Do you make your laws, do you make your covenants, for the very purpose of their being evaded?  Is this the purpose for which a British tribunal sits here, to furnish a subject for an epigram, or a tale for the laughter of the world?  Believe me, my Lords, the world is not to be thus trifled with.  But, my Lords, you will never trifle with your duty.  You have a gross, horrid piece of corruption before you,—­impudently confessed, and more impudently defended.  But you will not suffer Mr. Hastings to say, “I have only to go to Moorshedabad, or to order the Nabob to meet me half way, and I can set aside and laugh at all your covenants and acts of Parliament.”  Is this all the force and power of the covenant by which you would prevent the servants of the Company from committing acts of fraud and oppression, that they have nothing to do but to amuse themselves with a tour of pleasure to Moorshedabad in order to put any sum of money in their pocket that they please?

But they justify themselves by saying, such things have been practised before.  No doubt they have; and these covenants were made that they should not be practised any more.  But your Lordships are desired to say, that the very custom which the covenant is made to destroy, the very grievance itself, may be pleaded; the abuse shall be admitted to destroy the law made to prevent it.  It is impossible, I venture to say, that your Lordships should act thus.  The conduct of the criminal is not half so abhorrent as the justification is affronting to justice, whilst it tends to vilify and degrade the dignity of the Peerage and the character of the Commons of Great Britain, before the former and against the latter of which such a justification is produced in the face of the world.

At the same time that we call for your justice upon this man, we beseech you to remember the severest justice upon him is the tenderest pity towards the innocent victims of his crimes.  Consider what was at that time the state of the people from whom, in direct defiance of his covenant, he took this sum of money.  Were they at this time richer, were they more opulent, was the state of the country more flourishing than when Mr. Sumner, when Mr. Vansittart, in short, than when the long line of Mr. Hastings’s predecessors visited that country?  No, they were not.  Mr. Hastings at this very time had reduced the Nabob’s income from 450,000_l._ [400,000_l._?] sterling a year, exclusive of other considerable domains and revenues, to 160,000_l._ He was, indeed, an object of compassion.  His revenues had not only been reduced during his state of minority, but they were reduced when he afterwards continued in a state in which he could do no one valid act; and yet, in this state, he was made competent to give away, under the name of compensation for entertainments, the sum of 18,000_l._,—­perhaps at that time nearly all he had in the world.