resulting from them were light in comparison with the services performed.  I say that you cannot acquit him; but your Lordships might think some pity due to him, that might mitigate the severity of your sentence.  In the second place, you would consider whether the evidence of the services alleged to be performed was as clear and undoubted as that of the crimes charged.  I confess, that, if a man has done great services, it may be some alleviation of lighter faults; but then they ought to be urged as such,—­with modesty, with humility, with confession of the faults, and not with a proud and insolent defiance.  They should not be stated as proofs that he stands justified in the eye of mankind for committing unexampled and enormous crimes.  Indeed, humility, suppliant guilt, always makes impression in our bosoms, so that, when we see it before us, we always remember that we are all frail men; and nothing but a proud defiance of law and justice can make us forget this for one moment.  I believe the Commons of Great Britain, and I hope the persons that speak to you, know very well how to allow for the faults and frailties of mankind equitably.

Let us now see what are the merits which Mr. Hastings has set up against the just vengeance of his country, and against his proved delinquencies.  From the language of the prisoner, and of his counsel, you would imagine some great, known, acknowledged services had been done by him.  Your Lordships recollect that most of these presumed services have been considered, and we are persuaded justly considered, as in themselves crimes.  He wishes your Lordships to suppose and believe that these services were put aside either because we could not prove the facts against him or could not make out that they were criminal, and consequently that your Lordships ought to presume them to have been meritorious; and this is one of the grounds upon which he demands to be acquitted of the charges that have been brought forward and proved against him.  Finding in our proceedings, and recorded upon our journals, an immense mass of criminality with which he is charged, and finding that we had selected, as we were bound to select, such parts as might be most conveniently brought before your Lordships, (for to have gone through the whole would have been nearly impossible,) he takes all the rest that we have left behind and have not brought here as charges, and converts them, by a strange metamorphosis, into merits.

My Lords, we must insist, on the part of the House of Commons, we must conjure your Lordships, for the honor of a cooerdinate branch of the legislature, that, whenever you are called upon to admit what we have condemned as crimes to be merits, you will at least give us an opportunity of being heard upon the matter,—­that you will not suffer Mr. Hastings, when attempting to defend himself against our charges, in an indirect and oblique manner to condemn or censure the House of Commons itself, as having misrepresented