10,000_l._ from these ministers to Mrs. Hastings.  Whether she ever received any other money than this, I also neither affirm nor deny.  But in whatever manner Mrs. Hastings received this or any other money, I must say, in this grave place in which I stand, that, if the wives of Governors-General, the wives of Presidents of Council, the wives of the principal officers of the India Company, through all the various departments, can receive presents, there is an end of the covenants, there is an end of the act of Parliament, there is an end to every power of restraint.  Let a man be but married, and if his wife may take presents, that moment the acts of Parliament, the covenants, and all the rest expire.  There is something, too, in the manners of the East that makes this a much more dangerous practice.  The people of the East, it is well known, have their zenanah, the apartment for their wives, as a sanctuary which nobody can enter,—­a kind of holy of holies, a consecrated place, safe from the rage of war, safe from the fury of tyranny.  The rapacity of man has here its bounds:  here you shall come, and no farther.  But if English ladies can go into these zenanahs and there receive presents, the natives of Hindostan cannot be said to have anything left of their own.  Every one knows that in the wisest and best time of the Commonwealth of Rome, towards the latter end of it, (I do not mean the best time for morals, but the best for its knowledge how to correct evil government, and to choose the proper means for it,) it was an established rule, that no governor of a province should take his wife along with him into his province,—­wives not being subject to the laws in the same manner as their husbands; and though I do not impute to any one any criminality here, I should think myself guilty of a scandalous dereliction of my duty, if I did not mention the fact to your Lordships.  But I press it no further:  here are the accounts, delivered in by Mr. Larkins at Mr. Hastings’s own requisition.

The three lines which were read out of a Persian paper are followed by a long account of the several species in which this present was received, and converted by exchange into one common standard.  Now, as these three lines of paper, which are said to have been read out of a Persian paper, contain an account of bribes to the amount of 100,000_l._, and as it is not even insinuated that this was the whole of the paper, but rather the contrary indirectly implied, I shall leave it for your Lordships, in your serious consideration, to judge what mines of bribery that paper might contain.  For why did not Mr. Larkins get the whole of that paper read and translated?  The moment any man stops in the midst of an account, he is stopping in the midst of a fraud.