improbable,)
you take your chance of a reimbursement subject to all the extra
expense, and to all the accidents that may happen to a public revenue.
This confiscation could not, therefore, be justified as a measure of
economy; it must have been designed merely for the sake of shaking and
destroying the property of the country.

The whole transaction, my Lords, was an act of gross violence, ushered
in by a gross fraud. It appears that no pensions were ever intended to
be paid; and this you will naturally guess would be the event, when such
a strange metamorphosis was to be made as that of turning a great landed
interest into a pensionary payment. As it could answer no other purpose,
so it could be intended for no other, than that of getting possession of
these jaghires by fraud. This man, my Lords, cannot commit a robbery
without indulging himself at the same time in the practice of his
favorite arts of fraud and falsehood.

And here I must again remind your Lordships, that at the time of the
treaty of Chunar the jaghires were held in the following manner. Of the
285,000_l._ a year which was to be confiscated, the old grants of Sujah
Dowlah, [and?] the grandfather of the Nabob, amounted to near two thirds
of the whole, as you will find in the paper to which we refer you. By
this confiscation, therefore, the Nabob was authorized to _resume_
grants of which he had not been the grantor.

[_Mr. Burke here read the list of the jaghires._]

Now, my Lords, you see that all these estates, except 25,782_l._ a year,
were either jaghires for the Nabob's own immediate family, settled by
his father upon his mother, and by his father's father upon his
grandmother, and upon Salar Jung, his uncle, or were the property of the
most considerable nobility, to the gross amount of 285,000_l._ Mr.
Hastings confesses that the Nabob reluctantly made the confiscation to
the extent proposed. Why? "Because," says he, "the orderlies, namely,
certain persons so called, subservient to his debaucheries, were persons
whom he wished to spare." Now I am to show you that this man, whatever
faults he may have in his private morals, (with which we have nothing at
all to do,) has been slandered throughout by Mr. Hastings. Take his own
account of the matter. "The Nabob," says he, "would have confiscated all
the rest, except his orderlies, whom he would have spared; but I,
finding where his partiality lay, compelled him to sacrifice the whole;
for other