“But Jagher Deo Seo was unfit for his office.”—­“How dared you to appoint a man unfit for his office?”—­“Oh, it signified little, without their having a constitution.”—­“Why did you destroy the official constitution that existed before?  How dared you to destroy those establishments which enabled the people to dig wells and to cultivate the country like a garden, and then to leave the whole in the hands of your arbitrary and wicked Residents and their instruments, chosen without the least idea of government and without the least idea of protection?”

God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason, that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.  The human faculties and reason are in such cases deranged; and therefore this man has been dragged by the just vengeance of Providence to make his own madness the discoverer of his own wicked, perfidious, and cursed machinations in that devoted country.

Think, my Lords, of what he says respecting the military.  He says there is no restraining them,—­that they pillage the country wherever they go.  But had not Mr. Hastings himself just before encouraged the military to pillage the country?  Did he not make the people’s resistance, when the soldiers attempted to pillage them, one of the crimes of Cheyt Sing?  And who would dare to obstruct the military in their abominable ravages, when they knew that one of the articles of Cheyt Sing’s impeachment was his having suffered the people of the country, when plundered by these wicked soldiers, to return injury for injury and blow for blow?  When they saw, I say, that these were the things for which Cheyt Sing was sacrificed, there was manifestly nothing left for them but flight.—­What! fly from a Governor-General?  You would expect he was bearing to the country, upon his balmy and healing wings, the cure of all its disorders and of all its distress.  No:  they knew him too well; they knew him to be the destroyer of the country; they knew him to be the destroyer of their sovereign, the destroyer of the persons whom he had appointed to govern under him; they knew that neither governor, sub-governor, nor subject could enjoy a moment’s security while he possessed supreme power.  This was the state of the country; and this the Commons of England call upon your Lordships to avenge.

Let us now see what is next done by the prisoner at your bar.  He is satisfied with simply removing from his office Jagher Deo Seo, who is accused by him of all these corruptions and oppressions.  The other poor, unfortunate man, who was not even accused of malversations in such a degree, and against whom not one of the accusations of oppression was regularly proved, but who had, in Mr. Hastings’s eye, the one unpardonable fault of not having been made richer by his crimes, was twice imprisoned, and finally perished in prison.  But we have never heard one word of the imprisonment of Jagher Deo Seo, who, I believe, after some mock inquiry, was acquitted.