If, for a further instance, I have stated that in general the service of the India Company was insufficient in legal pay or emolument and abundant in the means of illegal profit, I do not state that defect as owing to Mr.Hastings; but I state it as a fact, to show in what manner and on what pretences he did, fraudulently, corruptly, and for the purposes of his own ambition, take advantage of that defect, and, under color of reformation, make an illegal, partial, corrupt rise of emoluments to certain favored persons without regard to the interests of the service at large,--increasing rather than lessening the means of illicit emolument, as well as loading the Company with many heavy and ruinous expenses in avowed salaries and allowances.
Having requested your Lordships to keep in mind, which I trust you would do even without my taking the liberty of suggesting it to you, these necessary distinctions, I shall revert to the period at which I closed yesterday, that great and memorable period which has remotely given occasion to the trial of this day.
* * * * * My Lords, to obtain empire is common; to govern it well has been rare indeed.

To chastise the guilt of those who have been instruments of imperial sway over other nations by the high superintending justice of the sovereign state has not many striking examples among any people.
Hitherto we have not furnished our contingent to the records of honor.
We have been confounded with the herd of conquerors.

Our dominion has been a vulgar thing.

But we begin to emerge; and I hope that a severe inspection of ourselves, a purification of our own offences, a lustration of the exorbitances of our own power, is a glory reserved to this time, to this nation, and to this august tribunal.
The year 1756 is a memorable era in the history of the world: it introduced a new nation from the remotest verge of the Western world, with new manners, new customs, new institutions, new opinions, new laws, into the heart of Asia.
My Lords, if, in that part of Asia whose native regular government was then broken up,--if, at the moment when it had fallen into darkness and confusion from having become the prey and almost the sport of the ambition of its home-born grandees,--if, in that gloomy season, a star had risen from the West, that would prognosticate a better generation, and would shed down the sweet influences of order, peace, science, and security to the natives of that vexed and harassed country, we should have been covered with genuine honor.

It would have been a beautiful and noble spectacle to mankind.
Indeed, something might have been expected of the kind, when a new dominion emanated from a learned and enlightened part of the world in the most enlightened period of its existence.