An account of these transactions, as we have proved by Mr. Holt’s evidence, was regularly transmitted and made known to him.  But why do I say made known to him?  Do not your Lordships know that Oude was his,—­that he treated it like his private estate,—­that he managed it in all its concerns as if it were his private demesne,—­that the Nabob dared not do a single act without him,—­that he had a Resident there, nominated by himself, and forced upon the Nabob, in defiance of the Company’s orders?  Yet, notwithstanding all this, we do not find a trace of anything done to relieve the aggravated distresses of these unfortunate people.

These are some of the consequences of that abominable system which, in defiance of the laws of his country, Mr. Hastings established in Oude.  He knew everything there; he had spies upon his regular agents, and spies again upon them.  We can prove, (indeed, he has himself proved,) that, besides his correspondence with his avowed agents, Major Palmer and Major Davy, he had secret correspondence with a whole host of agents and pensioners, who did and must have informed him of every circumstance of these affairs.  But if he had never been informed of it at all, the Commons contend, and very well and justly contend, that he who usurps the government of a country, who extinguishes the authority of its native sovereign, and places in it instruments of his own, and that in defiance of those whose orders he was bound to obey, is responsible for everything that was done in the country.  We do charge him with these acts of delinquencies and omissions, we declare him responsible for them; and we call for your Lordships’ judgment upon these outrages against humanity, as cruel perhaps as ever were suffered in any country.

My Lords, if there is a spark of manhood, if there is in your breasts the least feeling for our common humanity, and especially for the sufferings and distresses of that part of human nature which is made by its peculiar constitution more quick and sensible,—­if, I say, there is a trace of this in your breasts, if you are yet alive to such feelings, it is impossible that you should not join with the Commons of Great Britain in feeling the utmost degree of indignation against the man who was the guilty cause of this accumulated distress.  You see women, whom we have proved to be of respectable rank and condition, exposed to what is held to be the last of indignities in that country,—­the view of a base, insulting, ridiculing, or perhaps vainly pitying populace.  You have before you the first women in Asia, who consider their honor as joined with that of these people, weeping and bewailing the calamities of their house.  You have seen that in this misery and distress the sons of the Nabob were involved, and that two of them were wounded in an attempt to escape:  and yet this man has had the impudence to declare his doubts of the Nabob’s having had any children in the place, though the account of what was going on had been regularly transmitted to him.  After this, what is there in his conduct that we can wonder at?