Your Lordships will find in your printed Minutes who the jaghiredars
were, and what was the amount of their estates. The jaghires of which
Mr. Hastings authorized the confiscation, or what he calls a
_resumption_, appear from Mr. Purling's account, when first the forced
loan was levied upon them under his Residentship, to amount to
285,000_l._ sterling per annum; which 285,000_l._, if rated and valued
according to the different value of provisions and other necessaries of
life in that country and in England, will amount, as near as may be, to
about 600,000_l._ a year. I am within compass. Everybody conversant with
India will say it is equivalent at least to 600,000_l._ a year in
England; and what a blow such a confiscation as this would be on the
fortunes of the peers of Great Britain your Lordships will judge. I like
to see your estates as great as they are; I wish they were greater than
they are; but whatever they are, I wish, above all that they should be
perpetual. For dignity and property in this country, _Esto perpetua_
shall be my prayer this day, and the last prayer of my life. The
Commons, therefore, of Great Britain, those guardians of property, who
will not suffer the monarch they love, the government which they adore,
to levy one shilling upon the subject in any other way than the law and
statutes of this kingdom prescribe, will not suffer, nor can they bear
the idea, that any single class of people should be chosen to be the
objects of a contrary conduct, nor that even the Nabob of Oude should be
permitted to act upon such a flagitious principle. When an English
governor has substituted a power of his own instead of the legal
government of the country, as I have proved this man to have done, if he
found the prince going to do an act which would shake the property of
all the nobility of the country, he surely ought to raise his hand and
say, "You shall not make my name your sanction for such an atrocious and
abominable act as this confiscation would be."