men versed equally in the law of parliament and the law of evidence, must be obtained; for although he knew, from long experience, something of the law of parliament, and had in the course of his life looked frequently into law books on different subjects, he meant not to trust the issue of a matter so important in every point of view to so weak, uninformed, immature, and incompetent a head and understanding as his own. He had the utmost anxiety upon his mind, that the matter should go up to the lords in a shape regular, complete, formal, and perfect; that the House should not be liable to sustain the disgrace of having sent up and prepared an impeachment, every point of which did not prima facie appear to be significant of the gravity, caution, and solemnity which ought to mark the conduct of the House of Commons in such an awful proceeding. Mr. Burke expatiated on this idea, and said, that his whole attention had long been engrossed by the subject, and that there was not on record a proceeding at all similar which he had not consulted and closely examined; and he could not but acknowledge, that scarcely any one of them appeared to him to have been managed with due attention, or rendered in any proportion so complete and perfect, as, in his mind, it be came the honour and dignity of that House to have made it. He mentioned some of the rights which had been claimed by that House on such occasions, and said, that although he should be very sorry that there should ultimately appear to be any real occasion to take advantage of them, yet he should hold it unwise, if, on the ensuing, or any other occasion, that House were entirely to abandon them. He mentioned one in particular, which former precedents justified, and that was, that the House should persist in its right of saying, at the bar of the House of Lords, "This article the House of Commons does not insist upon," and to exercise that right as often as occasion should render it necessary or discreet.

The House then resolved itself into a committee of the whole House on the charges against Mr. Hastings, in which Mr.

Windham opened the sixth charge, respecting Fyzoola Khan, the rajah of Rampore. Major Scott answered Mr. Windham; after which, Mr. Dundas rose, and stated the principal point, in which he thought the conduct of Mr. Hastings criminal, viz. the violation of the guarantee of the Company to the treaty of 1774. To that treaty he conceived Fyzoola Khan had every right to consider the Company as guarantee, in consequence of Colonel Champion's signing his name as an attestation of it, and of the subsequent public authorised attestation of it at Rampore. By the treaty of Chunar, in 1781, that guarantee was violated, and the British name brought into disgrace, as by an article of that treaty Fyzoola Khan was declared to have forfeited the protection of the British government, and permission was granted to the nabob vizier to resume his lands. That that permission was never intended to be suffered by Mr. Hastings to be carried into execution, Mr. Dundas declared, he verily believed; and in that circumstance consisted, in his mind, a great part of Mr. Hastings's criminality; as he thereby made use of the credit of the British name to delude the nabob vizier, and at the same time to hold out to Fyzoola Khan an idea that the British government, which was the guarantee to him for the quiet possession of Rampore, Shawabad, and some other districts, had stipulated by treaty to assist the nabob vizier in dispossessing him of those territories. He commented on the extreme criminality of this conduct; but as it certainly differed materially from the construction that might be put on the charge, viz. that it had been the intention of Mr. Hastings really to assist in dispossessing Fyzoola Khan of his territories, he could not agree to the motion unless it was modified and tempered so as to restrict it to the points in which the matter of impeachment, in his opinion, really consisted. The better to convey his meaning to the committee, Mr. Dundas said, he would produce the amendment he had designed to offer to the motion. It was in substance to state that in the charge there was matter of impeachment, as far as related to that part of the treaty of Chunar, which went to a breach of the guarantee of the treaty of Rampore. Mr. Dundas said, he did not mean to press his amendment, if it should appear to be disagreeable to gentlemen on the other side. He was aware he should have another opportunity of stating it, and enforcing its reception, when the question of impeachment came to be agitated.

Mr. BURKE applauded the candour of the right honourable and learned gentleman, in thus fairly stating what his objection was, as well as his conduct in declaring that he would not press it then, if not found generally acceptable. With regard to its having been no real intention of Mr. Hastings to dispossess Fyzoola Khan of his Jaghire, Mr. Burke said, the right honourable and learned gentleman might rest assured he never would make that a charge or a part of a charge against Mr. Hastings, which he could not support either by direct legal evidence, or presumption so strong, as to be nearly equal to direct legal evidence. If the right honourable and learned gentleman would have the goodness to recollect, he would undoubtedly have candour to acknowledge, that in the charge preferred by him, and in the argument of his right honourable friend, there had not been one syllable amounting to an insinuation, much less a charge, that it had been Mr. Hastings's real intention to assist in dispossessing Fyzoola Khan of his Jaghire; and the reason why there had not, was, because he had neither direct legal evidence, nor strong presumptive evidence to support such an insinuation. The great charge against Mr. Hastings in this case, was, that he had kept Fyzoola Khan in a fever for ten years together, in which that father of agriculture (for so Mr. Hastings had described him to be) was put into a perpetual series of hot and cold fits, not knowing whether he was to look up to the British government in India as his protectors or his oppressors. Mr. Burke said, he had that day to congratulate the committee on the singular circumstance of the honourable major, who had, so much to his own credit, and with a degree of zeal highly meritorious, on all occasions stood up the defender of Mr. Hastings, having declared that he had no defence to make against the present charge, and therefore he had gone back to the charge concerning the affairs of Farruckabad, and treated the committee with some verses inscribed on the bust of the late Earl Chatham. Those lines he had never before heard; but they were certainly beautiful, and he would do

the honourable major the justice to say, they had suffered nothing in his hands, for the delivery had been as fine as the poetry. The purport of them was to declare that the greatness of the country had risen by the councils of the late Earl of Chatham, and that after his death it had fallen. This poetry had been introduced by the honourable major in order to shew that India had in like manner risen by the government of Mr. Hastings, but that it was not likely to fall, notwithstanding that he had quitted his power. The similarity therefore had failed. If that were true, all that he could say was, that he wished Mr. Hastings to have as much justice done him as the late Earl of Chatham had in the instance in question, viz. to have an epitaph after he had his deserts. He wished the resolutions of that committee might not be the epitaph. The honourable major had besides talked of temples having been erected in India to Mr. Hastings. He knew not to the contrary, Mr. Burke said; but he well knew that there were temples dedicated in India to two very different sorts of divinities, to Brama and Wisnow, the good and guardian deities, to whom the natives returned thanks for the benefits they received, and to Rudor the evil spirit, whose unwearied enmity and malign influence they earnestly deprecated. Whether Mr. Hastings was most likely to have been worshipped in the latter or in the former character, that committee might be at no great loss to guess; or, perhaps, the temple in question might be a temple of gratitude, in which the Indians offered up their hearty thanks to their guardian deities, for having delivered them from a monster, under whose persecuting spirit they had suffered so much. Mr. Burke was extremely pleasant upon the temples, and said Templa quam dilecta! with an archness of tone that conveyed a meaning that raised a hearty laugh from both sides of the House.

After pushing his ridicule to some length, he reverted to the charge, and to Mr. Hastings's defence, in which that gentleman had himself admitted the truth of the charge, by using these words: "I am not ashamed to acknowledge,

that the act itself was formally wrong, and yet more than formally, as it might become a precedent for worse purposes." Mr. Burke reasoned upon this admission as comprehending the whole criminality imputed to Mr. Hastings in the charge, and in order to prove that the degree of criminality so imputed was enormous, he went over the principal facts, and argued upon them severally, as he proceeded. In the course of what he said, he paid Mr. Windham some compliments on the clear, logical, and pointed manner in which he had opened the charge, and observed, that Mr. Hastings was extremely fond of proving that other persons had shared with him in the guilt of certain parts of his conduct, and wherever he thought he could prove that he had acted with an accomplice, he always seemed to think himself immediately exonerated from criminality. On the present occasion, he had endeavoured to state that an honourable member, Mr. Francis, was his accomplice; a point on which the committee were on that night to decide. Mr. Burke stated what Mr. Francis's conduct had been, when he attended the council in Calcutta, wounded as he was; and shewed that Mr. Hastings was the man who misled the council, by declaring that five thousand cavalry was the exact number which, by the treaty of Rampore, the nabob Fyzoola Khan was to furnish the vizier with, when called upon. That circumstance alone, he said, so strongly marked the scandalous negligence with which the government of Mr. Hastings had been conducted, that it was a sufficient ground of impeachment. He observed also, how shameful it was that Mr. Bristow, at the distance of nine hundred miles from Calcutta, where the records of all treaties were kept, should be the person to send Mr. Hastings information what was the real purport of the treaty, upon a gross misconception of which he had acted, and that in a manner tending to disgrace the British government. After a variety of remarks and reasonings, all pointing to establish the extreme readiness which Fyzoola Khan had shewn to comply with the requisitions made upon him for cavalry,