Edmund Burke

We have not chosen to bring before you a poor, puny, trembling delinquent, misled, perhaps, by those who ought to have taught him better, but who have afterwards oppressed him by their power, as they had first corrupted him by their…

His offences are, not in formal, technical language, but in reality, in substance and effect, high crimes and high misdemeanors.

They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice which are our rule and our birthright.

Hastings are crimes not only in themselves, but aggravated by being crimes of contumacy.

We urge no crimes that were not crimes of forethought.

Let everything that can be pleaded on the ground of surprise or error, upon those grounds be pleaded with success: we give up the whole of those predicaments.

If we do not plant his crimes in those vices which the breast of man is made to abhor, and the spirit of all laws, human and divine, to interdict, we desire no longer to be heard upon this occasion.

But the crimes which we charge in these articles are not lapses, defects, errors of common human frailty, which, as we know and feel, we can allow for.

We know, as we are to be served by men, that the persons who serve us must be tried as men, and with a very large allowance indeed to human infirmity and human error.

On that review, we are warranted to assert that the crimes with which we charge the prisoner at the bar are substantial crimes,--that they are no errors or mistakes, such as wise and good men might possibly fall into, which may even…

We have chosen (we trust it will so appear to your Lordships) such a crime, and such a criminal, and such a body of evidence, and such a mode of process, as would have recommended this course of justice to posterity, even if it had not…

Having, therefore, resolved upon the last and only resource, a penal prosecution, it was our next business to act in a manner worthy of our long deliberation.

We found it was impossible to evade painful duty without betraying a sacred trust.

To have forborne longer would not have been patience, but collusion; it would have been participation with guilt; it would have been to make ourselves accomplices with the criminal.

It ought, therefore, my Lords, to become our common care to guard this your precious deposit, rare in its use, but powerful in its effect, with a religious vigilance, and never to suffer it to be either discredited or antiquated.

It is here that those who by the abuse of power have violated the spirit of law can never hope for protection from any of its forms; it is here that those who have refused to conform themselves to its perfections can never hope to escape…

It is by this tribunal that statesmen who abuse their power are accused by statesmen and tried by statesmen, not upon the niceties of a narrow jurisprudence, but upon the enlarged and solid principles of state morality.

Other constitutions are satisfied with making good subjects; this is a security for good governors.

It is by this process that magistracy, which tries and controls all other things, is itself tried and controlled.

For this process is the cement which binds the whole together; this is the individuating principle that makes England what England is.

And if the Constitution should be deprived, I do not mean in form, but virtually, of this resource, it is virtually deprived of everything else that is valuable in it.

For we must not deceive ourselves: whatever does not stand with credit cannot stand long.

The future use and the whole effect, if not the very existence, of the process of an impeachment of high crimes and misdemeanors before the peers of this kingdom upon the charge of the Commons will very much be decided by your judgment in…

It is not only the interest of India, now the most considerable part of the British empire, which is concerned, but the credit and honor of the British nation itself will be decided by this decision.

It will take its perpetual tenor, it will receive its final impression, from the stamp of this very hour.