Your Lordships will now see, from this luminous, satisfactory, and clear account, which could come from no other than a great accountant and a great financier, establishing some new system of finance, and recommending it to the world as superior to those old-fashioned foolish establishments, the Exchequer and Bank of England, what lights are received from Mr. Hastings.

However, it does so happen that from these obscure hints we have been able to institute examinations which have discovered such a mass of fraud, guilt, corruption, and oppression as probably never before existed since the beginning of the world; and in that darkness we hope and trust the diligence and zeal of the House of Commons will find light sufficient to make a full discovery of his base crimes.  We hope and trust, that, after all his concealments, and though he appear resolved to die in the last dike of prevarication, all his artifices will not be able to secure him from the siege which the diligence of the House of Commons has laid to his corruptions.

Your Lordships will remark, in a paragraph, which, though it stands last, is the first in principle, in Mr. Larkins’s letter, that, having before given his comment, he perorates, as is natural upon such an occasion.  This peroration, as is usual in perorations, is in favor of the parties speaking it, and ad conciliandum auditorem.  “Conscious,” he says, “that the concern which I have had in these transactions needs neither an apology nor an excuse,”—­that is rather extraordinary, too!—­“and that I have in no action of my life sacrificed the duty and fidelity which I owed to my honorable employers either to the regard which I felt for another or to the advancement of my own fortune, I shall conclude this address, firmly relying upon the candor of those before whom it may be submitted for its being deemed a satisfactory as well as a circumstantial compliance with the requisition in conformity to which the information it affords has been furnished,”—­meaning, as your Lordships will see in the whole course of the letter, that he had written it in compliance with the requisition and in conformity to the information he had been furnished with by Mr. Hastings,—­“without which it would have been as base as dishonorable for me spontaneously to have afforded it:  for, though the duty which every man owes to himself should render him incapable of making an assertion not strictly true, no man actuated either by virtuous or honorable sentiments could mistakenly apprehend, that, unless he betrayed the confidence reposed in him by another, he might be deemed deficient in fidelity to his employers.”