ally out, and without recompense, to purchase
for us that delicate meal with which your Lordships, and all this
auditory, and all this country, have begun every day for these fifteen
years at their expense. To those beneficent hands that labor for our
benefit the return of the British government has been cords and hammers
and wedges. But there is a place where these crippled and disabled hands
will act with resistless power. What is it that they will not pull down,
when they are lifted to heaven against their oppressors? Then what can
withstand such hands? Can the power that crushed and destroyed them?
Powerful in prayer, let us at least deprecate and thus endeavor to
secure ourselves from the vengeance which these mashed and disabled
hands may pull down upon us. My Lords, it is an awful consideration: let
us think of it.

But to pursue this melancholy, but necessary detail. I am next to open
to your Lordships, what I am hereafter to prove, that the most
substantial and leading yeomen, the responsible farmers, the parochial
magistrates and chiefs of villages, were tied two and two by the legs
together; and their tormentors, throwing them with their heads
downwards, over a bar, beat them on the soles of the feet with rattans,
until the nails fell from the toes; and then attacking them at their
heads, as they hung downward, as before at their feet, they beat them
with sticks and other instruments of blind fury, until the blood gushed
out at their eyes, mouths, and noses. Not thinking that the ordinary
whips and cudgels, even so administered, were sufficient, to others (and
often also to the same who had suffered as I have stated) they applied,
instead of rattan and bamboo, whips made of the branches of the bale
tree,--a tree full of sharp and strong thorns, which tear the skin and
lacerate the flesh far worse than ordinary scourges. For others,
exploring with a searching and inquisitive malice, stimulated by an
insatiate rapacity, all the devious paths of Nature for whatever is most
unfriendly to man, they made rods of a plant highly caustic and
poisonous, called _Bechettea_, every wound of which festers and
gangrenes, adds double and treble to the present torture, leaves a crust
of leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of
life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of
avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season
when nature takes refuge in insensibi