with a rebellion which shook the British power in India to its foundation?  And if it be true that this rebellion had its rise in some wicked act of this man, who had offended these women, and made them, as he says, his mortal enemies, you will then see that you never can go so deep with this prisoner that you do not find in every criminal act of his some other criminal act.  In the lowest deep there is still a lower deep.  In every act of his cruelty there is some hidden, dark motive, worse than the act itself, of which he just gives you a hint, without exposing it to that open light which truth courts and falsehood basely slinks from.

But cruelly as they have suffered, dreadfully as they have been robbed, insulted as they have been, in every mode of insult that could be offered to women of their rank, all this must have been highly aggravated by coming from such a man as Mr. Middleton.  You have heard the audacious and insulting language he has held to them, his declining to correspond with them, and the mode of his doing it.  There are, my Lords, things that embitter the bitterness of oppression itself:  contumelious acts and language, coming from persons who the other day would have licked the dust under the feet of the lowest servants of these ladies, must have embittered their wrongs, and poisoned the very cup of malice itself.

Oh! but they deserved it.  They were concerned in a wicked, outrageous rebellion:  first, for expelling their own son from his dominions; and, secondly, for expelling and extirpating the English nation out of India.—­Good God Almighty! my Lords, do you hear this?  Do you understand that the English nation had made themselves so odious, so particularly hateful, even to women the most secluded from the world, that there was no crime, no mischief, no family destruction, through which they would not wade, for our extermination?  Is this a pleasant thing to hear of?  Rebellion is, in all parts of the world, undoubtedly considered as a great misfortune:  in some countries it must be considered as a presumption of some fault in government:  nowhere is it boasted of as supplying the means of justifying acts of cruelty and insult, but with us.

We have, indeed, seen that a rebellion did exist in Baraitch and Goruckpore.  It was an universal insurrection of the people:  an insurrection for the very extermination of Englishmen,—­for the extermination of Colonel Hannay,—­for the extermination of Captain Gordon,—­for the extermination of Captain Williams, and of all the other captains and colonels exercising the office of farmer-general and sub-farmer-general in the manner that we have described.  We know that there did exist in that country such a rebellion.  But mark, my Lords, against whom!—­against these mild and gracious sovereigns, Colonel Hannay, Captain Gordon, Captain Williams.  Oh, unnatural and abominable rebellion!—­But will any one pretend to say that the Nabob himself was ever attacked by any of