In the satisfaction which he had promised to give them he neither mentions the persons, the times, the occasions, or motives for any of his actions.  He adds, “I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest.”  For some purposes, he thought it necessary to use the most complicated and artful concealments; for some, he could not tell what his motives were; and for others, that it was mere carelessness.  Here is the exchequer of bribery!—­have I falsified any part of my original stating of it?—­an exchequer in which the man who ought to pay receives, the man who ought to give security takes it, the man who ought to keep an account says he has forgotten; an exchequer in which oblivion was the remembrancer; and, to sum up the whole, an exchequer into the accounts of which it was useless to inquire.  This is the manner in which the account of near two hundred thousand pounds is given to the Court of Directors.  You can learn nothing in this business that is any way distinct, except a premeditated design of a concealment of his transactions.  That is avowed.

But there is a more serious thing behind.  Who were the instruments of his concealment?  No other, my Lords, than the Company’s public accountant.  That very accountant takes the money, knowing it to be the Company’s, and that it was only pretended to be advanced by Mr. Hastings for the Company’s use.  He sees Mr. Hastings make out bonds to himself for it, and Mr. Hastings makes him enter him as creditor, when in fact he was debtor.  Thus he debauches the Company’s accountant, and makes him his confederate.  These fraudulent and corrupt acts, covered by false representations, are proved to be false not by collation with anything else, but false by a collation with themselves.  This, then, is the account, and his explanation of it; and in this insolent, saucy, careless, negligent manner, a public accountant like Mr. Hastings, a man bred up a book-keeper in the Company’s service, who ought to be exact, physically exact, in his account, has not only been vicious in his own account, but made the public accounts vicious and of no value.

But there is in this account another curious circumstance with regard to the deposit of this sum of money, to which he referred in his first paragraph of his letter of the 29th of November, 1780.  He states that this deposit was made and passed into the hands of Mr. Larkins on the 1st of June.  It did so; but it is not entered in the Company’s accounts till November following.  Now in all that intermediate space where was it? what account was there of it?  It was entirely a secret between Mr. Larkins and Mr. Hastings, without a possibility of any one discovering any particular relative to it.  Here is an account of two hundred thousand pounds received, juggled between the accountant and him, without a trace of it appearing in the Company’s books.  Some of those committees, to whom, for their diligence at least, I must say the