This is the account he gives of his power, and of the people subject to the British government in India. We deny that the act of Parliament gave him any such power; we deny that the India Company gave him any such power, or that they had ever any such power to give; we even deny that there exists in all the human race a power to make the government of any state dependent upon individual will. We disclaim, we reject all such doctrines with disdain and indignation; and we have brought them up to your Lordships to be tried at your bar. What must be the condition of the people of India, governed, as they have been, by persons who maintain these principles as maxims of government, and not as occasional deviations caused by the irregular will of man,--principles by which the whole system of society is to be controlled, not by law, reason, or justice, but by the will of one man? Your Lordships will remark, that not only the whole of the laws, rights, and usages, but the very being of the people, are exposed to ruin: for Mr. Hastings says, that the people may be fined, that they may be exiled, that they may be imprisoned, and that even their lives are dependent upon the mere will of their foreign master; and that he, the Company's Governor, exercised that will under the authority of this country. Remark, my Lords, his application of this doctrine. "I would," he says, "have kept Cheyt Sing from the consequences of this dependence, by making him independent, and not in any manner subjecting him to our government. The moment he came into a state of dependence upon the British government, all these evils attached upon him.--It is," he adds, "disagreeable to me to exert such powers; but I know they must be exerted; and I declare there is no security from this arbitrary power, but by having nothing to do with the British government." My Lords, the House of Commons has already well considered what may be our future moral and political condition, when the persons who come from that school of pride, insolence, corruption, and tyranny are more intimately mixed up with us of purer morals. Nothing but contamination can be the result, nothing but corruption can exist in this country, unless we expunge this doctrine out of the very hearts and souls of the people. It is not to the gang of plunderers and robbers of which I say this man is at the head, that we are only, or indeed principally, to look. Every man in Great Britain will be contaminated and must be corrupted, if you let loose among us whole legions of men, generation after generation, tainted with these abominable vices, and avowing these detestable principles. It is, therefore, to preserve the integrity and honor of the Commons of Great Britain, that we have brought this man to your Lordships' bar.