There is, my Lords, always a close connection between vices of every description.  The man who is a tyrant would, under some other circumstances, be a rebel; and he that is a rebel would become a tyrant.  They are things which originally proceed from the same source.  They owe their birth to the wild, unbridled lewdness of arbitrary power.  They arise from a contempt of public order, and of the laws and institutions which curb mankind.  They arise from a harsh, cruel, and ferocious disposition, impatient of the rules of law, order, and morality:  and accordingly, as their relation varies, the man is a tyrant, if a superior, a rebel, if an inferior.  But this man, standing in a middle point between the two relations, the superior and inferior, declares himself at once both a rebel and a tyrant.  We therefore naturally expect, that, when he has thrown off the laws of his country, he will throw off all other authority.  Accordingly, in defiance of that authority to which he owes his situation, he nominates Mr. Markham to the Residency at Benares, and therefore every act of Mr. Markham is his.  He is responsible,—­doubly responsible to what he would have been, if in the ordinary course of office he had named this agent.  Every governor is responsible for the misdemeanors committed under his legal authority for which he does not punish the delinquent; but the prisoner is doubly responsible in this case, because he assumed an illegal authority, which can be justified only, if at all, by the good resulting from the assumption.

Having now chosen his principal instrument and his confidential and sole counsellor, having the country entirely in his hand, and every obstacle that could impede his course swept out of the arena, what does he do under these auspicious circumstances?  You would imagine, that, in the first place, he would have sent down to the Council at Calcutta a general view of his proceedings, and of their consequences, together with a complete statement of the revenue; that he would have recommended the fittest persons for public trusts, with such other measures as he might judge to be most essential to the interest and honor of his employers.  One would have imagined he would have done this, in order that the Council and the Court of Directors might have a clear view of the whole existing system, before he attempted to make a permanent arrangement for the administration of the country.  But, on the contrary, the whole of his proceedings is clandestinely conducted; there is not the slightest communication with the Council upon the business, till he had determined and settled the whole.  Thus the Council was placed in a complete dilemma,—­either to confirm all his wicked and arbitrary acts, (for such we have proved them to be,) or to derange the whole administration of the country again, and to make another revolution as complete and dreadful as that which he had made.