the one was wasted and desolated, the other reduced to a condition of want and misery, and that the zemindars, that is, the nobility and gentry of the country, were so beggared as not to be able to give even a common decent education to their children, notwithstanding the foundation of Mr. Hastings’s colleges.  You have heard this noble person, who had been an eye-witness of what he relates, supplicating for their relief, and expressly stating that most of the complicated miseries, and perhaps the cruelest of the afflictions they endured, arose from the management of the country having been taken out of the hands of its natural rulers, and given up to Mr. Hastings’s farmers, namely, the banians of Calcutta.  These are the things that ought to go to your Lordships’ hearts.  You see a country wasted and desolated.  You see a third of it become a jungle for wild beasts.  You see the other parts oppressed by persons in the form and shape of men, but with all the character and disposition of beasts of prey.  This state of the country is brought before you, and by the most unexceptionable evidence,—­being brought forward through Mr. Hastings himself.  This evidence, whatever opinion you may entertain of the effrontery or of the impudence of the criminal who has produced it, is of double and treble force.  And yet at the very time when Lord Cornwallis is giving this statement of the country and its inhabitants, at the very time when he is calling for pity upon their condition, are these people brought forward to bear testimony to the benign and auspicious government of Mr. Hastings, directed, as your Lordships know it was, by the merciful and upright Gunga Govind Sing.

My Lords, you have now the evidence of Lord Cornwallis on the one hand, and the razinamas of India on the other.  But before I dismiss this part of my subject, I must call your Lordships’ attention to another authority,—­to a declaration, strictly speaking, legal, of the state to which our Indian provinces were reduced, and of the oppressions which they have suffered, during the government of Mr. Hastings:  I speak of the act 24 Geo. III. cap. 25, intituled, “An act for the better regulation and management of the affairs of the East India Company, and of the British possessions in India, and for establishing a court of judicature for the more speedy and effectual trial of persons accused of offences committed in the East Indies,” Sec. 39.

My Lords, here is an act of Parliament; here are regulations enacted in consequence of an inquiry which had been directed to be made into the grievances of India, for the redress of them.  This act of Parliament declares the existence of oppressions in the country.  What oppressions were they?  The oppressions which it suffered by being let out to the farmers of the Company’s revenues.  Who was the person that sold these revenues to the farmers?  Warren Hastings.  By whom were these oppressions notified to the Court of Directors?  By Lord Cornwallis.  Upon what