“My country and house belong to you; there is no difference.  I hope that you desire in your heart the good of my concerns.  Colonel Hannay is inclined to request your permission to be employed in the affairs of this quarter.  If by any means any matter of this country dependent on me should be intrusted to the Colonel, I swear by the Holy Prophet, that I will not remain here, but will go from hence to you.  From your kindness let no concern dependent on me be intrusted to the Colonel, and oblige me by a speedy answer which may set my mind at ease.”

We know very well that the prisoner at your bar denied his having any intention to send him up.  We cannot prove them, but we maintain that there were grounds for the strongest suspicions that he entertained such intentions.  He cannot deny the reality of this terror which existed in the minds of the Nabob and his people, under the apprehension that he was to be sent up, which plainly showed that they at least considered there was ground enough for charging him with that intention.  What reason was there to think that he should not be sent a third time, who had been sent twice before?  Certainly, none; because every circumstance of Mr. Hastings’s proceedings was systematical, and perfectly well known at Oude.

But suppose it to have been a false report; it shows all that the Managers wish to show, the extreme terror which these creatures and tools of Mr. Hastings struck into the people of that country.  His denial of any intention of again sending Colonel Hannay does not disprove either the justness of their suspicions or the existence of the terror which his very name excited.

My Lords, I shall now call your attention to a part of the evidence which we have produced to prove the terrible effects of Colonel Hannay’s operations.  Captain Edwards, an untainted man, who tells you that he had passed through that country again and again, describes it as bearing all the marks of savage desolation.  Mr. Holt says it has fallen from its former state,—­that whole towns and villages were no longer peopled, and that the country carried evident marks of famine.  One would have thought that Colonel Hannay’s cruelty and depredations would have satiated Mr. Hastings.  No:  he finds another military collector, a Major Osborne, who, having suffered in his preferment by the sentence of a court-martial, whether justly or unjustly I neither know nor care, was appointed to the command of a thousand men in the provinces of Oude, but really to the administration of the revenues of the country.  He administered them much in the same manner as Colonel Hannay had done.  He, however, transmitted to the government at Calcutta a partial representation of the state of the provinces, the substance of which was, that the natives were exposed to every kind of peculation, and that the country was in a horrible state of confusion and disorder.  This is upon the Company’s records; and although not produced in evidence, your Lordships may find it, for it has been printed over and over again.  This man went up to the Vizier; in consequence of whose complaint, and the renewed cries of the people, Mr. Hastings was soon obliged to recall him.