One of the counsel for the prisoner (I think it was one who has comported himself in this cause with decency) has told your Lordships that we have come here on account of some doubts entertained in the House of Commons concerning the conduct of the prisoner at your bar,—­that we shall be extremely delighted, when his defence and your Lordships’ judgment shall have set him free, and shall have discovered to us our error,—­that we shall then mutually congratulate one another,—­and that the Commons, and the Managers who represent them here, will be the first to rejoice in so happy an event and so fortunate a discovery.

Far, far from the Commons of Great Britain be all manner of real vice; but ten thousand times further from them, as far as from pole to pole, be the whole tribe of false, spurious, affected, counterfeit, hypocritical virtues!  These are the things which are ten times more at war with real virtue, these are the things which are ten times more at war with real duty, than any vice known by its name and distinguished by its proper character.  My Lords, far from us, I will add, be that false and affected candor that is eternally in treaty with crime,—­that half virtue, which, like the ambiguous animal that flies about in the twilight of a compromise between day and night, is to a just man’s eye an odious and disgusting thing!  There is no middle point in which the Commons of Great Britain can meet tyranny and oppression.  No, we never shall (nor can we conceive that we ever should) pass from this bar, without indignation, without rage and despair, if the House of Commons should, upon such a defence as has here been made against such a charge as they have produced, be foiled, baffled, and defeated.  No, my Lords, we never could forget it; a long, lasting, deep, bitter memory of it would sink into our minds.

My Lords, the Commons of Great Britain have no doubt upon this subject.  We came hither to call for justice, not to solve a problem; and if justice be denied us, the accused is not acquitted, but the tribunal is condemned.  We know that this man is guilty of all the crimes which he stands accused of by us.  We have not come here to you, in the rash heat of a day, with that fervor which sometimes prevails in popular assemblies, and frequently misleads them.  No:  if we have been guilty of error in this cause, it is a deliberate error, the fruit of long, laborious inquiry,—­an error founded on a procedure in Parliament before we came here, the most minute, the most circumstantial, and the most cautious that ever was instituted.  Instead of coming, as we did in Lord Strafford’s case, and in some others, voting the impeachment and bringing it up on the same day, this impeachment was voted from a general sense prevailing in the House of Mr. Hastings’s criminality after an investigation begun in the year 1780, and which produced in 1782 a body of resolutions condemnatory of almost the whole of his conduct.  Those resolutions