My Lords,—­When I last had the honor of addressing your Lordships from this place, my want of strength obliged me to conclude where the patience of a people and the prosperity of a country subjected by solemn treaties to British government had concluded.  We have left behind us the inhabitants of Benares, after having seen them driven into rebellion by tyranny and oppression, and their country desolated by our misrule.  Your Lordships, I am sure, have had the map of India before you, and know that the country so destroyed and so desolated was about one fifth of the size of England and Wales in geographical extent, and equal in population to about a fourth.  Upon this scale you will judge of the mischief which has been done.

My Lords, we are now come to another devoted province:  we march from desolation to desolation; because we follow the steps of Warren Hastings, Esquire, Governor-General of Bengal.  You will here find the range of his atrocities widely extended; but before I enter into a detail of them, I have one reflection to make, which I beseech your Lordships to bear in mind throughout the whole of this deliberation.  It is this:  you ought never to conclude that a man must necessarily be innoxious because he is in other respects insignificant.  You will see that a man bred in obscure, vulgar, and ignoble occupations, and trained in sordid, base, and mercenary habits, is not incapable of doing extensive mischief, because he is little, and because his vices are of a mean nature.  My Lords, we have shown to you already, and we shall demonstrate to you more clearly in future, that such minds placed in authority can do more mischief to a country, can treat all ranks and distinctions with more pride, insolence, and arrogance, than those who have been born under canopies of state and swaddled in purple:  you will see that they can waste a country more effectually than the proudest and most mighty conquerors, who, by the greatness of their military talents, have first subdued and afterwards plundered nations.

The prisoner’s counsel have thought proper to entertain your Lordships, and to defend their client, by comparing him with the men who are said to have erected a pyramid of ninety thousand human heads.  Now look back, my Lords, to Benares; consider the extent of country laid waste and desolated, and its immense population; and then see whether famine may not destroy as well as the sword, and whether this man is not as well entitled to erect his pyramid of ninety thousand heads as any terrific tyrant of the East.  We follow him now to another theatre, the territories of the Nabob of Oude.