I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the Company’s treasury without passing through my hands.  The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th November, 1780.  The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it.  The exigencies of the government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind.  Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them; but neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid which I could thus procure, nor do I know how I could have stated it, without appearing to court favor by an ostentation which I disdain, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have laid an equal claim.  I should have deemed it particularly dishonorable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them.  I was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it, which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the money to be brought directly to my own house, or to that of any person known to be in trust for me:  for these reasons I caused it to be transported immediately to the treasury.  There, you well know, Sir, it could not be received without being passed to some credit, and this could only be done by entering it as a loan or as a deposit:  the first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it.  Why the second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant:  possibly it was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed.

Although I am firmly persuaded that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were.  Though I feel their impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it.  Of this I am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the Court of Directors.  They had answered my purpose of public utility, and I had almost totally dismissed them from my remembrance.  But when fortune threw a sum