had from the beginning destined, as he afterwards publicly offered, for this very expedition of Colonel Camac’s.  The complication of fraud and cruelty in the transaction admits of few parallels.  Mr. Hastings at the Council Board of Bengal displays himself as a zealous servant of the Company, bountifully giving from his own fortune, and in his letter to the Directors (as he says himself) as going out of the ordinary roads for their advantage;[22] and all this on the credit of supplies derived from the gift of a man whom he treats with the utmost severity, and whom he accuses, in this particular, of disaffection to the Company’s cause and interests.

With 23,000_l._ of the Rajah’s money in his pocket, he persecutes him to his destruction,—­assigning for a reason, that his reliance on the Rajah’s faith, and his breach of it, were the principal causes that no other provision was made for the detachment on the specific expedition to which the Rajah’s specific money was to be applied.  The Rajah had given it to be disposed of by Mr. Hastings; and if it was not disposed of in the best manner for the accomplishing his objects, the accuser himself is the criminal.

To take money for the forbearance of a just demand would have been corrupt only; but to urge unjust public demands,—­to accept private pecuniary favors in the course of those demands,—­and, on the pretence of delay or refusal, without mercy to persecute a benefactor,—­to refuse to hear his remonstrances,—­to arrest him in his capital, in his palace, in the face of all the people,—­thus to give occasion to an insurrection, and, on pretext of that insurrection, to refuse all treaty or explanation,—­to drive him from his government and his country,—­to proscribe him in a general amnesty,—­and to send him all over India a fugitive, to publish the shame of British government in all the nations to whom he successively fled for refuge,—­these are proceedings to which, for the honor of human nature, it is hoped few parallels are to be found in history, and in which the illegality and corruption of the acts form the smallest part of the mischief.

Such is the account of the first sum confessed to be taken as a present by Mr. Hastings, since the year 1775; and such are its consequences.  Mr. Hastings apologizes for this action by declaring “that he would not have received the money but for the occasion, which prompted him to avail himself of the accidental means which were at that instant afforded him of accepting and converting it to the use of the Company."[23] By this account, he considers the act as excusable only by the particular occasion, by the temptation of accidental means, and by the suggestion of the instant.  How far this is the case appears by the very next paragraph of this letter in which the account is given and in which the apology is made.  If these were his sentiments in June, 1780, they lasted but a very short time:  his accidental means appear to be growing habitual.