constitution of Asia only from its practice." Will your Lordships submit to hear the corrupt
practices of mankind made the principles of government? No! it will be your pride and
glory to teach men intrusted with power, that, in their use of it, they are to conform to
principles, and not to draw their principles from the corrupt practice of any man whatever.
Was there ever heard, or could it be conceived, that a governor would dare to heap up all
the evil practices, all the cruelties, oppressions, extortions, corruptions, briberies, of all the
ferocious usurpers, desperate robbers, thieves, cheats, and jugglers, that ever had office,
from one end of Asia to another, and, consolidating all this mass of the crimes and
absurdities of barbarous domination into one code, establish it as the whole duty of an
English governor? I believe that till this time so audacious a thing was never attempted by
man.
He have arbitrary power! My Lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to
give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give him; your Lordships have not; nor the
Commons, nor the whole legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary
power is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man can
lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one person be governed
by the will of another. We are all born in subjection,—all born equally, high and low,
governors and governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, preëxistent law, prior to all
our devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas and all our
sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and connected in the
eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot stir.
This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the contrary, it gives to
our conventions and compacts all the force and sanction they can have. It does not arise