or any other fraud whatever.  I know there was a faction formed against them upon that very account.  Be corrupt, you have friends; stem the torrent of corruption, you open a thousand venal mouths against you.  Men resolved to do their duty must be content to suffer such opprobrium, and I am content; in the name of the living and of the dead, and in the name of the Commons, I glory in our having appointed some good servants at least to India.

But to proceed.  “This system was not,” says he, “of my making.”  You would, then, naturally imagine that the persons who made this abominable system had also made some tyrannous use of it.  Let us see what use they made of it during the time of their majority in the Council.  There was an arrear of subsidy due from the Nabob.  How it came into arrear we shall consider hereafter.  The Nabob proposed to pay it by taxing the jaghires of his family, and taking some money from the Begum.  This was consented to by Mr. Bristow, at that time Resident for the Company in Oude; and to this arrangement Asoph ul Dowlah and his advisers lent a willing ear.  What did Mr. Hastings then say of this transaction?  He called it a violent assumption of power on the part of the Council.  He did not, you see, then allow that a bad system justified any persons whatever in an abuse of it.  He contended that it was a violent attack upon the rights and property of the parties from whom the money was to be taken, that it had no ground or foundation in justice whatever, and that it was contrary to every principle of right and equity.

Your Lordships will please to bear in mind, that afterwards, by his own consent, and the consent of the rest of the Council, this business was compromised between the son, the mother, and their relations.  A very great sum of money, which was most useful to the Company at that period, was raised by a family compact and arrangement among themselves.  This proceeding was sanctioned by the Company, Mr. Hastings himself consenting; and a pledge was given to the Begums and family of the Nabob, that this should be the last demand made upon them,—­that it should be considered, not as taken compulsively, but as a friendly and amicable donation.  They never admitted, nor did the Nabob ever contend, that he had any right at all to take this money from them.  At that time it was not Mr. Hastings’s opinion that the badness of the system would justify any violence as a consequence of it; and when the advancement of the money was agreed to between the parties, as a family and amicable compact, he was as ready as anybody to propose and sanction a regular treaty between the parties, that all claims on one side and all kind of uneasiness on the other should cease forever, under the guardianship of British faith.