As a proof of the extremity of the distress which reigned in the Khord Mohul, your Lordships have been told that these women must have perished through famine, if their gaolers, Captain Jaques and Major Gilpin, had not raised money upon their own credit, and supplied them with an occasional relief. And therefore, when they talk of his peculation, of his taking but a bribe here and a bribe there, see the consequences of his system of peculation, see the consequences of a usurpation which extinguishes the natural authority of the country, see the consequences of a clandestine correspondence that does not let the injuries of the country come regularly before the authorities in Oude to relieve it, consider the whole mass of crimes, and then consider the sufferings that have arisen in consequence of it.
My Lords, it was not corporal pain alone that these miserable women suffered. The unsatisfied cravings of hunger and the blows of the sepoys' bludgeons could touch only the physical part of their nature. But, my Lords, men are made of two parts,—the physical part, and the moral. The former he has in common with the brute creation. Like theirs, our corporeal pains are very limited and temporary. But the sufferings which touch our moral nature have a wider range, and are infinitely more acute, driving the sufferer sometimes to the extremities of despair and distraction. Man, in his moral nature, becomes, in his progress through life, a creature of prejudice, a creature of opinions, a creature of habits, and of sentiments growing out of them. These form our second nature, as inhabitants of the country and members of the society in which Providence has placed us. This sensibility of our moral nature is far more acute in that sex which, I may say without any compliment, forms the better and more virtuous part of mankind, and which is at the same time the least protected from the insults and outrages to which this sensibility exposes them. This is a new source of feelings, that often make corporal distress doubly felt; and it has a whole class of distresses of its own. These are the things that have gone to the heart of the Commons.
We have stated, first, the sufferings of the Begum, and, secondly, the sufferings of the two thousand women (I believe they are not fewer in number) that belong to them, and are dependent upon them, and dependent upon their well-being. We have stated to you that the Court of Directors were shocked and astonished, when they received the account of the first, before they had heard the second. We have proved they desired him to redress the former, if, upon inquiry, he found that his original suspicions concerning their conduct were ill-founded. He has declared here that he did not consider these as orders. Whether they were orders or not, could anything have been more pressing upon all the duties and all the sentiments of man than at least to do what was just,—that is, to make such an inquiry as in the result might justify his acts, or have entitled them to redress? Not one trace of inquiry or redress do we find, except we suppose, as we hear nothing after this of the famine, that Mr. Bristow, who seems to be a man of humanity, did so effectually interpose, that they should no longer depend for the safety of their honor on the bludgeons of the sepoys, by which alone it seems they were defended from the profane view of the vulgar, and which we must state as a matter of great aggravation in this case.
The counsel on the other side say that all this intelligence comes in an anonymous paper without date, transmitted from a newspaper-writer at Fyzabad. This is the contempt with which they treat this serious paper, sent to Mr. Hastings himself by official authority,—by Hoolas Roy, who was the news-writer at Fyzabad,—the person appointed to convey authentic intelligence concerning the state of it to the Resident at Lucknow. The Resident received it as such; he transmitted it to Mr. Hastings; and it was not till this hour, till the counsel were instructed (God forgive them for obeying such instructions!) to treat these things with ridicule, that we have heard this Hoolas Roy called a common news-writer of anonymous information, and the like. If the information had come in any way the least authentic, instead of coming in a manner the most authentic in which it was possible to come to Mr. Hastings, he was bound by every feeling of humanity, every principle of regard to his own honor and his employers', to see whether it was true or false; if false, to refute it; if true, to afford redress: he has done neither. Therefore we charge him with being the cause; we charge upon him the consequences, with all the aggravations attending them; and we call both upon justice and humanity for redress, as far as it can be afforded to these people, and for the severest punishments which your Lordships can inflict upon the author of these evils. If, instead of the mass of crimes that we have brought before you, this singly had been charged upon the prisoner, I will say that it is a greater crime than any man has ever been impeached for before the House of Lords, from the first records of Parliament to this hour.
I need not remind your Lordships of one particular circumstance in this cruel outrage. No excuse or pretence whatever is brought forward in its justification. With respect to the Begums, they have been charged with rebellion; but who has accused the miserable inhabitants of the Khord Mohul of rebellion, or rebellious designs? What hearsay is there, even, against them of it? No: even the persons permitted by Mr. Hastings to rob and destroy the country, and who are stated by him to have been so employed,—not one of that legion of locusts which he had sent into the country to eat up and devour the bread of its inhabitants, and who had been the cause both of the famine itself and of the inability of the Begums to struggle with it,—none of these people, I say, ventured even a hearsay about these women.
Were the sufferers few? There were eight hundred of them, besides children. Were they persons of any rank and consequence? We are told that they were persons of considerable rank and distinction, connected with and living under the protection of women of the first rank in Asia. Were they persons not deserving pity? We know that they were innocent women and children, not accused, and unsuspected, of any crime. He has taken into his head to speak contemptuously of these women of the Khord Mohul: but your Lordships will consider both descriptions generally with some respect; and where they are not objects of the highest respect, they will be objects of your compassion. Your Lordships, by your avenging justice, will rescue the name of the British government from the foulest disgrace which this man has brought upon it.
An account of these transactions, as we have proved by Mr. Holt's evidence, was regularly transmitted and made known to him. But why do I say made known to him? Do not your Lordships know that Oude was his,—that he treated it like his private estate,—that he managed it in all its concerns as if it were his private demesne,—that the Nabob dared not do a single act without him,—that he had a Resident there, nominated by himself, and forced upon the Nabob, in defiance of the Company's orders? Yet, notwithstanding all this, we do not find a trace of anything done to relieve the aggravated distresses of these unfortunate people.
These are some of the consequences of that abominable system which, in defiance of the laws of his country, Mr. Hastings established in Oude. He knew everything there; he had spies upon his regular agents, and spies again upon them. We can prove, (indeed, he has himself proved,) that, besides his correspondence with his avowed agents, Major Palmer and Major Davy, he had secret correspondence with a whole host of agents and pensioners, who did and must have informed him of every circumstance of these affairs. But if he had never been informed of it at all, the Commons contend, and very well and justly contend, that he who usurps the government of a country, who extinguishes the authority of its native sovereign, and places in it instruments of his own, and that in defiance of those whose orders he was bound to obey, is responsible for everything that was done in the country. We do charge him with these acts of delinquencies and omissions, we declare him responsible for them; and we call for your Lordships' judgment upon these outrages against humanity, as cruel perhaps as ever were suffered in any country.
My Lords, if there is a spark of manhood, if there is in your breasts the least feeling for our common humanity, and especially for the sufferings and distresses of that part of human nature which is made by its peculiar constitution more quick and sensible,—if, I say, there is a trace of this in your breasts, if you are yet alive to such feelings, it is impossible that you should not join with the Commons of Great Britain in feeling the utmost degree of indignation against the man who was the guilty cause of this accumulated distress. You see women, whom we have proved to be of respectable rank and condition, exposed to what is held to be the last of indignities in that country,—the view of a base, insulting, ridiculing, or perhaps vainly pitying populace. You have before you the first women in Asia, who consider their honor as joined with that of these people, weeping and bewailing the calamities of their house. You have seen that in this misery and distress the sons of the Nabob were involved, and that two of them were wounded in an attempt to escape: and yet this man has had the impudence to declare his doubts of the Nabob's having had any children in the place, though the account of what was going on had been regularly transmitted to him. After this, what is there in his conduct that we can wonder at?