e no longer necessary;
succession supplied their places: and well the object agreed with the
policy. Rules of succession could not be very well ascertained to an
office like that of the Nabob, which was hereditary only by the
appointment of the Mogul. The issue by lawful wives would naturally be
preferred by those who meant the quiet of the country. But a more
doubtful title was preferred, as better adapted to the purposes of
extortion and peculation. This miserable succession was sold, and the
eldest of the issue of Munny Begum, an harlot, brought in to pollute the
harem of the seraglio, of whom you will hear much hereafter, was chosen.
He soon succeeded to the grave. Another son of the same prostitute
succeeded to the same unhappy throne, and followed to the same untimely
grave. Every succession was sold; and between venal successions and
venal revolutions, in a very few years seven princes and six sales were
seen successively in Bengal. The last was a minor, the issue of a
legitimate wife, admitted to succeed because a minor, and because there
was none illegitimate left. He was instantly stripped of the allowance
of his progenitors, and reduced to a pension of 160,000 a year. He still
exists, and continued to the end of Mr. Hastings's government to furnish
constant sources of bribery and plunder to him and his creatures.

The offspring of Munny Begum clinging, as his father did, to Nundcomar,
they tore Nundcomar from his side, as they had done from the side of his
father, and carried him down as a sort of prisoner to Calcutta; where,
having had the weakness to become the first informer, he was made the
first example. This person, pushed to the wall, and knowing that the man
he had to deal with was desperate and cruel in his resentments, resolves
on the first blow, and enters before the Council a regular information
in writing of bribery against Mr. Hastings. In his preface to that
charge he excuses himself for what is considered to be an act equally
insane and wicked, and as the one inexpiable crime of an Indian, the
discovery of the money he gives,--that Mr. Hastings had declaredly
determined on his ruin, and to accomplish it had newly associated
himself with one Mohun Persaud, a name I wish your Lordships to
remember, a bitter enemy of his, an infamous person, whom Mr. Hastings
knew to be such, and as such had turned him out of his house,--that Mr.
Hastings had lately recalled, and held frequent communications with