accounts as might have been expected, he falls into a violent passion for their expecting them; he tells them it would be dangerous; and he tells them they knew who had profited by these transactions:  thus, in order to strike terror into their breasts, hinting at some frauds which they had practised or protected.  What weight this may have had with them I know not; but your Lordships will expect in vain, that Mr. Hastings, after giving four accounts, if any one of which is true, the other three must necessarily be false,—­after having thrown the Company’s accounts into confusion, and being unable to tell, as he says himself, why he did so,—­will at last give some satisfaction to the Directors, who continued, in a humble, meek way, giving him hints that he ought to do it.—­You have heard nothing yet but the consequences of their refusing to give him the present of a hundred thousand pounds, which he had taken from the Nabob.  They did right to refuse it to him; they did wrong to take it to themselves.

We now find Mr. Hastings on the river Ganges, in September, 1784,—­that Ganges whose purifying water expiates so many sins of the Gentoos, and which, one would think, would have washed Mr. Hastings’s hands a little clean of bribery, and would have rolled down its golden sands like another Pactolus.  Here we find him discovering another of his bribes.  This was a bribe taken upon totally a different principle, according to his own avowal:  it is a bribe not pretended to be received for the use of the Company,—­a bribe taken absolutely entirely for himself.  He tells them that he had taken between thirty and forty thousand pounds.  This bribe, which, like the former, he had taken without right, he tells them that he intends to apply to his own purposes, and he insists upon their sanction for so doing.  He says, he had in vain, upon a former occasion, appealed to their honor, liberality, and generosity,—­that he now appeals to their justice; and insists upon their decreeing this bribe—­which he had taken without telling them from whom, where, or on what account—­to his own use.

Your Lordships remember, that in the letter which he wrote from Patna, on the 20th of January, 1782, he there states that he was in tolerable good circumstances, and that this had arisen from his having continued long in their service.  Now, he has continued two years longer in their service, and he is reduced to beggary!  “This,” he says, “is a single example of a life spent in the accumulation of crores for your benefit, and doomed in its close to suffer the extremity of private want, and to sink in obscurity.”