corruption, I must bring before you the business of the visitor and the
condition of the host, as stated by Mr. Hastings himself, who best knows
what he was doing. He was, then, at the old capital of Bengal at the
time of this expensive entertainment, on a business of retrenchment, and
for the establishment of a most harsh, rigorous, and oppressive economy.
He wishes the task were assigned to spirits of a less gentle kind. By
Mr. Hastings's account, he was giving daily and hourly wounds to his
humanity in depriving of their sustenance hundreds of persons of the
ancient nobility of a great fallen kingdom. Yet it was in the midst of
this galling duty, it was at that very moment of his tender sensibility,
that, from the collected morsels plucked from the famished mouths of
hundreds of decayed, indigent, and starving nobility, he gorged his
ravenous maw with 200_l._ a day for his entertainment. In the course of
all this proceeding your Lordships will not fail to observe he is never
corrupt, but he is cruel; he never dines with comfort, but where he is
sure to create a famine. He never robs from the loose superfluity of
standing greatness; he devours the fallen, the indigent, the
necessitous. His extortion is not like the generous rapacity of the
princely eagle, who snatches away the living, struggling prey; he is a
vulture, who feeds upon the prostrate, the dying, and the dead. As his
cruelty is more shocking than his corruption, so his hypocrisy has
something more frightful than his cruelty; for whilst his bloody and
rapacious hand signs proscriptions, and now sweeps away the food of the
widow and the orphan, his eyes overflow with tears, and he converts the
healing balm that bleeds from wounded humanity into a rancorous and
deadly poison to the race of man.

Well, there was an end to this tragic entertainment, this feast of
Tantalus. The few left on the pension-list, the poor remnants that had
escaped, were they paid by his administratrix and deputy, Munny Begum?