ate the sentiments and affections of nature.

On the same principle, and for the same ends, virgins, who had never
seen the sun, were dragged from the inmost sanctuaries of their houses,
and in the open court of justice, in the very place where security was
to be sought against all wrong and all violence, (but where no judge or
lawful magistrate had long sat, but in their place the ruffians and
hangmen of Warren Hastings occupied the bench,) these virgins, vainly
invoking heaven and earth, in the presence of their parents, and whilst
their shrieks were mingled with the indignant cries and groans of all
the people, publicly were violated by the lowest and wickedest of the
human race. Wives were torn from the arms of their husbands, and
suffered the same flagitious wrongs, which were indeed hid in the
bottoms of the dungeons in which their honor and their liberty were
buried together. Often they were taken out of the refuge of this
consoling gloom, stripped naked, and thus exposed to the world, and then
cruelly scourged; and in order that cruelty might riot in all the
circumstances that melt into tenderness the fiercest natures, the
nipples of their breasts were put between the sharp and elastic sides of
cleft bamboos. Here in my hand is my authority; for otherwise one would
think it incredible. But it did not end there. Growing from crime to
crime, ripened by cruelty for cruelty, these fiends, at length outraging
sex, decency, nature, applied lighted torches and slow fire--(I cannot
proceed for shame and horror!)--these infernal furies planted death in
the source of life, and where that modesty, which, more than reason,
distinguishes men from beasts, retires from the view, and even shrinks
from the expression, there they exercised and glutted their unnatural,
monstrous, and nefarious cruelty,--there, where the reverence of nature
and the sanctity of justice dares not to pursue, nor venture to describe
their practices.

These, my Lords, were sufferings which we feel all in common, in India
and in England, by the general sympathy of our common nature. But there
were in that province (sold to the tormentors by Mr. Hastings) things
done, which, from the peculiar manners of India, were even worse than
all I have laid before you; as the dominion of manners and the law of
opinion contribute more to their happiness and misery than anything in
mere sensitive nature can do.

The women thus treated lost their caste. My Lords, we