But, my Lords, the prisoner thinks, that, when, under any pretence, any sort of means could be furnished of interfering in the government of the country, he has a right to avail himself of them, to use them at his pleasure, and to govern by his own arbitrary will.  The Vizier, he says, by this treaty was reduced to a state of vassalage; and he makes this curious distinction in proof of it.  It was, he says, an optional vassalage:  for, if he chose to get rid of our troops, he might do so and be free; if he had not a mind to do that, and found a benefit in it, then he was a vassal.  But there is nothing less true.  Here is a person who keeps a subsidiary body of your troops, which he is to pay for you; and in consequence of this Mr. Hastings maintains that he becomes a vassal.  I shall not dispute whether vassalage is optional or by force, or in what way Mr. Hastings considered this prince as a vassal of the Company.  Let it be as he pleased.  I only think it necessary that your Lordships should truly know the actual state of that country, and the ground upon which Mr. Hastings stood.  Your Lordships will find it a fairy land, in which there is a perpetual masquerade, where no one thing appears as it really is,—­where the person who seems to have the authority is a slave, while the person who seems to be the slave has the authority.  In that ambiguous government everything favors fraud, everything favors peculation, everything favors violence, everything favors concealment.  You will therefore permit me to show to you what were the principles upon which Mr. Hastings appears, according to the evidence before you, to have acted,—­what the state of the country was, according to his conceptions of it; and then you will see how he applied those principles to that state.

“The means by which our government acquired this influence,” says Mr. Hastings, “and its right to exercise it, will require a previous explanation.”  He then proceeds,—­“With his death [Sujah Dowlah’s] a new political system commenced, and Mr. Bristow was constituted the instrument of its formation, and the trustee for the management of it.  The Nabob Asoph ul Dowlah was deprived of a large part of his inheritance,—­I mean the province of Benares, attached by a very feeble and precarious tenure to our dominions; the army fixed to a permanent station in a remote line of his frontier, with an augmented and perpetual subsidy; a new army, amphibiously composed of troops in his service and pay, commanded by English officers of our own nomination, for the defence of his new conquests; and his own natural troops annihilated, or alienated by the insufficiency of his revenue for all his disbursements, and the prior claims of those which our authority or influence commanded:  in a word, he became a vassal of the government; but he still possessed an ostensible sovereignty.  His titular rank of Vizier of the Empire rendered him a conspicuous object of view to all the states and chiefs of India; and on the moderation and justice with which the British government in Bengal exercised its influence over him many points most essential to its political strength and to the honor of the British name depended.”