minal, if the crime is of magnitude. If the crime is a small one,
then you ought to be angry with the crime and reluctant to punish the
criminal; but when there are great crimes, then you may hate them
together. What! am I to love Nero? to fall in love with Heliogabalus? is
Domitian to be the subject of my affection? No, we hate the crime, and
we hate the criminal ten times more; and if I use indignant language, if
I use the language of scorn and horror with respect to the criminal, I
use the language that becomes me.

But, says one of the counsel, the Company might possess a knowledge of
the country in general, but they could not know every _bega_, of it,
(about the third part of an acre of land,) without such a commission.
That is to say, you could not squeeze everything out of the people,
without ordering such a villain as Gunga Govind Sing, (I call things, by
their names,) that most atrocious and wicked instrument of the most
atrocious and wicked tyranny, to examine every man's papers, to oblige
every man to produce his titles and accounts upon pain of criminal
punishment, to be inflicted at the discretion of this commissioner, this
Gunga Govind Sing. For an account of these acts, and for a description
of an aumeeny, I refer your Lordships to the evidence in your Minutes,
from page 1287 to 1301; and I pass on, expressing only my horror and
detestation at it, and wishing to kindle in your Lordships' minds the
same horror and detestation of it.

Thus you see that Mr. Hastings was not satisfied with confiscation only.
He comes just afterwards with a blister upon the sore. He lets loose
another set of ravagers and inquisitors upon them, under Gunga Govind
Sing, and these poor people are ravaged by the whole tribe of Calcutta
banians.

Mr. Hastings has himself defined an aumeen in page 1022, where he states
that Nundcomar desired him to make his son an aumeen. "The promise which
he [Nundcomar] says I made him, that he should be constituted aumeen,
that is, inquisitor-general over the whole country, and that I would
delegate to him my whole power and influence, is something more than a
negative falsehood." He justly and naturally reprobates the proposition
of appointing an inquisitor-general over the whole country; and yet we
see him afterwards appointing Gunga Govind Sing such an
inquisitor-general over the whole country, in order that a bega of land
should not escape him.

Let us see how all this ended, and what it