Let me now call your Lordships’ attention to his assumption of power, without one word of communication with the Council at Calcutta, where the whole of these trading regulations might and ought to have been considered, and where they could have been deliberately examined and determined upon.  By this assumption the Council was placed in the situation which I have before described:  it must either confirm his acts, or again undo everything which had been done.  He had provided not only against resistance, but almost against any inquiry into his wild projects.  He had by his opium contracts put all vigilance asleep, and by his bullock and other contracts he had secured a variety of concealed interests, both abroad and at home.  He was sure of the ratification of his acts by the Council, whenever he should please to inform them of his measures; and to his secret influence he trusted for impunity in his career of tyranny and oppression.

In bringing before you his arbitrary mode of imposing duties, I beg to remind your Lordships, that, when I examined Mr. Markham concerning the imposing of a duty of five per cent instead of the former duty of two, I asked him whether that five per cent was not laid on in such a manner as utterly to extinguish the trade, and whether it was not in effect and substance five times as much as had been paid before.  What was his answer?  Why, that many plans, which, when considered in the closet, look specious and plausible, will not hold when they come to be tried in practice, and that this plan was one of them.  The additional duties, said he, have never since been exacted.  But, my Lords, the very attempt to exact them utterly ruined the trade of the country.  They were imposed upon a visionary theory, formed in his own closet, and the result was exactly what might have been anticipated.  Was it not an abominable thing in Mr. Hastings to withhold from the Council the means of ascertaining the real operation of his taxes?  He had no knowledge of trade himself; he cannot keep an account; he has no memory.  In fact, we find him a man possessed of no one quality fit for any kind of business whatever.  We find him pursuing his own visionary projects, without knowing anything of the nature or [of?] the circumstances under which the trade of the country was carried on.  These projects might have looked very plausible:  but when you come to examine the actual state of the trade, it is not merely a difference between five and two per cent, but it becomes a different mode of estimating the commodity, and it amounts to five times as much as was paid before.  We bring this as an exemplification of this cursed mode of arbitrary proceeding, and to show you his total ignorance of the subject, and his total indifference about the event of the measure he was pursuing.  When he began to perceive his blunders, he never took any means whatever to put the new regulations which these blunders had made necessary into execution, but he left all this mischievous project to rage in its full extent.