the event of our
being better satisfied with his conduct, or of appropriating them to the
Company's advantage, he sells them to the Nabob of Oude, who he knew had
the art, above all men, of destroying a country which he was to keep, or
which he might fear he was not to keep, permanent possession of. And
what do you think he sold them for? He sold them at a little more than
two years' purchase. Will any man believe that Mr. Hastings, when he
sold these provinces to the Vizier for two years' purchase, and when
there was no man that would not have given ten years' purchase for them,
did not put the difference between the real and pretended value into his
own pocket, and that of his associates?

We charge, therefore, first, that this act for which he assumes merit
was in itself a breach of faith; next, that the sale of these provinces
was scandalously conducted; and thirdly, that this sale, at one fifth of
the real value, was effected for corrupt purposes. Thus an act of
threefold delinquency is one of the merits stated with great pomp by his
counsel.

Another of his merits is the stoppage of the pension which the Company
was under an obligation to pay to Nudjif Khan: a matter which, even if
admitted to be a merit, is certainly not worth, as a set-off, much
consideration.

But there is another set-off of merit upon which he plumes himself, and
sets an exceedingly high value: the sale of the Rohilla nation to that
worthless tyrant, the Vizier, their cruel and bitter enemy,--the
cruelest tyrant, perhaps, that ever existed, and their most implacable
enemy, if we except Mr. Hastings, who appears to have had a concealed
degree of animosity, public, private, or political, against them. To
this man he sold this whole nation, whose country, cultivated like a
garden, was soon reduced, as Mr. Hastings, from the character of the
Vizier, knew would be the consequence, to a mere desert, for 400,000_l._
He sent a brigade of our troops to assist the Vizier in extirpating
these people, who were the bravest, the most honorable, and generous
nation upon earth. Those who were not left slaughtered to rot upon the
soil of their native country were cruelly expelled from it, and sent to
publish the merciless and scandalous behavior of Great Britain from one
end of India to the other. I believe there is not an honest, ingenuous,
or feeling heart upon the face of the globe, I believe there is no man
possessing the least degree of regard to honor