cruel manner. I quote them to show that no governors in the East, upon any principle of
their constitution or any good practice of their government, can lay arbitrary imposts or
receive presents. When they escape, it is probably by bribery, by corruption, by creating
factions for themselves in the seraglio, in the country, in the army, in the divan. But how
they escape such punishments is not my business to inquire; it is enough for me that the
constitution disavows them, that the princes of the country disavow them,—that they revile
them with the most horrible expressions, and inflict dreadful punishments on them, when
they are called to answer for these offences. Thus much concerning the Mahomedan laws of
Asia. That the people of Asia have no laws, rights, or liberty, is a doctrine that wickedly is
to be disseminated through this country. But I again assert, every Mahomedan government
is, by its principles, a government of law.
I shall now state, from what is known of the government of India, that it does not and
cannot delegate, as Mr. Hastings has frequently declared, the whole of its powers and
authority to him. If they are absolute, as they must be in the supreme power, they ought to
be arbitrary in none; they were, however, never absolute in any of their subordinate parts,
and I will prove it by the known provincial constitutions of Hindostan, which are all
Mahomedan, the laws of which are as clear, as explicit, and as learned as ours.
The first foundation of their law is the Koran. The next part is the Fetwah, or adjudged
cases by proper authority, well known there. The next, the written interpretations of the
principles of jurisprudence: and their books are as numerous upon the principles of
jurisprudence as in any country in Europe. The next part of their law is what they call the
Kanon,—that is, a positive rule equivalent to acts of Parliament, the law of the several
powers of the country, taken from the Greek word Καν∙ν, which was brought into their