XXVII.  That it appears that the said Warren Hastings, at the time that he formed his design of seizing upon the treasures of the Rajah of Benares, and of deposing him, did not believe him guilty of that premeditated project for driving the English out of India with which he afterwards thought fit to charge him, or that he was really guilty of any other great offence:  because he has caused it to be deposed, that, if the said Rajah should pay the sum of money by him exacted, “he would settle his zemindary upon him on the most eligible footing”; whereas, if he had conceived him to have entertained traitorous designs against the Company, from whom he held his tributary estate, or had been otherwise guilty of such enormous offences as to make it necessary to take extraordinary methods for coercing him, it would not have been proper for him to settle upon such a traitor and criminal the zemindary of Benares, or any other territory, upon the most eligible, or upon any other footing whatever:  whereby the said Hastings has by his own stating demonstrated that the money intended to have been exacted was not as a punishment for crimes, but that the crimes were pretended for the purpose of exacting money.

XXVIII.  That the said Warren Hastings, in order to justify the acts of violence aforesaid to the Court of Directors, did assert certain false facts, known by him to be such, and did draw from them certain false and dangerous inferences, utterly subversive of the rights of the princes and subjects dependent on the British nation in India, contrary to the principles of all just government, and highly dishonorable to that of Great Britain:  namely, that the “Rajah of Benares was not a vassal or tributary prince, and that the deeds which passed between him and the board, upon the transfer of the zemindary in 1775, were not to be understood to bear the quality and force of a treaty upon optional conditions between equal states; that the payments to be made by him were not a tribute, but a rent; and that the instruments by which his territories were conveyed to him did not differ from common grants to zemindars who were merely subjects; but that, being nothing more than a common zemindar and mere subject, and the Company holding the acknowledged rights of his former sovereign, held an absolute authority over him; that, in the known relations of zemindar to the sovereign authority, or power delegated by it, he owed a personal allegiance and an implicit and unreserved obedience to that authority, at the forfeiture of his zemindary, and even of his life and property.”  Whereas the said Hastings did well know, that, whether the payments from the Rajah were called rent or tribute, having been frequently by himself called the one and the other, and that of whatever nature the instruments by which he held might have been, he did not consider him as a common zemindar or landholder, but as far independent as a tributary prince could be:  for he did assign