to be as well as I can, did not believe that Providence did
watch over Mr. Hastings, so as in the nick of time, like a god in a
machine, to come down to save him in the moment of his imminent peril
and distress: I did not think so, but I must not say so.

But now, to show that it was not weakly, loosely, or idly, that I took
up this business, or that I anticipated a defence which it was not
probable for Mr. Hastings to make, (and I wish to speak to your
Lordships in the first instance, but to the Commons in the next,) I will
read part of Mr. Hastings's defence before the House of Commons: it is
in evidence before your Lordships. He says,--"My accuser" (meaning
myself, then acting as a private member of Parliament) "charges me with
'the receipt of large sums of money, corruptly taken before the
promulgation of the Regulating Act of 1773, contrary to my covenants
with the Company, and with the receipt of very large sums taken since,
in defiance of that law, and contrary to my declared sense of its
provisions.' And he ushers in this charge in the following pompous
diction: 'That in March, 1775, the late Rajah Nundcomar, a native Hindoo
of the highest caste in his religion, and of the highest rank in
society, by the offices which he had held under the country government,
did lay before the Council an account of various sums of money,' &c. It
would naturally strike every person ignorant of the character of
Nundcomar, that an accusation made by a person of the highest caste in
his religion and of the highest rank by his offices demanded particular
notice, and acquired a considerable degree of credit, from a prevalent
association of ideas that a nice sense of honor is connected with an
elevated rank of life: but when this honorable House is informed that my
accuser knew (though he suppressed the facts) that this person, of high
rank and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to honor, veracity,
and credit,--that there are facts recorded on the very Proceedings which
my accuser partially quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a
most flagrant forgery of letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram
ul Dowlah, (independent of the forgery for which he suffered death,) of
the most deliberate treachery to the state, for which he was confined,
by the orders of the Court of Directors, to the limits of the town of
Calcutta, in order to prevent his dangerous intrigues, and of having
violated every principle of common honest