which he has dared to write to this board, and which I am ashamed to say we have suffered.  I desire that a copy of it may be inserted in this day’s proceedings, that it may stand before the eyes of every member of the board, when he shall give his vote upon a question for giving their confidence to a man, their servant, who has publicly insulted them, his masters, and the members of the government to whom he owes his obedience,—­who, assuming an association with the Court of Directors, and erecting himself into a tribunal, has arraigned them for disobedience of orders, passed judgment upon them, and condemned or acquitted them, as their magistrate or superior.  Let the board consider, whether a man possessed of so independent a spirit, who has already shown a contempt of their authority, who has shown himself so wretched an advocate for his own cause and negotiator for his own interest, is fit to be trusted with the guardianship of their honor, the execution of their measures, and as their confidential manager and negotiator with the princes of India.  As the motion has been unaccompanied by any reasons which should induce the board to pass their acquiescence in it, I presume the motion which preceded it, for reading the orders of the Court of Directors, was intended to serve as an argument for it, as well as an introduction to it.  The last of those was dictated the 23rd December, 1778, almost two years past.  They were dictated at a time when, I am sorry to say, the Court of Directors were in the habit of casting reproach upon my conduct and heaping indignities upon my station.”

Had the language and opinions which prevail throughout this part of the minute, as well as in all the others to which your Committee refer, been uttered suddenly and in a passion, however unprovoked, some sort of apology might be made for the Governor-General.  But when it was produced five months after the supposed offence, and then delivered in writing, which always implies the power of a greater degree of recollection and self-command, it shows how deeply the principles of disobedience had taken root in his mind, and of an assumption to himself of exorbitant powers, which he chooses to distinguish by the title of “his prerogative.”  In this also will be found an obscure hint of the cause of his disobedience, which your Committee conceive to allude to the main cause of the disorders in the government of India,—­namely, an underhand communication with Europe.