I have already stated to your Lordships his reason and motives for this violence, and they are such as aggravated his crime by attempting to implicate his country in it.  He says he was afraid to go home without having provided for the payment of the Nabob’s debt.  Afraid of what?  Was he afraid of coming before a British tribunal, and saying, “Through justice, through a regard for the rights of an allied sovereign, through a regard to the rights of his people, I have not got so much as I expected”?  Of this no man could be afraid.  The prisoner’s fear had another origin.  “I have failed,” says he to himself, “in my first project.  I went to Benares to rob; I have lost by my violence the fruits of that robbery.  I must get the money somewhere, or I dare not appear before a British House of Commons, a British House of Lords, or any other tribunal in the kingdom; but let me get money enough, and they won’t care how I get it.  The estates of whole bodies of nobility may be confiscated; a people who had lived under their protection may be given up into the hands of foreign usurers:  they will care for none of these things; they will suffer me to do all this, and to employ in it the force of British troops, whom I have described as a set of robbers, provided I can get money.”  These were Mr. Hastings’s views; and, in accordance with them, the jaghires were all confiscated, the jaghiredars with their families were all turned out, the possessions delivered up to the usurer, in order that Mr. Hastings might have the excuse of money to plead at the bar of the House of Commons, and afterwards at the bar of the House of Lords.  If your Lordships, in your sacred character of the first tribunal in the world, should by your judgment justify those proceedings, you will sanction the greatest wrongs that have been ever known in history.

But to proceed.  The next thing to be asked is, Were the promised pensions given to the jaghiredars?  I suppose your Lordships are not idle enough to put that question to us.  No compensation, no consideration, was given or stipulated for them.  If there had been any such thing, the prisoner could have proved it,—­he would have proved it.  The means were easy to him.  But we have saved him the trouble of the attempt.  We have proved the contrary, and, if called upon, we will show you the place where this is proved.

I have now shown your Lordships how Mr. Hastings, having with such violent and atrocious circumstances usurped the government of Oude, (I hope I need not use any farther proof that the Nabob was in effect non-existent in the country,) treated all the landed property.  The next question will be, How has he treated whatever moneyed property was left in the country?  My Lords, he looked over that immense waste of his own creating, not as Satan viewed the kingdoms of the world and saw the power and glory of them,—­but he looked over the waste of Oude with a diabolical malice which one could hardly