them, is the very person who, by the constitution of the country,
is the most fettered by law.

Corruption is the true cause of the loss of all the benefits of the
constitution of that country. The _practice of Asia_, as the gentleman
at your bar has thought fit to say, is what he holds to; the
constitution he flies away from. The question is, whether you will take
the constitution of the country as your rule, or the base practices of
those usurpers, robbers, and tyrants who have subverted it. Undoubtedly,
much blood, murder, false imprisonment, much peculation, cruelty, and
robbery are to be found in Asia; and if, instead of going to the sacred
laws of the country, he chooses to resort to the iniquitous practices of
it, and practices authorized only by public tumult, contention, war, and
riot, he may indeed find as clear an acquittal in the practices as he
would find condemnation in the institutions of it. He has rejected the
law of England. Your Lordships will not suffer it. God forbid! For my
part, I should have no sort of objection to let him choose his
law,--Mahomedan, Tartarian, Gentoo. But if he disputes, as he does, the
authority of an act of Parliament, let him state to me that law to which
he means to be subject, or any law which he knows that will justify his
actions. I am not authorized to say that I shall, even in that case,
give up what is not in me to give up, because I represent an authority
of which I must stand in awe; but, for myself, I shall confess that I am
brought to public shame, and am not fit to manage the great interests
committed to my charge. I therefore again repeat of that Asiatic
government with which we are best acquainted, which has been constituted
more in obedience to the laws of Mahomet than any other, that the
sovereign cannot, agreeably to that constitution, exercise any arbitrary
power whatever.

The next point for us to consider is, whether or no the Mahomedan
constitution of India authorizes that power. The gentleman at your
Lordships' bar has thought proper to say, that it will be happy for
India, (though soon after he tells you it is an happiness they can never
enjoy,) "when the despotic institutes of Genghiz Khan or Tamerlane shall
give place to the liberal spirit of a British legislature; and," says
he, "I shall be amply satisfied in my present prosecution, if it shall
tend to hasten the approach of an event so beneficial to the great
interests of mankind."

My Lords, you