goodness of our cause.

The table of the House of Commons groaned under complaints of the evils
growing in India under this systematic connivance of Mr. Hastings. The
Directors had set on foot prosecutions, to be conducted God knows how;
but, such as they were, they were their only remedy; and they began to
consider at last that these prosecutions had taken a long oblivious nap
of many years; and at last, knowing that they were likely, in the year
1782, to be called to a strict account about their own conduct, the
Court of Directors began to rouse themselves, and they write thus:
"Having in several of our letters to you very attentively perused all
the proceedings referred to in these paragraphs, relative to the various
forgeries on the Company's treasuries, we lament exceedingly that the
parties should have been so long in confinement without being brought to
trial."

Here, my Lords, after justice had been asleep awhile, it revived. They
directed two things: first, that those suits should be pursued; but
whether pursued or not, that an account of the state of them should be
given, that they might give orders concerning them.

Your Lordships see the orders of the Company. Did they not want to
pursue and to revive those dormant prosecutions? They want to have a
state of them, that they may know how to direct the future conduct of
them with more effect and vigor than they had yet been pursued with. You
will naturally imagine that Mr. Hastings did not obey their orders, or
obeyed them languidly. No, he took another part. He says, "Having
attentively read and weighed the arguments ... for withdrawing them."[7]

Thus he begins with the general principle of connivance; he directly
avows he does it for a political purpose; and when the Company directs
he shall proceed in the suits, instead of deferring to their judgment,
he takes the judgment on himself, and says theirs is untenable; he
directly discharges the prosecutions of the Company, supersedes the
authority of his masters, and gives a general release to all the persons
who were still suffering by the feeble footsteps of justice in that
country. He gave them an act of indemnity, and that was the last of his
acts.

Now, when I show the consequence of his bribery, the presumptions that
arise from his own bribes, his attention to secure others from the
punishment of theirs, and, when ordered to carry on a suit, his
discharging it,--when we see all this, can we avoid jud