and this will, I believe, be thought a clear and fair way of proceeding.  Your Lordships will then judge whether Mr. Hastings’s conduct at the time, his resisting an inquiry, preventing his servant appearing as an evidence, discountenancing and discouraging his colleagues, raising every obstruction to the prosecution, dissolving the Council, preventing evidence and destroying it as far as lay in his power by collateral means, be not also such presumptive proofs as give double force to all the positive proof we produce against him.

The lac and a half, I know, he means to support upon the custom of entertainment; and your Lordships will judge whether or not a man who was ordered and had covenanted never to take more than 400_l._ could take 16,000_l._ under color of an entertainment.  That which he intends to produce as a justification we charge, and your Lordships and the world will think, to be the heaviest aggravation of his crime.  And after explaining to your Lordships the circumstances under which this justification is made, and leaving a just impression of them upon your minds, I shall beg your Lordships’ indulgence to finish this member of the business to-morrow.

It is stated and entered in the account, that an entertainment was provided for Mr. Hastings at the rate of 200_l._ a day.  He stayed at Moorshedabad for near three months; and thus you see that visits from Mr. Hastings are pretty expensive things:  it is at the rate of 73,000_l._ a year for his entertainment.  We find that Mr. Middleton, an English gentleman who was with him, received likewise (whether under the same pretence I know not, and it does not signify) another sum equal to it; and if these two gentlemen had stayed in that country a year, their several allowances would have been 146,000_l._ out of the Nabob’s allowance of 160,000_l._ a year:  they would have eat up nearly the whole of it.  And do you wonder, my Lords, that such guests and such hosts are difficult to be divided?  Do you wonder that such visits, when so well paid for and well provided for, were naturally long?  There is hardly a prince in Europe who would give to another prince of Europe from his royal hospitality what was given upon this occasion to Mr. Hastings.

Let us now see what was Mr. Hastings’s business during this long protracted visit.  First, he tells you that he came there to reduce all the state and dignity of the Nabob.  He tells you that he felt no compunction in reducing that state; that the elephants, the menagerie, the stables, all went without mercy, and consequently all the persons concerned in them were dismissed also.  When he came to the abolition of the pensions, he says,—­“I proceeded with great pain, from the reflection that I was the instrument in depriving whole families, all at once, of their bread, and reducing them to a state of penury:  convinced of the necessity of the measure, I endeavored to execute it with great impartiality.”  Here he states the work he was employed in, when he