other person, high or low, in India, ever suggested this defence, and
that it was never thought of till lately found by the learned counsel in
the English translation of the Hedaya. "God bless me!" now says Mr.
Hastings, "what ignorance have I been in all this time! I thought I was
seizing this unjustly, and that the pretence of rebellion was necessary;
but my counsel have found out a book, since published, and from it they
produce the law upon that subject, and show that the Nabob had a right
to seize upon the treasures of his mother." But are your Lordships so
ignorant--(your Lordships are not ignorant of anything)--are any men so
ignorant as not to know that in every country the common law of
distribution of the estate of an intestate amongst private individuals
is no rule with regard to the family arrangements of great princes? Is
any one ignorant, that, from the days of the first origin of the Persian
monarchy, the laws of which have become rules ever since for almost all
the monarchs of the East, the wives of great men have had, independent
of the common distribution of their goods, great sums of money and great
estates in land, one for their girdle, one for their veil, and so on,
going through the rest of their ornaments and attire,--and that they
held great estates and other effects over which the reigning monarch or
his successor had no control whatever? Indeed, my Lords, a more curious
and extraordinary species of trial than this of a question of right
never was heard of since the world began. Mr. Hastings begins with
seizing the goods of the Begums at Fyzabad, nine thousand miles from
you, and fourteen years after tries the title in an English court,
without having one person to appear for these miserable ladies. I trust
you will not suffer this mockery; I hope this last and ultimate shame
will be spared us: for I declare to God, that the defence, and the
principles of it, appear to me ten thousand times worse than the act
itself.