_ a year to prevent his
giving an account of the dilapidation and robbery that was made of the
160,000_l._ which had been left him.

* * * * *

I have now finished what I proposed to say relative to his great fund of
bribery, in the first instance of it,--namely, the administration of
justice in the country. There is another system of bribery which I shall
state before my friends produce the evidence. He put up all the great
offices of the country to sale; he makes use of the trust he had of the
revenues in order to destroy the whole system of those revenues, and to
bind them and make them subservient to his system of bribery: and this
will make it necessary for your Lordships to couple the consideration of
the charge of the revenues, in some instances, with that of bribery.

The next day your Lordships meet (when I hope I shall not detain you so
long) I mean to open the second stage of his bribery, the period of
discovery: for the first stage was the period of concealment. When he
found his bribes could no longer be concealed, he next took upon him to
discover them himself, and to take merit from them.

When I shall have opened the second scene of his peculation, and his new
principles of it, when you see him either treading in old corruptions,
and excelling the examples he imitated, or exhibiting new ones of his
own, in which of the two his conduct is the most iniquitous, and
attended with most evil to the Company, I must leave your Lordships to
judge.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Document wanting.

[3] Document wanting.

[4] Document wanting.

[5] Document wanting.

[6] Document wanting.

[7] Document wanting.

SPEECH

ON

THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE.

THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1789.

My Lords,--Agreeably to your Lordships' proclamation, which I have just
heard, and the duty enjoined me by the House of Commons, I come forward
to make good their charge of high crimes and misdemeanors against Warren
Hastings, Esquire, late Governor-General of Bengal, and now a prisoner
at your bar.

My Lords, since I had last the honor of standing in this place before
your Lordships, an event has happened upon which it is difficult to
speak and impossible to be silent. My Lords, I have been disavowed by
those who sent me here to represent them. My Lords, I have been
disavowed in a material part of that engagement which I had pledged
myself to this House to perform. My Lords, that dis