of course will be apprised that this cause is not what
occurs every day, in the ordinary round of municipal affairs,--that it
has a relation to many things, that it touches many points in many
places, which are wholly removed from the ordinary beaten orbit of our
English affairs. In other affairs, every allusion immediately meets its
point of reference; nothing can be started that does not immediately
awaken your attention to something in your own laws and usages which you
meet with every day in the ordinary transactions of life. But here you
are caught, as it were, into another world; you are to have the way
pioneered before you. As the subject is new, it must be explained; as it
is intricate as well as new, that explanation can be only comparatively
short: and therefore, knowing your Lordships to be possessed, along with
all other judicial virtues, of the first and foundation of them all,
judicial patience, I hope that you will not grudge a few hours to the
explanation of that which has cost the Commons fourteen years' assiduous
application to acquire,--that your Lordships will not disdain to grant a
few hours to what has cost the people of India upwards of thirty years
of their innate, inveterate, hereditary patience to endure.

* * * * *

My Lords, the powers which Mr. Hastings is charged with having abused
are the powers delegated to him by the East India Company. The East
India Company itself acts under two very dissimilar sorts of powers,
derived from two sources very remote from each other. The first source
of its power is under charters which the crown of Great Britain was
authorized by act of Parliament to grant; the other is from several
charters derived from the Emperor of the Moguls, the person in whose
dominions they were chiefly conversant,--particularly that great charter
by which, in the year 1765, they acquired the high-stewardship of the
kingdoms of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. Under those two bodies of
charters, the East India Company, and all their servants, are authorized
to act.

As to those of the first description, it is from the British charters
that they derive the capacity by which they are considered as a public
body, or at all capable of any public function. It is from thence they
acquire the capacity to take from any power whatsoever any other
charter, to acquire any other offices, or to hold any other possessions.
This, being the root and origin of their po