situations informers against bribery and corruption, rather than to
protect the accused from any of the preliminary methods which must
indispensably be used for the purpose of detecting their guilt,--he flew
to this court, charging this Nundcomar and others with being
conspirators.

A man might be convicted as a conspirator, and yet afterwards live; he
might put the matter into other hands, and go on with his information;
nothing less than _stone-dead_ would do the business. And here happened
an odd concurrence of circumstances. Long before Nundcomar preferred his
charge, he knew that Mr. Hastings was plotting his ruin, and that for
this purpose he had used a man whom he, Nundcomar, had turned out of
doors, called Mohun Persaud. Mr. Hastings had seen papers put upon the
board, charging him with this previous plot for the destruction of
Nundcomar; and this identical person, Mohun Persaud, whom Nundcomar had
charged as Mr. Hastings's associate in plotting his ruin, was now again
brought forward as the principal evidence against him. I will not enter
(God forbid I should!) into the particulars of the subsequent trial of
Nundcomar; but you will find the marks and characters of it to be these.
You will find a close connection between Mr. Hastings and the
chief-justice, which we shall prove. We shall prove that one of the
witnesses who appeared there was a person who had been before, or has
since been, concerned with Mr. Hastings in his most iniquitous
transactions. You will find, what is very odd, that in this trial for
forgery with which this man stood charged, forgery in a private
transaction, all the persons who were witnesses or parties to it had
been, before or since, the particular friends of Mr. Hastings,--in
short, persons from that rabble with whom Mr. Hastings was concerned,
both before and since, in various transactions and negotiations of the
most criminal kind. But the law took its course. I have nothing more to