longer; and you must be content to die under the lash of this inexorable
justice which you had exchanged for the banners of Freedom.
Lord Erskine.


CLIV.

BRITISH TYRANNY IN INDIA.

I am driven in the defence of my client, to remark, that it is mad and
preposterous to bring to the standard of justice and humanity the exercise
of a dominion founded upon violence and terror. It may and must be true
that Mr. Hastings has repeatedly offended against the rights and privileges
of Asiatic government, if he was the faithful deputy of a power which could
not maintain itself for an hour without trampling upon both. He may and
must have offended against the laws of God and nature, if he was the
faithful viceroy of an empire wrested in blood from the people to whom God
and nature had given it. He may and must have preserved that unjust
dominion over timorous and abject nations by a terrifying overbearing,
insulting superiority, If he was the faithful administrator of your
government, which, leaving no root in consent or affection no foundation in
similarity of interests--no support from any one principle which cements
men together in society, could only be upheld by alternate stratagem and
force. The unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from
the softness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by
the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up in
all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all,
they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the East would,
long since, have been lost to Great Britain, if civil skill and military
prowess had not united their efforts to support an authority--which Heaven