Your Lordships see Mr. Hastings’s system, a system of concealment, a system of turning the vassals of the Company into his own vassals, to make them contributory, not to the Company, but to himself.  He has avowed this system in Benares; he has avowed it in Oude.  It was his constant practice.  Your Lordships see in Oude he kept a correspondence with Mr. Markham for years, and did alone all the material acts which ought to have been done in Council.  He delegated a power to Mr. Markham which he had not to delegate; and you will see he has done the same in every part of India.

We first charge him not only with acting without authority, but with a strong presumption, founded on his concealment, of intending to act mischievously.  We next charge his concealing and withdrawing correspondence, as being directly contrary to the orders of the Court of Directors, the practice of his office, and the very nature and existence of the Council in which he was appointed to preside.  We charge this as a substantive crime, and as the forerunner of the oppression, desolation, and ruin of that miserable country.

Mr. Hastings having thus rendered the Council blind and ignorant, and consequently fit for subserviency, what does he next do?  I am speaking, not with regard to the time of his particular acts, but with regard to the general spirit of the proceedings.  He next flies in the face of the Company upon the same principle on which he removed Mr. Fowke from Benares.  “I removed him on political grounds,” says he, “against the orders of the Court of Directors, because I thought it necessary that the Resident should be a man of my own nomination and confidence.”  At Oude he proceeds on the same principle.  Mr. Bristow had been nominated to the office of Resident by the Court of Directors.  Mr. Hastings, by an act of Parliament, was ordered to obey the Court of Directors.  He positively refuses to receive Mr. Bristow, for no other reason that we know of but because he was nominated by the Court of Directors; he defies the Court, and declares in effect that they shall not govern that province, but that he will govern it by a Resident of his own.

Your Lordships will mark his progress in the establishment of that new system, which, he says, he had been obliged to adopt by the evil system of his predecessors.  First, he annihilates the Council, formed by an act of Parliament, and by order of the Court of Directors.  In the second place, he defies the order of the Court, who had the undoubted nomination of all their own servants, and who ordered him, under the severest injunction, to appoint Mr. Bristow to the office of Resident in Oude.  He for some time refused to nominate Mr. Bristow to that office; and even when he was forced, against his will, to permit him for a while to be there, he sent Mr. Middleton and Mr. Johnson, who annihilated Mr. Bristow’s authority so completely that no one public act passed through his hands.