uption and peculation?

We have fully stated to you, from the authority of these parties
themselves, the effects and consequences of these proceedings,--namely,
the dilapidation of the revenues, and the ruin and desolation of the
provinces. And, my Lords, what else could have been expected or designed
by this sweeping subversion of the control of the Company's servants
over the collections of the revenue, and the vesting of it in a black
dewan, but fraud and peculation? What else, I say, was to be expected,
in the inextricable turnings and windings of that black mystery of
iniquity, but the concealment of every species of wrong, violence,
outrage, and oppression?

Your Lordships, then, have seen that the whole country was put into the
hands of Gunga Govind Sing; and when you remember who this Gunga Govind
Sing was, and how effectually Mr. Hastings had secured him against
detection, in every part of his malpractices and atrocities, can you for
a moment hesitate to believe that the whole project was planned and
executed for the purpose of putting all Bengal under contribution to Mr.
Hastings? But if you are resolved, after all this, to entertain a good
opinion of Mr. Hastings,--if you have taken it into your heads, for
reasons best known to yourselves, to imagine that he has some hidden
virtues, which in the government of Bengal he has not displayed, and
which, to us of the House of Commons, have not been discernible in any
one single instance,--these virtues may be fit subjects for paragraphs
in newspapers, they may be pleaded for him by the partisans of his
Indian _faction_, but your Lordships will do well to remember that it is
not to Mr. Hastings himself that you are trusting, but to Gunga Govind
Sing. If the Committee were tools in his hands, must not Mr. Hastings
have also been a tool in his hands? If they with whom he daily and
hourly had to transact business, and whose office it was to control and
restrain him, were unable so to do, is this control and restraint to be
expected from Mr. Hastings, who was his confidant, and whose corrupt
transactions he could at any time discover to the world? My worthy
colleague has traced the whole of Mr. Hastings's bribe account, in the
most clear and satisfactory manner, to Gunga Govind Sing,--him first,
him last, him midst, and without end. If we fail of the conviction of
the prisoner at your bar, your Lordships will not have acquitted Mr.
Hastings merely, but you will confirm