I am ashamed to be troublesome to your Lordships in this dry affair, but the detection of fraud requires a good deal of patience and assiduity, and we cannot wander into anything that can relieve the mind:  if it was in my power to do it, I would do it.  I wish, however, to call your Lordships’ attention to this last bribe before I quit these bonds.  Such is the confusion, so complicated, so intricate are these bribe accounts, that there is always something left behind, glean never so much from the paragraphs of Mr. Hastings and Mr. Larkins.  “I could not bring them to account,” says Mr. Larkins.  “They were received before the 1st and 2d of October.”  Why does not the running treasury account give an account of them?  The Committee of the House of Commons examined whether the running treasury account had any such account of sums deposited.  No such thing.  They are said by Mr. Hastings to be deposited in June:  they were not deposited in October, nor any account of them given till the January following.  “These bonds,” says he, “I could not enter as regular money, to be entered on the Company’s account, or in any public way, until I had had an order of the Governor-General and Council.”  But why had not you an order of the Governor-General and Council?  We are not calling on you, Mr. Larkins, for an account of your conduct:  we are calling upon Mr. Hastings for an account of his conduct, and which he refers to you to explain.  Why did not Mr. Hastings order you to carry them to the public account?  “Because,” says he, “there was no other way.”  Every one who knows anything of a treasury or public banking-place knows, that if any person brings money as belonging to the public, that the public accountant is bound, no doubt, to receive it and enter it as such.  “But,” says he, “I could not do it until the account could be settled, as between debtor and creditor:  I did not do it till I could put on one side durbar charges, secret service, to such an amount, and balance that again with bonds to Mr. Hastings.”  That is, he could not make an entry regularly in the Company’s books until Mr. Hastings had enabled him to commit one of the grossest frauds and violations of a public trust that ever was committed, by ordering that money of the Company’s to be considered as his own, and a bond to be taken as a security for it from the Company, as if it was his own.

But to proceed with this deposit.  What is the substance of Mr. Larkins’s explanation of it?  The substance of this explanation is, that here was a bribe received by Mr. Hastings from Cheyt Sing, guarded with such scrupulous secrecy, that it was not carried to the house of Mr. Croftes, who was to receive it finally, but to the house of Mr. Larkins, as a less suspected place; and that it was conveyed in various sums, no two people ever returning twice with the various payments which made up that sum of 23,000_l._ or thereabouts.  Now do you want an instance of prevarication and trickery in an account?