rather a plan of the proceeding than the direct proof of the crimes, your Lordships will hear
me with the same goodness and indulgence I have hitherto experienced,—that you will
consider, if I have detained you long, it was not with a view of exhausting my own strength,
or putting your patience to too severe a trial, but from the sense I feel that it is the most
difficult and the most complicated cause that was ever brought before any human tribunal.
Therefore I was resolved to bring the whole substantially before you. And now, if your
Lordships will permit me, I will state the method of my future proceeding, and the future
proceeding of the gentlemen assisting me.
I mean first to bring before you the crimes as they are classed, and are of the same species
and genus, and how they mutually arose from one another. I shall first show that Mr.
Hastings's crimes had root in that which is the root of all evil, I mean avarice; that avarice
and rapacity were the groundwork and foundation of all his other vicious system; that he
showed it in setting to sale the native government of the country, in setting to sale the whole
landed interest of the country, in setting to sale the British government and his own fellow-
servants, to the basest and wickedest of mankind.
I shall then show your Lordships, that, when, in consequence of such a body of corruption
and peculation, he justly dreaded the indignation of his country and the vengeance of its
laws, in order to raise himself a faction embodied by the same guilt and rewarded in the
same manner, he has, with a most abandoned profusion, thrown away the revenues of the
country to form such a faction here.
I shall next show your Lordships, that, having exhausted the resources of the Company, and
brought it to extreme difficulties within, he has looked to his external resources, as he calls
them; he has gone up into the country. I will show that he has plundered, or attempted to