To conclude, instead of regretting, with Mr. Francis, the occasion which deprives us of so useless and hurtful a disguise, I should rather rejoice, were it really the case, and consider it as a crisis which freed the constitution of our government from one of its greatest defects.”

Now, my Lords, the delicacy of the affidavit is no more; the great arcanum of the state is avowed:  it is avowed that the government is ours,—­that the Nabob is nothing.  It is avowed to foreign nations; and the disguise which we have put on, Mr. Hastings states, in his opinion, to be hurtful to the affairs of the Company.  Here we perceive the exact and the perfect agreement between his character as a delicate affidavit-maker in a court of justice and his indelicate declarations upon the records of the Company for the information of the whole world concerning the real arcanum of the Bengal government.

Now I cannot help praising his consistency upon this occasion, whether his policy was right or wrong.  Hitherto we find the whole consistent, we find the affidavit perfectly supported.  The inferences which delicacy at first prevented him from producing better recollection and more perfect policy made him here avow.  In this state things continued.  The Nabob, your Lordships see, is dead,—­dead in law, dead in politics, dead in a court of justice, dead upon the records of the Company.  Except in mere animal existence, it is all over with him.

I have now to state to your Lordships, that Mr. Hastings, who has the power of putting even to death in this way, possesses likewise the art of restoring to life.  But what is the medicine that revives them?  Your Lordships, I am sure, will be glad to know what nostrum, not hitherto pretended to by quacks in physic, by quacks in politics, nor by quacks in law, will serve to revive this man, to cover his dead bones with flesh, and to give him life, activity, and vigor.  My Lords, I am about to tell you an instance of a recipe of such infallible efficacy as was never before discovered.  His cure for all disorders is disobedience to the commands of his lawful superiors.  When the orders of the Court of Directors are contrary to his own opinions, he forgets them all.  Let the Court of Directors but declare in favor of his own system and his own positions, and that very moment, merely for the purpose of declaring his right of rebellion against the laws of his country, he counteracts them.  Then these dead bones arise,—­or, to use a language more suitable to the dignity of the thing, Bayes’s men are all revived.  “Are these men dead?” asks Mr. Bayes’s friend.  “No,” says he, “they shall all get up and dance immediately.”  But in this ludicrous view of Mr. Hastings’s conduct, your Lordships must not lose sight of its great importance.  You cannot have in an abstract, as it were, any one thing that better develops the principles of the man, that more fully develops all the sources of his conduct, and of all the frauds and iniquities which he has committed, in order at one and the same time to evade his duty to the Court of Directors, that is to say, to the laws of his country, and to oppress, crush, rob, and ill-treat the people that are under him.