with a color for permitting him to recall the Company’s
Resident, and to exercise the whole powers of the Company
in his own person, without any check whatsoever, or
witness of his proceedings, except the persons of
his own private choice, make the express and positive
engagement aforesaid, which, if understood of a real
and substantial discharge of debt for the relief of
the total of the Company’s finances, was grossly
fallacious: because at the very time he must
have been perfectly sensible, that, in the then state
of the revenues and country of Oude, (which are in
effect the Company’s revenues and the Company’s
country,) the debt or pretended debt aforesaid, asserted
to be about five hundred thousand pounds, or thereabouts,
could not be paid without contracting another debt
at an usurious interest, without encroaching on the
necessary establishments or on private property or
on the pay of the army, or without grievous oppression
of the country, or all these together. And it
doth appear that one hundred thousand pounds towards
the said payment of debts was borrowed at Calcutta
by the Nabob’s agent there, but at what interest
is not known; it appears also that other sums were
borrowed for arrear of the interest, on which forty
thousand pounds sterling appears in the Company’s
claims for the current year, and that various deductions
were made from the jaghires restored to the Begums,
as well as other parts of the Nabob’s family;
and it did and doth appear that an arrear is still
due to the old and new brigade,—but whether
the same be growing or not doth not appear: yet
he hath not hesitated to assert that he had “provided
for the complete discharge, in one year,
of a debt contracted by the accumulation of many,
and from a country whose resources have been wasted
and dissipated by three successive years of drought
and one of anarchy.” But the said Hastings
never did even realize the payments to be made in
the first year, (as he confesses in the said letter,)
except by an anticipation of the second; and though
he states in his letter aforesaid the following facts
and engagements, that is to say, “that a
recovery of so large a part of your property [the
Company’s] will afford a seasonable and substantial
relief to the necessities of your government, and
enable it (for such is my confident hope) to begin
on the reduction of your debt at interest before
the conclusion of this year (I mean the year of this
computation).” Whereas the said Warren
Hastings did apply the whole produce of the revenue
to the mere pay of some part of the British army in
Oude; and did not mention in his correspondence that
he had remitted any money whatsoever to Calcutta,
nor to any other place, (except the fifty thousand
pounds taken from Almas Ali Khan, and said to be remitted
to Surat,) for the said “substantial relief,”
in consequence of the said pretended “recovery
of property,”—admitting that it had
been suggested to him, and not by him denied, that