med into savage beasts, with no other vestiges of reason left
but what serves to furnish the inventions and refinements of ferocious
subtlety, for purposes of which beasts are incapable and at which fiends
would blush.

Debi Sing and his instruments suspected, and in a few cases they
suspected justly, that the country people had purloined from their own
estates, and had hidden in secret places in the circumjacent deserts,
some small reserve of their own grain to maintain themselves during the
unproductive months of the year, and to leave some hope for a future
season. But the under-tyrants knew that the demands of Mr. Hastings
would admit no plea for delay, much less for subtraction of his bribe,
and that he would not abate a shilling of it to the wants of the whole
human race. These hoards, real or supposed, not being discovered by
menaces and imprisonment, they fell upon the last resource, the naked
bodies of the people. And here, my Lords, began such a scene of
cruelties and tortures as I believe no history has ever presented to the
indignation of the world,--such as I am sure, in the most barbarous
ages, no politic tyranny, no fanatic persecution, has ever yet exceeded.
Mr. Paterson, the commissioner appointed to inquire into the state of
the country, makes his own apology and mine for opening this scene of
horrors to you in the following words: "That the punishments inflicted
upon the ryots, both of Rungpore and Dinagepore, for non-payment, were
in many instances of such a nature that I would rather wish to draw a
veil over them than shock your feelings by the detail, but that, however
disagreeable the task may be to myself, it is absolutely necessary, for
the sake of justice, humanity, and the honor of government, that they
should be exposed, to be prevented in future."

My Lords, they began by winding cords round the fingers of the unhappy
freeholders of those provinces, until they clung to and were almost
incorporated with one another; and then they hammered wedges of iron
between them, until, regardless of the cries of the sufferers, they had
bruised to pieces and forever crippled those poor, honest, innocent,
laborious hands, which had never been raised to their mouths but with a
penurious and scanty proportion of the fruits of their own soil; but
those fruits (denied to the wants of their own children) have for more
than fifteen years past furnished the investment for our trade with
China, and been sent annu