to connect to blend-to associate and to co-operate; bearing the same course of kindred energies and harmonious sympathy; each perfect in its own lovely sphere; each moving in its wider or more contracted orbit with different but concentrating powers, guided by the same influence of reason, endeavouring at the same blessed end-the happiness of the individual, the harmony of the species and the glory of the Creator.

the vices it is the discord that ensures defeat; each clamours to be heard in its own barbarous language; each claims the exclusive cunning of the brain; each thwarts and reproaches the other, and even while their fell rage assails with common hate the peace and virtue of the world, the civil war among their own tumultuous legions defeats the purpose of the foul conspiracy. These are the furies of the mind, my Lords, that unsettle the understanding; these are the furies of the mind that destroy the virtue of prudence; while the distracted brain and shivered intellect proclaim the tumult that is within, and bear their testimonies from the mouth of God Himself to the foul condition of the heart.

**

I beg your Lordships to review for a moment shortly-and I really must apologise to your Lordships for wishing you to dwell longer upon subjects which must be so exasperating to the human heart to contemplate-but I wish your Lordships to review for a moment the whole progress of this business, from that period of time which I first stated to be the period when he [Hastings] first determined upon this measure [the spoliation of the Oudh dowagers]. Your lordships remember that, after his disappointment at Bidjey Ghur, that instant he seems to have turned an eye of death upon the palace at Fyzabad. At that glance at that fell glancepeace, faith, joy, careless innocence and feeble confidence, that lay reposing under the superstitious shade of those protected walls, receive their inexorable doom. You see him instantly despatching Mr. Middleton to Lucknow to bear his orders, and then to gather justification. After that, you see the correspondence carried on between Sir Elijah Impey and Mr. Middleton; you see Sir Elijah Impey conveying to Mr. Middleton the alternate hopes and fears that agitated his mind in this business; you see Hyder Beg applying to Mr. Hastings and encouraging him to proceed; you see him

confessing that he has got the curses and execration of his country for joining in this act of perfidity and oppression against the Nawab and his parents; you see the miserable state of the Nawab-wretched, dejected, in a settled melancholy; you see him submitting at last to his miserable doom. In the meanwhile, the great figure of the piece, not mixing in the battle, but afar off aloof and listening to the war, but not idle and inactive as he calls it, marking the whole of the business, collected, firm, determined. Then, when things the most tried begin to wince in the proof-when the patience of the Nawab and the conscience of Middleton began to fail-when things the toughest bend-then you see him, determined and firm, casting a general's eye over the scene, despatching his tough tool, Sir Elijah Impey, to reinforce the failing conscience of Middleton; desiring Ali Ibrahim Khan to whet and inflame the stouter villany of Hyder Beg. You see him present in mind everywhere, with cold, deliberate, sober wrath, with tranquil veteran malignity, guiding the fell array and pointing to his object.

This concludes the circumstances as far as relates to the progress of this business towards seizing the treasures. With regard to the private letters which I have dwelt so much upon, I do trust that your Lordships will not countenance a sort of distinction which was endeavoured to be taken by the learned Counsel, when first these letters were produced, when they requested your Lordships to remark that they were letters. of a most private and familiar nature, inferring from that that they were not to be considered as testimony of equal authority with the deliberate public letters which stand upon record. I trust your Lordships will not countenance such a distinction. I trust you will not suffer them to insinuate, as Sir Elijah Impey does in his oral evidence, that it is not fair to take advantage of an answer which he made without adverting to the consequences. It is because these letters were written without adverting to the consequences-because these letters were written in an unguarded moment-because they were not meant for public view-it is therefore that I do state them as the best authority, the weightiest evidence, in the whole of these proceedings. If the learned Counsel had another object in making that distinction-because I believe your Lordships

will recollect something of a remarkable circumstance in their compelling us to read certain private and domestic parts of these letters which we wish undoubtedly to avoid-if their object was to bring out an anecdote which is now under my eye, respecting the paternal tenderness and affection of the accomplice, Mr. Middleton, to his son, who was then ill-if they conceive that that would be a kind of reconciling and palliating circumstance to your Lordships-I must say, though it may perhaps be thought something harsh, that the effect upon my mind was directly the contrary. I must speak what I feel on this occasion. I must then ask your Lordships, seeing this family anecdote in the light which I do, what must be the nature of these crimes, into which the loveliest energies of the human mind cannot intrude without exciting sensations rather of disgust and contempt than of respect ?

I know that I am speaking before those who understand what the feelings of fathers are. I trust I am not to learn them : but, my Lords, I say this aggravates what I consider as Mr. Middleton's guilt in this business; because it convinces me that his mind was not without circumstances to show him the sacredness of those ties which he was violating; because it shows me that he did not want opportunities of those duties which he was tearing from the bosom of another-that he could look in his child's face and read nothing there to warn him from the guilt he was engaged in. Good God! my Lords, what a cause is this we are maintaining! What! when I feel it a part of my duty, as it were, when I feel it an instruction in my brief to support the claim of age to reverence, of maternal feebleness to filial protection and support, can I recollect where I stand? can I recollect before whom I am pleading? I look round on this various assembly that surrounds me, seeing in every countenance a breathing testimony to this general principle, and yet for a moment think it necessary to enforce the bitter aggravation which attends the crimes of those who violate this universal duty. Yet, my Lords, such is the nature of the charge which we maintain-such the monstrous nature of the guilt which we arraign-and such the more monstrous nature of the defence opposed to that guilt— that when I see in many of these letters the infirmities of age made a subject of mockery and ridicule-when I see the feelings of a son treated by Mr. Middleton as puerile (as he calls them)

and contemptible-when I see an order given from Mr. Hastings to harden that son's heart, to choke the struggling nature in his bosom-when I see them pointing to the son's name and to his standard, when they march to oppress the mother, as to a banner that gives dignity, that gives an holy sanction and a reverence, to their enterprise-when I see and hear these things done-when I hear them brought into three deliberate Defences offered to the charges of the Commons-my Lords, I own I grow puzzled and confounded, and almost doubt whether where such a defence can be offered it may not be tolerated.

And yet, my Lords, how can I support the claim of filial love by argument, much less the affection of a son to a mother, where love loses its awe, and veneration is mixed with tenderness? What can I say upon such a subject? What can I do but repeat the ready truths which with the quick impulse of the mind must spring to the lips of every man on such a theme? Filial love-the morality, the instinct, the sacrament, of nature—a duty, or rather let me say that it is miscalled a duty, for it flows from the heart without effort-its delightits indulgence-its enjoyment. It is guided not by the slow dictates of reason; it awaits not encouragement from reflection or from thought; it asks no aid of memory; it is an innate but active consciousness of having been the object of a thousand tender solicitudes, a thousand waking, watchful cares, of meek anxiety and patient sacrifices, unremarked and unrequited by the object. It is a gratitude founded upon a conviction of obligations not remembered, but the more binding because not remembered, because conferred before the tender reason could acknowledge or the infant memory record them gratitude and affection which no circumstances should subdue and which few can strengthen--a gratitude [in] which even injury from the object, though it may blend regret, should never breed resentment-an affection which can be increased only by the decay of those to whom we owe it-then most fervent when the tremulous voice of age, resistless in its feebleness, inquires for the natural protectors of its cold decline.

a

If these are the general sentiments of man, what must be their depravity, what must be their degeneracy, who can blot out and erase from the bosom the virtue that is deepest rooted

in the human heart, and twined within the cords of life itself— alien from nature-apostates from humanity! And yet, if there is a crime more fell-more foul-if there is anything worse than a wilful persecutor of his mother-it is to see a deliberate, reasoning, instigator and abettor to the deed. This is a thing that shocks, disgusts and appals the mind more than the other. To view-not a wilful parricide-to see a parricide by compulsion-a miserable wretch, not actuated by the stubborn evils of his own worthless heart-not driven by the fury of his own distracted brain-but lending his sacrilegeous hand, without malice of his own, to answer the abandoned purposes of the human fiends that have subdued his will. To condemn crimes like these we need not talk of laws or of human rules. Their foulness-their deformity-does not depend upon local constitutions, upon human institutes or religious creeds. They are crimes; and the persons who perpetrate them are monsters who violate the primitive condition upon which the earth was given to man. They are guilty by the general verdict of human kind.

Now your Lordships will mark what Mr. Hastings does. Mr. Bristow determines to adopt lenient measures. He accordingly orders the eunuchs to be released. He writes word of this to Mr. Hastings. Mr. Hastings receives his letter and withholds it from the [council]. That is the letter we had such a battle about, your Lordships recollect, with the Counsel, when they wanted us to read another letter that was nothing to the purpose. He withholds that letter, and then gets the Board to write to know what had been done with respect to the Begums. After he had heard a detail of all the severities —of all the cruelties; after he had not only had this communicated to him, but had heard from the best authority that nothing but lenient proceedings would do, he suppresses the information that the Begums' ministers were released, and gets the Board to give a new order to recommence severities, which he had already been apprised were not equal to the object. This is the man that had never any information upon the subject until after his arrival in England!

If anything more was wanted upon the subject-the Directors here order an inquiry. By suppressing that inquiry while Mr. Middleton and Mr. Johnson were upon the spot, he