The next article is Patna.  Your Lordships are not so ill acquainted with the geography of India as not to know that there is such a place as Patna, nor so ill acquainted with the chronology of it as not to know that there are three months called Baisakh, Asin, Chait.  Here was paid to Mr. Croftes two lac of rupees, and there was left a balance of about two more.  But though you learn with regard to the province of Dinagepore that there is a balance to be discharged by G.G.S., yet with regard to Patna we have not even a G.G.S.:  we have no sort of light whatever to know through whose hands the money passed, nor any glimpse of light whatever respecting it.

You may expect to be made amends in the other province, called Nuddea, where Mr. Hastings had received a considerable sum of money.  There is the very same darkness:  not a word from whom received, by whom received, or any other circumstance, but that it was paid into the hands of Mr. Hastings’s white banian, as he was commonly called in that country, into the hands of Mr. Croftes, who is his white agent in receiving bribes:  for he was very far from having but one.

After all this inquiry, after so many severe animadversions from the House of Commons, after all those reiterated letters from the Directors, after an application to Mr. Hastings himself, when you are hunting to get at some explanation of the proceedings mentioned in the letter of the month of May, 1782, you receive here by Mr. Larkins’s letter, which is dated the 5th of August, 1786, this account, which, to be sure, gives an amazing light into this business:  it is a letter for which it was worth sending to Bengal, worth waiting for with all that anxious expectation with which men wait for great events.  Upon the face of the account there is not one single word which can tend to illustrate the matter:  he sums up the whole, and makes out that there was received five lac and fifty thousand rupees, that is to say, 55,000_l._, out of the sum of nine lac and fifty thousand engaged to be paid:  namely,—­

From Dinagepore 4,00,000
From Nuddea 1,50,000
And from Patna 4,00,000
                      --------
                      9,50,000
                      --------
                    Or L95,000

Now you have got full light! Cabooleat signifies a contract, or an agreement; and this agreement was, to pay Mr. Hastings, as one should think, certain sums of money,—­it does not say from whom, but only that such a sum of money was paid, and that there remains such a balance.  When you come and compare the money received by Mr. Croftes with these cabooleats, you find that the cabooleats amount to 95,000_l._, and that the receipt has been about 55,000_l._, and that upon the face of this account there is 40,000_l._ somewhere or other unaccounted for.  There never was such a mode of account-keeping, except in the new system of this bribe exchequer.