But now, to show that it was not weakly, loosely, or idly, that I took up this business, or that I anticipated a defence which it was not probable for Mr. Hastings to make, (and I wish to speak to your Lordships in the first instance, but to the Commons in the next,) I will read part of Mr. Hastings's defence before the House of Commons: it is in evidence before your Lordships. He says,--"My accuser" (meaning myself, then acting as a private member of Parliament) "charges me with 'the receipt of large sums of money, corruptly taken before the promulgation of the Regulating Act of 1773, contrary to my covenants with the Company, and with the receipt of very large sums taken since, in defiance of that law, and contrary to my declared sense of its provisions.' And he ushers in this charge in the following pompous diction: 'That in March, 1775, the late Rajah Nundcomar, a native Hindoo of the highest caste in his religion, and of the highest rank in society, by the offices which he had held under the country government, did lay before the Council an account of various sums of money,' &c. It would naturally strike every person ignorant of the character of Nundcomar, that an accusation made by a person of the highest caste in his religion and of the highest rank by his offices demanded particular notice, and acquired a considerable degree of credit, from a prevalent association of ideas that a nice sense of honor is connected with an elevated rank of life: but when this honorable House is informed that my accuser knew (though he suppressed the facts) that this person, of high rank and high caste, had forfeited every pretension to honor, veracity, and credit,--that there are facts recorded on the very Proceedings which my accuser partially quotes, proving this man to have been guilty of a most flagrant forgery of letters from Munny Begum and the Nabob Yeteram ul Dowlah, (independent of the forgery for which he suffered death,) of the most deliberate treachery to the state, for which he was confined, by the orders of the Court of Directors, to the limits of the town of Calcutta, in order to prevent his dangerous intrigues, and of having violated every principle of common honesty in private life,--I say, when this honorable House is acquainted it is from mutilated and garbled assertions, founded on the testimony of such an evidence, without the whole matter being fairly stated, I do hope and trust it will be sufficient for them to reject _now_ these vague and unsupported charges, in like manner as they were _before_ rejected by the Court of Directors and his Majesty's ministers, when they were first made by General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis.--I must here interrupt the course of my defence to explain on what grounds I employed or had any connection with a man of so flagitious a character as Nundcomar."