have made the discovery.  And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to the present age and posterity, will be their use, that, if we pursue them with the vigor which the great trust justly imposed upon us demands, and if your Lordships do firmly administer justice upon this man’s frauds, you will at once put an end to those frauds and prevarications forever.  Your Lordships will see, that, in this inquiry, it is the diligence of the House of Commons, which he has the audacity to call malice, that has discovered and brought to light the frauds which we shall be able to prove against him.

I will now read to your Lordships an extract from that stuff, called a defence, which he has either written himself or somebody else has written for him, and which he owns or disclaims, just as he pleases, when, under the slow tortures of a Parliamentary impeachment, he discovered at length from whom he got this last bribe.

“The last part of the charge states, that, in my letter to the Court of Directors of the 21st February, 1784, I have confessed to have received another sum of money, the amount of which is not declared, but which, from the application of it, could not be less than thirty-four thousand pounds sterling, &c.  In the year 1783, when I was actually in want of a sum of money for my private expenses, owing to the Company not having at that time sufficient cash in their treasury to pay my salary, I borrowed three lacs of rupees of Rajah Nobkissin, an inhabitant of Calcutta, whom I desired to call upon me with a bond properly filled up.  He did so; but at the time I was going to execute it he entreated I would rather accept the money than execute the bond.  I neither accepted the offer nor refused it; and my determination upon it remained suspended between the alternative of keeping the money, as a loan to be repaid, and of taking it, and applying it, as I had done other sums, to the Company’s use.  And there the matter rested till I undertook my journey to Lucknow, when I determined to accept the money for the Company’s use; and these were my motives.  Having made disbursements from my own cash for services, which, though required to enable me to execute the duties of my station, I had hitherto omitted to enter into my public accounts, I resolved to reimburse myself in a mode most suitable to the situation of the Company’s affairs, by charging these disbursements in my durbar accounts of the present year, and crediting them by a sum privately received, which was this of Nobkissin’s.  If my claim on the Company were not founded in justice, and bona fide due, my acceptance of three lacs of rupees from Nobkissin by no means precludes them from recovering that sum from me.  No member of this Honorable House suspects me, I hope, of the meanness and guilt of presenting false accounts.”