his rights. Mr.
Hastings upon this enters the following minute:--

"The Nabob's demands are grounded upon positive rights, which will
not admit of a discussion; he has an incontestable right to the
management of his own household; he has an incontestable right to
the nizamut."

My Lords, you have heard his affidavit, you have heard his avowed and
recorded opinion. In direct defiance of both, because he wishes to make
doubtful the orders of the Company and to evade his duty, he here makes
without any delicacy a declaration, which if it be true, the affidavit
is a gross perjury, let it be managed with what delicacy he pleases. The
word _nizamut_, which he uses, may be unfamiliar to your Lordships. In
India it signifies the whole executive government, though the word
strictly means viceroyalty: all the princes of that country holding
their dominions as representatives of the Mogul, the great nominal
sovereign of the empire. To convince you that it does so, take his own
explanation of it.

"It is his by inheritance: the adawlut and the foujdarry having
been repeatedly declared by the Company and by this government to
appertain to the nizamut. The adawlut, namely, the distribution of
civil justice, and the foujdarry, namely, the executive criminal
justice of that country, that is to say, the whole sovereign
government of the courts of justice, have been declared by the
Company to appertain to the nizamut."

I beg of your Lordships to recollect, when you take into your
consideration the charges of the House of Commons, that the person they
accuse, and persons suborned by him, have never scrupled to be guilty,
without sense of shame, of the most notorious falsehoods, the most
glaring inconsistencies, and even of perjury itself; and that it is thus
they make the power of the Company dead or alive, as best suits their
own wicked, clandestine, and fraudulent purposes, and the great end of
all their actions and all their politics plunder and peculation.

I must here refer your Lordships to a minute of Mr. Francis's, which I
recommend to your reading at large, and to your very serious
recollection, in page 1086; because it contains a complete history of
Mr. Hastings's conduct, and of its effects upon this occasion.

And now to proceed.--The Nabob, in a subsequent application to the
Company's government at Calcutta, desires that Munny Begum may be
allowed to take on herse