Corruption is the true cause of the loss of all the benefits of the constitution of that country.
The practice of Asia, as the gentleman at your bar has thought fit to say, is what he holds to;
the constitution he flies away from. The question is, whether you will take the constitution
of the country as your rule, or the base practices of those usurpers, robbers, and tyrants who
have subverted it. Undoubtedly, much blood, murder, false imprisonment, much peculation,
cruelty, and robbery are to be found in Asia; and if, instead of going to the sacred laws of
the country, he chooses to resort to the iniquitous practices of it, and practices authorized
only by public tumult, contention, war, and riot, he may indeed find as clear an acquittal in
the practices as he would find condemnation in the institutions of it. He has rejected the law
of England. Your Lordships will not suffer it. God forbid! For my part, I should have no
sort of objection to let him choose his law,—Mahomedan, Tartarian, Gentoo. But if he
disputes, as he does, the authority of an act of Parliament, let him state to me that law to
which he means to be subject, or any law which he knows that will justify his actions. I am
not authorized to say that I shall, even in that case, give up what is not in me to give up,
because I represent an authority of which I must stand in awe; but, for myself, I shall
confess that I am brought to public shame, and am not fit to manage the great interests
committed to my charge. I therefore again repeat of that Asiatic government with which we
are best acquainted, which has been constituted more in obedience to the laws of Mahomet
than any other, that the sovereign cannot, agreeably to that constitution, exercise any
arbitrary power whatever.
The next point for us to consider is, whether or no the Mahomedan constitution of India
authorizes that power. The gentleman at your Lordships' bar has thought proper to say, that
it will be happy for India, (though soon after he tells you it is an happiness they can never