in his own hands; that, if it [the Mogul’s authority] is suffered to receive its final extinction, it is impossible to foresee what power may arise out of its ruins, or what events may be linked in the same chain of revolution with it:  but your interests may suffer by it, your reputation certainly will, as his right to our assistance has been constantly acknowledged, and by a train of consequences to which our government has not intentionally given birth, but most especially by the movements which its influence, by too near an approach, has excited, it has unfortunately become the efficient instrument of a great portion of the king’s present distresses and dangers,—­intimating (as well as the studied obscurity of his expressions will permit anything to be discerned) that his own late intrigues had been among the causes of the distresses and dangers, which by new intrigues he did pretend to remove:  and he did conclude this part of his letter with some loose general expressions of his caution not to affect the Company’s interests or revenues by any measures he might at that time take.

XIV.  That the principle, so far as the same hath been directly avowed, of the said proceedings at the Mogul’s court, was as altogether irrational, and the pretended object as impracticable, as the means taken in pursuit of it were fraudulent and dishonorable, namely, the restoration of the Mogul in some degree to the dignity of his situation, and to his free agency in the conduct of his affairs.  For the said Hastings, at the very time in which he did with the greatest apparent earnestness urge the purpose which he pretended to have in view with regard to the dignity and liberty of the Mogul emperor, did represent him as a person wholly disqualified, and even indisposed, to take any active part whatsoever in the conduct of his own affairs, and that any attempt for that purpose would be utterly impracticable; and this he hath stated to the Court of Directors as a matter of public notoriety, in his said letter of the 16th of June, 1784, in the following emphatical and decisive terms.

“You need not be told the character of the king, whose inertness, and the habit of long-suffering, has debased his dignity and the fortunes of his house beyond the power of retrieving either the one or the other.  Whilst his personal repose is undisturbed, he will prefer to live in the meanest state of indigence, under the rule of men whose views are bounded by avarice and the power which they derive from his authority, rather than commit any share of it to his own sons, (though his affection for them is boundless in every other respect,) from a natural jealousy, founded on the experience of a very different combination of those circumstances which once served as a temptation and example of unlawful ambition in the princes of the royal line.  His ministers, from a policy more reasonable, have constantly employed every means of influence to confirm this disposition, and to prevent his sons from having any share in the distribution of affairs, so as to have established a complete usurpation of the royal prerogative under its own sanction and patronage.”