st state a grievance. It is necessary that the
correctives should be uncommonly vigorous, and the work of men sanguine,
warm, and even impassioned in the cause. But it is an arduous thing to
plead against abuses of a power which originates from your own country,
and affects those whom we are used to consider as strangers.

I shall certainly endeavor to modulate myself to this temper; though I
am sensible that a cold style of describing actions, which appear to me
in a very affecting light, is equally contrary to the justice due to
the people and to all genuine human feelings about them. I ask pardon of
truth and Nature for this compliance. But I shall be very sparing of
epithets either to persons or things. It has been said, (and, with
regard to one of them, with truth,) that Tacitus and Machiavel, by their
cold way of relating enormous crimes, have in some sort appeared not to
disapprove them; that they seem a sort of professors of the art of
tyranny; and that they corrupt the minds of their readers by not
expressing the detestation and horror that naturally belong to horrible
and detestable proceedings. But we are in general, Sir, so little
acquainted with Indian details, the instruments of oppression under
which the people suffer are so hard to be understood, and even the very
names of the sufferers are so uncouth and strange to our ears, that it
is very difficult for our sympathy to fix upon these objects. I am sure
that some of us have come down stairs from the committee-room with
impressions on our minds which to us were the inevitable results of our
discoveries, yet, if we should venture to express ourselves in the
proper language of our sentiments to other gentlemen not at all prepared
to enter into the cause of them, nothing could appear more harsh and
dissonant, more violent and unaccountable, than our language and
behavior. All these circumstances are not, I confess, very favorable to
the idea of our attempting to govern India at all. But there we are;
there we are placed by the Sovereign Disposer; and we must do the best
we can in our situation. The situation of man is the preceptor of his
duty.

Upon the plan which I laid down, and to which I beg leave to return, I
was considering the conduct of the Company to those nations which are
indirectly subject to their authority. The most considerable of the
dependent princes is the Nabob of Oude. My right honorable friend,[57]
to whom we owe the remedial bills on