An unseen
tyrant and four miserable companies of sepoys executed all the horrible
things that we have mentioned. The spirit of the Rajah's subjects was
roused by their wrongs, and encouraged by the contemptible weakness of
their oppressors. The whole country rose up in rebellion, and surely in
justifiable rebellion. Every writer on the Law of Nations, every man
that has written, thought, or felt upon the affairs of government, must
write, know, think, and feel, that a people so cruelly scourged and
oppressed, both in the person of their chief and in their own persons,
were justified in their resistance. They were roused to vengeance, and a
short, but most bloody war followed.
We charge the prisoner at your bar with all the consequences of this
war. We charge him with the murder of our sepoys, whom he sent unarmed
to such a dangerous enterprise. We charge him with the blood of every
man that was shed in that place; and we call him, as we have called him,
a tyrant, an oppressor, and a murderer. We call him murderer in the
largest and fullest sense of the word; because he was the cause of the
murder of our English officers and sepoys, whom he kept unarmed, and
unacquainted with the danger to which they would be exposed by the
violence of his transactions.
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