Your Committee find that this last is the only sum the giver of which Mr. Hastings has thought proper to declare.  It is to be observed, that he did not receive this 100,000_l._ in money, but in bills on a great native money-dealer resident at Benares, and who has also an house at Calcutta:  he is called Gopal Das.  The negotiation of these bills tended to make a discovery not so difficult as it would have been in other cases.

With regard to the application of this last sum of money, which is said to be carried to the Durbar charges of April, 1782, your Committee are not enabled to make any observations on it, as the account of that period has not yet arrived.

Your Committee have, in another Report, remarked fully upon most of the circumstances of this extraordinary transaction.  Here they only bring so much of these circumstances again into view as may serve to throw light upon the true nature of the sums of money taken by British subjects in power, under the name of presents, and to show how far they are entitled to that description in any sense which can fairly imply in the pretended donors either willingness or ability to give.  The condition of the bountiful parties who are not yet discovered may be conjectured from the state of those who have been made known:  as far as that state anywhere appears, their generosity is found in proportion, not to the opulence they possess or to the favors they receive, but to the indigence they feel and the insults they are exposed to.  The House will particularly attend to the situation of the principal giver, the Subah of Oude.

“When the knife,” says he, “had penetrated to the bone, and I was surrounded with such heavy distresses that I could no longer live in expectations, I wrote you an account of my difficulties.

“The answer which I have received to it is such that it has given me inexpressible grief and affliction.  I never had the least idea or expectation from you and the Council that you would ever have given your orders in so afflicting a manner, in which you never before wrote, and which I could not have imagined.  As I am resolved to obey your orders, and directions of the Council, without any delay, as long as I live, I have, agreeably to those orders, delivered up all my private papers to him [the Resident], that, when he shall have examined my receipts and expenses, he may take whatever remains.  As I know it to be my duty to satisfy you, the Company, and Council, I have not failed to obey in any instance, but requested of him that it might be done so as not to distress me in my necessary expenses:  there being no other funds but those for the expenses of my mutseddies, household expenses, and servants, &c.  He demanded these in such a manner, that, being remediless, I was obliged to comply with what he required.  He has accordingly stopped the pensions of my old servants for thirty years,