In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and contradictory.  Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts utterly irreconcilable with each other.  He is asked, “How came you to take bonds for this money, if it was not your own?  How came you to vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company’s records, and to state yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their debtor?” His answer was, “I really cannot tell; I have forgot my reasons; the distance of time is so great,” (namely, a time of about two years, or not so long,) “I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps I had this motive, perhaps I had another,” (but what is the most curious,) “perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect.”  You shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions.  “For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of these sums and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,—­namely, that I either chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest.  It will not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, follow them.”

My Lords, you see, as to any direct explanation, that he fairly gives it up:  he has used artifice and stratagem, which he knows will not do; and at last attempts to cover the treachery of his conduct by the treachery of his memory.  Frequent applications were made to Mr. Hastings upon this article from the Company,—­gentle hints, gemitus columbae,—­rather, little amorous complaints that he was not more open and communicative; but all these gentle insinuations were never able to draw from him any further account till he came to England.  When he came here, he left not only his memory, but all his notes and references, behind in India.  When in India the Company could get no account of them, because he himself was not in England; and when he was in England, they could get no account, because his papers were in India.  He then sends over to Mr. Larkins to give that account of his affairs which he was not able to give himself.  Observe, here is a man taking money privately, corruptly, and which was to be sanctified by the future application of it, taking false securities to cover it, and who, when called upon to tell whom he got the money from, for what ends, and on what occasion, neither will tell in India nor can tell in England, but sends for such an account as he has thought proper to furnish.