If we are asked what the terms of his farm were, we cannot discover that he farmed the country at any certain sum. We cannot discover that he was subjected to any terms, or confined by any limitations. Armed with arbitrary power, and exercising that power under a false title, his exactions from the poor natives were only limited by his own pleasure. Under these circumstances, we are now to ask what there was to prevent him from robbing and ruining the people, and what security against his robbing the exchequer of the person whose revenue he farmed. You are told by the witnesses in the clearest manner, (and, after what you have heard of the state of Oude, you cannot doubt the fact,) that nobody, not even the Nabob, dared to complain against him,--that he was considered as a man authorized and supported by the power of the British government; and it is proved in the evidence before you that he vexed and harassed the country to the utmost extent which we have stated in our article of charge, and which you would naturally expect from a man acting under such false names with such real powers. We have proved that from some of the principal zemindars in that country, who held farms let to them for twenty-seven thousand rupees a year, a rent of sixty thousand was demanded, and in some cases enforced,--and that upon the refusal of one of them to comply with this demand, he was driven out of the country. Your Lordships will find in the evidence before you that the inhabitants of the country were not only harassed in their fortunes, but cruelly treated in their persons. You have it upon Mr. Halhed's evidence, and it is not attempted, that I know of, to be contradicted, that the people were confined in open cages, exposed to the scorching heat of the sun, for pretended or real arrears of rent: it is indifferent which, because I consider all confinement of the person to support an arbitrary exaction to be an abomination not to be tolerated. They have endeavored, indeed, to weaken this evidence by an attempt to prove that a man day and night in confinement in an open cage suffers no inconvenience. And here I must beg your Lordships to observe the extreme unwillingness that appears in these witnesses. Their testimony is drawn from them drop by drop, their answers to our questions are never more than yes or no; but when they are examined by the counsel on the other side, it flows as freely as if drawn from a perennial spring: and such a spring we have in Indian corruption. We have, however, proved that in these cages the renters were confined till they could be lodged in the dungeons or mud forts. We have proved that some of them were obliged to sell their children, that others fled the country, and that these practices were carried to such an awful extent that Colonel Hannay was under the necessity of issuing orders against the unnatural sale and flight which his rapacity had occasioned.