Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.

My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national justice?
Do we want a cause, my Lords? You care the cause of oppressed princes, of
undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted
kingdoms.

Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid
to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish any
other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance
enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.

My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of
Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe my Lords, that the sun, in his
beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight
than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and
barriers of nature, united by the bond of a social and moral community--all
the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and
cruelties, that are offered to all the people of India.

Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the
modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with
a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the mind's eye,
that sacred majesty of the Crown, under whose authority you sit and whose
power you exercise.

We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a situation between
majesty and subjection, between the sovereign and the subject--offering a
pledge, in that situation, for the support of the rights of the Crown and
the liberties of the people, both which extremities they touch.