With his pedigree, I believe, your Lordships will think
we have nothing to do in the cause now before us. It has been pressed
upon us; and this marks the indecency, the rancor, the insolence, the
pride and tyranny which the Dows and the Hastings, and the people of
that class and character, are in the habit of exercising over the great
in India.
My Lords, I shall be saved a great deal of trouble in proving to you the
flourishing state of Oude, because the prisoner admits it as largely as
I could wish to state it; and what is more, he admits, too, the truth of
our statement of the condition to which it is now reduced,--but I shall
not let him off so easily upon this point. He admits, too, that it was
left in this reduced and ruined state at the close of his
administration. In his Defence he attributes the whole mischief
generally to a faulty system of government. My Lords, systems never make
mankind happy or unhappy, any further than as they give occasions for
wicked men to exercise their own abominable talents, subservient to
their own more abominable dispositions. "The system," says Mr. Hastings,
"was bad; but I was not the maker of it." Your Lordships have seen him
apply this mode of reasoning to Benares, and you will now see that he
applies it to Oude.
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