My Lords, you here see an instance of what I have before stated to your Lordships, and what I shall take the liberty of recommending to your constant consideration.  You see that a tyrant and a rebel is one and the same thing.  You see this man, at the very time that he is a direct rebel to the Company, arbitrarily and tyrannically displacing Mr. Bristow, although he had previously joined in the approbation of his conduct, and in voting him a pecuniary reward.  He is ordered by the Court of Directors to restore that person, who desires, in a suppliant, decent, proper tone, that the Company’s orders should produce their effect, and that the Council would have the goodness to restore him to his situation.

My Lords, you have seen the audacious insolence, the tyrannical pride, with which he dares to treat this order.  You have seen the recorded minute which he has dared to send to the Court of Directors; and in this you see, that, when he cannot directly asperse a man’s conduct, and has nothing to say against it, he maliciously, I should perhaps rather say enviously, insinuates that he had unjustly made his fortune.  “You are,” says he, “to judge from the independence of his manner and style, whether he could or no have got that without some unjust means.”  God forbid I should ever be able to invent anything that can equal the impudence of what this man dares to write to his superiors, or the insolent style in which he dares to treat persons who are not his servants!

Who made the servants of the Company the master of the servants of the Company?  The Court of Directors are their fellow-servants; they are all the servants of this kingdom.  Still the claim of a fellow-servant to hold an office which the Court of Directors had legally appointed him to is considered by this audacious tyrant as an insult to him.  By this you may judge how he treats not only the servants of the Company, but the natives of the country, and by what means he has brought them into that abject state of servitude in which they are ready to do anything he wishes and to sign anything he dictates.  I must again beg your Lordships to remark what this man has had the folly and impudence to place upon the records of the Council of which he was President; and I will venture to assert that so extraordinary a performance never before appeared on the records of any court, Eastern or European.  Because Mr. Bristow claims an office which is his right and his freehold as long as the Company chooses, Mr. Hastings accuses him of being an accomplice with the Court of Directors in a conspiracy against him; and because, after long delays, he had presented an humble petition to have the Court of Directors’ orders in his favor carried into execution, he says “he has erected himself into a tribunal of justice; that he has arraigned the Council for disobedience of orders, passed judgment upon them, and condemned or acquitted them as their magistrate and superior.”