that they held great estates and other effects over which the reigning monarch or his successor had no control whatever?  Indeed, my Lords, a more curious and extraordinary species of trial than this of a question of right never was heard of since the world began.  Mr. Hastings begins with seizing the goods of the Begums at Fyzabad, nine thousand miles from you, and fourteen years after tries the title in an English court, without having one person to appear for these miserable ladies.  I trust you will not suffer this mockery; I hope this last and ultimate shame will be spared us:  for I declare to God, that the defence, and the principles of it, appear to me ten thousand times worse than the act itself.

Now, my Lords, this criminal, through his counsel, chooses, with their usual flippancy, to say that the Commons have been cautious in stating this part of the charge, knowing that they were on tender ground, and therefore did not venture to say entitled, but possessed of only.  A notable discovery indeed!  We are as far from being taken in by such miserable distinctions as we are incapable of making them.  We certainly have not said that the Begums were entitled to, but only that they were possessed of, certain property.  And we have so said because we were not competent to decide upon their title, because your Lordships are not competent to decide upon their title, because no part of this tribunal is competent to decide upon their title.  You have not the parties before you; you have not the cause before you,—­but are getting it by oblique, improper, and indecent means.  You are not a court of justice to try that question.  The parties are at a distance from you; they are neither present themselves, nor represented by any counsel, advocate, or attorney:  and I hope no House of Lords will ever judge and decide upon the title of any human being, much less upon the title of the first women in Asia, sequestered, shut up from you, at nine thousand miles’ distance.

I believe, my Lords, that the Emperor of Hindostan little thought, while Delhi stood, that an English subject of Mr. Hastings’s description should domineer over the Vizier of his empire, and give the law to the first persons in his dominions.  He as little dreamed of it as any of your Lordships now dream that you shall have your property seized by a delegate from Lucknow, and have it tried by what tenure a peer or peeress of Great Britain hold, the one his estate, and the other her jointure, dower, or her share of goods, her paraphernalia, in any court of Adawlut in Hindostan.  If any such thing should happen, (for we know not what may happen; we live in an age of strange revolutions, and I doubt whether any more strange than this,) the Commons of Great Britain would shed their best blood sooner than suffer that a tribunal at Lucknow should decide upon any of your titles, for the purpose of justifying a robber that has taken your property.  We should do the best we could, if such a strange circumstance occurred.