Mr. Hastings took the money with a view to apply it to the Company’s service.  How?  To pay his own contingent bills.  “Everything that I do,” says he, “and all the money I squander, is all for the Company’s benefit.  As to particulars of accounts, never look into them; they are given you upon honor.  Let me take this bribe:  it costs you nothing to be just or generous.  I take the bribe:  you sanctify it.”  But in every transaction of Mr. Hastings, where we have got a name, there we have got a crime.  Nobkissin gave him the money, and did not take his bond, I believe, for it; but Nobkissin, we find, immediately afterwards enters upon the stewardship or management of one of the most considerable districts in Bengal.  We know very well, and shall prove to your Lordships, in what manner such men rack such districts, and exact from the inhabitants the money to repay themselves for the bribes which had been taken from them.  These bribes are taken under a pretence of the Company’s service, but sooner or later they fall upon the Company’s treasury.  And we shall prove that Nobkissin, within a year from the time when he gave this bribe, had fallen into arrears to the Company, as their steward, to the amount of a sum the very interest of which, according to the rate of interest in that country, amounted to more than this bribe, taken, as was pretended, for the Company’s service.  Such are the consequences of a banian’s generosity, and of Mr. Hastings’s gratitude, so far as the interest of the country is concerned; and this is a good way to pay Mr. Hastings’s contingent accounts.  But this is not all:  a most detestable villain is sent up into the country to take the management of it, and the fortunes of all the great families in it are given entirely into his power.  This is the way by which the Company are to keep their own servants from falling into “the extremity of private want.”  And the Company itself, in this pretended saving to their treasury by the taking of bribes, lose more than the amount of the bribes received.  Wherever a bribe is given on one hand, there is a balance accruing on the other.  No man, who had any share in the management of the Company’s revenues, ever gave a bribe, who did not either extort the full amount of it from the country, or else fall in balance to the Company to that amount, and frequently both.  In short, Mr. Hastings never was guilty of corruption, that blood and rapine did not follow; he never took a bribe, pretended to be for their benefit, but the Company’s treasury was proportionably exhausted by it.

And now was this scandalous and ruinous traffic in bribes brought to light by the Court of Directors?  No:  we got it in the House of Commons.  These bribes appear to have been taken at various times and upon various occasions; and it was not till his return from Patna, in February, 1782, that the first communication of any of them was made to the Court of Directors.  Upon the receipt of this letter, the Court of Directors