Your Lordships will observe that he slips in the word sovereignty and forgets compact; because it is plain, and your Lordships must perceive it, that, wherever he uses the word sovereignty, he uses it to destroy the authority of all compacts; and accordingly in the passage now before us he declares that there is an invalidity in all compacts entered into in India, from the nature, state, and constitution of that empire.  “From the disorderly form of its government,” says he, “there is an invalidity in all compacts and treaties whatever.”  “Persons who had no treaty with the Rajah wished,” says he, “to rob him:  therefore I, who have a treaty with him, and call myself his sovereign, have a right to realize all their wishes.”

But the fact is, my Lords, that his predecessors never did propose to deprive Bulwant Sing, the father of Cheyt Sing, of his zemindary.  They, indeed, wished to have had the dewanny transferred to them, in the manner it has since been transferred to the Company.  They wished to receive his rents, and to be made an intermediate party between him and the Mogul emperor, his sovereign.  These predecessors had entered into no compact with the man:  they were negotiating with his sovereign for the transfer of the dewanny or stewardship of the country, which transfer was afterwards actually executed; but they were obliged to give the country itself back again to Bulwant Sing, with a guaranty against all the pretensions of Sujah Dowlah, who had tyrannically assumed an arbitrary power over it.  This power the predecessors of Mr. Hastings might also have wished to assume; and he may therefore say, according to the mode of reasoning which he has adopted,—­“Whatever they wished to do, but never succeeded in doing, I may and ought to do of my own will.  Whatever fine Sujah Dowlah would have exacted I will exact.  I will penetrate into that tiger’s bosom, and discover the latent seeds of rapacity and injustice which lurk there, and I will make him the subject of my imitation.”

These are the principles upon which, without accuser, without judge, without inquiry, he resolved to lay a fine of 500,000_l._ on Cheyt Sing!

In order to bind himself to a strict fulfilment of this resolution, he has laid down another very extraordinary doctrine.  He has laid it down as a sort of canon, (in injustice and corruption,) that, whatever demand, whether just or unjust, a man declares his intention of making upon another, he should exact the precise sum which he has determined upon, and that, if he takes anything less, it is a proof of corruption.  “I have,” says he, “shown by this testimony that I never intended to make any communication to Cheyt Sing of taking less than the fifty lacs which in my own mind I had resolved to exact.”  And he adds,—­“I shall make my last and solemn appeal to the breast of every man who shall read this, whether it is likely, or morally possible, that I should have tied down my own future conduct to so decided a process and series of acts, if I had secretly intended to threaten, or to use a degree of violence, for no other purpose than to draw from the object of it a mercenary atonement for my own private emolument, and suffer all this tumult to terminate in an ostensible and unsubstantial submission to the authority which I represented.”