No: if we have been guilty of
error in this cause, it is a deliberate error, the fruit of long,
laborious inquiry,--an error founded on a procedure in Parliament before
we came here, the most minute, the most circumstantial, and the most
cautious that ever was instituted. Instead of coming, as we did in Lord
Strafford's case, and in some others, voting the impeachment and
bringing it up on the same day, this impeachment was voted from a
general sense prevailing in the House of Mr. Hastings's criminality
after an investigation begun in the year 1780, and which produced in
1782 a body of resolutions condemnatory of almost the whole of his
conduct. Those resolutions were formed by the Lord Advocate of
Scotland, and carried in our House by the unanimous consent of all
parties: I mean the then Lord Advocate of Scotland,--now one of his
Majesty's principal Secretaries of State, and at the head of this very
Indian department. Afterwards, when this defendant came home, in the
year 1785, we reinstituted our inquiry. We instituted it, as your
Lordships and the world know, at his own request, made to us by his
agent, then a member of our House. We entered into it at large; we
deliberately moved for every paper which promised information on the
subject.
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