In short, we have proved that the whole power, civil, military, municipal, and financial, resided in him; and we further refer your Lordships to Mr. Lumsden and Mr. Halhed for the authority which he possessed in that country.  Your Lordships, I am sure, will supply with your diligence what is defective in my statement; I have therefore taken the liberty of indicating to you where you are to find the evidence to which I refer.  You will there, my Lords, find this Colonel Hannay in a false character:  he is ostensibly given to the Nabob as a commander of his troops, while in reality he is forced upon that prince as his farmer-general.  He is invested with the whole command of the country, while the sovereign is unable to control him, or to prevent his extorting from the people whatever he pleases.

If we are asked what the terms of his farm were, we cannot discover that he farmed the country at any certain sum.  We cannot discover that he was subjected to any terms, or confined by any limitations.  Armed with arbitrary power, and exercising that power under a false title, his exactions from the poor natives were only limited by his own pleasure.  Under these circumstances, we are now to ask what there was to prevent him from robbing and ruining the people, and what security against his robbing the exchequer of the person whose revenue he farmed.

You are told by the witnesses in the clearest manner, (and, after what you have heard of the state of Oude, you cannot doubt the fact,) that nobody, not even the Nabob, dared to complain against him,—­that he was considered as a man authorized and supported by the power of the British government; and it is proved in the evidence before you that he vexed and harassed the country to the utmost extent which we have stated in our article of charge, and which you would naturally expect from a man acting under such false names with such real powers.  We have proved that from some of the principal zemindars in that country, who held farms let to them for twenty-seven thousand rupees a year, a rent of sixty thousand was demanded, and in some cases enforced,—­and that upon the refusal of one of them to comply with this demand, he was driven out of the country.

Your Lordships will find in the evidence before you that the inhabitants of the country were not only harassed in their fortunes, but cruelly treated in their persons.  You have it upon Mr. Halhed’s evidence, and it is not attempted, that I know of, to be contradicted, that the people were confined in open cages, exposed to the scorching heat of the sun, for pretended or real arrears of rent:  it is indifferent which, because I consider all confinement of the person to support an arbitrary exaction to be an abomination not to be tolerated.  They have endeavored, indeed, to weaken this evidence by an attempt to prove that a man day and night in confinement in an open cage suffers no inconvenience.  And here I must beg your Lordships to observe the extreme