to repeat the words I made use of on a former occasion, extortion is the assessor, in which fraud is the treasurer, confusion the accountant, oblivion the remembrancer.  That these are not mere words, I will exemplify as I go through the detail:  I will show you that every one of the things I have stated are truths, in fact, and that these men are bound by the condition of their recognized fidelity to Mr. Hastings to keep back his secrets, to change the accounts, to alter the items, to make him debtor or creditor at pleasure, and by that means to throw the whole system of the Company’s accounts into confusion.

I have shown the impossibility of the Company’s having intended to authorize such a revenue, much less such a constitution of it as Mr. Hastings has drawn from the very prohibitions of bribery, and such an exchequer as he has formed upon the principles I have stated.  You will not dishonor the legislature or the Company, be it what it may, by thinking that either of them could give any sanction to it.  Indeed, you will not think that such a device could ever enter into the head of any rational man.  You are, then, to judge whether it is not a device to cover guilt, to prevent detection by destroying the means of it; and at the same time your Lordships will judge whether the evidence we bring you to prove that revenue is a mere pretext be not stronger than the strange, absurd reasons which he has produced for forming this new plan of an exchequer of bribery.

My Lords, I am now going to read to you a letter in which Mr. Hastings declares his opinion upon the operation of the act, which he now has found the means, as he thinks, of evading.  My Lords, I will tell you, to save you a good deal of reading, that there was certain prize-money given by Sujah ul Dowlah to a body of the Company’s troops serving in the field,—­that this prize-money was to be distributed among them; but upon application being made to Mr. Hastings for his opinion and sanction in the distribution, Mr. Hastings at first seemed inclined to give way to it, but afterwards, upon reading and considering the act of Parliament, before he allowed the soldiery to receive this public donation, he thus describes his opinion of the operation of the act.

Extract of a Letter from Mr. Hastings to Colonel Champion, 31 August, 1774.

“Upon a reference to the new act of Parliament, I was much disappointed and sorry to find that our intentions were entirely defeated by a clause in the act, (to be in force after the 1st of August, 1774,) which divests us of the power to grant, and expressly prohibits the army to receive, the Nabob’s intended donation.  Agreeable to the positive sense of this clause, notwithstanding it is expressed individually, there is not a doubt but the army is included with all other persons in the prohibition from receiving presents or donations; a confirmation of which is, that in the clause of exceptions, wherein ’counsellors-at-law,