e hands of its natural proprietors: that the
public revenue had sunk and lost by it, and that the country was wasted
and destroyed. I leave it to your Lordships' own meditation and
reflection; and I shall not press it one step further than just to
remind you of what has been so well opened and pressed by my fellow
Managers. He, Mr. Hastings, confesses that he let the lands to his own
banians; he took his own domestic servants and put them in the houses of
the nobility of the country; and this he did in direct violation of an
express order made by himself, that no banian of a collector (the spirit
of which order implied ten thousand times more strongly the exclusion of
any banians of a Governor-General) should have any one of those farms.
We also find that he made a regulation that no farmers should rent more
than a lac of rupees; but at the same time we find his banians holding
several farms to more than that amount. In short, we find that in every
instance, where, under some plausible pretence or other, the fixed
regulations are violated, it touches him so closely as to make it
absolutely impossible not to suppose that he himself had the advantage
of it.

For, in the first place, you have proof that he does take bribes, and
that he has corrupt dealings. This is what he admits; but he says that
he has done it from public-spirited motives. Now there is a rule,
formed upon a just, solid presumption of law, that, if you find a man
guilty of one offence contrary to known law, whenever there is a
suspicious case against him of the same nature, the _onus probandi_ that
he is not guilty is turned upon him. Therefore, when I find the
regulations broken,--when I find farms given of more than a lac of
rupees,--when I find them given to the Governor-General's own banian,
contrary to the principle of the regulation, contrary, I say, in the
strongest way to it,--when I find that he accumulates farms beyond the
regulated number,--when I find all these things done, and besides that
the banian has great balances of account against him,--then, by the
presumption of law, I am bound to believe that all this was done, not
for the servants, but for the master.

It is possible Mr. Hastings might really be in love with Munny Begum; be
it so,--many great men have played the fool for prostitutes, from Mark
Antony's days downwards; but no man ever fell in love with his own
banian. The persons for whom Mr. Hastings was guilty of all this rapine