“Your order for the reduction of the Nabob’s stipend was communicated to him in the month of December, 1771.  He remonstrated against it, and desired it might be again referred to the Company.  The board entirely acquiesced in his remonstrance, and the subsequent payments of his stipend were paid as before.  I might easily have availed myself of this plea.  I might have treated it as an act of the past government, with which I had no cause to interfere, and joined in asserting the impossibility of his defraying the vast expense of his court and household without it, which I could have proved by plausible arguments, drawn from the actual amount of the nizamut and bhela establishments; and both the Nabob and Begum would have liberally purchased my forbearance.  Instead of pursuing this plan, I carried your orders rigidly and literally into execution.  I undertook myself the laborious and reproachful task of limiting his charges, from an excess of his former stipend, to the sum of his reduced allowance.”

He says in another place,—­“The stoppage of the king’s tribute was an act of mine, and I have been often reproached with it.  It was certainly in my power to have continued the payment of it, and to have made my terms with the king for any part of it which I might have chosen to reserve for my own use.  He would have thanked me for the remainder.”

My Lords, I believe it is a singular thing, and what your Lordships have been very little used to, to see a man in the situation of Mr. Hastings, or in any situation like it, so ready in knowing all the resources by which sinister emolument may be made and concealed, and which, under pretences of public good, may be transferred into the pocket of him who uses those pretences.  He is resolved, if he is innocent, that his innocence shall not proceed from ignorance.  He well knows the ways of falsifying the Company’s accounts; he well knows the necessities of the natives, and he knows that by paying a part of their dues they will be ready to give an acquittance of the whole.  These are parts of Mr. Hastings’s knowledge of which your Lordships will see he also well knows how to avail himself.

But you would expect, when he reduced the allowance to sixteen lac, and took credit to himself as if he had done the thing which he professed, and had argued from his rigor and cruelty his strict and literal obedience to the Company, that he had in reality done it.  The very reverse:  for it will be in proof, that, after he had pretended to reduce the Company’s allowance, he continued it a twelvemonth from the day in which he said he had entirely executed it, to the amount of 90,000_l._, and entered a false account of the suppression in the Company’s accounts; and when he has taken a credit as under pretence of reducing that allowance, he paid 90,000_l._ more than he ought.  Can you, then, have a doubt, after all these false pretences, after all this fraud, fabrication, and suppression which he made use of, that that 90,000_l._, of which he kept no account and transmitted no account, was money given to himself for his own private use and advantage?