I have already remarked to your Lordships, that, after this charge was brought and recorded before the Council in spite of the resistance made by Mr. Hastings, in which he employed all the power and authority of his station, and the whole body of his partisans and associates in iniquity, dispersed through every part of these provinces,--after he had taken all these steps, finding himself pressed by the proof and pressed by the presumption of his resistance to the inquiry, he did think it necessary to make something like a defence. Accordingly he has made what he calls a justification, which did not consist in the denial of that fact, or any explanation of it. The mode he took for his defence was abuse of his colleagues, abuse of the witnesses, and of every person who in the execution of his duty was inquiring into the fact, and charging them with things which, if true, were by no means sufficient to support him, either in defending the acts themselves, or in the criminal means he used to prevent inquiry into them. His design was to mislead their minds, and to carry them from the accusation and the proof of it. With respect to the passion, violence, and intemperate heat with which he charged them, they were proceeding in an orderly, regular manner; and if on any occasion they seem to break out into warmth, it was in consequence of that resistance which he made to them, in what your Lordships, I believe, will agree with them in thinking was one of the most important parts of their functions. If they had been intemperate in their conduct, if they had been violent, passionate, prejudiced against him, it afforded him only a better means of making his defence; because, though in a rational and judicious mind the intemperate conduct of the accuser certainly proves nothing with regard to the truth or falsehood of his accusation, yet we do know that the minds of men are so constituted that an improper mode of conducting a right thing does form some degree of prejudice against it. Mr. Hastings, therefore, unable to defend himself upon principle, has resorted as much as he possibly could to prejudice. And at the same time that there is not one word of denial, or the least attempt at a refutation of the charge, he has loaded the records with all manner of minutes, proceedings, and letters relative to everything but the fact itself. The great aim of his policy, both then, before, and ever since, has been to divert the mind of the auditory, or the persons to whom he addressed himself, from the nature of his cause, to some collateral circumstance relative to it,--a policy to which he has always had recourse; but that trick, the last resource of despairing guilt, I trust will now completely fail him.