men will be found to commit wicked, rapacious, and
oppressive acts with fidelity and disinterestedness for the sole
emolument of dishonest employers? No: they must have their full share of
the prey, and the greater share, as they are the nearer and more
necessary instruments of the general extortion. We must not, therefore,
flatter ourselves, when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000_l._ in bribes for
Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the people nothing more
than 40,000_l._ is extorted. I speak within compass, four times forty
must be levied on the people; and these violent sales, fraudulent
purchases, confiscations, inhuman and unutterable tortures,
imprisonment, irons, whips, fines, general despair, general
insurrection, the massacre of the officers of revenue by the people, the
massacre of the people by the soldiery, and the total waste and
destruction of the finest provinces in India, are things of course,--and
all a necessary consequence involved in the very substance of Mr.
Hastings's bribery.

I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed, for private
purposes, the whole system of government by the six Provincial Councils,
which he had no right to destroy.

I charge him with having delegated to others that power which the act of
Parliament had directed him to preserve unalienably in himself.

I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere instruments and
tools, at the enormous expense of 62,000_l._ per annum.

I charge him with having appointed a person their dewan to whom these
Englishmen were to be subservient tools,--whose name, to his own
knowledge, was, by the general voice of India, by the general recorded
voice of the Company, by recorded official transactions, by everything
that can make a man known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with infamy;
and with giving him the whole power which he had thus separated from the
Council-General, and from the Provincial Councils.

I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing.

I charge him with not having done that bribe-service which fidelity even
in iniquity requires at the hands of the worst of men.

I charge him with having robbed those people of whom he took the bribes.

I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the fortunes of widows.

I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, taken the
lands of orphans, and given them to wicked persons under him.

I charge him with having removed the natural guardians