the country. "I," he says, "am Nabob of Oude: the
jaghires shall be confiscated: I have given my orders, and they shall be
supported by a military force."

I am ashamed to have so far distrusted your Lordships' honorable and
generous feelings as to have offered you, upon this occasion, any
remarks which you must have run before me in making. Those feelings
which you have, and ought to have, feelings born in the breasts of all
men, and much more in men of your Lordships' elevated rank, render my
remarks unnecessary. I need not, therefore, ask what you feel, when a
foreign resident at a prince's court takes upon himself to force that
prince to act the part of a tyrant, and, upon his resistance, openly and
avowedly assumes the sovereignty of the country. You have it in proof
that Mr. Middleton did this. He not only put his own name to the orders
for this horrible confiscation, but he actually proceeded to dispossess
the jaghiredars of their lands, and to send them out of the country. And
whom does he send, in the place of this plundered body of nobility, to
take possession of the country? Why, the usurers of Benares. Yes, my
Lords, he immediately mortgages the whole country to the usurers of
Benares, for the purpose of raising money upon it: giving it up to those
bloodsuckers, dispossessed of that nobility, whose interest, whose duty,
whose feelings, and whose habits made them the natural protectors of the
people.

My Lords, we here see a body of usurers put into possession of all the
estates of the nobility: let us now see if this act was necessary, even
for the avowed purposes of its agents,--the relief of the Nabob's
financial difficulties, and the payment of his debts to the Company. Mr.
Middleton has told your Lordships that these jaghires would pay the
Company's debt completely in two years. Then would it not have been
better to have left these estates in the hands of their owners, and to
have oppressed them in some moderate, decent way? Might they not have
left the jaghiredars to raise the sums required by some settlement with
the bankers of Benares, in which the repayment of the money within five
or six years might have been secured, and the jaghiredars have had in
the mean time something to subsist upon? Oh, no! these victims must have
nothing to live upon. They must be turned out. And why? Mr. Hastings
commands it.

Here I must come in aid of Mr. Middleton a little; for one cannot but
pity the miserable instru