June or July following.  Our proceedings against him commenced in the sessions of 1786; and this defence was given, I believe, in the year 1787.  Yet at that time, when he could hardly have received any account from India, he was ready, he says, to produce the evidence (and no doubt might have done so) of many gentlemen whose depositions would have directly contradicted what he had himself deposed of the state in which he, so short a time before, had left the country.  Your Lordships cannot suppose that it could have recovered its prosperity within that time.  We know you may destroy that in a day which will take up years to build; we know a tyrant can in a moment ruin and oppress:  but you cannot restore the dead to life; you cannot in a moment restore fields to cultivation; you cannot, as you please, make the people in a moment restore old or dig new wells:  and yet Mr. Hastings has dared to say to the Commons that he would produce persons to refute the account which we had fresh from himself.  We will, however, undertake to show you that the direct contrary was the fact.

I will first refer you to Mr. Barlow’s account of the state of trade.  Your Lordships will there find a full exposure of the total falsehood of the prisoner’s assertions.  You will find that Mr. Hastings himself had been obliged to give orders for the change of almost every one of the regulations he had made.  Your Lordships may there see the madness and folly of tyranny attempting to regulate trade.  In the printed Minutes, page 2830, your Lordships will see how completely Mr. Hastings had ruined the trade of the country.  You will find, that, wherever he pretended to redress the grievances which he had occasioned, he did not take care to have any one part of his pretended redress executed.  When you consider the anarchy in which he states the country through which he passed to have been, you may easily conceive that regulations for the protection of trade, without the means of enforcing them, must be nugatory.

Mr. Barlow was sent, in the years 1786 and 1787, to examine into the state of the country.  He has stated the effect of all those regulations, which Mr. Hastings has had the assurance to represent here as prodigies of wisdom.  At the very time when our charge was brought to this House, (it is a remarkable period, and we desire your Lordships to advert to it,) at that time, I do not know whether it was not on the very same day that we brought our charge to your bar, Mr. Duncan was sent by Lord Cornwallis to examine into the state of that province.  Now, my Lords, you have Mr. Duncan’s report before you, and you will judge whether or not, by any regulation which Mr. Hastings had made, or whether through any means used by him, that country had recovered or was recovering.  Your Lordships will there find other proofs of the audacious falsehood of his representation, that all which he had done had operated on the minds of the inhabitants very greatly in favor of British integrity and good government.  Mr. Duncan’s report will not only enable you to decide upon what he has said himself, it will likewise enable you to judge of the credit which is due to the gentlemen now in London whom he can produce to confirm his assertions, that the country of Benares and Gazipore were never, within the memory of Englishmen, so well protected and cultivated as at the present moment.