With regard to this matter, we are to state to your Lordships, in order to bring it fully and distinctly before you, what the nature of this distemper of bribery is in the Indian government. We are to state what the laws and rules are which have been opposed to prevent it, and the utter insufficiency of all that have been proposed: to state the grievance, the instructions of the Company and government, the acts of Parliament, the constructions upon the acts of Parliament. We are to state to your Lordships the particular situation of Mr. Hastings; we are to state the trust the Company had in him for the prevention of all those evils; and then we are to prove that every evil, that all those grievances which the law intended to prevent, which there were covenants to restrain, and with respect to which there were encouragements to smooth and make easy the path of duty, Mr. Hastings was invested with a special, direct, and immediate trust to prevent. We are to prove to your Lordships that he is the man who, in his own person collectively, has done more mischief than all those persons whose evil practices have produced all those laws, those regulations, and even his own appointment. The first thing that we shall do is to state, and which we shall prove in evidence, that this vice of bribery was the ancient, radical, endemical, and ruinous distemper of the Company's affairs in India, from the time of their first establishment there. Very often there are no words nor any description which can adequately convey the state of a thing like the direct evidence of the thing itself: because the former might be suspected of exaggeration; you might think that which was really fact to be nothing but the coloring of the person that explained it; and therefore I think that it will be much better to give to your Lordships here a direct state of the Presidency at the time when the Company enacted those covenants which Mr. Hastings entered into, and when they took those measures to prevent the very evils from persons placed in those very stations and in those very circumstances in which we charge Mr. Hastings with having committed the offences we now bring before you. I wish your Lordships to know that we are going to read a consultation of Lord Clive's, who was sent out for the express purpose of reforming the state of the Company, in order to show the magnitude of the pecuniary corruptions that prevailed in it.