Your Lordships will remember that Mr. Goodlad was sent up into the country, whose conduct was terrible indeed:  for that he could not be in place and authority in that country, and be innocent, while such things were doing, I shall prove.  But that is not now my consideration.

The Governor-General’s minute, just read, is this.  “I entirely acquit Mr. Goodlad of all the charges:  he has disproved them.  It was the duty of the accuser to prove them” (the accuser, namely, the commissioner).  “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,” &c., &c., &c.

Now your Lordships perceive he has acquitted Mr. Goodlad.  He is clear.  Be it that he is fairly and conscientiously acquitted.  But what is Mr. Hastings’s account of Rajah Debi Sing?  He is presented to him in 1781, by Gunga Govind Sing, as a person against whose character there could be no exception, and by him accepted in that light.  Upon the occasion I have mentioned, Mr. Hastings’s opinion of him is this:  “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.”

Thus your Lordships see what Mr. Hastings’s opinion of Debi Sing was.  We shall prove it at another time, by abundance of clear and demonstrative evidence, that, whether he was bad or no, (but we shall prove that bad he was indeed,) even he could hardly be so bad as he was in the opinion which Mr. Hastings entertained of him; who, notwithstanding, now disowns this mock Committee, instituted by himself, but, in reality, entirely managed by Gunga Govind Sing.  This Debi Sing was accepted as an unexceptionable man; and yet Mr. Hastings knows both his power of doing mischief and his artifice in concealing it.  If, then, Mr. Goodlad is to be acquitted, does it not show the evil of Mr. Hastings’s conduct in destroying those Provincial Councils which, as I have already stated, were obliged to book everything, to minute all the circumstances which came before them, together with all the consultations respecting them?  He strikes at the whole system at once, and, instead of it, he leaves an Englishman, under pretence of controlling Gunga Govind Sing’s agent, appointed for the very purpose of giving him bribes, in a province where Mr. Hastings says that agent had the power of committing such enormities, and which nobody doubts his disposition to commit,—­he leaves him, I say, in such a state of inefficiency, that these iniquities could be concealed (though every one true) from the person appointed there to inspect his conduct!  What, then, could be his business there?  Was it only