olds respectable
and sacred, hanged in the face of all his nation by the judges you sent
to protect that people: hanged for a pretended crime, upon an _ex post
facto_ British act of Parliament, in the midst of his evidence against
Mr. Hastings. The accuser they saw hanged. The culprit, without
acquittal or inquiry, triumphs on the ground of that murder: a murder,
not of Nundcomar only, but of all living testimony, and even of evidence
yet unborn. From that time not a complaint has been heard from the
natives against their governors. All the grievances of India have found
a complete remedy.

Men will not look to acts of Parliament, to regulations, to
declarations, to votes, and resolutions. No, they are not such fools.
They will ask, What is the road to power, credit, wealth, and honors?
They will ask, What conduct ends in neglect, disgrace, poverty, exile,
prison, and gibbet? These will teach them the course which they are to
follow. It is your distribution of these that will give the character
and tone to your government. All the rest is miserable grimace.

When I accuse the Court of Directors of this habitual treachery in the
use of reward and punishment, I do not mean to include all the
individuals in that court. There have been, Sir, very frequently men of
the greatest integrity and virtue amongst them; and the contrariety in
the declarations and conduct of that court has arisen, I take it, from
this,--that the honest Directors have, by the force of matter of fact on
the records, carried the reprobation of the evil measures of the
servants in India. This could not be prevented, whilst these records
stared them in the face; nor were the delinquents, either here or there,
very solicitous about their reputation, as long as they were able to
secure their power. The agreement of their partisans to censure them
blunted for a while the edge of a severe proceeding. It obtained for
them a character of impartiality, which enabled them to recommend with
some sort of grace, what will always carry a plausible appearance, those
treacherous expedients called moderate measures. Whilst these were under
discussion, new matter of complaint came over, which seemed to antiquate
the first. The same circle was here trod round once more; and thus
through years they proceeded in a compromise of censure for punishment,
until, by shame and despair, one after another, almost every man who
preferred his duty to the Company to the interest of t