During the whole day of that deliberation things wore a decided face.  Mr. Hastings stood to his principles in their full extent, and seemed resolved upon unqualified disobedience.  But as the debate was adjourned to the day following, time was given for expedients; and such an expedient was hit upon by Mr. Hastings as will, no doubt, be unexpected by the House; but it serves to throw new lights upon the motives of all his struggles with the authority of the legislature.

The next day the Council met upon the adjournment.  Then Mr. Hastings proposed, as a compromise, a division of the object in question.  One half was to be surrendered to the authority of the Court of Directors, the other was reserved for his dignity.  But the choice he made of his own share in this partition is very worthy of notice.  He had taken his sole ground of objection against Mr. Bristow on the supposed ill effect that such an appointment would have on the minds of the Indian powers.  He said, “that these powers could have no dependence on his fulfilling his engagements, or maintaining the faith of treaties which he might offer for their acceptance, if they saw him treated with such contempt.”  Mr. Bristow’s appearing in a political character was the whole of his complaint; yet, when he comes to a voluntary distribution of the duties of the office, he gives Mr. Bristow those very political negotiations of which but the day before he had in such strong terms declared him personally incapable, whose appointment he considered to be fatal to those negotiations, and which he then spoke of as a measure in itself such as the bitterest adversary to Great Britain would have proposed.  But having thus yielded his whole ground of ostensible objection, he reserved to his own appointment the entire management of the pecuniary trust.  Accordingly he named Mr. Bristow for the former, and Mr. Middleton for the latter.  On his own principles he ought to have done the very reverse.  On every justifiable principle he ought to have done so; for a servant who for a long time resists the orders of his masters, and when he reluctantly gives way obeys them by halves, ought to be remarkably careful to make his actions correspond with his words, and to put himself out of all suspicion with regard to the purity of his motives.  It was possible that the political reasons, which were solely assigned against Mr. Bristow’s appointment, might have been the real motives of Mr. Hastings’s opposition.  But these he totally abandons, and holds fast to the pecuniary department.  Now, as it is notorious that most of the abuses of India grow out of money-dealing, it was peculiarly unfit for a servant, delicate with regard to his reputation, to require a personal and confidential agent in a situation merely official, in which secrecy and personal connections could be of no possible use, and could only serve to excite distrust.  Matters of account cannot be made too public; and it is not the