We do not use torture or cruelties, even for the greatest crimes, but have banished them from our courts of justice; we never suffer them in any case.  Yet those men, in order to force others to break their most sacred trust, inflict tortures upon them.  They drag their poor victims from dungeon to dungeon, from one place of punishment to another, and wholly on account of an extorted bond,—­for they owed no money, they could not owe any,—­but to got this miserable balance of 60,000_l._, founded upon their tables of exchange:  after they had plundered these ladies of 500,000_l._ in money, and 70,000_l._ a year in land, they could not be satisfied without putting usury and extortion upon tyranny and oppression.  To enforce this unjust demand, the miserable victims were imprisoned, ironed, scourged, and at last threatened to be sent prisoners to Chunar.  This menace succeeded.  The persons who had resisted irons, who had been, as the Begums say, refused food and water, stowed in an unwholesome, stinking, pestilential prison, these persons withstood everything till the fort of Chunar was mentioned to them; and then their fortitude gave way:  and why?  The fort of Chunar was not in the dominions of the Nabob, whose rights they pretended to be vindicating:  to name a British fort, in their circumstances, was to name everything that is most horrible in tyranny; so, at least, it appeared to them.  They gave way; and thus were committed acts of oppression and cruelty unknown, I will venture to say, in the history of India.  The women, indeed, could not be brought forward and scourged, but their ministers were tortured, till, for their redemption, these princesses gave up all their clothes, all the ornaments of their persons, all their jewels, all the memorials of their husbands and fathers,—­all were delivered up, and valued by merchants at 50,000_l._; and they also gave up 5,000_l._ in money, or thereabouts:  so that, in reality, only about 5,000_l._, a mere nothing, a sum not worth mentioning, even in the calculations of extortion and usury, remained unpaid.

But, my Lords, what became of all this money?  When you examine these witnesses here, they tell you it was paid to Hyder Beg Khan.  Now they had themselves received the money in tale at their own assay-table.  And when an account is demanded of the produce of the goods, they shrink from it, and say it was Hyder Beg Khan who received the things and sold them.  Where is Hyder Beg Khan’s receipt?  The Begums say (and the thing speaks for itself) that even gold and jewels coming from them lost their value; that part of the goods were spoilt, being kept long unsold in damp and bad warehouses; and that the rest of the goods were sold, as thieves sell their spoil, for little or nothing.  In all this business Mr. Hastings and Mr. Middleton were themselves the actors, chief actors; but now, when they are called to account, they substitute Hyder Beg Khan in their place, a man that is dead and gone, and you hear nothing more of this part of the business.