My Lords, I think it is necessary to state, that there has been some little difficulty concerning this word, _presents_. Bribery and extortion have been covered by the name of presents, and the authority and practice of the East has been adduced as a palliation of the crime. My Lords, no authority of the East will be a palliation of the breach of laws enacted in the West: and to those laws of the West, and not the vicious customs of the East, we insist upon making Mr. Hastings liable. But do not your Lordships see that this is an entire mistake? that there never was any custom of the East for it? I do not mean vicious practices and customs, which it is the business of good laws and good customs to eradicate. There are three species of presents known in the East,--two of them payments of money known to be legal, and the other perfectly illegal, and which has a name exactly expressing it in the manner our language does. It is necessary that your Lordships should see that Mr. Hastings has made use of a perversion of the names of authorized gifts to cover the most abominable and prostituted bribery. The first of those presents is known in the country by the name of _peshcush_: this _peshcush_ is a fine paid, upon the grant of lands, to the sovereign, or whoever grants them. The second is the _nuzzer_, or _nuzzerana_, which is a tribute of acknowledgment from an inferior to a superior. The last is called _reshwat_, in the Persian language,--that is to say, a bribe, or sum of money clandestinely and corruptly taken,--and is as much distinguished from the others as, in the English language, a fine or acknowledgment is distinguished from a bribe. To show your Lordships this, we shall give in evidence, that, whenever a peshcush or fine is paid, it is a sum of money publicly paid, and paid in proportion to the grant,--and that the sum is entered upon the very grant itself. We shall prove the nuzzer is in the same manner entered, and that all legal fees are indorsed upon the body of the grant for which they are taken: and that they are no more in the East than in the West any kind of color or pretence for corrupt acts, which are known by the circumstance of their being clandestinely taken, and which are acknowledged and confessed to be illegal and corrupt. Having stated that Mr. Hastings, in some of the evidence that we shall produce, endeavors to confound these three things, I am only to remark that the nuzzer is generally a very small sum of money, that it sometimes amounts to one gold mohur, that sometimes it is less, and that, in all the records of the Company, I have never known it exceed one gold mohur, or about thirty-five shillings,--passing by the fifty gold mohurs which were given to Mr. Hastings by Cheyt Sing, and a hundred gold mohurs which were given to the Mogul, as a nuzzer, by Mahomed Ali, Nabob of Arcot.