f the pretences, both civil and criminal, by
which they have attempted to justify their proceedings.

SPEECH

IN

GENERAL REPLY.

SIXTH DAY, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 1794.

My Lords,--Your Lordships will recollect that we closed the last day of
your proceeding in this trial at a most interesting part of our charge,
or rather of our observations upon that charge. We closed at that awful
moment when we found the first women of Oude pillaged of all their
landed and of all their moneyed property, in short, of all they
possessed. We closed by reciting to you the false pretence on which this
pillage was defended, namely, that it was the work of the Nabob. Now we
had before proved to you, from evidence adduced by the prisoner himself,
that this Nabob was a mere tool in his hands; and therefore, if this
pretence be true, it aggravates his guilt: for surely the forcing a son
to violate the property of his mother must everywhere be considered a
crime most portentous and enormous. At this point we closed; and after
the detail which has been given you already of these horrible and
iniquitous proceedings, some apology may perhaps be necessary for
entering again into the refutation of this iniquitous pretence.

My honorable fellow Manager who preceded me in this business did, in his
remarks upon the inference drawn by the prisoner's counsel from the
seizure of the Begums' treasures by the Nabob, as evidence of their
guilt, as he ought to do,--he treated it with proper contempt. I
consider it, indeed, to be as little an evidence of their guilt as he
does, and as little a defence of that seizure as he does. But I consider
it in another and in a new light, namely, as a heavy aggravation of the
prisoner's crimes, and as a matter that will let you into the whole
spirit of his government; and I warn your Lordships against being
imposed on by evasions, of which if it were possible for you to be the
dupes, you would be unfit to be judges of the smallest matters in the
world, civil or criminal.

The first observation which I shall beg leave to make to your Lordships
is this, that the whole of the proceedings, from beginning to end, has
been a mystery of iniquity, and that in no part of them have the orders
of the Company been regarded, but, on the contrary, the whole has been
carried on in a secret and clandestine manner.

It is necessary that your Lordships should be acquainted with the manner
in which the correspondence of the