[Greek:  Ou nemesis, ... 
Toied’ amphi gunaiki polun chronon algea paschein.]

For I will fairly say that there are some passions that have their excuses; but the passion towards this woman was the passion of avarice and rapacity only,—­a passion, indeed, which lasted to the end of his government, and for which he defied the orders of the Court of Directors, rebelled against his masters, and finally subverted the justice of a great country.

* * * * *

My Lords, I have done with this business.  I come next to the third division of the natives, those who form the landed interest of the country.  A few words only will be necessary upon this part of the subject.  The fact is, that Mr. Hastings, at one stroke, put up the property of all the nobility and gentry, and of all the freeholders, in short, the whole landed interest of Bengal, to a public auction, and let it to the highest bidder.  I will make no observations upon the nature of this measure to your Lordships, who represent so large a part of the dignity, together with so large a part of the landed interest of this kingdom:  though I think, that, even under your Lordships’ restrictive order, I am entitled so to do; because we have examined some witnesses upon this point, in the revenue charge.  Suffice it to say, that it is in evidence before your Lordships that this sale was ordered.  Mr. Hastings does not deny it.  He says, indeed, he did it not with an ill intention.  My answer is, that it could have been done with no other than a bad intention.  The owners of the land had no way left to save themselves but to become farmers of their own estates; and from the competition which naturally took place, (and he himself declared, that the persons, whether owners or strangers, to whom he let the lands, had agreed to rents which surpassed their abilities to pay,) I need not tell you what must have been the consequence, when it got into such rapacious hands, and was taken out of the hands of its natural proprietors:  that the public revenue had sunk and lost by it, and that the country was wasted and destroyed.  I leave it to your Lordships’ own meditation and reflection; and I shall not press it one step further than just to remind you of what has been so well opened and pressed by my fellow Managers.  He, Mr. Hastings, confesses that he let the lands to his own banians; he took his own domestic servants and put them in the houses of the nobility of the country; and this he did in direct violation of an express order made by himself, that no banian of a collector (the spirit of which order implied ten thousand times more strongly the exclusion of any banians of a Governor-General) should have any one of those farms.  We also find that he made a regulation that no farmers should rent more than a lac of rupees; but at the same time we find his banians holding several farms to more than that amount.  In short, we find that in every instance, where, under some plausible pretence or other, the fixed regulations are violated, it touches him so closely as to make it absolutely impossible not to suppose that he himself had the advantage of it.