I have thought it necessary, and absolutely necessary it is, to state what the consequence of this clandestine mode of supplying the Company’s exigencies was.  Your Lordships will see that their exigencies are to be supplied by the ruin of the landed interest of a province, the destruction of the husbandmen, and the ruin of all the people in it.  This is the consequence of a general bribe-broker, an agent like Gunga Govind Sing, superseding all the powers and controls of government.

But Mr. Hastings has not only reduced bribery to a system of government practically, but theoretically.  For when he despaired any longer of concealing his bribes from the penetrating eye of Parliament, then he took another mode, and declared, as your Lordships will see, that it was the best way of supplying the necessities of the East India Company in the pressing exigencies of their affairs; that thus a relief to the Company’s affairs might be yielded, which, in the common, ostensible mode, and under the ordinary forms of government, and publicly, never would be yielded to them.  So that bribery with him became a supplement to exaction.

The best way of showing that a theoretical system is bad is to show the practical mischiefs that it produces:  because a thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in its practice excellent.  Here a thing in theory, stated by Mr. Hastings to be productive of much good, is in reality productive of all those horrible mischiefs I have stated.  That Mr. Hastings well knew this appears from an extract of the Bengal Revenue Consultations, 21st January, 1785, a little before he came away.

Mr. Hastings says,—­“I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges:  he has disproved them.  It was the duty of the accuser to prove them.  Whatever crimes may be established against Rajah Debi Sing, it does not follow that Mr. Goodlad was responsible for them; and I so well know the character and abilities of Rajah Debi Sing, that I can easily conceive that it was in his power both to commit the enormities which are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr. Goodlad, who had no authority but that of receiving the accounts and rents of the district from Rajah Debi Sing, and occasionally to be the channel of communication between him and the Committee.”

We shall now see what things Mr. Hastings did, what course he was in, a little before his departure,—­with what propriety and consistency of character he has behaved from the year of the commencement of his corrupt system, in 1773, to the end of it, when he closed it in 1785, when the bribes not only mounted the chariot, but boarded the barge, and, as I shall show, followed him down the Ganges, and even to the sea, and that he never quitted his system of iniquity, but that it survived his political life itself.

One of his last political acts was this.