designs for the destruction and the utter ruin of both.  He has himself told you, and he has got Mr. Anderson to vouch it, that he had received proposals for the sale of this miserable man and his country.  And from whom did he receive these proposals, my Lords?  Why, from the Nabob Asoph ul Dowlah, to whom he threatened to transfer both the person of the Rajah and his zemindary, if he did not redeem himself by some pecuniary sacrifice.  Now Asoph ul Dowlah, as appears by the minutes on your Lordships’ table, was at that time a bankrupt.  He was in debt to the Company tenfold more than he could pay, and all his revenues were sequestered for that debt.  He was a person of the last degree of indolence with the last degree of rapacity,—­a man of whom Mr. Hastings declared, that he had wasted and destroyed by his misgovernment the fairest provinces upon earth, that not a person in his dominions was secure from his violence, and that even his own father could not enjoy his life and honor in safety under him.  This avaricious bankrupt tyrant, who had beggared and destroyed his own subjects, and could not pay his debts to the English government, was the man with whom Mr. Hastings was in treaty to deliver up Cheyt Sing and his country, under pretence of his not having paid regularly to the Company those customary payments which the tyrant would probably have never paid at all, if he had been put in possession of the country.  This I mention to illustrate Mr. Hastings’s plans of economy and finance, without considering the injustice and cruelty of delivering up a man to the hereditary enemy of his family.