XII.  That the said Warren Hastings, at the time he gave his orders as aforesaid for arresting the said Mahomed Reza Khan, did not take any measures to compel the appearance of any other persons as witnesses,—­declaring it as his opinion, “that there would be little need of violence to obtain such intelligence as they could give against their former master, when his authority is taken from him”; but he did afterwards, in excuse for the long detention and imprisonment of the said Mahomed Reza Khan, without any proofs having been obtained of his guilt, or measures taken to bring him to a trial, assure the Directors, in direct contradiction to his former declaration, “that the influence of Mahomed Reza Khan still prevailed generally throughout the country, in the Nabob’s household, and at the capital, and was scarcely affected by his present disgrace,”—­notwithstanding, as he, the said Hastings, doth confess, he had used his utmost endeavors “to break that influence, by removing his dependants, and putting the direction of all the affairs that had been committed to his care into the hands of the most powerful or active of his enemies; that he depended on the activity of their hatred to Mahomed Reza Khan, incited by the expectation of rewards, for investigating the conduct of the latter; that with this the institution of the new dewanny coincided; and that the same principle had guided him in the choice of Munny Begum and Rajah Gourdas,—­the former for the chief administration, the latter” (the son of Nundcomar, and a mere instrument in the hands of his father) “for the dewanny of the Nabob’s household,—­both the declared enemies of Mahomed Reza Khan.”

XIII.  That, although it might be true that enemies will become the most active prosecutors, and as such may, though under much guard and many precautions, be used even as witnesses, and that it ought not to be an exception, supposing their character and capacity otherwise good, to the appointing them to power, yet to advance persons to power on the ground not of their honor and integrity, which might have produced the enmity of bad men, but merely for the enmity itself, without any reference whatsoever to a laudable cause, and even with a declared ill opinion of the morals of one of the party, such as was actually delivered in the said letter by him, the said Hastings, of Nundcomar, (and which time has shown he might also on good ground have conceived of others,) was, in the circumstances of a criminal inquiry, a motive highly disgraceful to the honor of government, and destructive of impartial justice, by holding out the greatest of all possible temptation to false accusation, to corrupt and factious conspiracies, to perjury, and to every species of injustice and oppression.