may contrast it with
the conduct of the prisoner, as stated by us, and proved by the evidence
we have adduced. We have stated and proved that Mr. Hastings did enter
upon a systematic connivance at the peculation of the Company's
servants, that he refused to institute any check whatever for the
purpose of preventing corruption, and that he carried into execution no
one measure of government agreeably to the positive and solemn
engagements into which he had entered with the Directors. We therefore
charge him, not only with his own corruptions, but with a systematic,
premeditated corruption of the whole service, from the time when he was
appointed, in the beginning of the year 1772, down to the year 1785,
when he left it. He never attempted to detect any one single abuse
whatever; he never endeavored once to put a stop to any corruption in
any man, black or white, in any way whatever. And thus he has acted in a
government of which he himself declares the nature to be such that it is
almost impossible so to detect misconduct as to give legal evidence of
it, though a man should be declared by the cries of the whole people to
be guilty.

My Lords, he desires an arbitrary power over the Company's servants to
be given to him. God forbid arbitrary power should be given into the
hands of any man! At the same time, God forbid, if by power be meant the
ability to discover, to reach, to check, and to punish subordinate
corruption, that he should not be enabled so to do, and to get at, to
prosecute, and punish delinquency by law! But honesty only, and not
arbitrary power, is necessary for that purpose. We well know, indeed,
that a government requiring arbitrary power has been the situation in
which this man has attempted to place us.

We know, also, my Lords, that there are cases in which the act of the
delinquent may be of consequence, while the example of the criminal,
from the obscurity of his situation, is of little importance: in other
cases, the act of the delinquent may be of no great importance, but the
consequences of the example dreadful. We know that crimes of great
magnitude, that acts of great tyranny, can but seldom be exercised, and
only by a few persons. They are privileged crimes. They are the dreadful
prerogatives of greatness, and of the highest situations only. But when
a Governor-General descends into the muck and filth of peculation and
corruption, when he receives bribes and extorts money, he does acts that
a