We have therefore in our charge strongly reprobated Sir Elijah Impey’s going to take such affidavits.  “Oh! but,” they say, “a judge may take an affidavit in his chamber privately; and he may take an affidavit, though not exactly in the place of his jurisdiction, to authenticate a bond, or the like.”—­We are not to be cheated by words.  It is not dirty shreds of worn-out parchments, the sweepings of Westminster Hall, that shall serve us in place of that justice upon, which the world stands.  Affidavits!  We know that in the language of our courts affidavits do not signify a body of evidence to sustain a criminal charge, but are generally relative to matter [matters?] in process collateral to the charge, which, not coming before the jury, are made known to the judge by way of affidavit.

But was it ever heard, or will it be borne, that a person exercising a judicial office under his Majesty should walk beyond the sphere of his jurisdiction,—­that he should desert the station in which he was placed for the protection of the natives, and should march to such a place as Lucknow in order to take depositions for criminating persons in that country, without so much as letting these poor victims know one article in the depositions so taken?  These depositions, my Lords, were made to criminate, they were meant to justify a forfeiture, and are not in the nature of those voluntary affidavits which, whether made within jurisdiction or without, whether made publicly or privately, signify comparatively nothing to the cause.  I do not mean, to say that any process of any court has not its weight, when the matter is within it in the ordinary course of proceedings:  it is the extraordinary course, the extrajudicial conduct, which divests it of that just weight it otherwise would have.

This chief-justice goes to Lucknow, where he holds his court, such as it was.  He is ready to authenticate any process by the signature of the English chief-justice, in a court which he holds by night, in a court which he holds in darkness and secrecy.  He holds his court in Fyzabad; he holds it, unknown to the Nabob of Oude, in his own capital, and without giving him the least knowledge of or any notice of what he was proceeding to do.  He holds it at the lodgings of Colonel Morgan, a pensioner of the Nabob; and the person assisting him is Mr. Middleton, who is likewise, as we have proved to you, one of the Nabob’s pensioners, a monopolizer of trade in the country, and a person who received much the major part of his emoluments from the Nabob’s hands.

In that clandestine manner, in the Nabob’s own house, in his own capital city, in the lodging of his dependant and pensioner, Colonel Morgan, with no other witness that we know of than Mr. Middleton, was this iniquitous, dark procedure held, to criminate the mother of the Nabob.  We here see a scene of dark, mysterious contrivance:  let us now see what is brought out in the face of open day.  The attestations themselves, which you have seen on