d honor. The landholders, even women of eminent rank and
condition, (for such the greatest part of the zemindars then were,) fled
from the ancient seats of their ancestors, and left their miserable
followers and servants, who in that country are infinitely numerous,
without protection and without bread. The monthly instalment of Mr.
Hastings's bribe was become due, and his rapacity must be fed from the
vitals of the people.

The zemindars, before their own flight, had the mortification to see all
the lands assigned to charitable and to religious uses, the humane and
pious foundations of themselves and their ancestors, made to support
infirmity and decrepitude, to give feet to the lame and eyes to the
blind, and to effect which they had deprived themselves of many of the
enjoyments of life, cruelly sequestered and sold at the same market of
violence and fraud where their demesne possessions and their goods had
been before made away with. Even the lands and funds set aside for
their funeral ceremonies, in which they hoped to find an end to their
miseries, and some indemnity of imagination for all the substantial
sufferings of their lives,--even the very feeble consolations of death,
were, by the same rigid hand of tyranny,--a tyranny more consuming than
the funeral pile, more greedy than the grave, and more inexorable than
death itself,--seized and taken to make good the honor of corruption and
the faith of bribery pledged to Mr. Hastings or his instruments.

Thus it fared with the better and middling orders of the people. Were
the lower, the more industrious, spared? Alas! as their situation was
far more helpless, their oppression was infinitely more sore and
grievous, the exactions yet more excessive, the demand yet more
vexatious, more capricious, more arbitrary. To afford your Lordships
some idea of the condition of those who were served up to satisfy Mr.
Hastings's hunger and thirst for bribes, I shall read it to you in the
very words of the representative tyrant himself, Rajah Debi Sing. Debi
Sing, when he was charged with a fraudulent sale of the ornaments of
gold and silver of women, who, according to the modes of that country,
had starved themselves to decorate their unhappy persons, argued on the
improbability of this part of the charge in these very words.

"It is notorious," says he, "that poverty generally prevails amongst the
husbandmen of Rungpore, more perhaps than in any other parts of the
country. They