wonderful admiration of the character of the person
whom we have brought as a criminal to your bar upon their part. I do
admit that it is a very awkward circumstance; but yet, at the same time,
the same candor which has induced the House of Commons to bring before
you the bosom friends and confidants of Mr. Hastings as their evidence
will not suffer them to suppress or withhold for a moment from your
Lordships this universal voice of Bengal, as an attestation in Mr.
Hastings's favor, and we shall produce it as a part of our evidence. Oh,
my Lords, consider the situation of a people who are forced to mix their
praises with their groans, who are forced to sign, with hands which have
been in torture, and with the thumb-screws but just taken from them, an
attestation in favor of the person from whom all their sufferings have
been derived! When we prove to you the things that we shall prove, this
will, I hope, give your Lordships a full, conclusive, and satisfactory
proof of the misery to which these people have been reduced. You will
see before you, what is so well expressed by one of our poets as the
homage of tyrants, "that homage with the mouth which the heart would
fain deny, but dares not." Mr. Hastings has received that homage, and
that homage we mean to present to your Lordships: we mean to present it,
because it will show your Lordships clearly, that, after Mr. Hastings
has ransacked Bengal from one end to the other, and has used all the
power which he derives from having every friend and every dependant of
his in every office from one end of that government to the other, he has
not, in all those panegyrics, those fine high-flown Eastern encomiums,
got one word of refutation or one word of evidence against any charge
whatever which we produce against him. Every one knows, that, in the
course of criminal trials, when no evidence of _alibi_ can be brought,
when all the arts of the Old Bailey are exhausted, the last thing
produced is evidence to character. His cause, therefore, is gone, when,
having ransacked Bengal, he has nothing to say for his conduct, and at
length appeals to his character. In those little papers which are given
us of our proceedings in our criminal courts, it is always an omen of
what is to follow: after the evidence of a murder, a forgery, or
robbery, it ends in his character: "He has an admirable character; I
have known him from a boy; he is wonderfully good; he is the best of
men; I would trust h