cles are presented.

My Lords, I have to state to-day the root of all these
misdemeanors,--namely, the pecuniary corruption and avarice which gave
rise and primary motion to all the rest of the delinquencies charged to
be committed by the Governor-General.

My Lords, pecuniary corruption forms not only, as your Lordships will
observe in the charges before you, an article of charge by itself, but
likewise so intermixes with the whole, that it is necessary to give, in
the best manner I am able, a history of that corrupt system which
brought on all the subsequent acts of corruption. I will venture to say
there is no one act, in which tyranny, malice, cruelty, and oppression
can be charged, that does not at the same time carry evident marks of
pecuniary corruption.

I stated to your Lordships on Saturday last the principles upon which
Mr. Hastings governed his conduct in India, and upon which he grounds
his defence. These may all be reduced to one short word,--_arbitrary
power_. My Lords, if Mr. Hastings had contended, as other men have often
done, that the system of government which he patronizes, and on which he
acted, was a system tending on the whole to the blessing and benefit of
mankind, possibly something might be said for him for setting up so
wild, absurd, irrational, and wicked a system,--something might be said
to qualify the act from the intention; but it is singular in this man,
that, at the time he tells you he acted on the principles of arbitrary
power, he takes care to inform you that he was not blind to the
consequences. Mr. Hastings foresaw that the consequences of this system
was corruption. An arbitrary system, indeed, must always be a corrupt
one. My Lords, there never was a man who thought he had no law but his
own will, who did not soon find that he had no end but his own profit.
Corruption and arbitrary power are of natural unequivocal generation,
necessarily producing one another. Mr. Hastings foresees the abusive and
corrupt consequences, and then he justifies his conduct upon the
necessities of that system. These are things which are new in the world;
for there never was a man, I believe, who contended for arbitrary power,
(and there have been persons wicked and foolish enough to contend for
it,) that did not pretend, either that the system was good in itself, or
that by their conduct they had mitigated or had purified it, and that
the poison, by passing through their constitution, had acquired