s obliged to be silent, when he
sees whole nations desolated around him. The great criminal at the head
of the service has the laws in his hand; he is always able to prove the
small offence, and crush the person who has committed it. This is one
grand source of Mr. Hastings's power. After he had got the better of the
Parliamentary commission, no complaint from any part of the service has
appeared against Mr. Hastings. He is bold enough to state it as one
presumption of his merit, that there has been no such complaint. No such
complaint, indeed, can exist. The spirit of the corps would of itself
almost forbid it,--to which spirit an informer is the most odious and
detestable of all characters, and is hunted down, and has always been
hunted down, as a common enemy. But here is a new security. Who can
complain, or dares to accuse? The whole service is irregular: nobody is
free from small offences; and, as I have said, the great offender can
always crush the small one.

If you examine the correspondence of Mr. Hastings, you would imagine,
from many expressions very deliberately used by him, that the Company's
service was made out of the very filth and dregs of human corruption;
but if you examine his conduct towards the corrupt body he describes,
you would imagine he had lived in the speculative schemes of visionary
perfection. He was fourteen years at the head of that service; and there
is not an instance, no, not one single instance, in which he endeavored
to detect corruption, or that he ever, in any one single instance,
attempted to punish it; but the whole service, with that whole mass of
enormity which he attributes to it, slept, as it were, at once, under
his terror and his protection: under his protection, if they did not
dare to move against him; under terror, from his power to pluck out
individuals and make a public example of them, whenever he thought fit.
And therefore that service, under his guidance and influence, was,
beyond even what its own nature disposed it to, a service of
confederacy, a service of connivance, a service composed of various
systems of guilt, of which Mr. Hastings was the head and the protector.
But this general connivance he did not think sufficient to secure to him
the general support of the Indian interest. He went further. We shall
prove to your Lordships, that, when the Company were driven by shame,
not by inclination, to order several prosecutions against delinquents in
their service