and rank:  but he allows that he has competence.  Your Lordships will see afterwards how miserably his hopes were disappointed:  for the Court of Directors, receiving this letter from Mr. Hastings, did declare, that they could not give it to him, because the act had ordered that “no fees of office, perquisites, emoluments, or advantages whatsoever, should be accepted, received, or taken by such Governor-General and Council, or any of them, in any manner or on any account or pretence whatsoever”; “and as the same act further directs, ’that no Governor-General, or any of the Council, shall directly take, accept, or receive, of or from any person or persons, in any manner or on any account whatsoever, any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise, or any promise or engagement for any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward,’ we cannot, were we so inclined, decree the amount of this present to the Governor-General.  And it is further enacted, ’that any such present, gift, gratuity, donation, or reward, accepted, taken, or received, shall be deemed and construed to have been received to and for the sole use of the Company.’” And therefore they resolved, most unjustly and most wickedly, to keep it to themselves.  The act made it in the first instance the property of the Company, and they would not give it him.  And one should think this, with his own former construction of the act, would have made him cautious of taking bribes.  You have seen what weight it had with him to stop the course of bribes which he was in such a career of taking in every place and with both hands.

Your Lordships have now before you this hundred thousand pounds, disclosed in a letter from Patna, dated the 20th January, 1782.  You find mystery and concealment in every one of Mr. Hastings’s discoveries.  For (which is a curious part of it) this letter was not sent to the Court of Directors in their packet regularly, but transmitted by Major Fairfax, one of his agents, to Major Scott, another of his agents, to be delivered to the Company.  Why was this done?  Your Lordships will judge, from that circuitous mode of transmission, whether he did not thereby intend to leave some discretion in his agent to divulge it or not.  We are told he did not; but your Lordships will believe that or not, according to the nature of the fact.  If he had been anxious to make this discovery to the Directors, the regular way would have been to send his letter to the Directors immediately in the packet:  but he sent it in a box to an agent; and that agent, upon due discretion, conveyed it to the Court of Directors.  Here, however, he tells you nothing about the persons from whom he received this money, any more than he had done respecting the two former sums.