gives the management of the money transactions.  He discovers plainly where his heart was:  for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  This private agent, this stifler of correspondence, a man whose costive retention discovers no secret committed to him, and whose slippery memory is subject to a diarrhoea which permits everything he did know to escape,—­this very man he places in a situation where his talents could only be useful for concealment, and where concealment could only be used to cover fraud; while Mr. Bristow, who was by his official engagement responsible to the Company for fair and clear accounts, was appointed superintendent of political affairs, an office for which Mr. Hastings declared he was totally unfit.

My Lords, you will judge of the designs which the prisoner had in contemplation, when he dared to commit this act of rebellion against the Company; you will see that it could not have been any other than getting the money transactions of Oude into his own hands.  The presumption of a corrupt motive is here as strong as, I believe, it possibly can be.

The next point to which I have to direct your Lordships’ attention is that part of the prisoner’s conduct, in this matter, by which he exposed the nakedness of the Company’s authority to the native powers.  You would imagine, that, after the first dismissal of Mr. Bristow, Mr. Hastings would have done with him forever; that nothing could have induced him again to bring forward a man who had dared to insult him, a man who had shown an independent spirit, a man who had dishonored the Council and insulted his masters, a man of doubtful integrity and convicted unfitness for office.  But, my Lords, in the face of all this, he afterwards sends this very man, with undivided authority, into the country as sole Resident.  And now your Lordships shall hear in what manner he accounts for this appointment to Gobind Ram, the vakeel, or ambassador, of the Nabob Asoph ul Dowlah at Calcutta.  It is in page 795 of the printed Minutes.

    Extract of an Arzee sent by Rajah Gobind Ram to the Vizier, by the
    Governor-General’s directions, and written the 27th of August,
    1782.

“This day the Governor-General sent for me in private.  After recapitulating the various informations he had received respecting the anarchy and confusion said to reign throughout your Highness’s country, and complains that neither your Highness, or Hyder Beg Khan, or Mr. Middleton, or Mr. Johnson, ever wrote to him on the state of your affairs, or, if he ever received a letter from your presence, it always contained assertions contrary to the above informations, the Governor-General proceeded as follows.

“That it was his intention to have appointed Mr. David Anderson to attend upon your Highness, but that he was still with Sindia, and there was no prospect of his speedy return from his camp; therefore it was now his wish to appoint