My Lords, you have here Mr. Hastings’s opinion of the whole military service.  You have here the authority and documents by which he supports his opinion.  He states that the contagion of peculation had tainted all the frontier stations, which contain much the largest part of the Company’s army.  He states that this contagion had tainted the whole army, everywhere: so that, according to him, there was, throughout the Indian army, an universal taint of peculation.  My Lords, peculation is not a military vice.  Insubordination, want of attention to duty, want of order, want of obedience and regularity, are military vices; but who ever before heard of peculation being a military vice?  In the case before you, it became so by employing military men as farmers of revenue, as masters of markets and of gunges.  This departure from the military character and from military duties introduced that peculation which tainted the army, and desolated the dominions of the Nabob Vizier.

I declare, when I first read the passage which has been just read to your Lordships, in the infancy of this inquiry, it struck me with astonishment that peculation should at all exist as a military vice; but I was still more astonished at finding Warren Hastings charging the whole British army with being corrupted by this base and depraved spirit, to a degree which tainted even their judicial character.  This, my Lords, is a most serious matter.  The judicial functions of military men are of vast importance in themselves; and, generally speaking, there is not any tribunal whose members are more honorable in their conduct and more just in their decisions than those of a court-martial.  Perhaps there is not a tribunal in this country whose reputation is really more untainted than that of a court-martial.  It stands as fair, in the opinion both of the army and of the public, as any tribunal, in a country where all tribunals stand fair.  But in India, this unnatural vice of peculation, which has no more to do with the vices of a military character than with its virtues, this venomous spirit, has pervaded the members of military tribunals to such an extent, that they acquit, honorably acquit, most honorably acquit a man, “upon an acknowledged fact which in times of stricter discipline would have been deemed a crime deserving the severest punishment.”

Who says all this, my Lords?  Do I say it?  No:  it is Warren Hastings who says it.  He records it.  He gives you his vouchers and his evidence, and he draws the conclusion.  He is the criminal accuser of the British army.  He who sits in that box accuses the whole British army in India.  He has declared them to be so tainted with peculation, from head to foot, as to have been induced to commit the most wicked perjuries, for the purpose of bearing one another out in their abominable peculations.  In this unnatural state of things, and whilst there is not one military man on these stations of whom Mr. Hastings does not give this abominably flagitious character, yet every one of them have joined to give him the benefit of their testimony for his honorable intentions and conduct.