of the collections were increased by no less a sum than 500,000_l._ You may judge from this what riot there was in rapacity and ravage, both amongst the European and native agents, but chiefly amongst the natives:  for Mr. Hastings did not divide the greatest part of this spoil among the Company’s servants, but among this gang of black dependants.  These accounts are in pages 1273 and 1274 of your Minutes.

My Lords, weighty indeed would have been the charge brought before your Lordships by the Commons of Great Britain against the prisoner at your bar, if they had fixed upon no other crime or misdemeanor than that which I am now pressing upon you,—­his throwing off the allegiance of the Company, his putting a black master over himself, and his subjecting the whole of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa, the whole of the Company’s servants, the Company’s revenues, the Company’s farms, to Gunga Govind Sing.  But, my Lords, it is a very curious and remarkable thing, that we have traced this man as Mr. Hastings’s bribe-broker up to the time of the nomination of this Committee; we have traced him through a regular series of bribery; he is Mr. Hastings’s bribe-broker at Patna; he is Mr. Hastings’s bribe-broker at Nuddea; he is his bribe-broker at Dinagepore; we find him his bribe-broker in all these places; but from the moment that this Committee was constituted, it became a gulf in which the prevention, the detection, and the correction of all kind of abuses were sunk and lost forever.  From the time when this Committee and Gunga Govind Sing were appointed, you do not find one word more of Mr. Hastings’s bribes.  Had he then ceased to receive any? or where are you to look for them?  You are to look for them in that 500,000_l._ excess of expense in the revenue department, and in the rest of all that corrupt traffic of Gunga Govind Sing of which we gave you specimens at the time we proved his known bribes to you.  These are nothing but index-hands to point out to you the immense mass of corruption which had its origin, and was daily accumulating in these provinces, under the protection of Mr. Hastings.  And can you think, and can we talk of such transactions, without feeling emotions of indignation and horror not to be described?  Can we contemplate such scenes as these,—­can we look upon those desolated provinces, upon a country so ravaged, a people so subdued,—­Mahometans, Gentoos, our own countrymen, all trampled under foot by this tyrant,—­can we do this; without giving expression to those feelings which, after animating us in this life, will comfort us when we die, and will form our best part in another?

My Lords, I am now at the last day of my endeavors to inspire your Lordships with a just sense of these unexampled atrocities.  I have had a great encyclopedia of crimes to deal with; I will get through them as soon as I can; and I pray your Lordships to believe, that, if I omit anything, it is to time I sacrifice it,—­that it is to want of strength I sacrifice it,—­that it is to necessity, and not from any despair of making, from the records and from the evidence, matter so omitted as black as anything that I have yet brought before you.