But, my Lords, he shall not escape so. It is in your minutes, that so
far was the Nabob from wishing to save the new exceptionable grants,
that, at the time of the forced loan I have mentioned, and also when the
resumption was proposed, he was perfectly willing to give up every one
of them, and desired only that his mother, his uncles, and his
relations, with other individuals, the prime of the Mahometan nobility
of that country, should be spared. Is it not enough that this poor
Nabob, this wretched prince, is made a slave to the man now standing at
your bar, that he is made by him a shame and a scandal to his family,
his race, and his country, but he must be cruelly aspersed, and have
faults and crimes attributed to him that do not belong to him? I know
nothing of his private character and conduct: Mr. Hastings, who deals in
scandalous anecdotes, knows them: but I take it upon the face of Mr.
Purling's assertion, and I say, that the Nabob would have consented to
an arbitrary taxation of the jaghires, and would have given up to
absolute confiscation every man except those honorable persons I have
mentioned.

The prisoner himself has called Mr. Wombwell to prove the names of those
infamous persons with a partiality for whom Mr. Hastings has aspersed
the Nabob, in order to lay the ground for the destruction of his family.
They amount to only six in number; and when we come to examine these
six, we find that their jaghires were perfectly contemptible. The list
of the other jaghiredars, your Lordships see, fills up pages; and the
amount of their incomes I have already stated. Your Lordships now see
how inconsiderable, both in number and amount, were the culpable
jaghires, in the destruction of which he has involved the greater number
and the meritorious. You see that the Nabob never did propose any
exemption of the former at any time; that this was a slander and a
calumny on that unhappy man, in order to defend the violent acts of the