Here, my Lords, I must beg you to recollect Mr. Hastings’s proceeding with Gunga Govind Sing, and to contrast his conduct towards these two peculators with his proceeding towards Durbege Sing.  Such a comparison will let your Lordships into the secret of one of the prisoner’s motives of conduct upon such occasions.  When you will find a man pillaging and desolating a country, in the manner Jagher Deo Seo is described by Mr. Hastings to have done, but who takes care to secure to himself the spoil, you will likewise find that such a man is safe, secure, unpunished.  Your Lordships will recollect the desolation of Dinagepore.  You will recollect that the rapacious Gunga Govind Sing, (the coadjutor of Mr. Hastings in peculation,) out of 80,000_l._ which he had received on the Company’s account, retained 40,000_l._ for his own use, and that, instead of being turned out of his employment and treated with rigor and cruelty, he was elevated in Mr. Hastings’s grace and favor, and never called upon for the restoration of a penny.  Observe, my Lords, the difference in his treatment of men who have wealth to purchase impunity, or who have secrets to reveal, and of another who has no such merit, and is poor and insolvent.

We have shown your Lordships the effects of Mr. Hastings’s government upon the country and its inhabitants; and although I have before suggested to you some of its effects upon the army of the Company, I will now call your attention to a few other observations on that subject.  Your Lordships will, in the first place, be pleased to attend to the character which he gives of this army.  You have heard what he tells you of the state of the country in which it was stationed, and of the terror which it struck into the inhabitants.  The appearance of an English soldier was enough to strike the country people with affright and dismay:  they everywhere, he tells you, fled before them.  And yet they are the officers of this very army who are brought here as witnesses to express the general satisfaction of the people of India.  To be sure, a man who never calls Englishmen to an account for any robbery or injury whatever, who acquits them, upon their good intentions, without any inquiry, will in return for this indemnity have their good words.  We are not surprised to find them coming with emulation to your bar to declare him possessed of all virtues, and that nobody has or can have a right to complain of him.  But we, my Lords, protest against these indemnities; we protest against their good words; we protest against their testimonials; and we insist upon your Lordships trying him, not upon what this or that officer says of his good conduct, but upon the proved result of the actions tried before you.  Without ascribing, perhaps, much guilt to men who must naturally wish to favor the person who covers their excesses, who suffers their fortunes to be made, you will know what value to set upon their testimony.  The Commons look on those testimonies with the greatest