neither formally instruct me
nor at all forbid my making use of such an argument; and therefore I
have given your Lordships the reason why it was fit to make use of such
argument,--if it was right to make use of it. I am in the memory of your
Lordships that I did conceive it to be relevant, and it was by the
poverty of the language I was led to express my private feelings under
the name of a _murder_. For, if the language had furnished me, under the
impression of those feelings, with a word sufficient to convey the
complicated atrocity of that act, as I felt it in my mind, I would not
have made use of the word _murder_. It was on account of the language
furnishing me with no other I was obliged to use that word. Your
Lordships do not imagine, I hope, that I used that word in any other
than a moral and popular sense, or that I used it in the legal and
technical sense of the word _murder_. Your Lordships know that I could
not bring before this bar any commoner of Great Britain on a charge for
murder. I am not so ignorant of the laws and constitution of my country.
I expressed an act which I conceived to be of an atrocious and evil
nature, and partaking of some of the moral evil consequences of that
crime. What led me into that error? Nine years' meditation upon that
subject.

My Lords, the prisoner at the bar in the year 1780 sent a petition to
the House of Commons complaining of that very chief-justice, Sir Elijah
Impey. The House of Commons, who then had some trust in me, as they have
some trust still, did order me, along with persons more wise and
judicious than myself, several of whom stand near me, to make an inquiry
into the state of the justice of that country. The consequence of that
inquiry was, that we began to conceive a very bad opinion both of the
complainant and defendant in that business,--that we found the English
justice to be, as we thought it, and reported it to the House, a
grievance, instead of a redress, to the people of India. I could bring
before your Lordships, if I did not spare your patience, whole volumes
of reports, whole bodies of evidence, which, in the progress we have
made in the course of eight or nine years, brought to my mind such a
conviction as will never be torn from my heart but with my life; and I
should have no heart that was fit to lodge any honest sentiment, if I
departed from my opinion upon that occasion. But when I declare my own
firm opinion upon it,--when I declare the reas