We have in part shown your Lordships what Mr. Hastings’s own manner of proceeding with regard to a public delinquent is; but at present we leave Mahomed Reza Khan where he was.  Do your Lordships think that there is no presumption of Mr. Hastings having a corrupt view in this business, and of his having put this great man, who was supposed to be of immense wealth, under contributions?  Mr. Hastings never trusted his colleagues in this proceeding; and what reason does he give?  Why, he supposed that they must be bribed by Mahomed Reza Khan.  “For,” says he, “as I did not know their characters at that time, I did not know whether Mahomed Reza Khan had not secured them to his interest by the known ways in which great men in the East secure men to their interest.”  He never trusted his colleagues with the secret; and the person that he employed to prosecute Mahomed Reza Khan was his bitter enemy, Nundcomar.  I will not go the length of saying that the circumstance of enmity disables a person from being a prosecutor; under some circumstances it renders a man incompetent to be a witness; but this I know, that the circumstance of having no other person to rely upon in a charge against any man but his enemy, and of having no other principle to go upon than what is supposed to be derived out of that enmity, must form some considerable suspicion against the proceeding.  But in this he was justified by the Company; for Nundcomar, the great rival of Mahomed Reza Khan, was in the worst situation with the Company as to his credit.  This Nundcomar’s politics in the country had been by Mr. Hastings himself, and by several persons joined with him, cruelly represented to the Company; and accordingly he stood so ill with them, by reason of Mr. Hastings’s representations and those of his predecessors, that the Company ordered and directed, that, if he could be of any use in the inquiry into Mahomed Reza Khan’s conduct, some reward should be given him suitable to his services; but they caution Mr. Hastings at the same time against giving him any trust which he might employ to the disadvantage of the Company.  Now Mr. Hastings began, before he could experience any service from him, by giving him his reward, and not the base reward of a base service, money, but every trust and power which he was prohibited from giving him.  Having turned out every one of Mahomed Reza Khan’s dependants, he filled every office, as he avows, with the creatures of Nundcomar.  Now when he uses a cruel and rigorous obedience in the case of Mahomed Reza Khan, when he breaks through the principles of his former conduct with regard to Nundcomar, when he gives him, Nundcomar, trust, whom he was cautioned not to trust, and when he gives him that reward before any service could be done,—­I say, when he does this, in violation of the Company’s orders and his own principles, it is the strongest evidence that he now found them in the situation in which they were in 1765, when bribes were notoriously taken, and that each party was mutually sold to the other, and faith kept with neither.  The situation in which Mr. Hastings thus placed himself should have been dreaded by him of all things, because he knew it was a situation in which the most outrageous corruption had taken place before.