“The province of Oude having fallen into a state of great disorder and confusion, its resources being in an extraordinary degree diminished, and the Nabob Asoph ul Dowlah having earnestly entreated the presence of the Governor-General, and declared, that, unless some effectual measures are taken for his relief, he must be under the necessity of leaving his country, and coming down to Calcutta, to present his situation to this government,—­the Governor-General therefore proposes, with the concurrence of Mr. Wheler, to visit the province of Oude as speedily as the affairs of the Presidency will admit, in hopes that, from a minute and personal observation of the circumstances of that country, the system of management which has been adopted, and the characters and conduct of the persons employed, he may possibly be able to concert and establish some plan by which the province of Oude may in time be restored to its former state of affluence, good order, and prosperity.”

Your Lordships have now the whole chain of the evidence complete, with regard to the state of the country, up to the period of Mr. Hastings’s journey into the country.  You see that Mr. Hastings himself admits it to have been formerly in a most flourishing, orderly, and prosperous state.  Its condition in 1781 he describes to you in words than which no enemy of his can use stronger, in order to paint the state in which it then was.  In this state he found it, when he went up in the year 1781; and he left it, with regard to any substantial regulation that was executed or could be executed, in the state in which he found it,—­after having increased every one of those grievances which he pretended to redress, and taken from it all the little resources that remained in it.

We now come to a subsequent period, at which time the state of the country is thus described by Mr. Bristow, on the 12th December, 1782.

“Despotism is the principle upon which every measure is founded, and the people in the interior parts of the country are ruled at the discretion of the aumil or foujdar for the time being.  They exercise, within the limits of their jurisdiction, the powers of life and death, and decisions in civil and other cases, in the same extent as the sovereign at the capital.  The forms prescribed by the ancient institutions of the Mogul empire are unattended to, and the will of the provincial magistrate is the sole law of the people.  The total relaxation of the Vizier’s authority, his inattention and dislike to business, leave the aumils in possession of this dangerous power, unawed, uncontrolled by any apprehension of retrospection, or the interference of justice.  I can hardly quote an instance, since the Vizier’s accession to the musnud, of an aumil having been punished for oppression, though the complaints of the people and the state of the country are notorious proofs of the violences daily committed:  it is even become unsafe for travellers to pass, except in large bodies; murders, thefts, and other enormities shocking to humanity, are committed in open day.”

In another paragraph of the same letter, he says,—­