of which the said Hastings himself appears to have been to that very time his sole accuser, as he hath since been his most anxious advocate:  but though he did use many endeavors to acquit Almas Ali of his intended flight, yet concerning his embezzlements and oppressions, the most important of all charges relative to that of the revenue and collection, he, the said Hastings, hath made no inquiry whatever; by which it might appear that he was not as fully guilty thereof as he had always represented him to be.  But some time after he, the said Warren Hastings, had arrived at Lucknow, in the year 1784, he suggested to the said Almas Ali Khan the advance to the Company’s use of a sum of money amounting to fifty thousand pounds or thereabouts; and the said suggested advance was (as the said Warren Hastings asserts, no witness or document of the transaction appearing) “cheerfully and without hesitation complied with, considering it as an evidence seasonably offered for the general refutation of the charges of perfidy and disloyalty”:  which practice of charging wealthy persons with treason and disloyalty, and afterwards acquitting them on the payment of a sum of money, is highly scandalous to the honor, justice, and government of Great Britain; and the offence is highly aggravated by the said Hastings’s declaration to the Court of Directors that the charges against Almas Ali Khan have been too laboriously urged against him, and carried at one time to such an excess as had nearly driven him to abandon his country “for the preservation of his life and honor,” and thus to give a “color to the charges themselves,” when he, the said Warren Hastings, did well know that he himself did consider as a crime, and did make it an article in a formal accusation against the Resident Middleton, that he did not inform him, the said Hastings, of the supposed treasons of Almas Ali Khan, and of his design to abandon the country, when he himself did most laboriously urge the charges against him, and when no attempt appears to have been made against the life of the said Almas Ali Khan except by the said Warren Hastings himself.

LXXV.  That the sum of fifty thousand pounds sterling, or thereabouts, publicly taken by the said Warren Hastings, as an advance for the use of the Company, if given as a consideration or fine, on account of the renewal for a long term of civil authority and military command, and the collection of the revenues to an immense amount, the same being at least eight hundred thousand pounds sterling yearly, was so totally inadequate to the interest granted, that it may justly be presumed it was not on that, or on any public ground or condition, that the said Hastings did delegate, out of all reach of resumption or correction, a lease of boundless power and enormous profit, for so long a term, to a known oppressor of the country.