the said Warren Hastings would have been guilty of very criminal perfidy, if he had simply neglected to interfere as a guaranty against a demand thus plainly contrary to the faith of treaty, so he aggravated the guilt of his perfidy in the most atrocious degree by being himself the first mover and instigator of that injustice, which he was bound by so many ties on himself, the Company, and the nation, not only not to promote, but, by every exertion of authority, influence, and power, to control, to divert, or to resist.

II.  That the answer of Fyzoola Khan to the Vizier did represent, with many expressions of deference, duty, and allegiance, that the whole force allowed him was but “five thousand men,” and that “these consisted of two thousand horse and three thousand foot; which,” he adds, “in consequence of our intimate connection, are equally yours and the Company’s”:  though he does subsequently intimate, that “the three thousand foot are for the management of the concerns of his jaghire, and without them the collections can never be made in time.”

That, on the communication of the said answer to the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, he, the said Hastings, (who, as the Council now consisted only of himself and Edward Wheler, Esquire, “united in his own person all the powers of government,”) was not induced to relax from his unjust purpose, but did proceed with new violence to record, that “the Nabob Fyzoola Khan had evaded the performance of his part of the treaty between the late Nabob Sujah ul Dowlah and him, to which the Honorable Company were guaranties, and upon which he was lately summoned to furnish the stipulated number of troops, which he is obliged to furnish on the condition by which he holds the jaghire granted to him.”

That, by the vague and indefinite term of evasion, the said Warren Hastings did introduce a loose and arbitrary principle of interpreting formal engagements, which ought to be regarded, more especially by guaranties, ill a sense the most literally scrupulous and precise.

That he charged with such evasion a moderate, humble, and submissive representation on a point which would have warranted a peremptory refusal and a positive remonstrance; and that in consequence of the said imputed evasion he indicated a disposition to attach such a forfeiture as in justice could only have followed from a gross breach of treaty,—­though the said Hastings did not then pretend any actual infringement even of the least among the conditions to which, in the name of the Company, he, the said Hastings, was the executive guaranty.

III.  That, however “the number of troops stipulated by treaty may have been understood,” at the period of the original demand, “to be five thousand horse,” yet the said Warren Hastings, at the time when he recorded the supposed evasion of Fyzoola Khan’s answer to the said demand, could not be unacquainted with the express words of the stipulation, as a letter of the Vizier, inserted