as his several defences; and
nothing in the defences is so singular as the principles upon which he
proceeds. Your Lordships will have to decide not only upon a large,
connected, systematic train of misdemeanors, but an equally connected
system of principles and maxims of government, invented to justify those
misdemeanors. He has brought them forward and avowed them in the face of
day. He has boldly and insultingly thrown them in the face of the
representatives of a free people, and we cannot pass them by without
adopting them. I am directed to protest against those grounds and
principles upon which he frames his defence; for, if those grounds are
good and valid, they carry off a great deal at least, if not entirely,
the foundation of our charge.

My Lords, we contend that Mr. Hastings, as a British governor, ought to
govern on British principles, not by British forms,--God forbid!--for if
ever there was a case in which the letter kills and the spirit gives
life, it would be an attempt to introduce British forms and the
substance of despotic principles together into any country. No! We call
for that spirit of equity, that spirit of justice, that spirit of
protection, that spirit of lenity, which ought to characterize every
British subject in power; and on these, and these principles only, he
will be tried.

But he has told your Lordships, in his defence, that actions in Asia do
not bear the same moral qualities which the same actions would bear in
Europe.

My Lords, we positively deny that principle. I am authorized and called
upon to deny it. And having stated at large what he means by saying that
the same actions have not the same qualities in Asia and in Europe, we
are to let your Lordships know that these gentlemen have formed a plan
of _geographical morality_, by which the duties of men, in public and in
private situations, are not to be governed by their relation to the
great Governor of the Universe, or by their relation to mankind, but by
climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of
latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues
die, as they say some insects die when they cross the line; as if there
were a kind of baptism, like that practised by seamen, by which they
unbaptize themselves of all that they learned in Europe, and after which
a new order and system of things commenced.

This geographical morality we do protest against; Mr. Hastings shall not
screen h