had promoted, and whose dominions he had protected and extended."

Gentlemen of the Jury, if this be a wilfully false account of the instructions given to Mr. Hastings 5 for his government, and of his conduct under them, the author and publisher of this defence deserve the severest punishment for a mercenary imposition on the public. But if it be true that he was directed to make the safety and prosperity of Bengal the first object 10 of his attention, and that under his administration it has been safe and prosperous; if it be true that the security and preservation of our possessions and revenues in Asia were marked out to him as the great leading principle of his government, and that those 15 possessions and revenues, amidst unexampled dangers, have been secured and preserved; then a question may be unaccountably mixed with your consideration much beyond the consequence of the present prosecution, involving, perhaps, the merit of the impeachment itself 20 which gave it birth; a question which the Commons, as prosecutors of Mr. Hastings, should in common prudence have avoided, unless, regretting the unwieldy length of their proceedings against him, they wished to afford him the opportunity of this strange, anomalous defence; 25 since although I am neither his counsel, nor desire to have anything to do with his guilt or innocence, yet in the collateral defence of my client I am driven to state matter which may be considered by many as hostile to the impeachment. For if our dependencies have been 30 secured, and their interests promoted, I am driven in the defence of my client to remark that it is mad and preposterous to bring to the standard of justice and humanity the exercise of a dominion founded upon violence and terror. It may and must be true that Mr. 35 Hastings has repeatedly offended against the rights and

privileges of Asiatic government, if he was the faithful deputy of a power which could not maintain itself for an hour without trampling upon both; he may and must have offended against the laws of God and nature if he was the faithful viceroy of an empire wrested in blood 5 from the people to whom God and nature had given it; he may and must have preserved that unjust dominion over timorous and abject nations by a terrifying, overbearing, insulting superiority, if he was the faithful administrator of your government, which, having no 10 root in consent or affection, no foundation in similarity of interests, no support from any one principle which cements men together in society, could be upheld only by alternate stratagem and force. The unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from the soft- 15 ness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up in all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all, they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the East 20 would long since have been lost to Great Britain if civil skill and military prowess had not united their efforts to support an authority which Heaven never gave, by means which it never can sanction.

Gentlemen, I think I can observe that you are touched 25 with this way of considering the subject, and I can account for it. I have not been considering it through the cold medium of books, but have been speaking of man and his nature, and of human dominion, from what I have seen of them myself amongst reluctant nations 30 submitting to our authority. I know what they feel, and how such feelings can alone be repressed. I have heard them in my youth from a naked savage, in the indignant character of a prince surrounded by his subjects, addressing the governor of a British colony, holding a bundle of 35

sticks in his hand as the notes of his unlettered eloquence: "Who is it," said the jealous ruler over the desert encroached upon by the restless foot of English adventure, "who is it that causes this river to rise in 5 the high mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean? Who is it that causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them again in the summer? Who is it that rears up the shade of these lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick lightning at his pleasure? The 10 same Being who gave to you a country on the other side of the waters, and gave ours to us; and by this title we will defend it," said the warrior, throwing down his tomahawk upon the ground, and raising the war-sound of his nation. These are the feelings of subjugated man all 15 round the globe; and, depend upon it, nothing but fear will control where it is vain to look for affection.

These reflections are the only antidotes to those anathemas of superhuman eloquence which have lately shaken the walls that surround us, but which it unaccountably 20 falls.to my province, whether I will or no, a little to stem the torrent of by reminding you that you have a mighty sway in Asia which cannot be maintained by the finer sympathies of life, or the practice of its charities and affections. What will they do for you when surrounded 25 by two hundred thousand men, with artillery, cavalry, and elephants, calling upon you for their dominions which you have robbed them of? Justice may, no doubt, in such a case forbid the levying of a fine to pay a revolting soldiery; a treaty may stand in the way of 30 increasing a tribute to keep up the very existence of the government; and delicacy for women may forbid all entrance into a Zenana for money, whatever may be the necessity for taking it. All these things must ever be occurring. But under the pressure of such constant 35 difficulties, so dangerous to national honor, it might be

hostile nations, beyond all comparison more numer and extended than herself, and gives commission to viceroys to govern them with no other instructions th to preserve them, and to secure permanently their re nues; with what color of consistency or reason can place herself in the moral chair, and affect to be shock at the execution of her own orders; adverting to exact measure of wickedness and injustice necessary their execution, and complaining only of the excess the immorality; considering her authority as a dispen tion for breaking the commands of God, and the brea of them as only punishable when contrary to the o nances of man?

Such a proceeding, gentlemen, begets serious ref tions. It would be better perhaps for the masters a the servants of all such governments to join in suppli tion that the great Author of violated humanity may confound them together in one common judgment.

Gentlemen, I find, as I said before, I have not suffici strength to go on with the remaining parts of the bo I hope, however, that notwithstanding my omissio you are now completely satisfied that whatever err or misconceptions may have misled the writer of th pages, the justification of a person whom he believed be innocent, and whose accusers had themselves appea to the public, was the single object of his contemplati If I have succeeded in that object, every purpose wh I had in addressing you has been answered.

It only now remains to remind you that another consideration has been strongly pressed upon you, and, no doubt, will be insisted on in reply. You will be told that the matters which I have been justifying as legal, and 5 even meritorious, have therefore not been made the subject of complaint; and that whatever intrinsic merit parts of the book may be supposed or even admitted to possess, such merit can afford no justification to the selected passages, some of which, even with the con10 text, carry the meaning charged by the information, and which are indecent animadversions on authority. To this I would answer (still protesting as I do against the application of any one of the innuendoes), that if you are firmly persuaded of the singleness and purity of 15 the author's intentions, you are not bound to subject him to infamy, because, in the zealous career of a just and animated composition, he happens to have tripped with his pen into an intemperate expression in one or two instances of a long work. If this severe duty were bind20 ing on your consciences, the liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man could venture to write on any subject, however pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other.

From minds thus subdued by the terrors of punish25 ment there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason, nor any masterly compositions on the general nature of government, by the help of which the great commonwealths of mankind have founded their establishments; much less any of those useful appli30 cations of them to critical conjunctures by which, from time to time, our own Constitution, by the exertion of patriot citizens, has been brought back to its standard. Under such terrors, all the great lights of science and civilization must be extinguished; for men cannot com35 municate their free thoughts to one another with a lash