son, write to Mr. James Anderson to apprise the Mahratta chief, Sindia, of that event,—­“for which as he was unprepared, he desired his [the said Sindia’s] advice for his conduct on the occasion of it.”  Which method of calling for the advice of a foreign power to regulate his political conduct, instead of being regulated therein by the advice of the British Council and the standing orders of the Court of Directors, was a procedure highly criminal; and the crime is aggravated by his not communicating the said correspondence to the Council-General, as by his duty he was bound to do; but it does abundantly prove his concert with the Mahrattas in all that related to his negotiations in the Mogul court, which were carried on agreeably to their advice, and in subserviency to their views and purposes.

XVIII.  That, in consequence of the cabal begun with the Mahrattas, the said chief, Sindia, did send his “familiar and confidential ministers” to him, the said Hastings, being at Lucknow, with whom the said Hastings did hold several secret conferences, without any secretary or other assistant:  and the said Hastings hath not conveyed to the Court of Directors any minutes thereof, but hath purposely involved even the general effect and tendency of these conferences in such obscurity that it is no otherwise possible to perceive the drift and tendency of the same, but by the general scope of councils and acts relative to the politics of the Mogul and of the Mahrattas together, and by the final event of the whole, which is sufficiently visible.  For

XIX.  That the said Hastings had declared, in his said letter of the 16th June, 1784, that the Mogul’s right to our assistance had been constantly acknowledged, that the Mogul had been oppressed by the lesser Mahomedan princes in the character of his officers of state and military commanders, and he did plainly intimate that the said Mogul ought to be relieved from that servitude.  And he did, in giving an account to the Court of Directors of the conferences aforesaid, assure them that “his inclinations [the inclinations of the Mahratta chief aforesaid] were not very dissimilar from his own”; and that “neither in this nor in any other instance would he suffer himself to be drawn into measures which shall tend to weaken their connection, nor in this even to oppose his [the said chiefs] inclinations”:  the said Hastings well knowing, as in his letter to Colonel Muir of the ——­ he has confessed, that the inclinations of the said Sindia were to seize on the Mogul’s territories, and that he himself did secretly concur therein, though he did not formally insert his concurrence in the treaty with the said Mahratta chief.  It is plain, therefore, that he did all along concur with the Mahrattas in their designs against the said king and his ministers, under the treacherous pretence of supporting the authority of the former against the latter, and did contrive and effect the ruin of them all.  For, first, he did