e imperfection of human wisdom that the Committee totally
failed in their well-laid project. They were totally mistaken in their
man. Under that cold outside the commissioner, Paterson, concealed a
firm, manly, and fixed principle, a deciding intellect, and a feeling
heart. My Lords, he is the son of a gentleman of a venerable age and
excellent character in this country, who long filled the seat of
chairman of the Committee of Supply in the House of Commons, and who is
now enjoying repose from his long labors in an honorable age. The son,
as soon as he was appointed to this commission, was awed by and dreaded
the consequences. He knew to what temptation he should be exposed, from
the known character of Debi Sing, to suppress or to misrepresent facts.
He therefore took out a letter he had from his father, which letter was
the preservation of his character and destruction of his fortune. This
letter he always resorted to in all trying exigencies of his life. He
laid the letter before him, and there was enjoined such a line of
integrity, incorruptness, of bearing every degree of persecution rather
than disguising truth, that he went up into the country in a proper
frame of mind for doing his duty.

He went to Rungpore strongly impressed with a sense of the great trust
that was placed in him; and he had not the least reason to doubt of full
support in the execution of it,--as he, with every other white man in
Bengal, probably, and every black, except two, was ignorant of the fact,
that the Governor-General, under whose delegated authority he was sent,
had been bribed by the farmer-general of those provinces, and had sold
them to his discretion for a great sum of money. If Paterson had known
this fact, no human consideration would have induced him, or any other
man of common prudence, to undertake an inquiry into the conduct of Debi
Sing. Pity, my Lords, the condition of an honest servant in Bengal.

But Paterson was ignorant of this dark transaction, and went simply to
perform a duty. He had hardly set his foot in the province, when the
universal, unquestioned, uncontradicted testimony of the whole people,
concurring with the manifest evidence of things which could not lie,
with the face of an utterly ruined, undone, depopulated country, and
saved from literal and exceptionless depopulation only by the
exhibition of scattered bands of wild, naked, meagre, half-famished
wretches, who rent heaven with their cries and howlings