correspondence.  It comes from another quarter, not much less singular, and equally authentic and unimpeachable.  But though it is not from the trunk, it smells of the trunk, it smells of the leather.  I was as proud of my imaginary discovery as Sancho Panza was that one of his ancestors had discovered a taste of iron in some wine, and another a taste of leather in the same wine, and that afterwards there was found in the cask a little key tied to a thong of leather, which had given to the wine a taste of both.  Now, whether this letter tasted of the leather of the trunk or of the iron of Mr. Macpherson, I confess I was a little out in my suggestion and my taste.  The letter in question was written by Hyder Beg Khan, after Mr. Hastings’s departure, to Mr. Macpherson, when he succeeded to the government.  That gentleman thus got possession of a key to the trunk; and it appears to have been his intentions to follow the steps of his predecessor, to act exactly in the same manner, and in the same manner to make the Nabob the instrument of his own ruin.  This letter was written by the Nabob’s minister to Sir John Macpherson, newly inaugurated into his government, and who might be supposed not to be acquainted with all the best of Mr. Hastings’s secrets, nor to have had all the trunk correspondence put into his hands.  However, here is a trunk extraordinary, and its contents are much in the manner of the other.  The Nabob’s minister acquaints him with the whole secret of the system.  It is plain that the Nabob considered it as a system not to be altered:  that there was to be nothing true, nothing aboveboard, nothing open in the government of his affairs.  When you thus see that there can be little doubt of the true nature of the government, I am sure that hereafter, when we come to consider the effects of that government, it will clear up and bring home to the prisoner at your bar all we shall have to say upon this subject.

Mr. Hastings, having thrown off completely the authority of the Company, as you have seen,—­having trampled upon those of their servants who had manifested any symptom of independence, or who considered the orders of the Directors as a rule of their conduct,—­having brought every Englishman under his yoke, and made them supple and fit instruments for all his designs,—­then gave it to be understood that such alone were fit persons to be employed in important affairs of state.  Consider, my Lords, the effect of this upon the whole service.  Not one man that appears to pay any regard to the authority of the Directors is to expect that any regard will be paid to himself.  So that this man not only rebels himself, in his own person, against the authority of the Company, but he makes all their servants join him in this very rebellion.  Think, my Lords, of this state of things,—­and I wish it never to pass from your minds that I have called him the captain-general of the whole host of actors in Indian iniquity, under whom that host was