f
these very severities and cruelties, the continuance of which the
letters in his pocket had shown him were of no effect. Here you have an
instance of his implacable cruelty; you see that it never relaxes, never
remits, and that, finding all the resources of tyranny useless and
ineffective, he is still willing to use them, and for that purpose he
makes a fraudulent concealment of the utter inefficacy of all the means
that had been used.

But, you will ask, what could make him persevere in these acts of
cruelty, after his avarice had been more than satiated? You will find it
is this. He had had some quarrel with these women. He believed that they
had done him some personal injury or other, of which he nowhere informs
you. But, as you find that in the case of Cheyt Sing he considered his
visit to General Clavering as an horrid outrage against himself, which
he never forgave, and revenged to the ruin of that miserable person, so
you find that he has avowed the same malicious disposition towards the
Begums, arising from some similar cause. In page 367 of your printed
Minutes, he says,--"I am sorry that I must in truth add, that a part of
the resentment of the Begums was, as I had too much reason to suspect,
directed to myself personally. The incidents which gave rise to it are
too light to be mixed with the professed subject and occasion of this
detail; and as they want the authenticity of recorded evidence, I could
lay no claim to credit in my relation of them. At some period I may be
induced to offer them to the world, my ultimate and unerring judges,
both of that and of every other trait in my political character."

My Lords, you have an anecdote here handed to you which is the key of a
great part of this transaction. He had determined upon some deep and
desperate revenge for some injury or affront of some kind or other that
he thought he had received from these people. He accuses them of a
personal quarrel with himself; and yet he has not the honor or honesty
to tell you what it was,--what it was that could induce them to
entertain such a personal resentment against him as to ruin themselves
and their country by their supposed rebellion. He says, that some time
or other he will tell it to the world. Why did he not tell his counsel,
and authorize them to tell a story which could not be unimportant, as it
was connected with a rebellion which shook the British power in India to
its foundation? And if it be true that this