There is another circumstance which makes their own acts the refutation of their false pretences.  This letter says that the country is disaffected, and it mentions the ill-disposed parts of the country.  Now we all know that the country was ill-disposed; and we may therefore conclude this paper was written by, and addressed to, some person who was employed against the persons so ill-disposed,—­namely, the very Rajahs so mentioned before.  The prisoner’s counsel, after producing this paper, had the candor to declare that they did not see what use could be made of it.  No, to be sure, they do not see what use can be made of it for their cause; but I see the use that can be made of it against their cause.  I say that the lost papers, upon which they do so much insist, deserve no consideration, when the only paper that they have preserved operates directly against them; and that therefore we may safely infer, that, if we had the rest of the contents of this trunk, we should probably find them make as strongly against them as this paper does.  You have no reason to judge of them otherwise than by the specimen:  for how can you judge of what is lost but from what remains?

The man who hid these papers in his trunk never understood one word of the Persian language, and consequently was liable to every kind of mistake, even though he meant well.  But who is this man?  Why, it is Captain Williams,—­the man who in his affidavits never mentioned the Begums without mentioning Saadut Ali.  It is Captain Williams,—­whom we charge to have murdered a principal man of the country by his own hand, without law or legal process.  It is Captain Williams,—­one of those British officers whom Mr. Hastings states to be the pests of the country.  This is the man who comes here as evidence against these women, and produces this monstrous paper.

All the evidence they had produced to you amounts to no more than that such a man believes such a man heard of something; and to close the whole of this hearsay account, Sir Elijah Impey, who always comes in as a supplement, declares that no man doubted of the existence of this rebellion, and of the guilt of the Begums, any more than of the rebellion of 1745:  a comparison which, I must say, is, by way of evidence, a little indecorous in a chief-justice of India.  Your Lordships are sufficiently acquainted with the history of that rebellion to know, that, when Lord Lovat was tried at this bar, the proceedings against him were not founded on second-hand hearsay.  The existence of the rebellion of 1745 was proved, notwithstanding its notoriety; but neither notoriety nor proof would have signified anything, if Lord Lovat’s participation in it had not been brought home to him directly, personally, and particularly.  Yet a chief-justice, sent to India to represent the sacred majesty of the crown of England, has gone so far as to say at your bar that no more doubt could be entertained of the existence either of the rebellion or the guilt of the Begums than of the rebellion in 1745.  Besides, he forgets that he himself carried the order to confiscate these people’s property without any trial whatever.  But this is the way of proceeding by an English chief-justice in India,—­a chief-justice who had rendered himself the instrument, the letter-carrier, the messenger, I had almost said the executioner of Mr. Hastings.