My Lords, you have heard the charge; and you are now going to see the prisoner at your bar in a new point of view.  I will now endeavor to display him in his character of a legislator in a foreign land, not augmenting the territory, honor, and power of Great Britain, and bringing the acquisition under the dominion of law and liberty, but desolating a flourishing country, that to all intents and purposes was our own,—­a country which we had conquered from freedom, from tranquillity, order, and prosperity, and submitted, through him, to arbitrary power, misrule, anarchy, and ruin.  We now see the object of his corrupt vengeance utterly destroyed, his family driven from their home, his people butchered, his wife and all the females of his family robbed and dishonored in their persons, and the effects which husband and parents had laid up in store for the subsistence of their families, all the savings of provident economy, distributed amongst a rapacious soldiery.  His malice is victorious.  He has well avenged, in the destruction of this unfortunate family, the Rajah’s intended visit to General Clavering; he has well avenged the suspected discovery of his bribe to Mr. Francis.

    “Thou hast it now, King, Cawdor, Glamis, all!”

Let us see, my Lords, what use he makes of this power,—­how he justifies the bounty of Fortune, bestowing on him this strange and anomalous conquest.  Anomalous I call it, my Lords, because it was the result of no plan in the cabinet, no operation in the field.  No act or direction proceeded from him, the responsible chief, except the merciless orders, and the grant to the soldiery.  He lay skulking and trembling in the fort of Chunar, while the British soldiery entitled themselves to the plunder which he held out to them.  Nevertheless, my Lords, he conquers; the country is his own; he treats it as his own.  Let us, therefore, see how this successor of Tamerlane, this emulator of Genghis Khan, governs a country conquered by the talents and courage of others, without assistance, guide, direction, or counsel given by himself.

My Lords, I will introduce his first act to your Lordships’ notice in the words of the charge.

“The said Warren Hastings did, some time in the year 1782, enter into a clandestine correspondence with William Markham, Esquire, the then Resident at Benares; which said Markham had been by him, the said Warren Hastings, obtruded into the said office, contrary to the positive orders of the Court of Directors.”

This unjustifiable obtrusion, this illegal appointment, shows you at the very outset that he defies the laws of his country,—­most positively and pointedly defies them.  In attempting to give a reason for this defiance, he has chosen to tell a branch of the legislature from which originated the act which wisely and prudently ordered him to pay implicit obedience to the Court of Directors, that he removed Mr. Fowke from Benares, contrary to the orders of the Court,