In this tremendous scene, which he himself exposes, are there no signs of this captain-generalship which I have alluded to?  Are there no signs of this man’s being a captain-general of iniquity, under whom all the spoilers of India were paid, disciplined, and supported?  I not only charge him with being guilty of a thousand crimes, but I assert that there is not a soldier or a civil servant in India whose culpable acts are not owing to this man’s example, connivance, and protection.  Everything which goes to criminate them goes directly against the prisoner.  He puts them in a condition to plunder; he suffered no native authority or government to restrain them; and he never called a man to an account for these flagitious acts which he has thought proper to bring before his country in the most solemn manner and upon the most solemn occasion.

I verily believe, in my conscience, his accusation is not true, in the excess, in the generality and extravagance in which he charges it.  That it is true in a great measure we cannot deny; and in that measure we, in our turn, charge him with being the author of all the crimes which he denounces; and if there is anything in the charge beyond the truth, it is he who is to answer for the falsehood.

I will now refer your Lordships to his opinion of the civil service, as it is declared and recorded in his remarks upon the removal of the Company’s civil servants by him from the service of the Vizier.—­“I was,” says he, “actuated solely by motives of justice to him [the Nabob of Oude], and a regard to the honor of our national character.”—­Here, you see, he declares his opinion that in Oude the civil servants of the Company had destroyed the national character, and that therefore they ought to be recalled.—­“By removing these people,” he adds, “I diminish my patronage.”—­But I ask, How came they there?  Why, through this patronage.  He sent them there to suck the blood which the military had spared.  He sent these civil servants to do ten times more mischief than the military ravagers could do, because they were invested with greater authority.—­“If,” says he, “I recall them from thence, I lessen my patronage.”—­But who, my Lords, authorized him to become a patron?  What laws of his country justified him in forcing upon the Vizier the civil servants of the Company?  What treaty authorized him to do it?  What system of policy, except his own wicked, arbitrary system, authorized him to act thus?

He proceeds to say, “I expose myself to obloquy and resentment from those who are immediately affected by the arrangement, and the long train of their friends and powerful patrons.”—­My Lords, it is the constant burden of his song, that he cannot do his duty, that he is fettered in everything, that he fears a thousand mischiefs to happen to him,—­not from his acting with carefulness, economy, frugality, and in obedience to the laws of his country, but from the very reverse of all this.  Says he, “I am afraid I shall forfeit the favor of the powerful patrons of those servants in England, namely, the Lords and Commons of England, if I do justice to the suffering people of this country.”