The second sort of document relative to these bonds (though the first in order of time) is Mr. Hastings’s letter of the 29th of November, 1780.[31] It is written between the time of the expenditure of the money for the Company’s use and the taking of the bonds.  Here, for the first time, a very material difference appears; and the difference is the more striking, because Mr. Hastings claimed the whole money as his own, and took bonds for it as such, after this representation.  The letter to the Company discovers that part of the money (the whole of which he had declared on record to be his own, and for which he had taken bonds) was not his, but the property of his masters, from whom he had taken the security.  It is no less remarkable that the letter which represents the money as belonging to the Company was written about six weeks before the Minute of Council in which he claims that money as his own.  It is this letter on which your Committee is to remark.

Mr. Hastings, after giving his reasons for the application of the three lacs of rupees, and for his having for some time concealed the fact, says, “Two thirds of that sum I have raised by my own credit, and shall charge it in my official account; the other third I have supplied from the cash in my hands belonging to the Honorable Company."[32]

The House will observe, that in November he tells the Directors that he shall charge only two thirds in his official accounts; in the following January he charges the whole.[33] For the other third, although he admitted that to belong to the Company, we have seen that he takes a bond to himself.

It is material that he tells the Company in his letter that these two lacs of rupees were raised on his credit.  His letter to the Council says that they were advanced from his private cash.  What he raises on his credit may, on a fair construction, be considered as his own:  but in this, too, he fails; for it is certain he has never transferred these bonds to any creditor; nor has he stated any sum he has paid, or for which he stands indebted, on that account, to any specific person.  Indeed, it was out of his power; for the first two thirds of the money, which he formerly stated as raised upon his credit, he now confesses to have been from the beginning the Company’s property, and therefore could not have been raised on his private credit, or borrowed from any person whatsoever.

To these two accounts, thus essentially varying, he has added a third,[34] varying at least as essentially from both.  In his last or third account, which is a statement of all the sums he has received in an extraordinary manner, and confessed to be the Company’s property, he reverses the items of his first account, and, instead of allowing the Company but one third and claiming two thirds for himself, he enters two of the bonds, each for a lac of rupees, as belonging to the Company:  of the third bond, which appears