You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in the banian language, a painche, in English, a screw.  It is a puzzled and studied involution of a period, framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and the detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better exemplified than in this sentence:  “Neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them.”  Observe, that he says, not facts stated, but facts implied in the report.  And of what was this to be a report?  Of things which the Directors declared they did not understand.  And then the inferences which are to follow these implied facts are to follow them—­But how? With a strong probability.  If you have a mind to study this Oriental figure of rhetoric, the painche, here it is for you in its most complete perfection.  No rhetorician ever gave an example of any figure of oratory that can match this.

But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage.  First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company’s accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them.  And if I understand it at all, which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, “Why do you call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could not give you them?  I cannot give them you.  And as to the papers relating to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you may learn something from them, perhaps you may not:  I will write to Mr. Larkins for those papers, if you please.”  Now, comparing this with his other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of fraud and concealment to cover his peculation.  He tells them,—­“I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the Company’s treasury without passing through my hands.  The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December [November?], 1780.”  He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he received it:  we have found it out by other collateral means.—­“The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it.  The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind.  Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them.”—­Allowable