well known to your Lordships and the world.  This agent, Major Scott, who I believe was here prior to the time of Major Fairfax’s arrival in the character of an agent, and for the very same purposes, was called before the Committee, and examined, point by point, article by article, upon all that obscure enumeration of bribes which the Court of Directors declare they did not understand; but he declared that he could speak nothing with regard to any of these transactions, and that he had got no instructions to explain any part of them.  There was but one circumstance which in the course of his examination we drew from him,—­namely, that one of these articles, entered in the account of the 22d of May as a deposit, had been received from Mr. Hastings as a bribe from Cheyt Sing.  He produced an extract of a letter relative to it, which your Lordships in the course of this trial may see, and which will lead us into a further and more minute inquiry on that head; but when that committee made their report in 1783, not one single article had been explained to Parliament, not one explained to the Company, except this bribe of Cheyt Sing, which Mr. Hastings had never thought proper to communicate to the East India Company, either by himself, nor, as far as we could find out, by his agent; nor was it at last otherwise discovered than as it was drawn out from him by a long examination in the Committee of the House of Commons.  And thus, notwithstanding the letters he had written and the agents he employed, he seemed absolutely and firmly resolved to give his employers no satisfaction at all.  What is curious in this proceeding is, that Mr. Hastings, all the time he conceals, endeavors to get himself the credit of a discovery.  Your Lordships have seen what his discovery is; but Mr. Hastings, among his other very extraordinary acquisitions, has found an effectual method of concealment through discovery.  I will venture to say, that, whatever suspicions there might have been of Mr. Hastings’s bribes, there was more effectual concealment in regard to every circumstance respecting them in that discovery than if he had kept a total silence.  Other means of discovery might have been found, but this, standing in the way, prevented the employment of those means.

Things continued in this state till the time of the letter from Cheltenham.  The Cheltenham letter declared that Mr. Hastings knew nothing of the matter,—­that he had brought with him no accounts to England upon the subject; and though it appears by this very letter that he had with him at Cheltenham (if he wrote the letter at Cheltenham) a great deal of his other correspondence, that he had his letter of the 22d of May with him, yet any account that could elucidate that letter he declared that he had not; but he hinted that a Mr. Larkins, in India, whom your Lordships will be better acquainted with, was perfectly apprised of all that transaction.  Your Lordships will observe that Mr. Hastings has all his faculties, some way or other,