But his apprehension of some change in the Company’s government is not his only pretext for some of these corrupt proceedings; he adverts also to the opposition which he had to encounter with his colleagues, as another circumstance which drove him to adopt others of these scandalous expediences.  Now there was a period when he had no longer to contend with, or to fear, that opposition.

When he had got rid of the majority in the Council, which thwarted him, what did he do?  Did he himself correct any of the evils and disorders which had prevailed in the service, and which his hostile majority had purposed to reform?  No, not one,—­notwithstanding the Court of Directors had supported the majority in all their declarations, and had accused him of corruption and rebellion in every part of his opposition to them.  Now that he was free from the yoke of all the mischief of that cursed majority which he deprecates, and which I have heard certain persons consider as a great calamity, (a calamity indeed it was to patronage,)—­as soon, I say, as he was free from this, you would imagine he had undertaken some great and capital reformation; for all the power which the Company could give was in his hands,—­total, absolute, and unconfined.

I must here remind your Lordships, that the Provincial Councils was an establishment made by Mr. Hastings.  So confident was he in his own opinion of the expediency of them, that he transmitted to the Court of Directors a draught of an act of Parliament to confirm them.  By this act it was his intention to place them beyond the possibility of mutation.  Whatever opinion others might entertain of their weakness, inefficacy, or other defects, Mr. Hastings found no such things in them.  He had declared in the beginning that he considered them as a sort of experiment, but that in the progress he found them answer so perfectly well that he proposed even an act of Parliament to support them.  The Court of Directors, knowing the mischiefs that innovation had produced in their service, and the desolations which it had brought on the country, commanded him not to take any step for changing them, without their orders.  Contrary, however, to his own declarations, contrary to the sketch of an act of Parliament, which, for aught he knew, the legislature might then have passed, (I know that it was in contemplation to pass, about that time, several acts for regulating the Company’s affairs, and, for one, I should have been, as I always have been, a good deal concerned in whatever tended to fix some kind of permanent and settled government in Bengal,)—­in violation, I say, of his duty, and in contradiction to his own opinion, he at that time, without giving the parties notice, turns out of their employments, situations, and bread, the Provincial Councils.