When the Court of Directors, alarmed at the proceedings against these ancient ladies, ordered their Indian government to make an inquiry into their conduct, the prisoner had then an opportunity and a duty imposed upon him of entering into a complete justification of his conduct:  he might have justified it by every civil, and by every criminal mode of process.  Did he do this?  No.  Your Lordships have in evidence the manner, equally despotic, rebellious, insolent, fraudulent, tricking, and evasive, by which he positively refused all inquiry into the matter.  How stands it now, more than twelve years after the seizure of their goods, at ten thousand miles’ distance?  You ask of these women, buried in the depths of Asia, secluded from human commerce, what is their title to their estate.  Have you the parties before you?  Have you summoned them?  Where is their attorney?  Where is their agent?  Where is their counsel?  Is this law?  Is this a legal process?  Is this a tribunal,—­the highest tribunal of all,—­that which is to furnish the example for, and to be a control on all the rest?  But what is worse, you do not come directly to the trial of this right to property.  You are desired to surround and circumvent it; you are desired obliquely to steal an iniquitous judgment, which you dare not boldly ravish.  At this judgment you can only arrive by a side wind.  You have before you a criminal process against an offender.  One of the charges against him is, that he has robbed matrons of high and reverend place.  His defence is, that they had not the apt deeds to entitle them in law to this property. In this cause, with only the delinquent party before you, you are called upon to try their title on his allegations of its invalidity, and by acquitting him to divest them not only of their goods, but of their honor,—­to call them disseizors, wrong-doers, cheats, defrauders of their own son.  No hearing for them,—­no pleading,—­all appeal cut off.  Was ever a man indicted for a robbery, that is, for the forcible taking of the goods possessed by another, suffered to desire the prosecutor to show the deeds or other instruments by which he acquired those goods?  The idea is contemptible and ridiculous.  Do these men dream?  Do they conceive, in their confused imaginations, that you can be here trying such a question, and venturing to decide upon it?  Your Lordships will never do that, which if you did do, you would be unfit to subsist as a tribunal for a single hour; and if we, on our part, did not bring before you this attempt, as the heaviest aggravation of the prisoner’s crimes, we should betray our trust as representatives of the Commons of Great Britain.  Having made this protest in favor of law, of justice, and good policy, permit me to take a single step more.