General of Bengal, of high crimes and misdemeanors; and their jurisdiction, for that high purpose of national justice, was unquestionably competent; but it is proper you should know the nature of this inquisitorial capacity. The Commons, in voting an impeachment, may be compared to a grand jury finding a bill of indictment for the Crown; neither the one nor the other can be supposed to proceed but upon the matter which is brought before them; neither of them can find guilt without accusation, nor the truth of accusation without evidence. When therefore we speak of the accuser or accusers of a person indicted for any crime, although the grand jury are the prosecutors in form, by giving effect to the accusation; yet in common parlance we do not consider them as the responsible authors of the prosecution. If I were to write of a most wicked indictment, found against an innocent man, which was preparing for trial, nobody who read it would conceive that I meant to stigmatize the grand jury that found the bill; but it would be inquired immediately, who was the prosecutor, and who were the witnesses on the back of it? In the same manner I mean to contend, that if this book is read with only common attention, the whole scope of it will be discovered to be this: that, in the opinion of the author, Mr. Hastings had been accused of maladministration in India, from the heat and spleen of political divisions in Parliament, and not from

any zeal for national honor or justice; that the impeachment did not originate from government, but from a faction banded against it, which, by misrepresentation and violence, had fastened it on an unwilling House of Commons; that prepossessed with this sentiment, which, however unfounded, makes no part of the present business, since the publisher is not called before you for defaming individual members of the Commons, but for a contempt of the Commons as a body, the author pursues the charges, article by article; enters into a warm and animated vindication of Mr. Hastings, by regular answers to each of them; and that, as far as the mind and soul of a man can be visible, I might almost say embodied in his writings, his intention throughout the whole volume appears to have been to charge with injustice the private accusers of Mr. Hastings, and not the House of Commons as a body, which undoubtedly rather reluctantly gave way to, than heartily adopted, the impeachment. This will be found to be the palpable scope of the book; and no man who can read English, and who, at the same time will have the candor and common sense to take up his impressions from what is written in it, instead of bringing his own along with him to the reading of it, can possibly understand it otherwise.

But it may be said, that admitting this to be the scope and design of the author, what right had

he to canvass the merits of an accusation upon the records of the Commons; more especially while it was in the course of legal procedure? This, I confess, might have been a serious question; but the Commons, as prosecutors of this information, seem to have waived or forfeited their right to ask it. Before they sent the Attorney-General into this place to punish the publication of answers to their charges, they should have recollected that their own want of circumspection in the maintenance of their privileges, and in the protection of persons accused before them, had given to the public the charges themselves, which should have been confined to their own journals. The course and practice of Parliament might warrant the printing of them for the use of their own members; but there the publication should have stopped, and all further progress been resisted by authority. If they were resolved to consider answers to their charges as a contempt of their privileges, and to punish the publication of them by such severe prosecutions, it would have well become them to have begun first with those printers who, by publishing the charges themselves throughout the whole kingdom, er rather throughout the civilized world, were anticipating the passions and judgments of the public against a subject of England upon his trial, so as to make the publication of answers to them not merely a privilege, but a debt and duty to humanity

and justice. The Commons of Great Britain claimed and exercised the privilege of questioning the innocence of Mr. Hastings by their impeachment; but as, however questioned, it was still to be presumed and protected until guilt was established by a judgment, he whom they had accused had an equal claim upon their justice, to guard him from prejudice and misrepresentation until the hour of trial.

Had the Commons, therefore, by the exercise of their high, necessary, and legal privileges, kept the public aloof from all canvass of their proceedings, by an early punishment of printers, who, without reserve or secrecy, had sent out the charges into the world from a thousand presses in every form of publication, they would then have stood upon ground to-day from whence no argument of policy or justice could have removed them; because nothing can be more incompatible with either, than appeals to the many upon subjects of judicature, which by common consent a few are appointed to determine, and which must be determined by facts and principles, which the multitude have neither leisure nor knowledge to investigate. But then let it be remembered, that it is for those who have the authority to accuse and punish, to set the example of, and to enforce this reserve, which is so necessary for the ends of justice. Courts of law therefore in England never endure the publication

of their records; and a prosecutor of an indictment would be attached for such a publication; and, upon the same principle, a defendant would be punished for anticipating the justice of his country by the publication of his defence, the public being no party to it until the tribunal appointed for its determination be open for its decision.

Gentlemen, you have a right to take judicial notice of these matters without the proof of them by witnesses; for jurors may not only, without evidence, found their verdicts on facts that are notorious, but upon what they know privately themselves, after revealing it upon oath to one another; and therefore you are always to remember, that this book was written when the charges against Mr. Hastings, to which it is an answer, were, to the knowledge of the Commons, for we cannot presume our watchmen to have been asleep, publicly hawked about in every pamphlet, magazine and newspaper in the kingdom. You well know with what a curious appetite these charges were devoured by the whole public, interesting as they were, not only from their importance, but from the merit of their composition; certainly not so intended by the honorable and excellent composer to oppress the accused, but because the commonest subjects swell into eloquence under the touch of his sublime genius. Thus by the remiss

*Edmund Burke.