"--"How dared you to
appoint a man unfit for his office?"--"Oh, it signified little, without
their having a constitution."--"Why did you destroy the official
constitution that existed before? How dared you to destroy those
establishments which enabled the people to dig wells and to cultivate
the country like a garden, and then to leave the whole in the hands of
your arbitrary and wicked Residents and their instruments, chosen
without the least idea of government and without the least idea of
protection?"
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the
credit of human reason, that men who are not in some degree mad are
never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. The human faculties
and reason are in such cases deranged; and therefore this man has been
dragged by the just vengeance of Providence to make his own madness the
discoverer of his own wicked, perfidious, and cursed machinations in
that devoted country.
Think, my Lords, of what he says respecting the military. He says there
is no restraining them,--that they pillage the country wherever they go.
But had not Mr. Hastings himself just before encouraged the military to
pillage the country? Did he not make the people's resistance, when the
soldiers attempted to pillage them, one of the crimes of Cheyt Sing? And
who would dare to obstruct the military in their abominable ravages,
when they knew that one of the articles of Cheyt Sing's impeachment was
his having suffered the people of the country, when plundered by these
wicked soldiers, to return injury for injury and blow for blow? When
they saw, I say, that these were the things for which Cheyt Sing was
sacrificed, there was manifestly nothing left for them but
flight.
Pages:
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440