No such plan was transmitted; but in the year 1781, Mr. Hastings having obtained a majority in the Council, he again changed the whole system, both of collection of the revenue and of the executive administration of civil and criminal justice.  And who were the persons substituted in the place of those whom he removed?  Names, my Lords, with which you are already but too well acquainted.  At their head stands Munny Begum; then comes his own domestic, and private bribe-agent, Gunga Govind Sing; then his banian, Cantoo Baboo; then that instrument of all evil, Debi Sing; then the whole tribe of his dependants, white and black, whom he made farmers of the revenue, with Colonel Hannay at their head; and, lastly, his confidential Residents, secret agents, and private secretaries, Mr. Middleton, Major Palmer, &c., &c.  Can your Lordships doubt, for a single instant, of the real spirit of these proceedings?  Can you doubt of the whole design having originated and ended in corruption and peculation?

We have fully stated to you, from the authority of these parties themselves, the effects and consequences of these proceedings,—­namely, the dilapidation of the revenues, and the ruin and desolation of the provinces.  And, my Lords, what else could have been expected or designed by this sweeping subversion of the control of the Company’s servants over the collections of the revenue, and the vesting of it in a black dewan, but fraud and peculation?  What else, I say, was to be expected, in the inextricable turnings and windings of that black mystery of iniquity, but the concealment of every species of wrong, violence, outrage, and oppression?

Your Lordships, then, have seen that the whole country was put into the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; and when you remember who this Gunga Govind Sing was, and how effectually Mr. Hastings had secured him against detection, in every part of his malpractices and atrocities, can you for a moment hesitate to believe that the whole project was planned and executed for the purpose of putting all Bengal under contribution to Mr. Hastings?  But if you are resolved, after all this, to entertain a good opinion of Mr. Hastings,—­if you have taken it into your heads, for reasons best known to yourselves, to imagine that he has some hidden virtues, which in the government of Bengal he has not displayed, and which, to us of the House of Commons, have not been discernible in any one single instance,—­these virtues may be fit subjects for paragraphs in newspapers, they may be pleaded for him by the partisans of his Indian faction, but your Lordships will do well to remember that it is not to Mr. Hastings himself that you are trusting, but to Gunga Govind Sing.  If the Committee were tools in his hands, must not Mr. Hastings have also been a tool in his hands?  If they with whom he daily and hourly had to transact business, and whose office it was to control and restrain him, were unable so to do, is this control and restraint