Mr. Hastings says, “This may come into a court of justice; it will come into a court of justice:  I reserve my defence on the occasion till it comes into a court of justice, and here I make no opposition to it.”  To this I answer, that the Company did not order him so to reserve himself, but ordered him to be an inquirer into those things.  Is it a lesson to be taught to the inferior servants of the Company, that, provided they can escape out of a court of justice by the back-doors and sally-ports of the law, by artifice of pleading, by those strict and rigorous rules of evidence which have been established for the protection of innocence, but which by them might be turned to the protection and support of guilt, that such an escape is enough for them? that an Old Bailey acquittal is enough to establish a fitness for trust? and if a man shall go acquitted out of such a court, because the judges are bound to acquit him against the conviction of their own opinion, when every man in the market-place knows that he is guilty, that he is fit for a trust?  Is it a lesson to be held out to the servants of the Company, that, upon the first inquiry which is made into corruption, and that in the highest trust, by the persons authorized to inquire into it, he uses all the powers of that trust to quash it,—­vilifying his colleagues, vilifying his accuser, abusing everybody, but never denying the charge?  His associates and colleagues, astonished at this conduct, so wholly unlike everything that had ever appeared of innocence, request him to consider a little better.  They declare they are not his accusers; they tell him they are not his judges; that they, under the orders of the Company, are making an inquiry which he ought to make.  He declares he will not make it.  Being thus driven to the wall, he says, “Why do you not form yourselves into a committee?  I won’t suffer these proceedings to go on as long as I am present.”  Mr. Hastings plainly had in view, that, if the proceedings had been before a committee, there would have been a doubt of their authenticity, as not being before a regular board; and he contended that there could be no regular board without his own presence in it:  a poor, miserable scheme for eluding this inquiry; partly by saying that it was carried on when he was not present, and partly by denying the authority of this board.

I will have nothing to do with the great question that arose upon the Governor-General’s resolution to dissolve a board, whether the board have a right to sit afterwards; it is enough that Mr. Hastings would not suffer them, as a Council, to examine into what, as a Council, they were bound to examine into.  He absolutely declared the Council dissolved, when they did not accept his committee, for which they had many good reasons, as I shall show in reply, if necessary, and which he could have no one good reason for proposing;—­he then declares the Council dissolved.  The Council, who did not think Mr. Hastings had a power to dissolve