in you: are you man enough to come up to it?" says
the great robber to the little robber, says Roland the Great to his puny
accomplice. "Are you equal to it? Do you feel yourself a man? If not,
send messengers and dawks to me, and I, the great master tyrant, will
come myself, and put to shame all the paltry delegate tools of
despotism, that have not edge enough to cut their way through and do the
services I have ordained for them."

I have already stated to your Lordships his reason and motives for this
violence, and they are such as aggravated his crime by attempting to
implicate his country in it. He says he was afraid to go home without
having provided for the payment of the Nabob's debt. Afraid of what? Was
he afraid of coming before a British tribunal, and saying, "Through
justice, through a regard for the rights of an allied sovereign, through
a regard to the rights of his people, I have not got so much as I
expected"? Of this no man could be afraid. The prisoner's fear had
another origin. "I have failed," says he to himself, "in my first
project. I went to Benares to rob; I have lost by my violence the fruits
of that robbery. I must get the money somewhere, or I dare not appear
before a British House of Commons, a British House of Lords, or any
other tribunal in the kingdom; but let me get money enough, and they
won't care how I get it. The estates of whole bodies of nobility may be
confiscated; a people who had lived under their protection may be given
up into the hands of foreign usurers: they will care for none of these
things; they will suffer me to do all this, and to employ in it the
force of British troops, whom I have described as a set of robbers,
provided I can get money." These were Mr. Hastings's views; and, in
accordance with them, the jaghires were all confiscated, the jaghiredars
with their families were all turned out, the possessions delivered up to
the usurer, in order that Mr. Hastings might have the excuse of money to
plead at the bar of the House of Commons, and afterwards at the bar of
the House of Lords. If your Lordships, in your sacred character of the
first tribunal in the world, should by your judgment justify those
proceedings, you will sanction the greatest wrongs that have been ever
known in history.

But to proceed. The next thing to be asked is, Were the promised
pensions given to the jaghiredars? I suppose your Lordships are not idle
enough to put that question to us. No compens