Your Lordships may perhaps suppose that the payment of this money was an act of friendship and generosity in the people of the country.  No:  we have found out, and shall prove, from whom he got it; at least we shall produce such a conjecture upon it as your Lordships will think us bound to do, when we have such an account before us.  Here on the face of the account there is no deficiency; but when we look into it, we find skulking in a corner a person called Nundulol, from whom there is received 58,000 rupees.  You will find that he, who appears to have paid up this money, and which Mr. Hastings spent as he pleased in his journey to Benares, and who consequently must have had some trust reposed in him, was the wickedest of men, next to those I have mentioned,—­always giving the first rank to Gunga Govind Sing, primus inter pares, the second to Debi Sing, the third to Cantoo Baboo:  this man is fit to be one next on a par with them.  Mr. Larkins, when he comes to explain this article, says, “I believe it is for a part of the Dinagepore peshcush, which would reduce the balance to about 5,000_l._”:  but he does not pretend to know what it is given for; he gives several guesses at it; “but,” he says, “as I do not know, I shall not pretend to give more than my conjecture upon it.”  He is in the right; because we shall prove Nundulol never did have any thing to do with the Dinagepore peshcush.  These are very extraordinary proceedings.  It is my business simply to state them to your Lordships now; we will give them in afterwards in evidence, and I will leave that evidence to be confirmed and fortified by further observations.

One of the objects of Mr. Larkins’s letter is to illustrate the bonds.  He says, “The two first stated sums” (namely, Dinagepore and Patna, in the paper marked No. 1, I suppose, for he seems to explain it to be such) “are sums for a part of which Mr. Hastings took two bonds:  viz., No. 1539, dated 1st October, 1780, and No. 1540, dated 2d October, 1780, each for the sum of current rupees 1,16,000, or sicca rupees one lac.  The remainder of that amount was carried to the credit of the head, Four per Cent Remittance Loan: Mr. Hastings having taken a bond for it, (No. 89,) which has been since completely liquidated, conformable to the law.”  But before I proceed with the bonds, I will beg leave to recall to your Lordships’ recollection that Mr. Larkins states in his letter that these sums were received in November.  How does this agree with another state of the transaction given by Mr. Hastings, namely, that the time of his taking the bonds was the 1st and 2d of October?  Mr. Larkins, therefore, who has thought proper to say that the money was received in the month of November, has here given as extraordinary an instance either of fraudulent accuracy or shameful official inaccuracy as was ever perhaps discovered.  The first sums are asserted to be paid to Mr. Croftes on the 18th and 19th of Asin, 1187.  The month