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.

From this view of the whole matter your Lordships will form an estimate
of the spirit of Indian government and Indian justice. But to blow away
and to put an end to all their false pretences, their hearsays, and talk
of nudjeeves, and wounds, and the like, I ask, Who is the first witness
that we have produced upon this occasion? It is the Nabob himself,
negativing all these pretences. Did he believe them? Not a word from him
of any rebellion, actual or suspected. Sir Elijah Impey, indeed, said
that he was obliged to wheel round, and to avoid that dangerous place,
Fyzabad. His friends urged him to this. "For God's sake," say they,
"have a reverend care of your sacred person! What will become of the
justice of India, what will become of the natives, if you, their
legitimate protector, should fall into the hands of these wicked,
rebellious women at Fyzabad?" But although the Chief-Justice does this,
the Nabob, whose deposition is said to be the first object of this
rebellion, takes leave of Mr. Hastings at the very moment when it is
raging in the highest possible degree, and gallops into its very focus.

And under what circumstances does he do this? He had brought some
considerable forces with him. No man of his rank in that country ever
goes without them. He left a part of these forces with Mr. Hastings,
notwithstanding he was going into the centre of