Extract of a Letter from Hyder Beg Khan, received 21st April,
    1785.

“I hope that such orders and commands as relate to the friendship between his Highness and the Company’s governments and to your will may be sent through Major Palmer, in your own private letters, or in your letters to the Major, who is appointed from you at the presence of his Highness, that, in obedience to your orders, he may properly explain your commands, and, whatever affair may be settled, he may first secretly inform you of it, and afterwards his Highness may, conformably thereto, write an answer, and I also may represent it.  By this system, your pleasure will always be fully made known to his Highness; and his Highness and we will execute whatever may be your orders, without deviating a hair’s-breadth:  and let not the representations of interested persons be approved of, because his Highness makes no opposition to your will; and I, your servant, am ready in obedience and service, and I make no excuses.”

Now, my Lords, was there ever such a discovery made of the arcana of any public theatre?  You see here, behind the ostensible scenery, all the crooked working of the machinery developed and laid open to the world.  You now see by what secret movement the master of the mechanism has conducted the great Indian opera,—­an opera of fraud, deceptions, and harlequin tricks.  You have it all laid open before you.  The ostensible scene is drawn aside; it has vanished from your sight.  All the strutting signors, and all the soft signoras are gone; and instead of a brilliant spectacle of descending chariots, gods, goddesses, sun, moon, and stars, you have nothing to gaze on but sticks, wire, ropes, and machinery.  You find the appearance all false and fraudulent; and you see the whole trick at once.  All this, my Lords, we owe to Major Scott’s trunk, which, by admitting us behind the scene, has enabled us to discover the real state of Mr. Hastings’s government in India.  And can your Lordships believe that all this mechanism of fraud, prevarication, and falsehood could have been intended for any purpose but to forward that robbery, corruption, and peculation by which Mr. Hastings has destroyed one of the finest countries upon earth?  Is it necessary, after this, for me to tell you that you are not to believe one word of the correspondence stated by him to have been received from India?  This discovery goes to the whole matter of the whole government of the country.  You have seen what that government was, and by-and-by you shall see the effects of it.

Your Lordships have now seen this trunk of Mr. Scott’s producing the effects of Aladdin’s lamp,—­of which your Lordships may read in books much more worthy of credit than Mr. Hastings’s correspondence.  I have given all the credit of this precious discovery to Mr. Scott’s trunk; but, my Lords, I find that I have to ask pardon for a mistake in supposing the letter of Hyder Beg Khan to be a part of Mr. Hastings’s