in seizing the goods of the rebels?” That is a question decided in a moment; and I must have a malice to Sir Elijah Impey of which I am incapable, to deny the propriety of his answer.  But observe, I pray you, my Lords, there is something peculiarly good and correct in it.  He does not take upon him to say one word of the actual existence of a rebellion, though he was at the time in the country, and, if there had been any, he must have been a witness to it; but, so chaste was his character as a judge, that he would not touch upon the juries’ office.  “I am chief-justice here,” says he, “though a little wandering out of my orbit; yet still the sacred office of justice is in me.  Do you take upon you the fact; I find the law.”  Were it not for this sacred attention to separate jurisdictions, he might have been a tolerable judge of the fact,—­just as good a judge as Mr. Hastings:  for neither of them knew it any other way, as it appears afterwards, but by rumor and reports,—­reports, I believe, of Mr. Hastings’s own raising; for I do not know that Sir Elijah Impey had anything to do with them.

But to proceed.  With regard to the title of these ladies, according to the Mahometan law, you have nothing laid before you by the prisoner’s counsel but a quotation cut out with the scissors from a Mahometan law-book, (which I suspect very much the learned gentlemen have never read through,) declaring how a Mahometan’s effects are to be distributed.  But Mr. Hastings could not at the time have consulted that learned counsel who now defends him upon the principles of the Hedaya, the Hedaya not having been then published in English; and I will venture to say, that neither Sir Elijah Impey nor Ali Ibrahim Khan, nor any other person, high or low, in India, ever suggested this defence, and that it was never thought of till lately found by the learned counsel in the English translation of the Hedaya.  “God bless me!” now says Mr. Hastings, “what ignorance have I been in all this time!  I thought I was seizing this unjustly, and that the pretence of rebellion was necessary; but my counsel have found out a book, since published, and from it they produce the law upon that subject, and show that the Nabob had a right to seize upon the treasures of his mother.”  But are your Lordships so ignorant—­(your Lordships are not ignorant of anything)—­are any men so ignorant as not to know that in every country the common law of distribution of the estate of an intestate amongst private individuals is no rule with regard to the family arrangements of great princes?  Is any one ignorant, that, from the days of the first origin of the Persian monarchy, the laws of which have become rules ever since for almost all the monarchs of the East, the wives of great men have had, independent of the common distribution of their goods, great sums of money and great estates in land, one for their girdle, one for their veil, and so on, going through the rest of their ornaments and attire,—­and