intains, the precedents he quotes, the laws and
authorities which he refuses to abide by, and those on which he relies;
and at last I have refuted all those pleas in bar on which he depends,
and for the effect of which he presumes on the indulgence and patience
of this country, or on the corruption of some persons in it. And here I
close what I had to say upon this subject,--wishing and hoping, that,
when I open before your Lordships the case more particularly, so as to
state rather a plan of the proceeding than the direct proof of the
crimes, your Lordships will hear me with the same goodness and
indulgence I have hitherto experienced,--that you will consider, if I
have detained you long, it was not with a view of exhausting my own
strength, or putting your patience to too severe a trial, but from the
sense I feel that it is the most difficult and the most complicated
cause that was ever brought before any human tribunal. Therefore I was
resolved to bring the whole substantially before you. And now, if your
Lordships will permit me, I will state the method of my future
proceeding, and the future proceeding of the gentlemen assisting me.

I mean first to bring before you the crimes as they are classed, and are
of the same species and genus, and how they mutually arose from one
another. I shall first show that Mr. Hastings's crimes had root in that
which is the root of all evil, I mean avarice; that avarice and rapacity
were the groundwork and foundation of all his other vicious system; that
he showed it in setting to sale the native government of the country, in
setting to sale the whole landed interest of the country, in setting to
sale the British government and his own fellow-servants, to the basest
and wickedest of mankind.

I shall then show your Lordships, that, when, in consequence of such a
body of corruption and peculation, he justly dreaded the indignation of
his country and the vengeance of its laws, in order to raise himself a
faction embodied by the same guilt and rewarded in the same manner, he
has, with a most abandoned profusion, thrown away the revenues of the
country to form such a faction here.

I shall next show your Lordships, that, having exhausted the resources
of the Company, and brought it to extreme difficulties within, he has
looked to his _external_ resources, as he calls them; he has gone up
into the country. I will show that he has plundered, or attempted to
plunder, every person dependen