These proceedings were brought before you for two purposes:  first, to show the corrupt principle of the whole proceeding; next, to show the manner in which the Company’s servants are treated.  They are accused and persecuted, until they are brought to submit to whatever terms it may be thought proper to impose upon them; they are then formally, indeed, acquitted of the most atrocious crimes charged against them, but virtually condemned upon some articles, with the scourge hung over them,—­and in some instances rewarded by the greatest, most honorable, and most lucrative situations in the Company’s service.  My Lords, it is on the same ground of the wicked, pernicious, and ruinous principles of Mr. Hastings’s government, that I have charged this with everything that is chargeable against him, namely, that, if your Lordships should ratify those principles by your acquittal of him, they become principles of government,—­rejected, indeed, by the Commons, but adopted by the Peerage of Great Britain.

There is another article which I have just touched, but which I must do more than barely notice, upon account of the evil example of it:  I mean the taking great sums of money, under pretence of an entertainment.  Your Lordships will recollect, that, when this business was charged against him in India, Mr. Hastings neither affirmed nor denied the fact.  Confession could not be there extorted from him.  He next appeared before the House of Commons, and he still evaded a denial or a confession of it.  He lastly appeared before your Lordships, and in his answer to our charge he in the same manner evaded either a confession or a denial.  He forced us to employ a great part of a session in endeavoring to establish what we have at last established, the receipt of the sums first charged, and of seven lacs more, by him.  At length the proof could not be evaded; and after we had fought through all the difficulties which the law could interpose in his defence, and of which he availed himself with a degree of effrontery that has, I believe, no example in the world, he confesses, avows, and justifies his conduct.  If the custom alleged be well founded, and be an honorable and a proper and just practice, why did he not avow it in every part and progress of our proceedings here?  Why should he have put us to the necessity of wasting so many months in the proof of the fact?  And why, after we have proved it, and not before, did he confess it, avow it, and even glory in it?

I must remind your Lordships that the sum charged to be so taken by way of entertainment made only a part, a single article, of the bribes charged by Nundcomar to have been received by Mr. Hastings; and when we find him confessing, what he could not deny, that single article, and evading all explanation respecting the others, and not giving any reason whatever why one was received and the others rejected, your Lordships will judge of the strong presumption of his having taken them all, even if we had given no other proofs