accommodation with Mr. Francis; but to effect this point he had been under the necessity of making some painful sacrifices, and particularly that of the restoration of Mahomed Reza Khan to the office of Naib Subah, a measure which he knew must be highly disagreeable to the Nabob, and which nothing but the urgent necessity of the case should have led him to acquiesce in; that he relied on me to state all these circumstances in the most forcible manner to the Nabob, and to urge his compliance, assuring him that it should not continue longer than until the next advices were received from the Court of Directors.”

Here Mr. Hastings himself lets us into the secrets of his government.  He writes an ostensible letter to the Nabob, declaring that what he does is in conformity to the orders of the Company.  He writes a private letter, in which he directs his agent to assure the Nabob that what he had done was not in compliance with the orders of the Company, but in consequence of the arrangement he had made with Mr. Francis, which arrangement he thought necessary for the support of his own personal power.  His design, in thus explaining the transaction to the Nabob, was in order to prevent the native powers from looking to any other authority than his, and from having the least hopes of redress of their complaints from the justice of this country or from any legal power in it.  He therefore tells him that Mahomed Reza Khan was replaced, not in obedience to the orders of the Company, but to gratify Mr. Francis.  If he quarrels with Mr. Francis, he makes that a reason for disobeying the orders of his masters; if he agrees with him, he informs the people concerned in the transaction, privately, that he acts, not in consequence of the orders that he has received, but from other motives.  But that is not all.  He promises that he will take the first opportunity to remove Mahomed Reza Khan from his office again.  Thus the country is to be re-plunged into the same distracted and ruined state in which it was before.  And all this is laid open fully and distinctly before you.  You have it on the authority of Sir John D’Oyly.  Sir John D’Oyly is a person in the secret; and one man who is in the secret is worth a thousand ostensible persons.

Mahomed Reza Khan, I must now tell you, was accordingly reinstated in all his offices, and the Nabob was reduced to the situation, as Mr. Hastings upon another occasion describes it, of a mere cipher.  But mark what followed,—­mark what this Sir John D’Oyly is made to tell you, or what Mr. Hastings tells you for him:  for whether Sir John D’Oyly has written this for Mr. Hastings, or Mr. Hastings for Sir John D’Oyly, I do not know; because they seem, as somebody said of two great friends, that they had but one will, one bed, and one hat between them.  These gentlemen who compose Mr. Hastings’s Council have but one style of writing among them; so that it is impossible for you to determine by which of the masters of this Roman school any paper was written,—­whether by D’Oyly, by Shore, or by Hastings, or any other of them.  They have a style in common, a kind of bank upon which they have a general credit; and you cannot tell to whose account anything is to be placed.