Your Lordships will observe the strange situation in which we are here placed.  If the fact of the rebellion can be proved, the discussion of the title to the property in question will be totally useless; for, if the ladies had actually taken up arms to cut the Nabob’s throat, it would require no person to come from the dead to prove to us that the Nabob, but not Mr. Hastings, had a right, for his own security and for his own indemnification, to take those treasures, which, whether they belonged to him or not, were employed in hostilities against him.  The law of self-defence is above every other law; and if any persons draw the sword against you, violence on your part is justified, and you may use your sword to take from them that property by which they have been enabled to draw their sword against you.

But the prisoner’s counsel do not trust to this justification; they set up a title of right to these treasures:  but how entirely they have failed in their attempts to substantiate either the one or the other of these his alleged justifications your Lordships will now judge.  And first with regard to the title.  The treasure, they say, belonged to the state.  The grandmother and mother have robbed the son, and kept him out of his rightful inheritance.  They then produce the Hedaya to show you what proportion of the goods of a Mussulman, when he dies, goes to his family; and here, certainly, there is a question of law to be tried.  But Mr. Hastings is a great eccentric genius, and has a course of proceeding of his own:  he first seizes upon the property, and then produces some Mahometan writers to prove that it did not belong to the persons who were in possession of it.  You would naturally expect, that, when he was going to seize upon those goods, he would have consulted his Chief-Justice, (for, as Sir Elijah Impey went with him, he might have consulted him,) and have thus learnt what was the Mahometan law:  for, though Sir Elijah had not taken his degree at a Mahometan college, though he was not a mufti or a moulavy, yet he had always muftis and moulavies near him, and he might have consulted them.  But Mr. Hastings does not even pretend that such consultations or conferences were ever had.  If he ever consulted Sir Elijah Impey, where is the report of the case?  When were the parties before him?  Where are the opinions of the moulavies?  Where is the judgment of the Chief-Justice?  Was he fit for nothing but to be employed as a messenger, as a common tipstaff?  Was he not fit to try these rights, or to decide upon them?  He has told you here, indeed, negatively, that he did not know any title Mr. Hastings had to seize upon the property of the Begums, except upon his hypothesis of the rebellion.  He was asked if he knew any other.  He answered, No.  It consequently appears that Mr. Hastings, though he had before him his doctors of all laws, who could unravel for him all the enigmas of all the laws in the world, and who had himself shone upon questions of Mahometan