he has written a letter to the chairman of that court, professedly in answer to their letter above mentioned, but in fact giving no explanation or satisfaction whatsoever on the points which they had declared to be unintelligible.  That the terms of his letter are ambiguous and obscure, such as a guilty man might have recourse to in order to cover his guilt, but such as no innocent man, from whom nothing was required but to clear his innocence by giving plain answers to plain questions, could possibly have made use of.  That in his letter of the 11th of July, 1785, he says, “that he has been kindly apprised that the information required as above was yet expected from him:  that the submission which his respect would have enjoined him to pay to the command imposed on him was lost to his recollection, perhaps from the stronger impression which the first and distant perusal of it had left on his mind that it was rather intended as a reprehension for something which had given offence in his report of the original transaction than as expressive of any want of a further elucidation of it."[2]

That the said Warren Hastings, in affecting to doubt whether the information expressly required of him by his employers was expected or not, has endeavored to justify a criminal delay and evasion in giving it.  That, considering the importance of the subject, and the recent date of the command, it is not possible that it could be lost to his recollection; much less is it possible that he could have understood the specific demand of an answer to specific questions to be intended only as a reprehension for a former offence, viz., the offence of withholding from the Directors that very explanation which he ought to have given in the first instance.  That the said Warren Hastings, in his answer to the said questions, cautiously avoids affirming or denying anything in clear, positive terms, and professes to recollect nothing with absolute certainty.  That he has not, even now, informed the Directors of the name of any one person from whom any part of the money in question was received, nor what was the motive of any one person for giving the same.  That he has, indeed, declared, that his motive for lending to the Company, or depositing in their treasury in his own name, money which he has in other places declared to be their property, was to avoid ostentation, and that lending the money was the least liable to reflection; yet, when he has stated these and other conjectural motives for his own conduct, he declares he will not affirm, though he is firmly persuaded, that those were his sentiments on the occasion.  That of one thing only the said Warren Hastings declares he is certain, viz., “that it was his design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the Court of Directors, but that, when fortune threw a sum in his way of a magnitude