Lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are
to state the trust the Company had in him for the prevention of all
those evils; and then we are to prove that every evil, that all those
grievances which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants
to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to
smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a
special, direct, and immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your
Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person collectively, has
done more mischief than all those persons whose evil practices have
produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own
appointment.

The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove
in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical,
endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company's affairs in India, from
the time of their first establishment there. Very often there are no
words nor any description which can adequately convey the state of a
thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself: because the former
might be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that which was
really fact to be nothing but the coloring of the person that explained
it; and therefore I think that it will be much better to give to your
Lordships here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when the
Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings entered into, and
when they took those measures to prevent the very evils from persons
placed in those very stations and in those very circumstances in which
we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the offences we now bring
before you.

I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to read a consultation
of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming
the state of the Company, in order to show the magnitude of the
pecuniary corruptions that prevailed in it.

"It is from a due sense of the regard we owe and profess to your
interests and to our own honor, that we think it indispensably
necessary to lay open to your view a series of transactions too
notoriously known to be suppressed, and too affecting to your
interest, to the national character, and to the existence of the
Company in Bengal, to escape unnoticed and uncensured,--transactions
which seem to demonstrate that every spring of this government was
smeared with corruption, that princi