emn or censure the House of
Commons itself, as having misrepresented to be crimes the acts of a
meritorious servant of the public. Mr. Hastings has pleaded a variety of
merits, and every one of these merits, without the exception of one of
them, have been either directly censured by the House of Commons, and
censured as a ground for legislative provision, or they remain upon the
records of the House of Commons, with the vouchers for them, and proofs;
and though we have not actually come to the question upon every one of
them, we had come, before the year 1782, to forty-five direct
resolutions upon his conduct. These resolutions were moved by a person
to whom this country is under many obligations, and whom we must always
mention with honor, whenever we are speaking of high situations in this
country, and of great talents to support them, and of long public
services in the House of Commons: I mean Mr. Dundas, then Lord Advocate
of Scotland, and now one of the principal Secretaries of State, and at
the head, and worthily and deservedly at the head, of the East Indian
department. This distinguished statesman moved forty-five resolutions,
the major part of them directly condemning these very acts which Mr.
Hastings has pleaded as his merits, as being delinquencies and crimes.
All that the House of Commons implore of your Lordships is, that you
will not take these things, which we call crimes, to be merits, without
hearing the House of Commons upon the subject-matter of them. I am sure
you are too noble and too generous, as well as too just and equitable,
to act in such a manner.

The first thing that Mr. Hastings brings forward in his defence is,
that, whereas the Company were obliged to pay a certain tribute to the
Mogul, in consideration of a grant by which the Moguls gave to us the
legal title under which we hold the provinces of Bengal, Bahar, and
Orissa, he did stop the payment of that tribute, or acknowledgment,
small as it was,--that, though bound by a treaty recognized by the
Company and recognized by the nation, though bound by the very sunnud by
which he held the very office he was exercising, yet he had broken the
treaty, and refused to pay the stipulated acknowledgment. Where are we,
my Lords? Is this merit? Good God Almighty! the greatest blockhead, the
most ignorant, miserable wretch, a person without either virtue or
talents, has nothing to do but to order a clerk to strike a pen through
such an account, and