to receive bribes.  He is not only a practitioner of bribery, but a professor, a doctor upon the subject.  His opinion is, that he might take presents or bribes to himself; he considers the penal clause which the Company attached to their prohibition, and by which all such bribes are constructively declared to be theirs, in order to recover them out of his hands, as a license to receive bribes, to extort money; and he goes with the very prohibition in his hand, the very means by which he was to be restrained, to exercise an unlimited bribery, peculation, and extortion over the unhappy natives of the country.

The moment he finds that the Company has got a scent of any one of his bribes, he comes forward and says, “To be sure, I took it as a bribe; I admit the party gave me it as a bribe:  I concealed it for a time, because I thought it was for the interest of the Company to conceal it; but I had a secret intention, in my own mind, of applying it to their service:  you shall have it; but you shall have it as I please, and when I please; and this bribe becomes sanctified the moment I think fit to apply it to your service.”  Now can it be supposed that the India Company, or that the act of Parliament, meant, by declaring that the property taken by a corrupt servant, contrary to the true intent of his covenant, was theirs, to give a license to take such property,—­and that one mode of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very covenants which were meant to prevent extortion, peculation, and corruption?  What sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited by the violation of the covenants imposed upon its own servants?  It is an odd sort of body to be so fed and so supported.  This new constitution of revenue that he has made is indeed a very singular contrivance.  It is a revenue to be collected by any officer of the Company, (for they are all alike forbidden, and all alike permitted,)—­to be collected by any person, from any person, at any time, in any proportion, by any means, and in any way he pleases; and to be accounted for, or not to be accounted for, at the pleasure of the collector, and, if applied to their use, to be applied at his discretion, and not at the discretion of his employers.  I will venture to say that such a system of revenue never was before thought of.  The next part is an exchequer, which he has formed, corresponding with it.  You will find the board of exchequer made up of officers ostensibly in the Company’s service, of their public accountant and public treasurer, whom Mr. Hastings uses as an accountant and treasurer of bribes, accountable, not to the Company, but to himself, acting in no public manner, and never acting but upon his requisition, concealing all his frauds and artifices to prevent detection and discovery.  In short, it is an exchequer in which, if I may be permitted