Your Committee were extremely struck with this intelligence.  They were totally unacquainted with it, when they presented to the House the Supplement to their Second Report, on the affairs of Cheyt Sing.  A gift received by Mr. Hastings from the Rajah of Benares gave rise in their minds to serious reflections on the condition of the princes of India subjected to the British authority.  Mr. Hastings was, at the very time of his receiving this gift, in the course of making on the Rajah of Benares a series of demands, unfounded and unjustifiable, and constantly growing in proportion as they were submitted to.  To these demands the Rajah of Benares, besides his objections in point of right, constantly sat up a plea of poverty.  Presents from persons who hold up poverty as a shield against extortion can scarcely in any case be considered as gratuitous, whether the plea of poverty be true or false.  In this case the presents might have been bestowed; if not with an assurance, at least with a rational hope, of some mitigation in the oppressive requisitions that were made by Mr. Hastings; for to give much voluntarily, when it is known that much will be taken away forcibly, is a thing absurd and impossible.  On the other [one?] hand, the acceptance of that gift by Mr. Hastings must have pledged a tacit faith for some degree of indulgence towards the donor:  if it was a free gift, gratitude, if it was a bargain, justice obliged him to do it.  If, on the other hand, Mr. Hastings originally destined (as he says he did) this money, given to himself secretly and for his private emolument, to the use of the Company, the Company’s favor, to whom he acted as trustee, ought to have been purchased by it.  In honor and justice he bound and pledged himself for that power which was to profit by the gift, and to profit, too, in the success of an expedition which Mr. Hastings thought so necessary to their aggrandizement.  The unhappy man found his money accepted, but no favor acquired on the part either of the Company or of Mr. Hastings.

Your Committee have, in another Report, stated to the House that Mr. Hastings attributed the extremity of distress which the detachments under Colonel Camac had suffered, and the great desertions which ensued on that expedition, to the want of punctuality of the Rajah in making payment of one of the sums which had been extorted from him; and this want of punctual payment was afterwards assigned as a principal reason for the ruin of this prince.  Your Committee have shown to the House, by a comparison of facts and dates, that this charge is wholly without foundation.  But if the cause of Colonel Camac’s failure had been true as to the sum which was the object of the public demand, the failure could not be attributed to the Rajah, when he had on the instant privately furnished at least 23,000_l._ to Mr. Hastings,—­that is, furnished the identical money which he tells us (but carefully concealing the name of the giver) he