m, the object of his
passion and flame, to which he sacrifices as much as Antony ever did to
Cleopatra. You see the object of his love and affection placed in the
administration of the viceroyalty; you see placed at her disposal the
administration of the civil judicature, and of the executory
justice,--together with the salary which was intended for Mahomed Reza
Khan.

Your Lordships will be pleased to remember that this distribution of the
Nabob's government was made in direct defiance of the orders of the
Company. And as a further proof of this defiance, it will not escape
your Lordships, that, before this measure was carried into execution,
Mr. Barwell being one day absent from the Council, Mr. Hastings fell
into a minority; and it was agreed, upon that occasion, that the whole
affair should be referred home to the Court of Directors, and that no
arrangement should be made till the Directors had given their opinion.
Mr. Hastings, the very moment after Mr. Barwell's return to his seat in
the Council, rescinds this resolution, which subjected the orders of the
Court of Directors to their own reconsideration; and he hurries headlong
and precipitately into the execution of his first determination. Your
Lordships will also see in this act what sort of use Mr. Hastings made
of the Council; and I have therefore insisted upon all these practices
of the prisoner at your bar, because there is not one of them in which
some principle of government is not wounded, if not mortally wounded.

My Lords, we have laid before you the consequences of this proceeding.
We have shown what passed within the walls of the seraglio, and what
tyranny was exercised by this woman over the multitude of women there. I
shall now show your Lordships in what manner she made use of her power
over the _supreme judicature_, to peculate, and to destroy the country;
and I shall adduce, as proofs of this abuse of her authority, the facts
I am about to relate, and of which there is evidence before your
Lordships.

There was an ostensible man, named Sudder ul Huk Khan, placed there at
the head of the administration of justice, with a salary of seven
thousand pounds a year of the Company's money. This man, in a letter to
the Governor-General and Council, received the 1st of September, 1778,
says,--"His Highness himself [the Nabob] is not deficient in regard for
me, but certain bad men have gained an ascendency over his temper, by
whose instigation he acts."