This act of disobedience differs from the others in one particular which, in the opinion of your Committee, rather aggravates than extenuates the offence.  In the others, Messrs. Hastings and Barwell took the responsibility on themselves; here they held up the pretext of the country government.  However, they obtained thereby one of the objects which they appear to have systematically pursued.  As they had in the other instances shown to the British servants of the Company that the Directors were not able to protect them, here the same lesson was taught to the natives.  Whilst the matter lay between the native power and the servants, the former was considered by Mr. Hastings in the most contemptible light.  When the question was between the servants and the Court of Directors, the native power was asserted to be a self-derived, hereditary, uncontrollable authority, and encouraged to act as such.

In this manner the authority of the British legislature was at that time treated with every mark of reprobation and contempt.  But soon after a most unexpected change took place, by which the persons in whose favor the Court of Directors had in vain interposed obtained specific objects which had been refused to them; things were, however, so well contrived, that legal authority was nearly as much affronted by the apparent compliance with their orders as by the real resistance they had before met with.  After long and violent controversies, an agreement took place between Mr. Hastings and Mr. Francis.  It appears that Mr. Hastings, embarrassed with the complicated wars and ruinous expenses into which his measures had brought him, began to think of procuring peace at home.  The agreement originated in a conversation held on Christmas-Day, 1779, between Major Scott, then aide-de-camp, and now agent, to Mr. Hastings, and Mr. Ducarrel, a gentleman high in the Company’s service at Calcutta.  Mr. Scott, in consequence of this conversation, was authorized to make overtures to Mr. Francis through Mr. Ducarrel:  to declare Mr. Hastings tired of controversy; expressing his wish to have the Mahratta war entirely left to him; that there were certain points he could not give up; that he could not (for reasons he then assigned) submit to the restoration of Mr. Fowke, Mahomed Reza Khan, and Mr. Bristow; that he had not the smallest personal objection to them, and would willingly provide for them in any other line.  Mr. Francis in this treaty insisted on those very points which Mr. Hastings declared he could never give up, and that his conditions were the Company’s orders,—­that is, the restoration of the persons whom they had directed to be restored.  The event of this negotiation was, that Mr. Hastings at length submitted to Mr. Francis, and that Mr. Fowke and Mahomed Reza Khan were reinstated in their situations.