Now he has accompanied this account with another very curious one.  For when you come to look into the particulars of it, you will find there are three bonds declared to be the Company’s bonds, and which refer to the former transactions, namely, the money for which he had taken the bonds; but when you come to look at the numbers of them, you will find that one of the three bonds which he had taken as his own disappears, and another bond, of another date, and for a much larger sum, is substituted in its place, of which he had never mentioned anything whatever.  So that, taking his first account, that two thirds is his own money, then that it is all his own, in the third that it is all the Company’s money, by a fourth account, given in a paper describing the three bonds, you will find that there is one lac which he does not account for, but substitutes in its place a bond before taken as his own.  He sinks and suppresses one bond, he gives two bonds to the Company, and to supply the want of the third, which he suppresses, he brings forward a bond for another sum, of another date, which he had never mentioned before.  Here, then, you have four different accounts:  if any one of them is true, every one of the other three is totally false.  Such a system of cogging, such a system of fraud, such a system of prevarication, such a system of falsehood, never was, I believe, before exhibited in the world.

In the first place, why did he take bonds at all from the Company for the money that was their own?  I must be cautious how I charge a legal crime.  I will not charge it to be forgery, to take a bond from the Company for money which was their own.  He was employed to make out bonds for the Company, to raise money on their credit.  He pretends he lent them a sum of money, which was not his to lend:  but he gives their own money to them as his own, and takes a security for it.  I will not say that it is a forgery, but I am sure it is an offence as grievous, because it is as much a cheat as a forgery, with this addition to it, that the person so cheating is in a trust; he violates that trust, and in so doing he defrauds and falsifies the whole system of the Company’s accounts.

I have only to show what his own explanation of all these actions was, because it supersedes all observation of mine.  Hear what prevaricating guilt says for the falsehood and delusion which had been used to cover it; and see how he plunges deeper and deeper upon every occasion.  This explanation arose out of another memorable bribe, which I must now beg leave to state to your Lordships.