He had just before said, “If I ever talked of selling the Company’s sovereignty to the Nabob of Oude, it was only in terrorem.”  In the face of this assertion, he here gives you to understand he never held out anything in terrorem, but what he intended to execute.  But we will show you that in fact he had reserved to himself a power of acting pro re nata, and that he intended to compound or not, just as answered his purposes upon this occasion.  “I admit,” he says, “that I did not enter it [the intention of fining Cheyt Sing] on the Consultations, because it was not necessary; even this plan itself of the fine was not a fixed plan, but to be regulated by circumstances, both as to the substantial execution of it and the mode.”  Now here is a man who has given it in a sworn narrative, that he did not intend to have a farthing less.  Why?  “Because I should have menaced and done as in former times has been done,—­made great and violent demands which I reduce afterwards for my own corrupt purposes.”  Yet he tells you in the course of the same defence, but in another paper, that he had no fixed plan, that he did not know whether he should exact a fine at all, or what should be his mode of executing it.

My Lords, what shall we say to this man, who declares that it would be a proof of corruption not to exact the full sum which he had threatened to exact, but who, finding that this doctrine would press hard upon him, and be considered as a proof of cruelty and injustice, turns round and declares he had no intention of exacting anything?  What shall we say to a man who thus reserves his determination, who threatens to sell a tributary prince to a tyrant, and cannot decide whether he should take from him his forts and pillage him of all he had, whether he should raise 500,000_l._ upon him, whether he should accept the 220,000_l._ offered, (which, by the way, we never knew of till long after the whole transaction,) whether he should do any or all of those things, and then, by his own account, going up to Benares without having resolved anything upon this important subject?

My Lords, I will now assume the hypothesis that he at last discovered sufficient proof of rebellious practices; still even this gave him no right to adduce such rebellion in justification of resolutions which he had taken, of acts which he had done, before he knew anything of its existence.  To such a plea we answer, and your Lordships will every one of you answer,—­“You shall not by a subsequent discovery of rebellious practices, which you did not know at the time, and which you did not even believe, as you have expressly told us here, justify your conduct prior to that discovery.”  If the conspiracy which he falsely imputes to Cheyt Sing, if that wild scheme of driving the English out of India, had existed, think in what miserable circumstances we stand as prosecutors, and your Lordships as judges, if we admit a discovery to be pleaded in justification of antecedent acts founded upon the assumed existence of that which he had no sort of proof, knowledge, or belief of!