him of everything.  What did you do?  Though he had shed much English blood, you reestablished him in all his power, you gave him more than he before possessed; and you had no reason to repent your generosity.  Your magnanimity and justice proved to be the best policy, and was the subject of admiration from one end of India to the other.  But Mr. Hastings had other maxims and other principles.  You are weak, he says, and therefore you ought never to forgive.  Indeed, Mr. Hastings never does forgive.  The Rajah was weak, and he persecuted him; Mr. Hastings was weak, and he lost his prey.  He went up the country with the rapacity, but not with the talons and beak, of a vulture.  He went to look for plunder; but he was himself plundered, the country was ravaged, and the prey escaped.

After the escape of Cheyt Sing, there still existed in one corner of the country some further food for Mr. Hastings’s rapacity.  There was a place called Bidjegur, one of those forts which Mr. Hastings declared could not be safely left in the possession of the Rajah; measures were therefore taken to obtain possession of this place, soon after the flight of its unfortunate proprietor.  And what did he find in it?  A great and powerful garrison?  No, my Lords:  he found in it the wives and family of the Rajah; he found it inhabited by two hundred women, and defended by a garrison of eunuchs and a few feeble militia-men.  This fortress was supposed by him to contain some money, which he hoped to lay hold of when all other means of rapacity had escaped him.  He first sends (and you have it on your minutes) a most cruel, most atrocious, and most insulting message to these unfortunate women; one of whom, a principal personage of the family, we find him in the subsequent negotiation scandalizing in one minute, and declaring to be a woman of respectable character in the next,—­treating her by turns as a prostitute and as an amiable woman, as best suited the purposes of the hour.  This woman, with two hundred of her sex, he found in Bidjegur.  Whatever money they had was their own property; and as such Cheyt Sing, who had visited the place before his flight, had left it for their support, thinking that it would be secure to them as their property, because they were persons wholly void of guilt, as they must needs have been.  This money the Rajah might have carried off with him; but he left it them, and we must presume that it was their property; and no attempt was ever made by Mr. Hastings to prove otherwise.  They had no other property that could be found.  It was the only means of subsistence for themselves, their children, their domestics, and dependants, and for the whole female part of that once illustrious and next to royal family.