My Lords, you will observe in this most astonishing account which he gives here, that several of these sums he meant to conceal forever, even from the knowledge of the Directors.  Look back to his letter of 22d May, 1782, and his letter of the 16th of December, and in them he tells you that he might have concealed them, but that he was resolved not to conceal them; that he thought it highly dishonorable so to do; that his conscience would have been wounded, if he had done it; and that he was afraid it would be thought that this discovery was brought from him in consequence of the Parliamentary inquiries.  Here he says of a discovery which he values himself upon making voluntarily, that he is afraid it should be attributed to arise from motives of fear.  Now, at last, he tells you, from Cheltenham, at a time when he had just cause to dread the strict account to which he is called this day, first, that he cannot tell whether any one motive which he assigns, either in this letter or in the former, were his real motive or not; that he does not know whether he has not invented them since, in consequence of a train of meditation upon what he might have done or might have said; and, lastly, he says, contrary to all his former declarations, “that he had never meant nor could give the Directors the least notice of them at all, as they had answered his purpose, and he had dismissed them from his remembrance.”  “I intended,” he says, “always to keep them secret, though I have declared to you solemnly, over and over again, that I did not.  I do not care how you discovered them; I have forgotten them; I have dismissed them from my remembrance.”  Is this the way in which money is to be received and accounted for?

He then proceeds thus:—­“But when fortune threw a sum of money in my way of a magnitude which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the time I received it made me more circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprise my employers of it, which I did hastily and generally:  hastily, perhaps, to prevent the vigilance and activity of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession.  I promised to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of it; and, in the performance of my promise, I thought it consistent with it to add to the amount all the former appropriations of the same kind:  my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution which might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally attended to it, that, if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards known, I might be asked what were my motives for withholding a part of these receipts from the knowledge of the Court of Directors and informing them of the rest, it being my wish to clear up every doubt.”