Yet he says, “If you call upon me in a Chancery way, or by Common Law, I really will abdicate all forms, and give you some account.”  In consequence of this the Company did demand from him an account, regularly, and as fully and formally as if they had demanded it in a court of justice.  He positively refused to give them any account whatever; and they have never, to this very day in which we speak, had any account that is at all clear or satisfactory.  Your Lordships will see, as I go through this scene of fraud, falsification, iniquity, and prevarication, that, in defiance of his promise, which promise they quote upon him over and over again, he has never given them any account of this matter.

He goes on to say (and the threat is indeed alarming) that by calling him to account they may provoke him—­to what?  “To appropriate,” he says, “to my own use the sums which I have already passed to your credit, by the unworthy and, pardon me, if I add, dangerous, reflections which you have passed upon me for the first communication of this kind.”  They passed no reflections:  they said they would neither praise nor blame him, but pressed him for an account of a matter which they could not understand:  and I believe your Lordships understand it no more than they, for it is not in the compass of human understanding to conceive or comprehend it.  Instead of an account of it, he dares to threaten them:  “I may be tempted, if you should provoke me, not to be an honest man,—­to falsify your account a second time, and to reclaim those sums which I have passed to your credit,—­to alter the account again, by the assistance of Mr. Larkins.”  What a dreadful declaration is this of his dominion over the public accounts, and of his power of altering them! a declaration, that, having first falsified those accounts in order to deceive them, and afterwards having told them of this falsification in order to gain credit with them, if they provoke him, he shall take back the money he had carried to their account, and make them his debtors for it!  He fairly avows the dominion he has over the Company’s accounts; and therefore, when he shall hereafter plead the accounts, we shall be able to rebut that evidence, and say, “The Company’s accounts are corrupted by you, through your agent, Mr. Larkins; and we give no credit to them, because you not only told the Company you could do so, but we can prove that you have actually done it.”  What a strange medley of evasion, pretended discovery, real concealment, fraud, and prevarication appears in every part of this letter!

But admitting this letter to have been written upon the 22d of May, and kept back to the 16th of December, you would imagine that during all that interval of time he would have prepared himself to give some light, some illustration of these dark and mysterious transactions, which carried fraud upon the very face of them.  Did he do so?  Not at all.  Upon the 16th of December, instead of giving them some such clear