factors and writers upon your establishment, (for, with our present appointments, we are assured there will be sufficient for this purpose,) and thus you will banish idleness, and its attendants, extravagance and dissipation.  And here we enjoin you to transmit to us a faithful and minute state of the pay and every known emolument of all below Council:  for, as it is notorious that even youths in our service expend in equipage, servants, dress, and living infinitely more than our stated allowances can afford, we cannot but be anxious to discover the means by which they are enabled to proceed in this manner; and, indeed, so obnoxious is this conduct to us, and so injurious in its consequences, that we expect and require you to show your displeasure to all such as shall transgress in this respect, contrasting it at the same time with instances of kindness towards the sober, frugal, and industrious.”

My Lords, you see the state in which the Directors conceived the country to be.  That it was in this state is not denied by Mr. Hastings, who was sent out for the purpose of reforming it.  The Directors had swept away almost the whole body of their Bengal servants for supposed corruption; and they appointed a set of new ones, to regenerate, as it were, the government of that country.

Mr. Hastings says, “I was brought to India like other people.”  This, indeed, is true; and I hope it will prove an example and instruction to all mankind never to employ a man who has been bred in base and corrupt practices, from any hope that his local knowledge may make him the fittest person to correct such practices.  Mr. Hastings goes on to say, that you could not expect more from him than could be done by a man bred up, as he was, in the common habits of the country.  This is also true.  My Lords, you might as well expect a man to be fit for a perfumer’s shop, who has lain a month in a pig’s stye, as to expect that a man who has been a contractor with the Company for a length of time is a fit person for reforming abuses.  Mr. Hastings has stated in general his history, his merits, and his services.  We have looked over with care the records relative to his proceedings, and we find that in 1760 and 1761 he was in possession of a contract for bullocks and a contract for provisions.  It is no way wrong for any man to take a contract, provided he does not do what Mr. Hastings has condemned in his regulations,—­become a contractor with his masters.  But though I do not bear upon Mr. Hastings for having spent his time in being a bullock-contractor, yet I say that he ought to have laid aside all the habits of a bullock-contractor when he was made a great minister for the reformation of a great service full of abuses.  I will show your Lordships that he never did so; that, on the contrary, being bred in those bad habits, and having had the education that I speak of, he persevered in the habits which had been formed in him to the very last.