Despotic governments are jealous, and the subjects prone to rebellion.

This very proneness of the subject to shake off his allegiance exposes him to continual danger from his sovereign's jealousy, and this is consequent on the political state of Hindostanic governments." He lays it down as a rule, that despotism is the genuine constitution of India, that a disposition to rebellion in the subject or dependent prince is the necessary effect of this despotism, and that jealousy and its consequences naturally arise on the part of the sovereign,--that the government is everything, and the subject nothing,--that the great landed men are in a mean and depraved state, and subject to many evils.
Such a state of things, if true, would warrant conclusions directly opposite to those which Mr.Hastings means to draw from them, both argumentatively and practically, first to influence his conduct, and then to bottom his defence of it.
Perhaps you will imagine that the man who avows these principles of arbitrary government, and pleads them as the justification of acts which nothing else can justify, is of opinion that they are on the whole good for the people over whom they are exercised.

The very reverse.

He mentions them as horrible things, tending to inflict on the people a thousand evils, and to bring on the ruler a continual train of dangers.
Yet he states, that your acquisitions in India will be a detriment instead of an advantage, if you destroy arbitrary power, unless you can reduce all the religious establishments, all the civil institutions, and tenures of land, into one uniform mass,--that is, unless by acts of arbitrary power you extinguish all the laws, rights, and religious principles of the people, and force them to an uniformity, and on that uniformity build a system of arbitrary power.
But nothing is more false than that despotism is the constitution of any country in Asia that we are acquainted with.

It is certainly not true of any Mahomedan constitution.