I must now introduce your Lordships to the last visitation that was made of this college.  It was visited by order of Lord Cornwallis in the year 1788, upon the complaints made against it which I have already mentioned to your Lordships,—­that it was a sink of filth, vermin, and misery.  Mr. Chapman, who was the visitor, and the friend of Mr. Hastings, declares that he could not sit in it even for a few minutes; his words are,—­“The wretched, squalid figures that from every part ran out upon me appeared to be more like anything else than students.”  In fact, a universal outcry was raised by the whole city against it, not only as a receptacle of every kind of abuse, not only of filth and excrements which made it stink in the natural nostrils, but of worse filth, which made it insufferably offensive to the moral nostrils of every inhabitant.  Such is the account given of a college supported at an expense of 3,000_l._ a year, (a handsome foundation for a college,) and for building which the Company was charged 5,000_l._:  though no vouchers of its expenditure were ever given by Mr. Hastings.  But this is not all.  When Lord Cornwallis came to inquire into it, he found that Mudjed-o-Din had sunk the income of the estate from 3,000_l._ to 2,000_l._ a year,—­in short, that it had been a scene of peculation, both by the masters and scholars, as well as of abandonment to every kind of vicious and licentious courses; and all this without the shadow of any benefit having been derived from it.  The visitors expressly inquired whether there was any good mixed with all this evil; and they found it was all bad and mischievous, from one end to the other.  Your Lordships will remark, that the greatest part of this disgusting business must have been known to Mr. Hastings when he gave to Mudjed-o-Din the disposal of 3,000_l._ a year.  And now, my Lords, can you vote this money, expended in the manner which I have stated to you, to be a set-off in his favor, in an account for money which was itself swindled from a private individual?

But there still remains behind another more serious matter belonging to this affair; and I hope you will not think that I am laying too much stress upon it, when I declare, that, if I were to select from the whole of his conduct one thing more dishonorable than another to the British nation, it would be that which I am now about to mention.  I will leave your Lordships to judge of the sincerity of this declaration, when you shall have heard read a paper produced by the prisoner in justification of conduct such as I have stated his to have been.  It is the razinama, or attestation, of Munny Begum (the woman whom Mr. Hastings placed in the seat of justice in that country) concerning this college, made precisely at the time of this inquisition by Lord Cornwallis into the management of it.  Your Lordships will see what sort of things attestations are from that country:  that they are attestations procured in diametrical contradiction to the certain knowledge of the party attesting.  It is in page 2350 of your Minutes.  Indeed, my Lords, these are pages which, unless they are effaced by your judgment, will rise up in judgment against us, some day or other.