As usual, the Court of Directors appear in their proper order in the procession.  After this third act of disobedience with regard to the same person and the same office, and after calling the proceedings unwarrantable, “in order to vindicate and uphold their own authority, and thinking it a duty incumbent on them to maintain the authority of the Court of Directors,” they again order Mr. Bristow to be reinstated, and Mr. Middleton to be recalled:  in this circle the whole moves with great regularity.

The extraordinary operations of Mr. Hastings, that soon after followed in every department which was the subject of all these acts of disobedience, have made them appear in a light peculiarly unpropitious to his cause.  It is but too probable, from his own accounts, that he meditated some strong measure, both at Benares and at Oude, at the very time of the removal of those officers.  He declares he knew that his conduct in those places was such as to lie very open to malicious representations; he must have been sensible that he was open to such representations from the beginning; he was therefore impelled by every motive which ought to influence a man of sense by no means to disturb the order which he had last established.

Of this, however, he took no care; but he was not so inattentive to the satisfaction of the sufferers, either in point of honor or of interest.  This was most strongly marked in the case of Mr. Fowke.  His reparation to that gentleman, in point of honor, is as full as possible.  Mr. Hastings “declared, that he approved his character and his conduct in office, and believed that he might depend upon his exact and literal obedience and fidelity in the execution of the functions annexed to it.”  Such is the character of the man whom Mr. Hastings a second time removed from the office to which he told the Court of Directors, in his letter of the 3rd of March, 1780, he had appointed him in conformity to their orders.  On the 14th of January, 1781, he again finds it an indispensable obligation in him to exercise powers “inherent in the constitution of his government.”  On this principle he claimed “the right of nominating the agent of his own choice to the Residence of Benares; that it is a representative situation:  that, speaking for myself alone, it may be sufficient to say, that Mr. Francis Fowke is not my agent; that I cannot give him my confidence; that, while he continues at Benares, he stands as a screen between the Rajah and this government, instead of an instrument of control; that the Rajah himself, and every chief in Hindostan, will regard it as the pledge and foundation of his independence.”  Here Mr. Hastings has got back to his old principles, where he takes post as on strong ground.  This he declares “to be his objection to Mr. Fowke, and that it is insuperable.”  The very line before this paragraph he writes of this person, to whom he could not give his confidence,