have reason to observe that his abilities are answerable to the dignity
of his cause, and make him worthy of everything that he had the honor to
suffer for it.

To cut short the thread of this shocking series of corruption,
oppression, fraud, and chicanery, which lasted for upwards of four
years: Paterson remains without employment; the inhabitants of great
provinces, whose substance and whose blood was sold by Mr. Hastings,
remain without redress; and the purchaser, Debi Sing, that corrupt,
iniquitous, and bloody tyrant, instead of being proceeded against by the
Committee in a civil suit for retribution to the sufferers, is handed
over to the false semblance of a trial, on a criminal charge, before a
Mahometan judge,--an equal judge, however. The judge was Mahomed Reza
Khan, his original patron, and the author of all his fortunes,--a judge
who depends on him, as a debtor depends upon his creditor. To that
judge is he sent, without a distinct charge, without a prosecutor, and
without evidence. The next ships will bring you an account of his
honorable acquittal.

I have stated before that I considered Mr. Hastings as responsible for
the characters of the people he employed,--doubly responsible, if he
_knew_ them to be bad. I therefore charge him with putting in situations
in which any evil may be committed persons of known evil characters.

My Lords, I charge him, as chief governor, with destroying the
institutions of the country, which were designed to be, and ought to
have been, controls upon such a person as Debi Sing.

An officer, called dewan, or steward of the country, had always been
placed as a control on the farmer; but that no such control should in
fact exist, that he, Debi Sing, should be let loose to rapine,
slaughter, and plunder in the country, both offices were conferred on
him. Did Mr. Hastings vest these offices in him? No: but if Mr. Hastings
had kept firm to the duties which the act of Parliament appointed him to
execute, all the revenue appointments must have been made by him; but,
instead of making them himself, he appointed Gunga Govind Sing to make
them; and for that appointment, and for the whole train of subordinate
villany which followed the placing iniquity in the chief seat of
government, Mr. Hastings is answerable. He is answerable, I say, first,
for destroying his own legal capacity, and, next, for destroying the
legal capacity of the Council, not one of whom ever had, or could have,
an