It was not easy, on the mere face of his offer, to give an ill turn to it.  The act, as it stands on the Minute, is not only disinterested, but generous and public-spirited.  If Mr. Hastings apprehended misrepresentation from Mr. Francis, or from any other person, your Committee conceive that he did not employ proper means for defeating the ill designs of his adversaries.  On the contrary, the course he has taken in his letter to the Court of Directors is calculated to excite doubts and suspicions in minds the most favorably disposed to him.  Some degree of ostentation is not extremely blamable at a time when a man advances largely from his private fortune towards the public service.  It is human infirmity at the worst, and only detracts something from the lustre of an action in itself meritorious.  The kind of ostentation which is criminal, and criminal only because it is fraudulent, is where a person makes a show of giving when in reality he does not give.  This imposition is criminal more or less according to the circumstances.  But if the money received to furnish such a pretended gift is taken from any third person without right to take it, a new guilt, and guilt of a much worse quality and description, is incurred.  The Governor-General, in order to keep clear of ostentation, on the 29th of November, 1780, declares, that the sum of money which he offered on the 26th of the preceding June as his own was not his own, and that he had no right to it.  Clearing himself of vanity, he convicts himself of deceit, and of injustice.

The other object of this brief apology was to clear himself of corrupt influence.  Of all ostentation he stands completely acquitted in the month of November, however he might have been faulty in that respect in the month of June; but with regard to the other part of the apprehended charge, namely, corrupt influence, he gives no satisfactory solution.  A great sum of money “not his own,”—­money to which “he had no right,”—­money which came into his possession “by whatever means":—­if this be not money obtained by corrupt influence, or by something worse, that is, by violence or terror, it will be difficult to fix upon circumstances which can furnish a presumption of unjustifiable use of power and influence in the acquisition of profit.  The last part of the apology, that he had converted this money ("which he had no right to receive”) to the Company’s use, so far as your Committee can discover, does nowhere appear.  He speaks, in the Minute of the 26th of June, as having then actually deposited it for the Company’s service; in the letter of November he says that he converted it to the Company’s property:  but there is no trace in the Company’s books of its being ever brought to their credit in the expenditure for any specific service, even if any such entry and expenditure could justify him in taking money which he had by his own confession, “no right to receive.”