told that these women must have perished through famine, if their gaolers, Captain Jaques and Major Gilpin, had not raised money upon their own credit, and supplied them with an occasional relief.  And therefore, when they talk of his peculation, of his taking but a bribe here and a bribe there, see the consequences of his system of peculation, see the consequences of a usurpation which extinguishes the natural authority of the country, see the consequences of a clandestine correspondence that does not let the injuries of the country come regularly before the authorities in Oude to relieve it, consider the whole mass of crimes, and then consider the sufferings that have arisen in consequence of it.

My Lords, it was not corporal pain alone that these miserable women suffered.  The unsatisfied cravings of hunger and the blows of the sepoys’ bludgeons could touch only the physical part of their nature.  But, my Lords, men are made of two parts,—­the physical part, and the moral.  The former he has in common with the brute creation.  Like theirs, our corporeal pains are very limited and temporary.  But the sufferings which touch our moral nature have a wider range, and are infinitely more acute, driving the sufferer sometimes to the extremities of despair and distraction.  Man, in his moral nature, becomes, in his progress through life, a creature of prejudice, a creature of opinions, a creature of habits, and of sentiments growing out of them.  These form our second nature, as inhabitants of the country and members of the society in which Providence has placed us.  This sensibility of our moral nature is far more acute in that sex which, I may say without any compliment, forms the better and more virtuous part of mankind, and which is at the same time the least protected from the insults and outrages to which this sensibility exposes them.  This is a new source of feelings, that often make corporal distress doubly felt; and it has a whole class of distresses of its own.  These are the things that have gone to the heart of the Commons.

We have stated, first, the sufferings of the Begum, and, secondly, the sufferings of the two thousand women (I believe they are not fewer in number) that belong to them, and are dependent upon them, and dependent upon their well-being.  We have stated to you that the Court of Directors were shocked and astonished, when they received the account of the first, before they had heard the second.  We have proved they desired him to redress the former, if, upon inquiry, he found that his original suspicions concerning their conduct were ill-founded.  He has declared here that he did not consider these as orders.  Whether they were orders or not, could anything have been more pressing upon all the duties and all the sentiments of man than at least to do what was just,—­that is, to make such an inquiry as in the result might justify his acts, or have entitled them to redress?  Not one trace of inquiry or redress do we find, except we suppose, as we hear nothing after this of the famine, that Mr. Bristow, who seems to be a man of humanity, did so effectually interpose, that they should no longer depend for the safety of their honor on the bludgeons of the sepoys, by which alone it seems they were defended from the profane view of the vulgar, and which we must state as a matter of great aggravation in this case.