to receive such sums of money as Debi Sing might put into his hands, and which might have been easily sent to Calcutta?  Was he to be of use as a communication between Debi Sing and the Committee, and in no other way?  Here, then, we have that English authority which Mr. Hastings left in the country,—­here the native authority which he settled, and the establishment of native iniquity in a regular system under Gunga Govind Sing,—­here the destruction of all English inspection.  I hope I need say no more to prove to your Lordships that this system, taken nakedly as it thus stands, founded in mystery and obscurity, founded for the very express purpose of conveying bribes, as the best mode of collecting the revenue and supplying the Company’s exigencies through Gunga Govind Sing, would be iniquitous upon the face and the statement of it.  But when your Lordships consider what horrid effects it produced, you will easily see what the mischief and abomination of Mr. Hastings’s destroying these Provincial Councils and protecting these persons must necessarily be.  If you had not known in theory, you must have seen it in practice.

But when both practice and theory concur, there can be no doubt that a system of private bribery for a revenue, and of private agency for a constitutional government, must ruin the country where it prevails, must disgrace the country that uses it, and finally end in the destruction of the revenue.  For what says Mr. Hastings?  “I was to have received 40,000_l._ in bribes, and 30,000_l._ was actually applied to the use of the Company.”  Now I hope I shall demonstrate, if not, it will be by some one abler than me demonstrated, in the course of this business, that there never was a bribe received by Mr. Hastings that was not instantly followed with a deficiency in the revenue,—­this is clear, and what we undertake to prove,—­and that Debi Sing himself was, at the time Mr. Hastings came away, between twenty and thirty thousand pounds debtor to the Company.  So that, in truth, you always find a deficiency of revenue nearly equal, and in some instances I shall show double, to all the bribes Mr. Hastings received:  from whence it will be evident that he never could nor did receive them under that absurd and strange idea of a resource to government.

I must re-state to your Lordships, because I wish you never to forget, that this Committee of Revenue was, in their own opinion, and from their own certain knowledge and mere motion, if motion can be attributed originally to instruments, mere tools; that they knew that they were tools in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing.  There were two persons principal in it,—­Mr. Shore, who was the acting President, and Mr. Anderson, who was President in rank, and President in emolument, but absent for a great part of the time upon a foreign embassy.  It is the recorded opinion of the former, (for I must beg leave to read again a part of the paper which has already been read to your Lordships,) that “the Committee, with the best intentions, best abilities, and steadiest application, must, after all, be a tool in the hands of their dewan.”