Your Lordships shall now hear what was the upshot of the whole.  The Company soon afterwards hearing that this college was become the greatest nuisance in Calcutta, and that it had raised the cries of all the inhabitants against it, one of their servants, a Mr. Chapman, was deputed by the Governor, Sir John Shore, to examine into it, and your Lordships will find the account he gives of it in your minutes.  In short, my Lords, we find that this was a seminary of robbers, housebreakers, and every nuisance to society; so that the Company was obliged to turn out the master, and to remodel the whole.  Your Lordships will now judge of the merits and value of this, one of the sets-off brought forward by the prisoner against the charges which we have brought forward against him:  it began in injustice and peculation, and ended in a seminary for robbers and housebreakers.

* * * * *

Nothing now remains to be pressed by me upon your Lordships’ consideration, but the account given by the late Governor-General, Earl Cornwallis, of the state in which he found the country left by his predecessor, Mr. Hastings, the prisoner at your bar.  But, patient as I know your Lordships to be, I also know that your strength is not inexhaustible; and though what I have farther to add will not consume much of your Lordships’ time, yet I conceive that there is a necessity for deferring it to another day.

SPEECH

IN

GENERAL REPLY.

NINTH DAY:  MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1794.

My Lords,—­I should think it necessary to make an apology to your Lordships for appearing before you one day more, if I were inclined to measure this business either by the standard of my own ability, or by my own impatience, or by any supposed impatience of yours.  I know no measure, in such a case, but the nature of the subject, and the duty which we owe to it.  You will therefore, my Lords, permit me, in a few words, to lead you back to what we did yesterday, that you may the better comprehend the manner in which I mean to conclude the business to-day.

My Lords, we took the liberty of stating to you the condition of Bengal before our taking possession of it, and of the several classes of its inhabitants.  We first brought before you the Mahometan inhabitants, who had the judicial authority of the country in their hands; and we proved to you the utter ruin of that body of people, and with them of the justice of the country, by their being, both one and the other, sold to an infamous woman called Munny Begum.  We next showed you, that the whole landed interest, the zemindars, or Hindoo gentry of the country, was likewise ruined by its being given over, by letting it on a five years’ lease, to infamous farmers, and giving it up to their merciless exactions,—­and afterwards by subjecting the rank of those zemindars, their title-deeds, and all their pecuniary affairs, to the minutest scrutiny,